Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth

[shiv]

The people who composed those hymns were also different so the conclusion is not valid.

Indeed they were different - they were sedentary enough to start naming their places

Of course this conclusion is an indicator of the level of science and proof you are willing to accept. You seem to place great faith in this credo, and believe it in your heart. To that extent I cannot offer any counter. But it only indicates the vacuous grounds on which linguists seem to be building up their theories. This is a forum and your reply will pass, but finding that in a scientific paper would not pass the test of scientific rigor. The absence of proof something is not proof of absence.

But it encourages me to find that people who claim expertise in the field are actually using flimsy rhetorical grounds to support theories. It means that the theories will need continuous rexamination and questioning to dig up assumptions and dogma.

[ManishH]

The dictionaries that I use seem to come up with meanings that you don't agree with. I actually consulted three different dictionaries. What is swarnamap?

Please tell me which dictionary calls निष्क् = necklace.

In Hindi, svarnamaap = svarna + maap = measure of gold. So the pandit's translation is accurate. But we cannot recover from the text how much is a 'measure' .

The little statement about pointing dictionaries "all your life" is actually unnecessary - it is merely a cheap barb to act as if your referencing is superior.

Ok, I do apologize.

Why are you trying to evade the fact that kaksivan acknowledges expensive gifts.

I don't want to evade anything. From the context :

śatam ... niṣkān | śatam aśvān
ṣaṣṭiḥ | sahasram | anu | gavyam

100 gold pieces, 100 horses, 60,000 cattle. It sounds hyperbole to me. But if you'd like to read it literally, no issues.

you will see that if the cattle and gifts bits are lies and hyperbole, even the existence of the king could be a lie

There is a difference between hyperbole and lie. A common blessing is śatāyu bhava - "may you live to a 100". It's a hyperbole, but not a lie. It's a genuine wish for long life.

Of course, I'm only defending what I think, and hopefully with data. No attempt to convince or change what your or anyone else's notions are.

[shiv]

Another thing I realized is that OIT needs to date Mahabharata, RgVeda, Brahmanas, Puranas all before 3000 BC.

See one example of the OIT chronology here:

http://books.google.co.in/books?id=-BVn ... BC&f=false

All of them before early Harappan phase. Then weren't there at least some Indian texts that were written later and mention the Harappan cities ?

What is OIT? Out of India Theory?

[ManishH]

yes

[member_22872]

Well, Firstly, AIT/AMT cannot be explained without jumps in logic and assumptions. OIT is another beast, one need nor accept it. If OIT can be explained with logic and proof fine, else I am fine with vedic Indians staying put in India and going no where. It is more the obsession of the Aryan Europeans to dominate and migrate out, hence the need to create AIT/AMT in various forms.

[shiv]

100 gold pieces, 100 horses, 60,000 cattle. It sounds hyperbole to me. But if you'd like to read it literally, no issues.

The Hindi translation you posted says nothing of 60,000 cattle. Only Griffiths says that. If I leave myself out of this, Griffiths, the Hindi translator and you do not agree with each other.

Clearly there is a lot of disagreement about the Rig Veda, and everyone does exactly what you have honestly admitted:

I'm only defending what I think

The last word is yet to be said. Under the circumstances theories built up on the beliefs/thoughts/opinions of a few people could well sound totally incredible to someone whose opinion is different.

I think we all know that it is difficult to be sure of anything on this issue. The lack of place names works in two ways. if the composer names no names, how does a modern day scholar name place names in the presence of so much controversy and disagreement?

I find that places have been named by hypotheses and not proof. Since there is little archaeological proof and patchy linguistic proof, the available matter has been extrapolated into linguistic analyses and it is those linguistic analyses that seem to throw up an equally large number of questions

For example you say that 'Tocharian" is a centum language. And Sanskrit is a satem language. Surely then, the border between Tocharian lands and Sanskrit lands are a clear Satem Centum border. If you recall two facts

1. Sanskrit is the oldest recorded "Indo-European" language
2. the Tocharian speaking lands had considerable influences from india, indicating interaction going back millennia

Based on these it is easy to conjecture that the real "proto Indo European" was created in the border areas between Tocharian speakers and Sanskrit speakers. That language spread from - say Kashmir into the rest of India and became Sanskrit and spread Westwards to make Avestan and Iranian. A branch of that language travelled up central Asia to Europe laying the seed for Centum European languages.

What this hypothesis does it to take the origin of PIE away from "central Asian steppes" to the regions around the Indus. That would make your PIE firmly Indic from around the Indus.

[shiv]

OK so here is my "Out of India theory"

Look at the maps below.This one one maps "Centum" languages of Europe in the North (green/red/blue) and the "satem" languages in olive green (or dirty green-brown) over India and Iran. There is a gap betwen the two langauge areas. To fill that gap, it was hypothesized that the "Proto language" that gave rise to both these branches was somewhere in between, in the "steppes" of central Asia. That is why the Rig Veda has to be shown to have been composed in those steppes. It is the earliest recorded language.



But look at this map (below)showing where Tocharian occurred. Tocharian was a problem. It was a Centum language, like European languages. But too far East and South. And when you take Tocharian into account, the border between satem and centum falls in Northern India, near the origin of the Indus in Kashmir.



So Proto Indo European may well have been invented near the origin of the Sindhu and split into Satem and Centum. The satem parts went South to become Sanskrit and west as Avestan and Iranian. The Centum parts went North through the steppes into Europe.

[brihaspati]

ManishH ji,
Moreover, early summer is the busiest time for us.

No issues sir. Will wait for your reply.

But it strikes me that you went into Greek to find a supposed counter-example. Pel/s -

ok, let me see a better cognate to demonstrate "labial proclivity":

Skt goćara > Grk boupolos (cowherd)
Skt saćate > Grk hepomai (to follow)

versus "pharyngeal proclivity"
Whereas Skt daśa > Grk deka (ten)

The more parsimonious explanation is that in the former, there was a labiovelar sound, which could become a pure labial 'p' in Greek. But became a velar, then palatalized in Sanskrit. In Latin and Lithuanian, a pure velar remained.

For me, the g-b transition should have rung your alarm bells before even quoting this. In comparative studies between Greek and Latin, I had always this problem about how within classical greek, the transitions appeared to cluster along two opposite directions : in some, the shift is to the front, while in others the shift is to the rear. Then it struck me that most indications of formation of the "Greek" in a paleo-genetic and reconstructed demographic flow sense is a mix of so-called Pontic/[but also Balkan] and North-East African. It is entirely possible that two different predominant shift tendency clusters mixed in the Greek with one frontal/labial and the other rear/glottal.


The crude parsimonious way leads to the assumption of a mathematical average between the two clusters as the proto form. That assumption in its turn is based on the assumption that there can only be one proto origin.

If you compare with Latin - whose speakers must have been neighbours for a long long time with the Greeks - the second example is typically illustrative.

As far as I remember hepomai would be the present indicative form of hepomi. The stem is -hep which is supposed to be cognate with the Latin stem -sequ. If you look at the Latin stem, -sequ is not a contradition to my hypothesis of a possible transition from S. -saca.

But clearly, the general direction of motion/shift in the Latin case is (relative to S.) to the rear/glottal. -s does'nt become a -h because that would mean going forward, while the -c become a -k/q.

In the Greek, -s moves forward into -h, -ch moves to labial -p. The general direction of shift is to the front for this particular Greek stem.

Curiously, if you note - it is only Sanskrit which is clearly recognizing the word as a compound, -s+ca, [which should rather more accurately be translated as "with/accompanying" rather than "follow"], whereas both Latin and Greek club it together as stems - "-sequ" and "-hep".

Taken together this indicates more adaptation from proto-Sanskrit on the part of Greek and Latin rather than the other way around.

The cow-go-bou is a highly interesting direction, which I will probably try to write more elaborately later.

By the way - scientists never use parsimony as an alibi for everything. Think what the PIE as it stands [Pontic founder - from which S. is derived] is analogous to for example : no need to move beyond Dalton's atomic theory, as it explains such different phenomena as chemical reaction, radioactivity, superconduction all with the further rule that it behaves in one way in one case and in another way in another case. These are all properties of the atom - and thats it. If we accepted such linguist thinking you can easily imagine where we would still be stuck!

[Sanku]

Brilliant Shiv-ji; please accept my humble pranams on this.

[brihaspati]

The much maligned common Indian street/village dog is now supposed to have been direct remnant population from prehistoric archaic/founder dog populations - with very few now left in the world in genetic terms. The Tibetan apso is one survivor. Modern genetic studies propose that the first dog was domesticated not for herding but as entertainer/lap dogs, and more as company rather than food source or working dog. The dog's instincts would help the village against wild animals and others in a way that the settled human would have lost in abilities once he/she became more independent of the forest.

The domestication of the dog in India therefore need not have originally had anything to do with herding.

[ramana]

Pardon the ignorance but what are the differences in Satem and Centum languages? IOW how does one language get categorised as centum or satem?

Thanks, ramana

[shiv]

Pardon the ignorance but what are the differences in Satem and Centum languages? IOW how does one language get categorised as centum or satem?

Thanks, ramana

"Shata" for 100, Cent for 100 the infamous "sha" and "ka/cha" of the shravan-kleon/cretin-shradda fame.

[brihaspati]

Pardon the ignorance but what are the differences in Satem and Centum languages? IOW how does one language get categorised as centum or satem?

Thanks, ramana

Supposed reconstruction of ancient pronunciation of the same letter in two different ways. Hundred as pronounced in two different groups representing the general tendency to pronounce the c-k dynamics.

[tyroneshoes]

Which I'm rebutting saying that RgVeda lifestyle is more mobile than sedentary.

Mobile from where to where?
If it mobile from Pura to pastures that surround it, I am fine with that...
There is no evidence for 'random wandering' along grasslands.

Remember we agreed that Rig Veda was composed in a geography where
elephants, horses, rhinos, lions, tigers, peacocks, etc. roamed.

Plenty of "kings" (राजन्) are mentioned but no place names. If the society is truly sedentary, they'd have names for places they delve in.

King nothing - neither pura nor sura to rule, why the heck were there even called Rajan?

I am sure Rajan meant - nomadic tribal chief <major sarcasm alert!>

A translation of vedic 'pur' to city, is redux to colonial era people like M. Wheeler to somehow allege that Harrappan cities were destroyed by invading aryans. This interpretation has been discredited is no longer considered true.

A 'pur' implies rampart or stronghold in RgVeda. See:
chap 13 "The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective" By Gregory L. Possehl
and Erdosy, George. 1994. “The meaning of Rgvedic pur :Notes on the Vedic landscape"

To consider pre-Harappan 'cities' in the modern context is idiotic. Pura could indeed be 'fortitied town' as close to a city as one got in those days. Nothing nomadic about these people who had Rajan defending these Pura, giving them the stature of Sura.

[member_20317]

Shiv ji why did you have to wait to post this for so long. We could have avoided 20 pages of acrimony.

One nubie kweschan - Were not the cities, states and population agglomerations carrying the suffix 'pur' before this guy M. Wheeler?

[ManishH]

The Hindi translation you posted says nothing of 60,000 cattle. Only Griffiths says that. If I leave myself out of this, Griffiths, the Hindi translator and you do not agree with each other.

That is because I hadn't included the hindi translation of that mantra. Here it is. It mentions 1,060, not 60,000. I'm told that the former is correct (ṣaṣṭiḥ sahasra = 1060; ṣaṣṭim sahasra = 60,000).

I think we all know that it is difficult to be sure of anything on this issue. The lack of place names works in two ways. if the composer names no names, how does a modern day scholar name place names in the presence of so much controversy and disagreement?

Names of dwellings are missing - but we do have names of rivers (toponyms).

For example you say that 'Tocharian" is a centum language. And Sanskrit is a satem language. Surely then, the border between Tocharian lands and Sanskrit lands are a clear Satem Centum border. If you recall two facts

1. Sanskrit is the oldest recorded "Indo-European" language
2. the Tocharian speaking lands had considerable influences from india, indicating interaction going back millennia

Centum is an isogloss, not a geographical boundary. Not all speakers of centum dialect moved to Europe. Some did move to east too.

Some more facts about Tocharian need to be added from archaeology:
- Tarim basin mummies are even older (1900 BC) than advent of Buddhism in this region.
- Between '59-'75, the chinese researchers extracted 305 of these mummies and to date ~500 mummies have been recovered in well-preserved condition. Source: "The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mysteries of the Earliest People in the West": by J. P. Mallory & Victor Mair
- DNA of modern inhabitants of this region is very different from these mummies.

The situation above is not comparable to India, where we don't have a lot of data from DNA of ancient human remains.

Kashmir into the rest of India and became Sanskrit and spread Westwards to make Avestan and Iranian.

No objection to Kashmir as the homeland if archaeology reveals early horse domestication and chariots here.

The PIE homeland has not been judged based on the weighted mean of geographical distances between attested branches. The well-reconstructed IE linguistic terms for horse, wagon terminology and chariotry; combined with archaeological evidence for horse domestication, chariot remains are the main criteria.

As you say, there is no final word here. As discoveries are made in archaeology, epigraphs etc., existing hypotheses will get overturned; as they have been many times.

[member_22872]

Shiv garu, that was indeed a nice post, very informative and illuminating about those language families. Thank you.

Manish garu, if it is 1060 cows, I don't think that is hyperbole, it is a possibility, I know vedic period and the present are different, but the possibility is there, so is 100 pieces of jewelry.

[member_20317]

Uroeka Uroeka, I have found the PIE dictionary. The PIE Roseta. The Brahmins themselves are speaking PIE and there is even the Indo European dancing girl. No chariots or horses but Linguistic evidence suggests this is definately the PIE. Follow the link if you do not believe me.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkVzQ1dJ ... re=related

[RajeshA]

No objection to Kashmir as the homeland if archaeology reveals early horse domestication and chariots here.

From the OIT view, I don't think archaeological evidence of horse domestication or even chariots is necessary.

As speculated earlier, horses could just as well have been imported to the region where proto-Rig Veda composers lived. There is hardly any mention of horse really being domesticated in the Rig Veda, other than it was a privileged animal. There is hardly much reference to any natural habitat of the horses and of the proto-RigVedians sharing that habitat with the horse. The absence of such narrative is in fact a clear indicator that the proto-RigVedians (Aryans if you like) did not necessarily domesticate the horse, and even if they did, it could just as well have been a migratory group, a forward scouting party if you like, which could have domesticated it and then exported it back to their ancestral home.

Chariots could or could not have been invented by proto-Rig Vedians (Aryans). Important is that once they came into possession of horses, they also started using the technology.

Horse Domestication is an unnecessary criteria imposed by the AIT without any logical imperative.

Why should PIE and Horse Domestication need to coincide?

[member_20317]

No objection to Kashmir as the homeland if archaeology reveals early horse domestication and chariots here.

Why should PIE and Horse Domestication need to coincide?

For the exact same reason for which India should tests its Thermo-Nukes again to give a seismic reading of 5.2.

Or we could just forget about testing and about finding the derby horse.

They are not sure.

The problem for them is nothing goes of my father if they are not so.

[Prem]

[Of course this conclusion is an indicator of the level of science and proof you are willing to accept. You seem to place great faith in this credo, and believe it in your heart. To that extent I cannot offer any counter. But it only indicates the vacuous grounds on which linguists seem to be building up their theories. But it encourages me to find that people who claim expertise in the field are actually using flimsy rhetorical grounds to support theories. It means that the theories will need continuous rexamination and questioning to dig up assumptions and dogma.

Going by Pie,Vacuous sounds just like Bakwas with little change in pronunciation.

[ManishH]

ok, let me see a better cognate to demonstrate "labial proclivity":

Skt goćara > Grk boupolos (cowherd)
Skt saćate > Grk hepomai (to follow)

versus "pharyngeal proclivity"
Whereas Skt daśa > Grk deka (ten)

For me, the g-b transition should have rung your alarm bells before even quoting this.

There cannot be a g-b transition - they are too far in the human mouth for mispronunciations in any direction. More likely, the original sound was a labiovelar gʷoukʷolos. Greek simply lost the velar element to make it 'boupolos'.

Then it struck me that most indications of formation of the "Greek" in a paleo-genetic and reconstructed demographic flow sense is a mix of so-called Pontic/[but also Balkan] and North-East African. It is entirely possible that two different predominant shift tendency clusters mixed in the Greek with one frontal/labial and the other rear/glottal.

Please point me to some evidence that North east African is frontal or glottal; and Pontic is the other way.

How would you explain the labiovelar which is already found in Mycenaean Greek inscriptions of Knossos ?

The crude parsimonious way leads to the assumption of a mathematical average between the two clusters as the proto form.

Labiovelars are attested in inscriptions - not an 'explanation'.

As far as I remember hepomai would be the present indicative form of hepomi. The stem is -hep which is supposed to be cognate with the Latin stem -sequ. If you look at the Latin stem, -sequ is not a contradition to my hypothesis of a possible transition from S. -saca.

Nope, ć, p and q are too far away in the human mouth to be mispronounced. The original sound is more likely sekʷ. Latin kept the labiovelar 'sequ'. Greek lost the velar to keep the labial 'hep'. Sanskrit lost the labial and palatalized the velar to make it 'saćati'.

But clearly, the general direction of motion/shift in the Latin case is (relative to S.) to the rear/glottal. -s does'nt become a -h because that would mean going forward, while the -c become a -k/q.

S often becomes H - it's called debuccalization. Like Sindhu was called Hindu by Iranians. This phenomenon also happened in Sanskrit eg. in sup vibhakti अंगिरस् becomes अंगिरः

Curiously, if you note - it is only Sanskrit which is clearly recognizing the word as a compound, -s+ca, [which should rather more accurately be translated as "with/accompanying" rather than "follow"], whereas both Latin and Greek club it together as stems - "-sequ" and "-hep".

No one cannot break roots like remove च out of चल In sanskrit, 'accompanyer' is अभिचर or सहचर, follower is अनुचर. There is a clear semantic difference between अनु (follow) and स/सह (accompany).

Taken together this indicates more adaptation from proto-Sanskrit on the part of Greek and Latin rather than the other way around.

Please treat the above only as criticism. But if you have theories on an alternate reconstruction called proto-sanskrit instead of proto-IE, it's a good idea. Esp. if you it is reviewed by medical professionals who study speech from biological side and are not in the league of linguists with ulterior motives

[ManishH]

Why should PIE and Horse Domestication need to coincide?

Because the phonetic relation between the various terms for 'horse' in IE languages is the same phonetic relation between them for a lot of fundamental human vocabulary. Eg.

Ten : Latin : decem, Skt daśam
horse : Latin : equus, Skt aśva
To see : Greek : derkomai, Skt dṛśyati

The term used is 'well reconstructed'. So they seem to have been familiar with horse (if not already domesticated it) before dispersal. If a people disperse before seeing the horse, (like human ancestors from africa), they end up having different names for the same animal. If the animal is introduced from somewhere else, they endup either making an own name, or using the foreign word which stands out in phonetic behaviour. Since 'aśva' follows the same phonetic relation (palatalized) as other fundamental, shared words, w.r.t to the other branches of IE family, we can safely say : speakers of these languages had this name for the horse when they were together.

In the same way, the terms for wheel, wagon-parts and chariot are also 'well reconstructed'. This map illustrates what parts are 'well reconstructed' in various branches:



From "The Horse, Wheel and Wagon", David Anthony

We can conclude - the people were familiar with chariotry and wheeled vehicle technology before wide dispersal.

[svinayak]

The Horse, Wheel and Wagon" - This should also coincide with genetics and archeology

[member_22872]

The term used is 'well reconstructed'

Manish ji, but where? in PIE? in a conjecture ?

[svinayak]

Well, Firstly, AIT/AMT cannot be explained without jumps in logic and assumptions. OIT is another beast, one need nor accept it. If OIT can be explained with logic and proof fine, else I am fine with vedic Indians staying put in India and going no where. It is more the obsession of the Aryan Europeans to dominate and migrate out, hence the need to create AIT/AMT in various forms.

OIT is not even in the picture. There is no need to bring this. AIT/AMT has to stand on its own feet or die.

OIT is a totally different one and not connected to show AIT is false.
Their strategy - They want to give credibility to AIT by discrediting OIT.

[RajeshA]

ManishH ji,

I have not denied that IE languages could have a common word for "horse" and that the domestication would have preceded any dispersal.

My question relates to
"What is the basis for considering that these Proto-IE people themselves were responsible for domesticating the horse, and even if they were, that they did it in their original homeland?"

[shiv]

The PIE homeland has not been judged based on the weighted mean of geographical distances between attested branches. The well-reconstructed IE linguistic terms for horse, wagon terminology and chariotry; combined with archaeological evidence for horse domestication, chariot remains are the main criteria.

Would you be able to say why terminology for horse, wagon and chariotry are so important to "Indo-European" languages. What is so important about these things? Why is the presence of archaeoogical evidence of horse, wheel and chariotry so important to the study of these languages?

[shyamoo]

Isn't this the crux of the discussion here?

Kashmir into the rest of India and became Sanskrit and spread Westwards to make Avestan and Iranian.

No objection to Kashmir as the homeland if archaeology reveals early horse domestication and chariots here.

The PIE homeland has not been judged based on the weighted mean of geographical distances between attested branches. The well-reconstructed IE linguistic terms for horse, wagon terminology and chariotry; combined with archaeological evidence for horse domestication, chariot remains are the main criteria.

As you say, there is no final word here. As discoveries are made in archaeology, epigraphs etc., existing hypotheses will get overturned; as they have been many times.

If proof is required for Kashmir to be the homeland for IE, then shouldn't there be proof of the existance of PIE to begin with? If the idea that India is the origin of PIE is on shaky ground, couldn't it be because of the fact that PIE itself is on shaky ground.

All we know is that remains of horses/chariots were found in central asia. But there is no indication that they spoke PIE.

[member_22872]

Since Manish ji is so well versed with linguistics, it will be of great help if he can actually tell us if he agrees with so many people calling PIE a conjecture. He will help us immensely if he could shed light on his view about why PIE is not a conjecture. For me it is a conjecture, from what I am following through in this discussion, I haven't seen any origin of this mythical PIE, nor proof of it's existence, I also wonder about the script of this PIE. Does it have a script else is it passed verbally?

[brihaspati]

ManishH ji,
you wrote

Skt saćate > Grk hepomai (to follow)

"follow" is just one of the senses in which the verb is used, there are equal uses of "to be together with", to love, be together, accompany/have to do with. In English usage "follow" carries a sense of subservience, mimetic behaviour, "be led". I think sacate is even used in the sense of "to go to".

This means for me that "c" was originally used in the sense of "exists/is" and hence extended to meaning "in a position/stationary". "s" generically seems to have meant speed/movement/motion and hence further as facilitate/help/be with etc. The wider uses of sacate as a verb makes sense then as "motion/action to be with" being the starting usage.

I don't think we can stop at classical Sanskrit root and not go beyond into how roots might have been composed in trying to understand the simultaneous multiple uses of the same root in widely divergent senses. It was in this sense I meant the decomposition for sacate.


If you apply your favoured axiomatic logic of "common origins" for "words" that seem to carry same sense and may be forced into phonetic similarity by hypothesizing incremental steps which are supposedly lost without trace - then, allow us to apply the same logic to even formation of words. How many different uses - are the same root used? What is common in those different senses? That can provide a clue to what the original synthesis was perhaps.

By the way, you seem to be following well known PIE lobby's textual examples. The examples you use on this thread are the iconic ones used in PIE lobby literature. Maybe it will be good for all of us here, if you state the texts you are using. We can deal with the common ammunition hurled by the lobby in a systematic way then? I found it surprising that you are using the specifically "follow" meaning for sacate, while it is known that sacate is used for many more and different senses - including accompany, "to go to", assist, to be with, etc. Then a little exploration provided the reason - it is the standard selective meaning used in PIE-outside-India lobby texts, while remaining absolutely silent about the other meanings and uses of sacate.

[brihaspati]

ManishH wrote Nope, ć, p and q are too far away in the human mouth to be mispronounced. The original sound is more likely sekʷ. Latin kept the labiovelar 'sequ'. Greek lost the velar to keep the labial 'hep'. Sanskrit lost the labial and palatalized the velar to make it 'saćati'.

Why did Latin keep the hypothesized "labiovelar", and Greek lost the "velar" onlee? Why Sanskrit lost the labial? Why did it need to not onlee lose the labial but also palatalize the velar? Why are two descendants of the same cultural group - who could not have split before the first archeological evidence of horse domestication with evidence of horse paraphernalia and clearly PIE-proponent-identifiable-spoked wheeled chariots - so unpredictably and wildly differing in their sound changes? Why would Sanskrit with such strong tradition of strict intergenerational maintenance of oral rendition accuracy of pronunciation suddenly start this practice after coming to India to maintain this strangely altered corruption of its ancestral usage?

Do you really fail to see what your insistence on the "labiovelar" means? You have no explanation as to - under the other cultural assumptions you impose - why these different descendant branches go in such wildly differing directions from the same origin word.

You need three extra rules : it happens in X ways for Greek, Y ways for Latin, and Z ways for Sanskrit. To explain the differences you need as many rules as the number of differences. This is not parsimony. To claim parsimony you need lesser number of rules than the differences they are seeking to explain.

As for inscriptional "proof" of labiovelars - labiovelars are an assumed phonetic category, dependent crucially on how they are supposedly pronounced. Inscriptions on the other hand provide symbols that supposedly represent sounds. It takes some leap of imagination and faith to claim inscriptions as proofs of labiovelars. And I am sure you are aware that even within linguists, the actual existence of "labiovelars" is contested and disputed.

[brihaspati]

Cow : the mother of all problems.

I was at first turned away from this thread because I felt that again aswa would dominate the proceedings. Now after ManishH ji's reference to "boupelos" it strikes me that maybe we should have more fun with this.

The argument for splitting of PIE after horse domestication onlee in Steppes is based on the apparent common occurrence of "cognates" [which still need branch and language specific rules of sound change, explicitly and uniquely applicable to single words to make them cognates - like the transition from ek̑u̯o-s to hippos] in "daughters".

I find it strange that however the same analysis doesnt go that far with the cow. PIE appears to claim that "cognates" for cow are similarly distributed in all the daughters, and reconstructs g[u̯]ou- as the PIE root. By the horse argument, IE could not have split from PIE before domestication of cow. If the PIE speakers did not move out of Steppes before domestication of horses - then they must have domesticated the cow in Steppes before or simultaneously around horse domestication. But if domestication is the ultimate connection then we cannot rule out origin of PIE in any of NE Africa, near East and India in the time range of c. 10,000 BCE.

Why was g[u̯]ou needed to be reconstructed? Because Latin and Greek had to be accommodated. These used the "B" sound instead of "g", and hence to explain the "labial" version, the "u" sound had to be postulated to fit the theory of incremental change [assumption that human mouth will not change positions of sound origins drastically - the rate is to be determined according to the convenience of the linguist lobby].

Note that ManishH ji claims that Latin retained the "labiovelar" in case of "sek[w]" [even though the full Latin stem doesn't stop at k/q but goes on to add "u/o"] but we also see that it suddenly springs forward in case of gou to jump to labial "bos". Both Greek and Latin in this case behave the same, while they dont about "sek[w]" - while their northern neighbours, across the Alps retain the "g" and even push it back further to generic "ku/kuh" sounds.


Interestingly the Semitic version is strongly leaning towards "baq". One of he Sanskrit words for cattle/herd/collection of animals is paśu, and seems to be phonetically and usage wise similar to Latin pecu. PIE proposes the root *pek̑-. Latin pecus ‘cattle as wealth.’ Pecus is a close relative of the Latin word pecu ‘flock, herd, cattle’ and *pek̑- should be compared to the Semitic shoresh [verb root] for ‘cow’ bqr whose reflex in Biblical Hebrew is baqar, in modern Arabic baqara.

We should consider the historical setting for arrival/rise/advent of the "Greeks". They were engaged in a contest with the Hittites in the bronze age, and apparently had exchanges too. Troy was a frontier trade centre between the Aegean aspiring powers and the Hittites on the other. It is not unlikely that the Homerian narrative is a symbolic representation of actual historical civilizational exchanges [marriage often symbolized in a narrative a kind of symbolization of treaties or cultural pacts] and we know that Greeks fought on both sides of the Athenian/Persian conflict. Both the Greeks and the Romans - whose Patricians claimed a Troy lineage - seems to be in the right milieu to be influenced by the middle east, especially during the early formational pre-empire/kingdom stages of human civilization in the eastern Med.

Is it entirely impossible that the Latins and Greeks sourced their term for the cow from near east?

But there is a further twist to this. In RV, there is a curious common equivalent bracketing of three things - Saraswati - cow - speech, through "vak". The equivalence pointed to of speech with flowing milk/milch cow, in the same breadth as Saraswati - together with Saraswati's explicit connection to a river, is not found in any other similar literature as far as I know. I could be mistaken, if t exists let me know.

If we go by ManishHji's philosophical claims - the association of milk/cow with language/speech and a wide flowing river - should point to an earlier presence of the root "vak" associated with cow, arising in India. This cannot be ruled out to have influenced the mesopotamian region, and hence the possible influence on Semitic languages in their formative days.

[brihaspati]

Antiquity, Volume: 83 Number: 322 Page: 1023–1037, 2008
From sheep to (some) horses: 4500 years of herd structure at the pastoralist settlement of Begash (south-eastern Kazakhstan)
Michael Frachetti and Norbert Benecke

The relative frequencies show a steady increase of this species [horse] through time, from 2 per cent in Phase 1b to 14 per cent in the Phases 5 and 6. Whether the lack of horses in the earliest phase of occupation (Phase 1a) is an artefact of the small size of the total faunal collection or was a reality remains an open question. The second half of the third millennium BC, which roughly corresponds with Phase 1a, is considered as the period when horse domestication flourished in Western Asia (Benecke & von den Driesch 2003). Nevertheless, percentages of horse remains at Begash remain below 6 per cent until approximately AD 50 (Phase 3b).

The steady increase in horses in the faunal record does correlate with documented political and social expansions of eastern Eurasian mobile pastoralists in the mid-first millennium BC. For example, the increase in horses in Phase 3 (750 BC-AD 50) corresponds with the growth of nomadic steppe confederacies such as the Saka and Wusun (Chang et al. 2003; Rogers 2007).

The domestic horse is documented at Begash by the start of the second millennium BC, but its impact on pastoralism is not clear. It is true that by increasing their use of the horse throughout the Iron Age and later periods, the inhabitants of Begash likely improved their mobility and access to pastures across various ecological niches for their primary herd animals. Nevertheless, the zooarchaeological record from Begash illustrates that the increase in horses through time correlates first with opportunistic hunting forays at the end of the Bronze Age and then with expanding political engagements that undoubtedly reshaped the organisation of Eurasian pastoralist communities from the first millennium BC onward.

When compared to the relative stability of other domesticates at Begash, the small Bronze Age presence and limited expansion of horses in the faunal record before historic periods demands that we reconsider the degree to which domestic horses played a dominant role in emerging pastoralist lifeways or in aiding the diffusion of regional material culture throughout prehistory. Specifically, there is not ample evidence for extensive horse riding during the second millennium BC at Begash. To the degree that Begash is indicative of other pastoralist settlements in the region, the faunal evidence directly challenges the image of middle to late Bronze Age pastoralists (2000-1000 BC) as derived from migrating horse-riders (Kuz’mina 2008) and suggests that horse riding was not the most significant catalyst for regional diffusion at this point in prehistory. This does not demote the importance of domestic horse riding as a key innovation for Eurasian populations in general or defray its historical impact on the region write large; rather these data suggest there were other mechanisms by which pastoralism, material culture, and ideology developed among regional populations in the third and second millennia BC (Frachetti 2008a).

[shyamoo]

Cow : the mother of all problems.

I was at first turned away from this thread because I felt that again aswa would dominate the proceedings. Now after ManishH ji's reference to "boupelos" it strikes me that maybe we should have more fun with this.
.....

If we go by ManishHji's philosophical claims - the association of milk/cow with language/speech and a wide flowing river - should point to an earlier presence of the root "vak" associated with cow, arising in India. This cannot be ruled out to have influenced the mesopotamian region, and hence the possible influence on Semitic languages in their formative days.

Brihaspati ji,

I have no idea of what you are trying to explain here. Can you please explain the same in normal English for a buddhu like me .

Thanks

[shyamoo]

This PIE ( as in AIT/AMT ) stuff sounds more and more like "Intelligent Design" to me...

[hanumadu]

It is not as if there are no horse remains in India.
THE HORSE EVIDENCE

Meanwhile, in several Harappan sites remains of horses have been found. Even supporters of the AIT have admitted that the horse was known in Mohenjo Daro, near the coast of the Arabian Sea (let alone in more northerly areas), in 2500 BC at the latest.30 But the presence of horses and even domesticated horses has already been traced further back: horse teeth at Amri, on the Indus near Mohenjo Daro, and at Rana Ghundai on the Panjab-Baluchistan border have been dated to about 3,600 BC. The latter has been interpreted as indicating “horse-riding invaders”31, but that is merely an application of invasionist preconceptions. More bones of the true and domesticated horse have been found in Harappa, Surkotada (all layers including the earliest), Kalibangan, Malvan and Ropar.32 Recently, bones which were first taken to belong to onager specimens, have been identified as belonging to the, domesticated horse (Kuntasi, near the Gujarat coast, dated to 2300 BC). Superintending archaeologist Dr. A.M. Chitalwala comments: “We may have to ask whether the Aryans (…) could have been Harappans themselves. (…) We don’t have to believe in the imports theory anymore.”

Admittedly, the presence of horses in the Harappan excavation sites is not as overwhelming in quantity as in the neolithic cultures of Eastern Europe. However, the relative paucity of horse remains is matched by the fact that the millions-strong population of the Harappan civilization, much larger than that of Egypt and Mesopotamia combined, has left us only several hundreds of skeletons, even when men sometimes had the benefit of burial which horses did not have.

It is natural that animals are not buried with the same care as humans. They are probably not even buried. Even if buried it would be away from living areas. But where do the excavations of archaeological sites take place? Wouldn't it be near city like areas where there are structures for dwellings, walls etc. Naturally there wouldn't be much animal remains in those areas. If excavations were to cover the entire area of a few mile radius from the populated areas, then more horse remains might be found. The horse excuse becomes flimsier and flimsier.

[member_22872]

Vnmshyam ji, this is what I understood from Bji's post:
According to Manish ji, PIE supposed to have branched out after the domestication of horse for some reason, that means they spread out with their horses and languages became distinct in their own way but retained their roots to PIE. Now BJi seems to question if domestication is what led to branching of languages, then one has to consider the affect of cow domestication on similar lines as Cow domestication either predates horse domestication or took place around the same time. So other languages similar to spread of languages after horse domestication argument of Manish ji should show common roots for cow. But the roots of cow in languages seem to show different development paths. Greek and Latin show a similarity in the b usage in the root for cow but seem to have not connected geographically? so do others. And also cow domestication having taken place in NE Africa and North India before it was done in steppe means that the origin of PIE at Least is not European. And also Bji seems to be of opinion that like Horse-wagon-wheel trio, Saravati(river)/milk/cow are related which should have been the real root of PIE rather than the horse trio.
BJi please correct me if I misunderstood.

[disha]

vmshyamji' PIE is more insidious than "intelligent design (ID)". The proponents of ID can be dismissed off as bible thumping lunatics. However the progenitors and propagators of PIE are called "Esteemed historians and scholars of Sanskrit".

Also to paraphrase Bji' for you: What got domesticated first? Cow or Horse? Or to reverse it since the cognates of horse in IE family is given higher antiquity, it appears that from linguistics and by linguistics - Horse got domesticated first before Cow! And from what I read, however the study of pastoralists (or animal herders) in all continents (except Antartica and Australia) across all cultures (yes, including masai-mara in Africa and mongols in Mongolia) indicate that cow (or cow-like creatures in South America) were domesticated first. Given that, if linguists are right, then the rest of the human history is wrong. So how can linguists be right? By giving to latin and greek that they jumped from the PIE root "gou" to "bos", but again that is specific to latin/greek but not to northern neighbour of latin/greek (across alps). Given that, please re-read the rest of B'Ji's post since translating it further will be killing the beauty of its argument.

Look at Shivji's post where the languages are geographically mapped. In the blank space in between the linguists expected a language that would neatly fit the divide and will be PIE - expecting it to be setum (sanskrit like) but older. They found "Tocharian" and that put paid to their dreams. What they found was a "Centum" (greek like) language. That pushed the origin of PIE right near the Indus (assuming languages and people's settlement fit on a curve on a flat geographical area). Basically, it means that the language which led to rigvedic sanskrit and where it was composed is PIE. Since the language occurred before rigveda is composed. In other words, the geographic origin of PIE is the Indus (or is it Saraswati?) basin. The only migration that could have happened would have been migration from the west bank of Indus to the east bank of Ganges (:lol:)

Coming back to Manhish'ji.,

Sir, you sound like Gus Portokalos in "My big fat greek wedding"

Gus Portokalos: Give me a word, any word, and I show you that the root of that word is Greek.

Gus Portokalos: Kimono, kimono, kimono. Ha! Of course! Kimono is come from the Greek word himona, is mean winter. So, what do you wear in the wintertime to stay warm? A robe. You see: robe, kimono. There you go!

You have PIE answer to every word! Importantly, can you tell us why this is important (and particularly without resorting to PIE)?

Would you be able to say why terminology for horse, wagon and chariotry are so important to "Indo-European" languages. What is so important about these things? Why is the presence of archaeoogical evidence of horse, wheel and chariotry so important to the study of these languages?

Also, google for "gypsy chariot races"., see how they tie wagons to horses and use them for racing. In fact, gypsies are so enameaured with horses and chariots just as a caucasian gora is enamoured with a blonde. Some of their horse adornments actually look like a horse with a tiny hump.

Coming to wheels, it is not necessary that a cart has to have a spoked wheel if it is horse drawn. Spoked wheels makes the chariot efficient and can come after the creation of chariot with regular wheels (there are images with spokes on a circular chakra from IVC). Further, a toy or a figurine may not have spoke wheels because making it one will be difficult (have you ever tried casting bronze to create a spoked wheel? It is easier to just create a disc. Try that with clay now - I tried with clay - it does not last more than a few hours/days). Spoked wheel based chariots were most likely used for war - one can have a "chariot" to transport small goods as well.

Now coming to herding you mentioned that horses help:

1. I am sure you made that comment after watching a cowboy movie. Since there is no use of horses in tribes in Sub-saharan africa for cattle herding (you should really learn how Masai-mara develop cattle herding. The kid starts from herding goats and graduates to small herds of cattle and then to big herds)

2. Dogs have nothing to do with Cow or Goat Herding. Their use for sheep herding is a later day innovation.

[shiv]

Here, for variety and a bit of fun, read this. It even has Wendy Doniger but she's not saying anything to cause langoti-twisting
http://www.silk-road.com/artl/horsemyth.shtml

Let Them Eat Horses
by Dr. David Anthony

(Original print at NEWSLETTER - Institute For Ancient Equestrian Studies, No. 4/Summer 1997

Why do most Americans and Europeans find the idea of eating horses so unappetizing! Horseflesh is, after all, extremely nutritious--it is particularly rich in vitamins, iron, and abbumnnodds-and can be very tasty. It is eaten enthusiastically in Kazakstan and other Central Asian countries, as well as in some parts of Europe and French-speaking Canada.

The aversion felt by most modern Americans and Europeans originated as a religious taboo in the early Middle Ages. The sacrifice of a horse and the consumption of its sanctified flesh were central parts of very widespread pagan rites in ancient Europe. The early Christian church forbade the consumption of horseflesh because it was so regularly associated with preChristian ceremonies. Pope Gregory III (AD 731-741) banned the eating of horses as "an unclean and execrable act."

Although the papal ban seems to have greatly reduced the consumption of horseflesh in most of Europe, the ritual sacrifice of horses continued for a surprisingly long time. Horses were slaughtered at the funerals of King John of England in 1216 and the Holy Roman Emperor Karl IV in 1378. As recently as 1781, during the funeral of cavalry General Friedrich Kasimir at Trier, his horse was killed and deposited in his grave. Even more surprising, churches were sanctified with horse sacrifices, perhaps conducted secretly by the workmen who built the church buildings. Modern construction workers found horse bones embedded in the floor of St. Botolph's at Boston, Lincolnshire, and in the belfry of a church at Elsdon, Northumberland. Eight horse skulls were discovered in 1883 in the stonework of the pulpit at Bristol Street meeting house in Edinburgh, Scotland; others were discovered embedded in the foundation of the choir stalls at Llandraff Cathedral, Wales. As late as the 18th century, Dutch peasants would place a horse skull on the roof to keep bad luck away from the home.

Why were horse sacrifices so widespread in ancient Europe, and why did rural Europeans cling to these superstitions for so long?

In prehistoric Europe and Asia, supernatural spirits and powers were thought to reside within fire, water, mountains, thunder, the vault of the sky, rocks, and trees. We still recognize the god that inhabits trees when we "knock on wood." The power and beauty of horses was easily translated into divinity. In the myths of the Romans, the Greeks, the Celts, and the Germans, we can detect common and extremely ancient horse rituals that are paralleled in rituals described in the Rig Veda. The Rig ~eda was a religious text compiled in northern India and Pakistan before 1000 B.C. (possibly as early as 1500 B.C.) by people who called themselves Aryans. It is quite possible that some of the horse rituals that appear both in the Rig Veda and in pre-Christian Europe originated before 3000 B.C. among the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. This language, now long dead, was the mother of most of the languages of Europe, as well as those of ancient Iran and India.

In the Rig Veda horses were closely linked with specific gods, and the sacrifice of a white horse or a champion racer was associated with events such as the consecration of a new king. After the sacrifice the flesh of the horse was eaten, and its head and legs were laid out or erected on a pole as an offering to the gods. Here are selected verses describing the Vedic horse sacrifices, translated from the Sanskrit by Prof. Wendy Doniger: - His mane is golden; his feet are bronze. He is s�re~ifr as thought, faster than Indra.
- The celestial coursers, reveling in their strength, fly in a line like wild geese when the horses reach the racecourse of the sky.
- The racehorse has come to the slaughter, pondering with his heart turned to the gods. The goat, his kin, is led in front; behind come the poets, the singers.
- You do not really die through this, nor are you harmed You go to the gods on paths pleasant to walk on.
- Let this racehorse bring us good cattle andgood horses, male children and all-nourishing wealth. Let Aditi [a goddess] make trsfreef~om sin. Let the horse ~e~ith our qfferings achieve sovereign power for us.

The horse's head was thought to be a source of power by itself, an idea that seems to have survived among the peasant cultures of Europe. One of the most intriguing myths in the Rig C~eda concerns a man, Dadhyanc Atharvan, who learned from Tvastr, the maker god, the secret of making mead, an intoxicating honey drink. The Asvins, or the Divine Twins who are themselves occasionally represented poetically as a pair of young horses, insisted that Dadhyanc tell them the secret of the mead. He refused. They cut off his head and replaced it with the head of a horse, through which he became an oracle and told them the secret they desired. In other hymns in the Rig Veda horse heads flowed magically with honey.

These ritual themes have been investigated archaeologically by the IAES and its sister organization in Samara, Russia, the Institute for the History and Archaeology of the Volga. Excavations led by Dr. Igor Vasiliev have unearthed ritual deposits of horse heads at Syezh'ye, a Copper Age cemetery dated about 4500-5000 B.C. in the Samara River valley in Russia. On the ancient surface above a group of nine Copper Age graves, Vasiliev's team found two horse skulls lying with various ornaments, broken ceramic pots, and stone tools within a redstained patch of powdered red ochre. The horses obviously were part of a funerary offering, the oldest of its kind yet found. At Dereivka on the Dnieper River in Ukraine, the now-famous horse with bit wear on its premolar teeth was part of a head-and-hoof deposit at the edge of a settlement dated about 4200-3700 B.C. It was found with the remains of two dogs, which probably were part of the same ritual offering. In a grave in the Elista steppes, south of the lower Volga in Russia, excavators found the skulls of 40 horses deposited in a Catacomb-culture grave dated about 2500 B.C. But the most fascinating discovery of this kind was a find that could have been the grave of Dadhyanc himself.

At Potapovka, near Samara on the Sok River, excavations conducted from 1985-1988 exposed four burial mounds, or kurgans, dated about 2200-2000 B.C. Beneath kurgan 3, the central grave pit contained the remains of a man buried with at least two horse heads and the head of a sheep, in addition to pottery vessels and weapons. After the grave pit was filled, a human male was decapitated, his head was replaced with the head of a horse, and he was laid down over the filled grave shaft. This unique ritual deposit provides a convincing antecedent for the Vedic myth.

Discoveries like these help us to understand how human attitudes toward horses have been molded by the history of religion. The IAES will continue to explore the origins and development of ancient horse cultures when we return to the field in Russia in 1999.

FURTHER READ1NGS ON TH1S SUBJECT

The Rig Veda; an Anthology One hundred and eight hymns, selected, translated, and annotated by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty. Published by Penguin Books, 1981.

The Religion and Philosophy of the I/eda and Upanishads. By Arthur Berriedale Keith. Published by Motilal Banarsidass in Delhi, Patna, and Varanasi, 1925. Authorized reprint as Volume Thirty-one of the Harvard Oriental Series in 1970.

"The Tale of the Indo-European Horse Sacrifices." By Wendy Doniger (at The University of Chicago) in Incognita (Leiden) 1:1-15, 1990.