Out-of-India - From Theory to Truth

[peter]

Question is how does Manish explain the rules of Vedic Sanskrit?

In Sanskrit a word cannot end on a Palatal. So a word ending in "च" needs to be written with a "क". Hence Vac is written as Vak. Similarly other rules exist for palatans and there are many exceptions.
The key observation is that these rules were created by a mind.

Peter,

Regarding RV 10.75, a favorite of "RV geographers", I have introduced it in a previous post but not yet posted a more detailed analysis. I will do so.

Thanks!

The grammatical rules of Sanskrit are humanly created, as mentioned before.

Agree. A very important point. Since they are humanly created it seems reasonable that the rishis decided what should be the correct pronounciation of a word. After all a smart Grammarian who is operating with Sanskrit alphabet would make sure that a person hearing the sanskrit sounds should not feel ambiguity.

[A_Gupta]

In the primer on old Persian (link previously posted) we learn

The extant Old Persian texts all date from the 6th to the 4th century. They are written in a cuneiform script, perhaps invented under Darius for the purpose of recording his deeds. It was the first cuneiform script to be deciphered and provided the clue to the decipherment of all the other cuneiform scripts.

Of course, other scripts were deciphered (decipherment = semantics +phonology) assuming the language had affinities with the Semetic languages; but the "first sound" so to speak, came from the Old Persian, and the Old Persian was doable because of the Avesta and Sanskrit.

[ManishH]

What understanding of phonetics are you referring to ? I am sorry, now I am starting to get irritated a little because it seems you don't read. Other than the pratishakhya and the preserved RV sounds, which language has a phonetic text and a preserved oral record of similar antiquity ?

I have already read and responded - there are no written records for that era. You are asking for written records like a lawyer would

And if there are not any such records, what the devil are you talking about? How do you "understand" phonetics without any oral records that have been passed down with high fidelity?

The "devil" here is that even in the absence of written records, the fact remains that languages as far away as Greek/Latin/Lithuanian/Sanskrit/Slavonic/Avestan Tocharian share a large set of common verb roots. If you have a hypothesis on how that fact came about, I ask you to lay out the hypothesis. Since that request is what you have ignored in your legal framework, I'll even narrow it down to some simple examples ...

A simple example is to look at IE cognates of 'wheel':
Sanskrit: cakra, Greek: kuklos, Old English: hweogol, New English: wheel
Sanskrit: bharati, Greek phérō, OIr beirid, Tocharian paer, Latin fero

In absence of written records, is it worthwhile to look for patterns behind these seemingly related words ? Can one apply the knowledge of biomechanics of human speech articulation to give a best hypothesis of which of these could be closer to the original or whether they could actually be originals themselves ? Thereby arriving at a relative chronological order between these languages.

These are some of the questions that are of concern to the field of Linguistics. Prātiśākhyā is the specification of how Vedic sounds are to be articulated and it is meant to preserve Vedic sound faithfully. It says nothing about what was before the Vedic corpus was composed.

And none of the 3 questions I asked about [url=viewtopic.php?p=1337799#p1337799]in this post[/u] are covered in ṛg-prātiśākhyā. They are artefacts of human sound change extensively discussed in earlier pages of this thread.

but PIE linguists adamantly insist it is *real*.

PIE is a reconstruction based on best hypothesis. No one claims it to be divine revelation.

[A_Gupta]

C.B.F. Walker - Reading the Past: Cuneiform - gives an example where the decipherment has succeeded only in the semantics, but not in the phonology, namely, that of Eblaite.

Much of what is written on the tabletes is Sumerian and therefore gives us no clue to the nature of the local language. Thus we can read the Sumerian signs 3 udu-mesh and know that they mean both to us and to the scribes of Ebla, 'three sheep'; but how the scribes of Ebla pronounced what they read is another matter. ...It has been estimated that eighty percent of the words in the Ebla texts are Sumerian. Interspersed among these Sumerian signs the remaining twenty per cent reflect the local language, now called Eblaite. Broadly speaking, most of the nouns, verbs and adjectives occurring in the economic texts are written in Sumerian, and most of the prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions and personal names are written syllabically in Eblaite. The fact that all the basic concepts of personal names are recorded in Sumerian makes it relatively easy to get an idea of their content, but since we have very few texts written entirely in phonetic Eblaite, and these mostly poetic, it is hard to get a good picture of the Eblaite language. It is certainly Semitic, but its exact relation to other Semitic languages such as Akkadian, Amorite and Hebrew is still a matter for academic dispute.

[Arjun]

PIE is a reconstruction based on best hypothesis. No one claims it to be divine revelation.

Good, you claim to be not dogmatic on PIE. It is very clear from interactions here that linguistics is what you know and your appreciation of other historical evidence for AIT is hazy at best, and definitely not your forte at worst.

How do you then combine the above two statements to arrive at a dogmatic position supporting AIT? If you are not dogmatic on AIT how do you justify it being taught in schools?

[A_Gupta]

Thieme wrote:

In fact, the Avesta knows of one "Nanhaitīm" only, who is mentioned as a daeva in company with Indra and Saurva (Vd. 10.9; 19.43).

This, is of course, disputed by our resident historical linguist (who has also ignored the Indra & Varuna arguments Thieme gave). Anyway, the writers of this Avesta online, forgot to consult the historical linguists. They have the Avestan Nasatya in the singular.

http://www.avesta.org/vendidad/vd10sbe.htm

9. 'After thou hast thrice said those Thris-amrutas, thou shalt say aloud these victorious, most healing words:-

'"I drive away Indra, I drive away Sauru, I drive away the daeva Naunghaithya,[7] from this house, from this borough, from this town, from this land; from the very body of the man defiled by the dead, from the very body of the woman defiled by the dead; from the master of the house, from the lord of the borough, from the lord of the town, from the lord of the land; from the whole of the world of Righteousness.

The foot note [7] explains:

Indra, Sauru, Naunghaithya, Tauru, and Zairi are (with Akemmano [Akoman], here replaced by the Nasu), the six chief demons, and stand to the Amesha Spentas in the same relation as Angra Mainyu to Spenta Mainyu. Indra opposes Asha Vahishta and turns men's hearts from good works; Sauru opposes Khshathra Vairya, he presides over bad government; Naunghaithya opposes Spenta Armaiti, he is the demon of discontent; Tauru and Zairi oppose Haurvatat and Ameretat and poison the waters and the plants. -- Akem-mano, Bad Thought, opposes Vohu-mano, Good Thought.

Note, 6 chief daivas, not 7.

[Arjun]

A very interesting article written this month, that attacks the Anatolian origin hypothesis recently published by Atkinson: Mismodeling Indo-European Origin and Expansion: Bouckaert, Atkinson, Wade and the Assault on Historical Linguistics.

It seems to be in support of the traditional Steppe hypothesis, but at the same time has a host of very revealing statements on the current state of historical linguistics:

Failing the most basic tests of verification, the Bouckaert article typifies the kind of undue reductionism that sometimes gives scientific excursions into human history and behavior a bad name, based on the belief that a few key concepts linked to clever techniques can allow one to side-step complexity, promising mathematically elegant short-cuts to knowledge. While purporting to offer a truly scientific* approach, Bouckaert et al. actually forward an example of scientism, or the inappropriate and overweening application of specific scientific techniques to problems that lie beyond their own purview.

The list of basic cognates found among Indo-European languages is not settled, nor is the actual enumeration of separate I-E languages, and the timing of the branching of the linguistic tree remains controversial as well. As a result of such uncertainties, errors can easily accumulate and compound, undermining the approach.

Regardless of whether the authors are intentionally trying to mislead the public or have simply succeeded in fooling themselves, their work approaches scientific malpractice. Science ultimately demands empirical verification, and here the project fails miserably. If generating scads of false information does not falsify the model, what possibly could? Non-falsifiable claims are, of course, non-scientific claims. The end result is a grotesquely rationalistic and hence ultimately irrational approach to the human past. As such, examining the claims made by the Science team becomes an example of what my colleagues Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger have aptly deemed “agnotology,” or “the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.”

We are exercised about the Science article not merely because of our passion for the seemingly esoteric issue of Indo-European origins, but also because we fear for the future of historical linguistics—and history more generally. The Bouckaert study, coupled with the mass-media celebration of the misinformation that it presents, constitutes an assault on a field that has generated an extraordinary body of rigorously derived information about the human past. Such an attack occurs at an unfortunate moment, as historical linguistics is already in crisis. Linguistics departments have been cutting positions in historical inquiry for some time, creating an environment in which even the best young scholars in the field are often unable to obtain academic positions.

The devaluation of historical linguistics is merely one aspect of a much larger shift away from the study of the past. Subdisciplines such as historical geography and historical sociology have been diminishing for decades, and even the discipline of history faces declining enrollments and reduced faculty slots. Academic history itself, moreover, has been progressively shying away from the deeper reaches of the human past to focus on modern if not recent historical processes. Such developments do not bode well for the maintenance of an educated public. At the risk of descending into hyperbole, we do worry about the emergence of something approaching institutionally produced societal dementia. The past matters, and we care deeply for the preservation of its study.

[Arjun]

More wailing from Martin Lewis, who is clearly extremely exercised by the Anatolian theory 'interloping' into the domain of historical linguistics: Why the Indo-European Debate Matters—And Matters Deeply

Since both the Anatolian and Steppe supporters are equally moronic from an Indian standpoint - this open warfare between the two needs to be egged on, so more skeletons can come tumbling out.

In regard to the second set of complaints, we must reject them outright. The Indo-European issue is not obscure, trivial, or unrelated to pressing issues of our day. In fact, it is difficult to locate a single topic of historical debate that has been more ideologically fraught and politically laden over the past 150 years than that of Indo-European origin and expansion.

Indo-European studies took on a heavy ideological burden in the late 1800s, a development that would indirectly lead to the most hideous examples of genocide and mass-murder that the world has ever witnessed. The supposedly superior “Aryans” of Nazi mythology were none other than the speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Nazi propagandists conjured their own wildly off-base theories about I-E origins, but their fantasies had roots in the scholarly endeavors of German philologists. And while Nazism was militarily crushed and its ideological foundations pulverized, the movement refuses to die. Indeed, it seems to be experiencing something of a revival in eastern Germany, Hungary, and—of all places—Russia.

Such developments, however, risk being cut short if the field of historical linguistics continues to languish. Further progress will depend not only on linguists carrying out their own research, but also on their passing down of their knowledge and techniques to future generations of students. Such lines of intellectual transmission, however, are threatened by cutbacks in linguistic departments, as well as by the assaults on the field mounted by interlopers who have somehow managed to convince many scientists that linguistic evidence is of little account when it comes to studying the history of languages. To the extent that the Anatolian hypothesis gains ground among archeologists and geneticists on the basis of the recent Science article, our collective knowledge of the past will take a sharp step backwards.

[RajeshA]

The "devil" here is that even in the absence of written records, the fact remains that languages as far away as Greek/Latin/Lithuanian/Sanskrit/Slavonic/Avestan Tocharian share a large set of common verb roots. If you have a hypothesis on how that fact came about, I ask you to lay out the hypothesis.

Actually the "devil" in linguistics lie elsewhere, but here is one sound change which does not extend over hundreds or thousands of years.

When Megasthenes wrote his Indica, he writes 'Sandrokottus' instead of 'Chandragupta'. Now what I don't understand is that these sound changes are supposed to happen over long duration, so how come this sound change is happening in almost real-time? How come an able ambassador sent by Seleucus I Nicator could not even pronounce the name of his host, and needed to change the pronunciation?!

So I am at a loss to understand how these sound changes can be introduced into Greek through some language other than PIE and that too in real time!

As I understand in PIE linguistics, neither loan words nor superstratum words get changed due to the phonetics of the substratum languages! The sound changes occur because after every generation the muscles in the mouth get weaker and lazier! Right? Or was Megasthenes trying out the Paan Benares Wala?

[peter]

And if there are not any such records, what the devil are you talking about? How do you "understand" phonetics without any oral records that have been passed down with high fidelity?

The "devil" here is that even in the absence of written records, the fact remains that languages as far away as Greek/Latin/Lithuanian/Sanskrit/Slavonic/Avestan Tocharian share a large set of common verb roots. If you have a hypothesis on how that fact came about, I ask you to lay out the hypothesis.

Hmmm. Why still stick with AIT and PIE then? Why could'nt OIT explain Sanskrit inheritance in Latin, Slavonic, Lithuanian, Greek, Avestan and Tocharian?

After all Vedic Grammarians have laws that have shown:
a) In Sanskrit a word cannot end on a Palatal. So a word ending in palatal "च" needs to be written with a guttural "क".
b) Older Corpus "ś" becomes "k" in younger corpus. Rg Vedic diś becomes dik in Atharv Veda. Here Rg Veda is older and Atharv Veda is younger.

So how can any one believe that k>ś?
Since:
i) You don't have any written evidence as demanded by Dubey.
ii) You have contrary evidence from Sanskrit Grammarians whose works can be read by all and sundry.

[RajeshA]

there are no written records for that era (of the Vedas). You are asking for written records like a lawyer would

We first need to know of what era we are speaking of! Since the Vedas cannot give that information, and any dependence on linguistics derived from pre-set models of imaginary Aryan migrations leads one into circular thinking, the only way is to try to date the post Vedic period, and then to see postulate what would have been the late Vedic period, in order to fix the 'era'.

In due time, we shall be getting ever more precise dating for Indian Itihaas from archaeo-astronomy, geology, archaeology, textual analysis, Indic calendars, and based on that one would be able to put some date to the Vedic period.

Without however first finding out what was the Vedic period from traditional Indian sources, it is premature to build chronological models of language change!

[shiv]

I am very sorry to see that historical linguists absorb not only the lore, but also the character of a Witzel. This is a poisonous "science" that corrupts the soul. Shiv, take care as you try to learn it.

Well once again Manish, while demanding that you quote Thieme verbatim has selectively quoted a few words from Mary Boyce's books on Zoroastrianism, which are out of stock online while priced at Rs 14,000 apiece.

However the Google Books link below will lead you to pages 54 and 55 which have the relevant quotes and shows that ManishH has, expectedly, attempted to deceive in making a selective quote

Read the 2 pages and their footnotes with ref to Thieme here - click on page 54
Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce, page 54-55

What Boyce says is that the two beings Indra-Nasatya are repudiated in the Venidad, the Avestan text. Boyce concludes that
1. It is not possible to accept that "Daeva" is a word for God that was borrowed from the Indo-Iranians before the Avestans and Vedics, so it is not some pre-Aryan Iranian God that Ahura Mazda is condemning
2. The Iranians and The Vedics worshiped the same Gods that the Ahura Mazda/Avestans repudiated
3. The Avestan text also mention a Saurva who gets no mention in the Rig Veda but is mentioned as Sarva in later Indian texts.

See also footnote on pg 14

I will post an image of the pages 54-55 when Photobucket starts working again. It seems to have an upload issue right now.

[shiv]

The "devil" here is that even in the absence of written records, the fact remains that languages as far away as Greek/Latin/Lithuanian/Sanskrit/Slavonic/Avestan Tocharian share a large set of common verb roots. If you have a hypothesis on how that fact came about, I ask you to lay out the hypothesis.

Yes. Let me give you a hypothesis. There was a common source. You can call it PIE even if I don't like the idea. But the timelines and direction of movement as currently accpted are bullshit. Nothing is known precisely because no records exist other than what exists in Indian texts. Indian records and texts suggest some earlier date for Sanskrit, so I suspect all other languages will have to be predated. Indo European was probably already in India when Sanskrit was created. Nothing can be said about "relative order" of other langauges. When it comes to relative dating OIT is more valid than the current fakers' theory. There is every possibility that Indo-European of some sort was already present in India before and during the Indus Valley civilization.

In absence of written records, is it worthwhile to look for patterns behind these seemingly related words ? Can one apply the knowledge of biomechanics of human speech articulation to give a best hypothesis of which of these could be closer to the original or whether they could actually be originals themselves ? Thereby arriving at a relative chronological order between these languages.

It is the relative chronological order that could be utter nonsense and amounts to bluffing in the way it has been used along with cooked up or faked evidence.

[shiv]

A simple example is to look at IE cognates of 'wheel':
Sanskrit: cakra, Greek: kuklos, Old English: hweogol, New English: wheel
Sanskrit: bharati, Greek phérō, OIr beirid, Tocharian paer, Latin fero

Chakra and kuklos being cognates of wheel does not work on phonetic grounds. You have to cook up, and then invoke a PIE to bring them together. Circle is more likely to be an English cognate.

Sanskrit, Old Iranian, Tocharian, Greek and Latin fall within the Vedic-Iranian/West Asia-South Asia sphere of influence. We know Sanskrit reached Mesopotamia from India as early as 1500 BC. Ancient Greek fragments have been found from earlier, but clearly Sanskrit and Ancient Greek had probably already split off by 1800 BC and Sanskrit and vedic deities (and horse training tehniquies) were clearly present in India before roving bands could cart them to Mesopotamia.

All this suggests that a proto language that later become IE languages was much, much older. Already a refined IE language (Vedic Sanskrit) existed in India prior to 1500 BC. That sort of refinement and the voluminous compositions take time.

[RajeshA]

However the Google Books link below will lead you to pages 54 and 55 which have the relevant quotes and shows that ManishH has, expectedly, attempted to deceive in making a selective quote

Read the 2 pages and their footnotes with ref to Thieme here - click on page 54
Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce, page 54-55

Publication Date: 1996
Author: Mary Boyce
History of Zoroastrianism
Page 54-55

[KLP Dubey]

I have already read and responded - there are no written records for that era. You are asking for written records like a lawyer would

Not only am I asking for a written record, I am also asking for an oral record. Stop putting in phrases such as "like a lawyer would". The scientific requirement is that if you want to "understand" a language spoken 3000 years ago, you need a preserved oral record of it, not conjectures of what it might have sounded like.

Conjecture and understanding are entirely two different things. "Conjecture" (postulation) is a pramana, a valid means of pursuing knowledge, whereas understanding means that reliable knowledge has been achieved. You and your PIE friends seem to think that making a conjecture itself deserves the status of "knowledge"/"understanding".

In the case of Sanskrit, there IS a preserved oral record which is 100% backed up by the phonetic texts. Therefore our undertanding is true scientific understanding and not quackery. Based upon this understanding, and using the other languages in their earliest attested state (which is comparatively very recent) we can make credible assertions as to how languages spread.

What do you have for Greek, Tocharian, Slavonian, Lithuanian etc ?

The "devil" here is that even in the absence of written records, the fact remains that languages as far away as Greek/Latin/Lithuanian/Sanskrit/Slavonic/Avestan Tocharian share a large set of common verb roots. If you have a hypothesis on how that fact came about, I ask you to lay out the hypothesis. Since that request is what you have ignored in your legal framework, I'll even narrow it down to some simple examples ...

I wonder whether you are deliberately pretending to not have read my posts, or if you honestly think I do not understand elementary aspects of cognates in Indian and European languages.

Furthermore, stop this nonsense of "legal framework". It is a straw man.

I have already made the hypothesis crystal-clear in at least 5 posts in pages 125,126, and 127 of this thread. I also clarified it in older posts. I even enumerated it in the previous post. I am cutting and pasting it here:

1) RV is the "oldest", and remarkably preserved (as good as listening to a tape or CD), sound.

2) The pratishakhya is the corresponding oldest phonetic record connecting RV sounds to the Sanskrit language.

3) Every sound change then must be logically explained as defective variations starting from the pratishakhya. Only AFTER such an exercise is fully debated and concluded, and in the unlikely event that large inconsistencies are still found, should one feel the desperate need for looking at other possibilities such as the fictional reconstructions of PIE languages that do not exist.

In absence of written records, is it worthwhile to look for patterns behind these seemingly related words ? Can one apply the knowledge of biomechanics of human speech articulation to give a best hypothesis of which of these could be closer to the original or whether they could actually be originals themselves ? Thereby arriving at a relative chronological order between these languages.

It may be worth it, but NOT BEFORE you have compared *known languages* and made sure that your theory is fully consistent. See my point (3) above. What you need to do is to compare the currently known languages and explain ALL sound changes as defects from the pratishakhya guide to pronunciation.

Fact of the matter is that such an explanation will, in my expectation, turn out to be 100% consistent - or at least, far more consistent than the PIE nonsense. Use all the biomechanics you want. Remember, the authors of the pratishakhya were experts in that field.

Again, you are not appreciating the significance of my advice. At the end of the day, what you will get if you make a sincere scientific effort, is that you will be able to expand the "speech defect" section of the pratishakhya by a good margin. Now that would be a tangible and useful addition to the literature. One should consider not only European/Caucasian/Central Asian languages but also Indian languages.

Only in the event that you run into a serious problem here, should you start getting concerned about trying to hypothesize non-existent languages.

These are some of the questions that are of concern to the field of Linguistics. Prātiśākhyā is the specification of how Vedic sounds are to be articulated and it is meant to preserve Vedic sound faithfully. It says nothing about what was before the Vedic corpus was composed.

And my dear chap, if you think there is nothing available for "before" the Vedic (or any other) corpus was composed, then there is no grounds for any scientific study there that will lead to knowledge.

All outcomes of such investigations should clearly be stated as conjectures and must NEVER be given the status of knowledge. That is strictly reserved for observable data, and testable deductions made from observable data.

Sorry to disappoint you, but you can ONLY make deductions from real data, and you need to VALIDATE those deductions. It might be a bummer that you can't study extinct civilizations with such an approach, but you have to live with that. There are other people (like archaeologists) doing that job. It is not yours.

And none of the 3 questions I asked about [url=viewtopic.php?p=1337799#p1337799]in this post[/u] are covered in ṛg-prātiśākhyā. They are artefacts of human sound change extensively discussed in earlier pages of this thread.

You claimed that you were at some point learning Vedic recitation from pandits. It seems like you left before shiksha was taken up for discussion.

The possibility of human sound changes is certainly covered in the pratishakhya, in the form of speech defects. The main driver for developing the pratishakhya was to avoid such speech defects in the first place, and the authors CERTAINLY knew about human sound changes (they were in fact worried about these tendencies that would corrupt the preservation of the RV sounds). Please do not try to insult my intelligence here.

Sanskrit: cakra, Greek: kuklos, Old English: hweogol, New English: wheel
Sanskrit: bharati, Greek phérō, OIr beirid, Tocharian paer, Latin fero

kuklos, hweogol, wheel (if they are indeed cognates of cakra) can perfectly be explained as speech defects relative to cakra. Same goes for the other set. Have you even tried doing this systematically, or have you not ?

PIE is a reconstruction

Finally. So you agree it is a conjecture then. Reconstructions can only be considered reliable if there is real data to compare with. For example, the quality of the assertion: "his face was surgically reconstructed after the accident" can be tested by comparing to his photograph before the accident.

based on best hypothesis.

Sorry. You won't get away with that "best hypothesis" nonsense. This needs to be debunked publicly for all to see. "Best hypothesis" and "best practice" are not terms to be used lightly. "Best hypothesis" would be a hypothesis made upon a firm foundation of existing knowledge. Only after one is able to achieve a full understanding of sound changes in real languages, should one give a shot at extinct ones. And even so, such results would always remain as interesting conjectures, NEVER to be accorded the status of scientific results that people should trust. NEVER.

No one claims it to be divine revelation.

Trying to divert the issue again, are you ? Did I say it was "divine revelation"? I exactly said "it is not real". Real means supported/validated by real data and observations.

Since you have substituted my use of the word "real" with your use of "divine revelation" in your reply, do you consider "real" and "divine revelation" to be equivalent ? If so, it seems important for you to acknowledge that, so we get a perspective of where you are ultimately coming from.

I have alluded to "guys with beards and frocks" 2-3 times in my replies to you. The more I interact with you, the more I start to suspect these connections.

KL

[shiv]

self deleted

[KLP Dubey]

Peter,

The grammatical rules of Sanskrit are humanly created, as mentioned before.

Agree. A very important point. Since they are humanly created it seems reasonable that the rishis decided what should be the correct pronounciation of a word. After all a smart Grammarian who is operating with Sanskrit alphabet would make sure that a person hearing the sanskrit sounds should not feel ambiguity.

Thanks for the post. Let's not waste time on elementary matters, please. You have selectively quoted only the first line of my reply. Let me be clear once again: the grammatical rules were deduced by humans from observing the patterns of the RV sounds.

The "rishis" did not "decide" the rules and sound-pronunciations on their own. They were truly practising science in the sense that they were drawing deductions from observed data (i.e. the RV sounds) and systematizing/fitting those deductions into grammatical rules. Even the grammarians acknowledge that these "fits" do not always perfectly fit. If they were actually deciding the rules, nothing would have prevented them from deleting/altering the exceptions in the RV to get a perfect fit. But they did NOT do that, because all of them were 100% clear that the RV sounds were intrinsic observables/data of utmost importance, and altering the data to fit their rules would essentially amount to COOKING DATA AND RESULTS.

Even before grammatical rules can be deduced, they had to first of all learn how to reproduce the sounds. This necessitated the trial and ultimately understanding of how sounds are produced using the human organs of speech.

KL

[A_Gupta]

Shiv, the Burrow article that you pointed to, has an assumption built in "that the Vedic Indians, .... migrated all the way to the Punjab from their earlier home".

If the Rig Veda was indeed compiled in North India, then the Mitanni "Aryan" of the Near East has to have arrived from India. It need not at all be OIT, but just like Alexander came to the borders of India and established a Hellenic presence, the Seleucid empire, perhaps some forgotten conqueror did a reverse Alexander, starting from India, and setting up the Indo-Aryan equivalent of the Seleucid empire. It is the most economical hypothesis, requiring no force-fitting of any data.

PS:
Burrow mentions Mayrhofer's three alternatives:
1. The Aryans of the Near East left Mitanni and proceeded to India (out of question)
2. The Aryans of the Near East had actually come from India "does not appeal to him very much, though he does not go so far as to exclude the possibility"
3. The migrating Indo-Aryans separated into two groups.

They go with option 3, which to me, requires that the Rig Veda was compiled outside India.

[vic]

If Dravidians were "forced" into south by Aryans then their old texts would have contained reference to it.

[KLP Dubey]

2. The Aryans of the Near East had actually come from India "does not appeal to him very much, though he does not go so far as to exclude the possibility"

It is amazing how much of the PIE/AIT nonsense is based upon "exclusion/discarding of non-appealing possibilities". Much of this is due to racism, as well as to the desire to "keep things going". It seems like the acceptance of Sanskrit as the oldest recorded language and the explanation of sound changes starting from RV sounds, would bring things to a logical and quick end. That, of course, would "not be very appealing" if one's salary comes from cranking out PIE junk.

KL

[shiv]

Shiv, the Burrow article that you pointed to, has an assumption built in "that the Vedic Indians, .... migrated all the way to the Punjab from their earlier home".

.

Arun. I deleted the post with a link to the article because I had a sudden "aha" moment while reading. I realised that Mr Burrow like many others is bullshitting. None of these people have actually learned, read or understood any of the Veda. They do not even have the foggiest clue of the socio-religious functions those Vedas play in India - and that is something that I can claim. I can also claim to know that the same function has been played by the Vedas for uncounted generations before me. I can also claim that while the Vedas were never considered a record of history or a bible like guideline, the rishis of the vedas are considered founding fathers on the Indian civilization and indeed our own ancestors in many cases.
These scholars are so confused after reading translations of the Vedas they don't know what to think and they wrte conflicting pfaffle. And they confuse themselves even more by reading translations of the Avesta.

Much of the work that has been done is trashed and needs to be trashed rather than rehashed and reconsidered. Anyone who actually learns the Rig veda ends up understanding its deeper meaning and drops out of the AIT/OIT game save to claim that it is of very remote origin when nothing modern except the human mind existed. People who actually learn the vedas and read old Indian works seem to have no issue using dates like 5000 and 10,000 years. It is only modern western scholars reading translations and other people's commentaries on translations who cook up theories that have no connection or relevance to the Vedas.

But I for one am going to stop arguing about the contents of the Veda. No one has a clue and everyone ties himself up in knots trying to explain stuff that has no clear relevance to a written historical document. Thieme gets a plus point from me for various reasons including the fact that he quotes and acknowledges a person who was familiar enough with the Rig Veda to recognize the name order. That iteelf is gyan that transcends any word search of Griffiths

[brihaspati]

This question is directly for ManishH ji :

(1) Are you aware of any "academic" criticism of the "sound change" laws?

Yes. The section 4. chapter on sound change in Hock, "Language History, Language Change and Language Relationship" has detailed points on arguments against universality of sound change. Some of these arguments I have summarized in response to Prem Kumar-ji's posts.

Just to confirm, you are not aware of any other criticsm than in Hock, chapter 4.?

(2) Would you quote the "statistical" evidence supporting these sound change laws?

Linguistics itself has moved away from lexicostatistics and Swadesh lists. So I'm skeptical using statistics. But are you questioning the amount of common vocabulary in IE languages ?

I was under the impression that you are a staunch proponent of quantitaive/proportionate inferences. I appreciate that attitude as otherwise claims become too vague. Applying quantitative methods on empirical data like your so-called "common vocabulary" is feasible, and will expectedly only reinforce your conclusions if they are true/real.

Indulge me, please. Can you give a quantitative and statistical justification of this "commonality"? There is a reason as to why lexicostatistics had to be abandoned : and instead specific "word cognates" were investigated with great gusto. Very few "word cognates" would fit the required bill, and most even within that would need hypothetical interim transitional phases or unprovable precursor roots from which they apparently deviated/drifted.

This would provide a rich field in which to fish for "rules" - and the key is the scant data that needs to be used. You surely recognize the value of noting "dilution" of a few highlighted cases in proportion to the overall population? Don't you? Unlike the case where you tried to use this argument - in linguistics, a few word-cases cannot be shown to dominate all other word instances in languages, including the "verb-stems" you are talking more about recently. [But you have carefully avoided the problems with the verb-stem approach too - which is of a more fundamentally problematic nature for your Steppenwolf hypothesis.]

As your own quotes show when dealing with "concrete examples" - they are a repeat of a few dozen so-called cognate word-collectives/pairs that appear in AIT lobby texts. The paucity of examples is crucial to understand - especially when the overall number of words used in the so-called reconstructed or IE languages is never taken into context, something that should have been amenable to quantitative testing and even necessary when claiming entire languages to have been daughters of parent languages.

(3) Would you quote the "phonetics" evidence that supports these sound change laws?

Has to be done per sound change. Eg. for palatalization, I've quoted a paper by DNS Bhat "A General Study of Palatalization" that goes into the biomechanics of palatalization. Eg. the effect of stressed front vowel on palatalization of velars, . The paper also has survey of multiple, non-IE language families where evidence for palatalization occurs.

Google has this paper in the book "Universals of Human Language"
http://books.google.co.in/books?id=QC-s ... on&f=false

Since you only asked for references.

So you have support from "phonetics" onlee for the palatilization claim? Are you okay with going through this paper's methods and examples/previous/other "research" it draws upon - here?

[Nilesh Oak]

Brihaspti ji,

Your refernces (on another thread -epics)to Prabhas Parva/geology/timing has intriqued me too much. Do let me know the details or links to your relevant posts on BRF.

K (LP) D ji,

Per Cricket lingo, those were 6, and 4, and 6 this morning.

"Best hypothesis" would be a hypothesis made upon a firm foundation of existing knowledge.

First and formost 'Best Hypothesis' in PURE nonsense, which you made it clear in responding to ManisH ji.

Hypothesis can come from anywhere, but it is to be tested against existing knowledge or new experiements/observations/tests etc.

And hypothesis that has withstood such falsification efforts is 'background knowledge, albeit tentative and always open to question!...not 'Best Hypothesis'.

[member_23686]

If Dravidians were "forced" into south by Aryans then their old texts would have contained reference to it.

vic ji, AIT Nazi's have "found evidence" in none other than Agastya muni

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agastya#Co ... Traditions

Contrast between Northern and Southern Traditions

The Comparision between the Two Traditions

The Comparison between the Two Traditions shows that the Northern Tradition is basically a historical,and is nothing more than a collection of incredible fables and myths dimly remembered from a very remote past with which those who recorded the tradition had lost living contact.On the contrary the Souther tradition rings much truer and appears to be a down to earth account of a historical event,namely the mass migration to the South of the Velir who are identified as part of living tradition at the time of the cankam polity described in the earliest Tamil works.[9]

The fact of Agastya's leadership of Velir clan

The fact of Agastya's leadership of Velir clan rules out the possibility that he was even in origin an Indo-Aryan speaker. The Velir-Velar-Velalar groups constituted the ruling and the land-owning classes in the Tamil country since the beginning of recorded history and betray no trace whatever of an indo-Aryan linguistic ancestry. The Tamil Society had of cource under the religious and cultural influences of the North even before the beginning of the Cankam Age but had maintained its linguistic identity.From what we now know of the linguistic prehistory of India,it is more plausible to assume that the Yadavas were the Aryanised descendants of an original Non-Aryan people that to consider the Tamil Velir as the later offshoot of the indo-Aryan speaking Yadavas.The Agastya legend itself can be re-interpreted as Non-Aryan and Dravidian even in origin and pertaining to the Pre-Vedic Proto-historical period in the North.[9]

We need to dismantle such "research"

[svinayak]

A very interesting article written this month, that attacks the Anatolian origin hypothesis recently published by Atkinson: Mismodeling Indo-European Origin and Expansion: Bouckaert, Atkinson, Wade and the Assault on Historical Linguistics.

It seems to be in support of the traditional Steppe hypothesis, but at the same time has a host of very revealing statements on the current state of historical linguistics:


We are exercised about the Science article not merely because of our passion for the seemingly esoteric issue of Indo-European origins, but also because we fear for the future of historical linguistics—and history more generally.


The devaluation of historical linguistics is merely one aspect of a much larger shift away from the study of the past Subdisciplines such as historical geography and historical sociology have been diminishing for decades, and even the discipline of history faces declining enrollments and reduced faculty slots.

They have to fear about the history itself - ABOUT WESTERN HISTORY which is about to be shattered.

Even the European history and more specifically the Euroepan Christian history will be shattered.

[A_Gupta]

^^^ Notice even while defending historical linguistics, the authors say

The list of basic cognates found among Indo-European languages is not settled, nor is the actual enumeration of separate I-E languages, and the timing of the branching of the linguistic tree remains controversial as well.

Source: http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geogra ... z26ZE1StHy

[JE Menon]

>>eg. the Greek hippo (for horse) differs a bit from the expected outcome 'eppo'

For those who are unaware, this looks like a cock-up that probably originated with the Brit colonials after Byron. "Hippo" is the English transliteration of "ippo" in Greek; when written in Greek, the letters "H", "i" "u" and "oi" are all pronounced like "e". But the brits probably saw that (and since their language uses alphabets very similar) left the H in the beginning, making those of us who don't know Greek think that the word is actually pronounced "Hippo" as in the animal. It is in fact pronounced "ippo" even if spelled with an "H" in front in Greek.

The same applies to "kuklos", which would be spelt exactly like that in Greek, but is pronounced "Kyklos" and actually means circle or cycle rather than wheel (at least today - maybe in ancient Greek it was wheel). In transliterating into English, it should be spelt either "Kyklos" or "Kiklos". If pronounced as written, i.e. "kuklos", it means "doll" (male) and "kukla" would be female. For instance, if a guy is good looking a bunch of chattering females might say "einai kuklos" (he's a doll). And guys frequently refer to their girlfriends (rarely their wives ), or even sometimes their colleagues as "kukla mou" (my doll)...

[ramana]

Acharya, There is history and there is History.
The former is what happens.
The latter is the Judeo-Christian-Islamist quest for dominance of their adherents over all people.

Archeology is really about the quest for identity and is extended to digging up the historical past even in languages.
The West is on a massive quest to fix the past so they can steer the future.

[brihaspati]

JE Menon ji,
The Greek word for horse doesnt fit in with so-called "regular" sound changes. The classical "h-" form does not exist in the so-called fossilized compounds used as personal names (such as "Alkippos" - His-horses-are-his-defense, not "Alkhippos"). However "i" exists right from the beginning and has no explanation really. It means we have only two routes left open.

One, as a loanword, but then it will mean - according to the requirements of the PIE lexicon, a language in which *é- transmuted into "i" by some so-called "regular" sound change, or second, a non-Indo-European language that could have borrowed the word and altered it in that way. Using Greek as an exemplar of PIE succession and development is highly problematic. Linguists more or less acknowledge that the reconstructed root is not analyzable.

[brihaspati]

Nilesh Oak ji,

http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 83#p810983
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 59#p889459
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 17#p894017
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 03#p894203
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 32#p894832
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 0#p1076390
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 0#p1281510
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 0#p1281800
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 8#p1290078

These are a lot of speculations. I also mention 3100/1800/1400 etc - but based on hypo about reason/motivation for inclusion of material. The 5700 BCE stage attracted me based on
(1) Krishna's reclamation of land from sea for Dvaravati
(2) archeological reports of cities potentially above water before this period
(3) the relatively slow submergence that is described in pravaasa parva
(4) balarama's thousand nagas departing into the sea+ the significance of maushal/nalavana "reed" as civilizationally significant in Sumerian and early Egyptian creation/foundation myths - all before the 3000 period+archeological speculation about the Nile civilizations taking off in their more protopharaoinic phase between 6000-3000.
(5) the peculiar rapid rise of sea-levels to 5700 [roughly - more details are there] and then rather slow fall again but not to the 8000 or 12000 level.

[KLP Dubey]

It is not only about the sound changes, but also the accent. The PIE jokers claim that they can even reconstruct the accent of PIE from almost no records at all. Whereas Vedic Sanskrit, about whose accent detailed information is delivered via 400,000 sounds of the RV, is claimed to be a "later" language! This should be another angle of attack on the PIE fraud. The "speech defect" model is the only one that can explain all of the phenomena.

KL

[ramana]

^^^
Bji, We need to be debriefed on all your ideas so others can run with the idea and explore it further. Cannot let those ideas be stifled due to lack of resources.
Please start a jottings or musing thread here and your blog.

[brihaspati]

ramana ji,
many thanks for your encouragement. Time is indeed getting very short and the workload heavy. I will try to start jotting in GDF. But there is so much to know that I do want to come back for at least 10 more times. Maybe more. If my startup continues alright to going public in next couple of years, we will be able to support some non-standard research. I have already planned for linguistic studies cast in networks/graph models under natural-language processing cover. Many of our core questions has to be thought of in terms that can be made acceptable/attractive for the current funding scenario under a different overt purpose altogether.

[KLP Dubey]

JE Menon ji,
The Greek word for horse doesnt fit in with so-called "regular" sound changes. The classical "h-" form does not exist in the so-called fossilized compounds used as personal names (such as "Alkippos" - His-horses-are-his-defense, not "Alkhippos"). However "i" exists right from the beginning and has no explanation really. It means we have only two routes left open.

One, as a loanword, but then it will mean - according to the requirements of the PIE lexicon, a language in which *é- transmuted into "i" by some so-called "regular" sound change, or second, a non-Indo-European language that could have borrowed the word and altered it in that way. Using Greek as an exemplar of PIE succession and development is highly problematic. Linguists more or less acknowledge that the reconstructed root is not analyzable.

I am not sure what you are hinting at, but the Sanskrit word "ashva" transforms into "ashua/ashuwa/ashpa/ahwa" by the pronunciation defects such as "suuna" (speaking with hollow mouth) and "ambukrta" (speaking with lips closed). These variations show up in various places. "ashpa" shows up in Iran from where it went to Greece.

Conversion of the "a" in Sanskrit to "e" in European languages occurs through the defect of "viklishta" (drawing away of the jaws).

As for the presence of "i" rather than "e", it is just a defect related to dropping of "guna" (the brain/vocal apparatus of some speakers did not correctly direct/actuate the "guna" on "i"). It may have been a genetic defect or a deliberate decision. Remember, "gunation" requires a larger mechanical effort than a simple vowel. There is nothing unusual about such defects/failures in primitive humans who were just learning how to speak in a "civilized" manner. In other places, one finds the reverse, i.e. mistaken over-application of guna when not needed. Such defects are also found in over-enthusiastic/aggressive Vedic recitation.

Again, such defects are commonplace if one does not have a proper "shiksha". Compared to the systematized pronunciation of the Indians occurring from generations of rigorous effort to reproduce RV sounds, the speakers in Greece were likely "illiterate", "uneducated" etc. There is nothing surprising here, but only fools attempt to find systematic theories in such occurrences.

KL

[brihaspati]

KL ji,
I meant it was problematic to explain based on the so-called "universal/non-universal" sound change laws. I have grave doubts about both Italic and Greek as claimed by the AITians. Thanks for the illuminating perspective you have put forward from the view of Sanskrit.

[peter]

Nilesh Oak ji,

http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 83#p810983
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 59#p889459
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 17#p894017
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 03#p894203
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 32#p894832
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 0#p1076390
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 0#p1281510
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 0#p1281800
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... 8#p1290078

These are a lot of speculations. I also mention 3100/1800/1400 etc - but based on hypo about reason/motivation for inclusion of material. The 5700 BCE stage attracted me based on
(1) Krishna's reclamation of land from sea for Dvaravati
(2) archeological reports of cities potentially above water before this period
(3) the relatively slow submergence that is described in pravaasa parva
(4) balarama's thousand nagas departing into the sea+ the significance of maushal/nalavana "reed" as civilizationally significant in Sumerian and early Egyptian creation/foundation myths - all before the 3000 period+archeological speculation about the Nile civilizations taking off in their more protopharaoinic phase between 6000-3000.
(5) the peculiar rapid rise of sea-levels to 5700 [roughly - more details are there] and then rather slow fall again but not to the 8000 or 12000 level.

What frustrates me is that we Indians have no consistency in our story on the topic of dating Mahabharat war. For instance a while ago I read a paper by Achar, Narhari a physics PhD and professor at Memphis, Tennessee on the dating of Mahabharat.

He made a solid case for Mahabharat war taking place in ~3000 BC.

Before we make our research public should'nt we atleast mention what is wrong with the current / existing research?

[peter]

The grammatical rules of Sanskrit are humanly created, as mentioned before.

Agree. A very important point. Since they are humanly created it seems reasonable that the rishis decided what should be the correct pronounciation of a word. After all a smart Grammarian who is operating with Sanskrit alphabet would make sure that a person hearing the sanskrit sounds should not feel ambiguity.

Peter,
Thanks for the post. Let's not waste time on elementary matters, please. You have selectively quoted only the first line of my reply. Let me be clear once again: the grammatical rules were deduced by humans from observing the patterns of the RV sounds.

I disagree that Rg Ved as it stands today and its contained sounds were the first sounds on planet earth. Besides we have recensions of Rg Veda which do not agree in sounds.

Since this is not testable one way or the other and it is a matter of belief let us not debate it just as yet since we want to get over the palatalization vad vivaad with Manish.

[shiv]

People. Dijda know that there is no Sanskrit cognate for steppe? The morons remembered horse, wheel, burials, but not steppe. How about that? Odd innit?

[disha]

From wiki on Rice:

First attested in English in the middle of the 13th century, the word "rice" derives from the Old French ris, which comes from Italian riso, in turn from the Latin oriza, which derives from the Greek ὄρυζα (oruza). The Greek word is the source of all European words (cf. Welsh reis, Ger. Reis, Lith. ryžiai, Serbo-Cr. riža, Pol. ryż, Dutch rijst, Romanian orez).[5][6][7] Ultimately, the original source for those languages is from the Tamil word அரிசி (arisi).[8][9]

So they Aryans came from steppe, forgot to mention that in RgVeda, pushed all the way down and cooked rice in Tamil Nadu (and called it arisi) and traded with Greeks via Romans and the word spread from there. What about the rice found in the SIVC? Oh they were dravidians who were pushed back. So what did the Aryans eat? Horses? Horse meat is not mentioned as diet in vedas (not even in Yajur) but vrihi (rice) is mentioned in Yajur. So Aryans forgot Steppe and Horse meat (in a blink) and became vegetarians on arrival (atleast non-horse eaters).