User talk:Sbhushan/OIT

Critique of Linguistics section

In the following I will give a critique of the Lingusitics section in the article:

Linguistics

Place Names and Hydronomy

" Kazanas states “Aryans who, W repeatedly tells us, did not intentionally invade NW India, but entered in waves or “trickling” and the like. W insists on not seeing that such a mode of entry could not possibly produce results that could only follow from an invasion, that is imposing names of rivers etc and the language and culture generally of the “immigrants”" (Kazanas 2001: 7)[6]

Talageri states "the evidence of place-names and river-names is a very important factor in locating the Indo-European homeland in any particular area. And India, and India alone, passes this test with flying colours." (Talageri 1999: Ch 7, section I.B"

I don't know of other linguists who place such value in placename history that it would override other linguistic arguments. Fact is that it is impossible to know whether said placenames had earlier names in other languages that have become forgotten - the fact that there is a tendency towards conservatism in placenames doesn't mean that it holds up in all or even most cases. When you state that Witzels statement "rings hollow" you are using a POV wording.

Maunus, I have used the wording from each authors publicatoin, my understanding was that if the author said it, it could be quoted. Any changes I made to the wording is to make it less abrasive then how T said it.

Place name and Hydrophony is argument proposed by Witzel, Erdosy had good words for this argument in the preface of published work. Published volume (1995) of the papers presented during a conference on Archaeological and Linguistic Approaches to Ethnicity in Ancient South Asia, held in Toronto on 4th-6th October 1991

Both K and T have used W's argument back on him to show that it favours OIT.

My edits to change original document were: I put "Dr." in front of Witzel, Changed T's words from:

"is compelled to admit" to "But Dr. Witzel admits" AND
"Witzel finds, to his chagrin, that " to "Dr. Witzel finds that" AND
"his explanation rings hollow" to "He adds".

I think this make T's comment more diplomatic even though as per WP I could quote T as is.

W and T comment were that IA came to a area of relatively advanced civilization spread over 1.5 million km, how could they change existing names without creating confusion and without use of force. This has not happened in history anywhere.Sbhushan 01:23, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

If that was a direct quote from Talageri you can use it as is of course, but in that case it wasn't clear which parts were quotes and which were the editors. It should be completely clear which parts are direct quotes (and from where) and which aren't. Anyway i don't thinkn it is fair to quote Witzel through Talageri. It is not standard practice in the west to put titles in front of names of scholars.

The evidence of linguistic isoglosses

I fail to see the relevance of the first two quotes by Winn and Meillet: all they establish is that Iranian and Indic are separate subgroups of indoiranian, hardly groundbreaking news (Antione Meillet died in 1936), and it doesn't mean that they aren't closer related to eachother than to each of the other groups.

While it is true that the languages in group A can be seen as innovative and thus likely to have split first the conclusions drawn from this are not sound.

When you say that no major isoglosses cut across the two groups it is notoriously false: Proto-greek was a Centum language - proto-indoiranian was a satem language. The Satemization split is finished at 2500BC. ProtoIndoiranian collapsed *e *o and *a into a protogreek does not. This means that at leats two isoglosses cut greek from the B group. In both cases Proto indoiranian is innovative and Protogreek conservative. Linguistic unity of groups is characterized by shared innovations. The only shared innovation beetween greek and indoarian is Grassman's Law and it is known to have developed independently in greek and protoindoiranian. The conservative retention of the PIE verbal stem that characterizes both greek and protoindoiranian is a shared retention and not innovation this cannot be the basis for a sound genealogical grouping of the two. Languages can be apart milennia and still have something incommon - in fact this is thee only thing that allows us to recognize linguistic families - the period of separation cannot be guessed from the degree of retention but from the number of shared innovations.

Also it is fairly bold to use Winn as an argument for OIT, he collaborated with Marija Gimbutas in formulating the Kurgan Hypothesis!. In the quote he argues against the Anatolian hypothesis not the Kurgan hypothesis, his arguments is thus brought out of context.

Calling Winn's argument "very valid" is POV - and in fact goes against standard linguistic theory which says that genealogy should be based on shared innovation rather than shared innovation.

Also Winns argument cannot be used against the Kurgan hypothesis exactly because the Kurgan hypothesis doesn't correlate the spread of agriculture with thee spread of PIE: infact the Kurgan hypothesis implies agriculture aalready exsted in Europe and India when the non agriculturalist indo-europeans arrived. Thus the problem that the wording poses becomes non existant - f we postulate a PIE urheimat in the pontic steppes (such as Winn does) it becomes a question of both indoiranians and greeks moving south from the point of origin (greek south west and Indoiranian southwest) and coming into contact with already agriculturalist cultures.

This all makes Talageris claim about India being the only candidate fitting the isoglosses groundless.

Again I have used exact words from T's book. the 2 key points that I saw were:

Four branches, Indic, Iranian, Hellenic (Greek) and Thraco-Phrygian (Armenian) were the last branches remaining behind in the original homeland after the other branches had dispersed (is that a linguistic consensus)
Anatolian hypothesis - Greek and Indic are thus separated by millenniums of linguistic change - despite the close grammatical correspondences between them. (would this not apply to any scenario)

These were the argument T used to favour OIT.Sbhushan 22:00, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Boldness is what you would expect from someone who is out to challenge establishment. In addition to Winn, he also quotes a paper by Johanna Nichols, The Epicentre of the Indo-European Linguistic Spread. Her view taking in account centum-satem split is that The locus of the IE spread was somewhere in the vicinity of ancient Bactria-Sogdiana.

Is this a quote by Talageri again then?Maunus 08:18, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

“As defined by Dyen (1956), a homeland is a continuous area and a migration is any movement causing that area to become non-continuous (while a movement that simply changes its shape or area is an expansion or expansive intrusion). The linguistic population of the homeland is a set of intermediate protolanguages, the first-order daughters of the original protolanguage (in Dyen’s terms, a chain of coordinate languages). The homeland is the same as (or overlaps) the area of the largest chain of such co-ordinates, i.e. the area where the greatest number of highest-level branches occur. Homelands are to be reconstructed in such a way as to minimize the number of migrations, and the number of migrating daughter branches, required to get from them to attested distributions (Dyen 1956: 613).”109

The theories which place the original homeland in South Russia postulate a great number of separate emigrations of individual branches in different directions: Hittite and Tocharian would be the earliest emigrants in two different and opposite directions, and Indo-Iranian, Armenian and Greek would be the last emigrants, again, in three different and opposite directions.

Another linguist has argued against Kurgan hypothesis. I do hope you feel intrigued enough to read T book Chapter 7.Sbhushan 02:00, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Everything except the last paragraph "Another linguist..." is from Talageri's book. I have provide link for electronic document. It can be easily searched by copying from the article something distinct and searching in the mentioned chapter.Sbhushan 13:58, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sanskrit

The arguments saying that Sanskrit must have developed in a settled area doesn't because it has changed slower and change is faster in unsettled areas doesn't hold up because it rests on two false assumptions.

The first assumption is that the correlation of faster language change and nomadic societies can be used to say that if nomadic a language "should have changed faster" - the settled/unsettled factor is only one of several (many!) factors deciding speed of language, and to date nobody knows how to calculate what determines the speed of language change - this is one of the main arguments against the theory of Glottochonology, we simply don't know what makes a language change faster or slower. So while it may be true that it is an acknowleedged principle this principlee cannot be used to support the conclusions drawn here.

The other is the assumption that sanskrit has suffered fewer changes from PIE than other Indo-european languages. Firstly sanskrit is documented earlier than all the other languages (save Hittite) and so we don't know far from PIE they were at the time when sanskrit was first documented. And when Hittite was being written iranian and indic was probably only closely related dialects of the same language.

Burrows statements about the antiquity of sanskrit are not presented in the form of arguments but postulates, I suspect they are also taken out of context (but I cannot verify this at this point also because there is no reference other than Burrow 1993. What book or article is this?). He doesn't say that because of the conservative traits in sanskrit the language is ancient but that because it is ancient it has conservative traits - this means that it is probably a statement about the time of the recording of sanskrit and not the other way round. Anyway stating that Sanskrit is "the oldest language" of the indoeuropean family is a statement that is often found but rarely substantiated. What does it even mean? The next to paragraphs fail to eexplain this to me. Kazanas scrutiny of the PIE word for son (which has solid cognates in nearly all IE-branches) have to do with the claim that sanskrit is oldest? What is the explanation that Sanskrit gives and the other languages doesn't? You don't say. Also it is untrue that most philologists disregard the phenomenon that can be termed cohesion - in fact all linguists/philologists do, I have never heard of such a term outside of Kazanas articles - it is simply not based on linguistic theory (hardly a surprise since Kazanas rejects the notion of linguistic theory).

The actual linguistic theory tells us that Indic has traits that are not found in any other IE branches such as retroflex consonants thee merger of *e *o and *a into a and loss of voiced sibilant *z. These innovations are all found in Vedic sanskrit and all othehr indic languages, but in none of the other branches. If theese traits were to represent something "old" or conservative then they should have reflexes in the other branches - but they don't. In fact as Witzel shows (in Autochtonous Aryans pg41) there are conservative traits in iranian that aren't found in the Indic branch!

This was presented as part of JIES article, what did the reviewer say to this. Would it be acceptable to quote from K's article and quote the response from reveiwers.Sbhushan 22:02, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Burrow T, 1973, The Sanskrit Language, rev ed, Faber. Burrow also says "Indeed, this is what happened to the Tocharians whose language, according to Burrow, underwent “profound … changes strongly suggestive of alien influence” since it had “travelled far from its original home” (1973: 10)"Sbhushan 01:29, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Another reference to Sanskrit from Elst article Linguistic aspects of the Aryan non-invasion theory[1]]

Sanskrit remains in many respects closest to PIE, as a standard textbook of IE testifies: "The distribution [of the two stems as/s for "to be"] in Sanskrit is the oldest one" (Beekes 1990:37); "PIE had 8 cases, which Sanskrit still has" (Beekes 1990:122); "PIE had no definite article. That is also true for Sanskrit and Latin, and still for Russian. Other languages developed one" (Beekes 1990:125); "[For the declensions] we ought to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-Iranian first,... But we will do with the Sanskrit because we know that it has preserved the essential information of the Proto-Indo-Iranian" (Beekes 1990:148); "While the accentuation systems of the other languages indicate a total rupture, Sanskrit, and to a lesser extent Greek, seem to continue the original IE situation" (Beekes 1990:187); "The root aorist... is still frequent in Indo-Iranian, appears sporadically in Greek and Armenian, and has disappeared elsewhere" (Beekes 1990:279). BEEKES, R.S.P., 1990: Vergelijkende Taalwetenschap. Tussen Sanskrit en Nederlands, Het Spectrum, Utrecht.Sbhushan 12:51, 18 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Conclusion

All in all I think the linguistic section is neither well argued nor NPOV nor coherent. I would like to help but really I cannot see any sound arguments in favour of OIT so it is a bit hard for me to suggest how to argue for it in a better way.Maunus 19:32, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

And I thought I had made a convert of you (this is me joking, LOL). I am not trying to argue for one position. Please see my comments in each section. I am just trying to present what E, K and T proposed. Would it be acceptable to document their position and reviewers comments. We are not going to solve this complex problem.Sbhushan 22:10, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I have tried to use original words from authors to avoid introducing any bias. That makes the article hard to read. I don't have any objection to changing the words as long as the message is not lost.

K and T are not linguist or are pretending to be one. The have done lots of research on this to identify inconsistencies in linguistic application K (2000:p 3). The statement they are making is that OIT can not be rejected on Linguistic ground.

HH Hock while not accepting OIT, says that it is not disapproved by linguistic evidence. (Hock 1999: 16 ‘Out of India? The linguistic evidence’ in Bronkhorst J & Deshpande M(eds) Aryan & Non-Aryan in South Asia... HOS Opera Minora vol 3, Camb Mass.)

Can anyone help me reword these section to make them more presentable without taking away the message.Sbhushan 01:44, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Hock is quite right. Linguistic evidence cannot disprove anything - humanist sciences don't operate with proof. But linguistic arguments can show that something is improbable. No one - not even Witzel states that it is impossible that India is the PIE homeland, but most people state that it requires a more complex explanation than it would if assuming a homeland somewhere else.

I would like to try and make a more to the point linguistic section - I am beginning to understand the kind of arguments used in favour of OIT (although I am by no means a convert) - I will see if I can present them unbiasedly.

I think overall the section would win by stating the arguments as simply as possible. Like the section of argumeents against that I presented on the other talk page.

The arguments on the page the way I understand them are the following:

Indo-Aryan languages are the oldest source of placenames in northern India - which is an argument in favour of seeing Indo-Aryan as the oldest documented population of that area.

Certain likenesses between the Hellenic (Greek) branch and the Indo-Iranian branch seem suggestive that Greek and Indo-Iranian shared a common homeland for awhile after the splitting of the other IE branches. Such a homeland could be northwestern India.

Certain traits in Vedic Sanskrit, for example "cohesion" of early cognates and proposed influence from Uralic suggest that Vedic Sanskrit in some aspects is more conservative than other branches of IE. Sometimes conservative traits in a language can be correlated with the speakers having a more sedentary lifestyle. This could suggest that Indo-Aryans were sedentary and remained in the original homeland while other groups left.

Maunus 08:24, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your help. T has done good research, but lacks diplomacy. The key messages are right and only thing I like to add is that these arguments are proposed by OIT opponents. I agree with your statement regarding "possible". Probability is the key issue. If IA were present in India 4000BC, which position is more probable. Now you can see why OIT opponent are so much against dating of Rigveda before IVC. Migration from outside could possibaly have happened before 4000BC but would be very unlikely. I am going to add details regarding dravidian influence on Rigvedic Sanskrit also. I will modify T exact words to make them more coherent.Sbhushan 14:12, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

References

I'm a firm believer that if references detract a reader from a smooth reading, they should be changed in format. I think it would be better if we used <ref>Kazanas 2004:4</ref>. Readers don't come to Wikipedia to find a source, Wikipedia IS the source. Providing references is an editor's responsibility, but viewing references is not a readers right. That's why people used to use Inotes. Anyway, I'll wait for other views before changing the references format. Nobleeagle ^[TALK] [C] 00:16, 18 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]