Linguistic aspects of the Aryan Invasion Theory

River names

There is also a remarkable absence of foreign influence where the AIT would have expected it. Unlike in more westerly areas of Indo-European settlement, the geographical terms (names of rivers, lakes, mountains) in the Vedic heartland are all Indo-European rather than substratal borrowings from some native language. Borrowed vocabulary is also remarkably sparse in the Vedas (negligeable in comparison with Greek), with an initially complete absence of Dravidian, often deemed the Harappan language. This fact should moreover be seen in conjunction with the presence of the Indo-European westerly-looking kentum (non-palatalizing) language Proto-Bangani in India, coming on top of the nearby presence of the similarly “misplaced” Tocharian. Ancient Indo-Aryan has all the makings of a native language. Elst 2018

• Witzel uses this phenomenon to explain the Sanskrit looks of no less than

thirty-five North-Indian river names: “Even a brief look at this list indicates that in northern India, by and large, only Sanskritic river names seem to survive” (1999a: 370). He quotes Pinnow 1953 as observing that over 90 percent don’t just look IA but “are etymologically clear and generally have a meaning” in IA. He attributes this unexpectedly large etymological transparency to “the ever-increasing process of changing older names by popular etymology.” This hypothesis of a very thorough assimilation of foreign names with pseudo-etymology is a possi- bility but quite unsubstantiated, a complicated explanation satisfying AIT pre- sumptions but not Occam’s razor. It has no counterpart in any other region of IE settlement, for example, in Belgium most river names are Celtic or pre-Celtic and make no sense at all in Dutch or French; yet in their present forms no attempt is in evidence of semantically romanizing or germanicizing them. In the USA, there are plainly native river names like Potomac, and plainly European ones like Hudson, but no anglicized native names. So, most likely, the Sanskrit-looking river names are simply Sanskrit. This may be contrasted with the situation farther east in the Ganga plain, where we do find many Sanskrit-sounding names of rivers and regions which however do not have a transparent etymology, for example, kaushikî or koshala, apparently linked to Tibeto-Birmese kosi, ‘water’, and the name of the river separating Koshala from Videha. In that case, we also see the ongoing sanskritization: kaushikî evolved from kosikî (attested in Pali), and koshala from kosala, which Witzel (1999a: 382) considers as necessarily foreign loans because the sequence -os- is “not allowed in Sanskrit.” But while the phonetic assimilation can be caught in the act, we can see no semantic domestication through folk etymology at work. The name koshala doesn’t mean anything in Sanskrit, and that is a deci- sive difference with the western hydronyms gomatî, ‘the cow-rich one’, or asiknî, ‘the dark one’. While the occurrence of some folk-etymological adaptation among the Panjabi river names can in principle be conceded, it is highly unlikely to be the explanation of all thirty-five names. Until proof to the contrary, the evidence of the Northwest-Indian hydronyms goes in favor of the absence of a non-IE substratum, hence of the OIT.

• • Elst, K: Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory, in Bryant, E. F. (2008). The Indo-Aryan controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge.

Sindhu

• According to Oleg Trubachov (1999), elaborating on a thesis by Kretschmer

(1944), Indo-Aryan was spoken in Ukraine as late as the Hellenistic period, by two tribes knows as the Maiotes and the Sindoi, the latter also known by its Scythian/Iranian-derived name Indoi and explicitly described by Hesychius as “an Indian people.” They reportedly used a word sinu, from sindhu, for ‘river’, a general meaning which it also has in some Vedic verses. Trubachov lists a number of personal and place-names recorded by Greek authors (e.g. Kouphes for the Kuban river, apparently a re-use of kubhâ, the Kabul river, Greek Kophes), and concludes that the Maiotes and Sindoi spoke an Indo-Aryan dialect, though often with -l- instead of -r-,.... Witzel himself (1999b: section 1.9) notes that the Sumerians (who recorded a handful of words from “Meluhha”/Sindh, which incidentally seem nei- ther IA nor Dravidian) in the third millennium already knew the name sindhu as referring to the lower basin of the Indus river, then the most accessible part of the Harappan civilization, when they imported “sinda” wood. If this is not a coinci- dental look-alike, then either sindhu is a word of non-IE origin already used by the non-IE Harappans, in which case the Pontic Sindoi were migrants from India (demonstrating how earlier the Kurganites might have migrated from India?); or sindhu was an IE word, and proves that the Harappan civilization down to its coastline was already IA-speaking.

• • Elst, K: Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory, in Bryant, E. F. (2008). The Indo-Aryan controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge.

Isoglosses

Elst writes : In Hans Hock’s opinion, the pattern of isoglosses is incompatible with the distribution of languages necessitated by an Indian homeland. Sh. Talageri responded to this argument at length[61], as did N. Kazanas, and K. Elst.

Kentum/Satem

The first major element creating a distance between PIE and Sanskrit was the kentum/satem divide. It was assumed, in my view correctly (but denied by Indian scholars like Satya Swarup Misra)8, that palatalization is a one-way process transforming velars (k,g) into palatals (c,j) but never the reverse; so that the velar or “kentum” (Latin for “hundred”, from PIE *kmtom) forms had to be the original and the palatal or “satem” (Avestan for “hundred”) forms the evolved variants.

However, it would be erroneous to infer from this that the kentum area, i.e. Western and Southern Europe, was the homeland. On the contrary, it is altogether more likely that the Urheimat was in satem territory. The alternative from the angle of an Indian Urheimat theory (IUT) would be that India had originally had the kentum form, that the dialects which first emigrated (Hittite, Italo-Celtic, Germanic, Tokharic) retained the kentum form and took it to the geographical borderlands of the IE expanse (Europe, Anatolia, China), while the dialects which emigrated later (Baltic, Thracian, Phrygian) were at a halfway stage and the last-emigrated dialects (Slavic, Armenian, Iranian) plus the staybehind Indo-Aryan languages had adopted the satem form. This would satisfy the claim of the so-called Lateral Theory that the most conservative forms are to be found at the outskirts rather than in the metropolis.

• • 8Satya Swarup Misra: The Aryan Problem (Delhi 1992), p.47. This palatalization is known in numerous languages, e.g. Chinese (Yangzi-kiang > Yangzi-jiang), the Bantu language Chiluba (cfr. Ki-konko, Ki-swahili, but Chi-luba), Arabic (Gabriel > JibrIt), English (kirk > church), the Romance languages, Swedish etc.
  • Elst 1999

Best known is the kentum/satem divide: Greek belongs to the Kentum group, along with Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Anatolian and Tocharian, while Armenian and Indo-Iranian share with Baltic and Slavic the Satem isogloss (as well as the “ruki rule”, changing s to sh after r, u, k, i). So, like between the dialects of any modern language, the IE languages share one isogloss with this neighbour, another isogloss with another neighbour, who in turn shares isoglosses with yet other neighbours. The key concept in Hock's argument is neighbour: the remarkable phenomenon which should ultimately support the AIT is that isoglosses are shared by neighbouring branches of IE. Thus, the Kentum languages form a continuous belt from Anatolia through southern to western and northern Europe, and the Satem isogloss likewise covers a continuous territory (only later fragmented by the intrusion of Turkic) from central Europe to India. To be sure, there are serious exceptions here, e.g. there are Kentum languages far removed from Europe, viz. Tocharian in Xinjiang and proto-Bangani in the western Himalaya; and there is a later satemizing tendency within the Kentum group, viz. in the Romance languages (none of which pronounces its word derived from Latin centum with a k sound), Swedish and English (where wicca became witch).

• • Elst 2007

I believe there is a plausible and entirely logical alternative. It remains possible that the isoglosses match a twofold scenario, part area effect and part genealogical tree, as follows. In part, they reflect successive migrations from the heartland where new linguistic trends developed and affected only the dialects staying behind or developing there later (vide e.g. T. Gamkrelidze and V. Ivanov's outlining in their magnum opus, Indo-European and the Indo- Europeans, Berlin 1995, the successive waves of emigration from Homeland X, leading to groupings like Celtic and Italic, or Germanic and Balto-Slavic). Thus, PIE in its Homeland was a kentum language, and its first emigrants retained the Kentum form: Anatolian (the oldest judging from its retaining the laryngeals), Tocharian, Celtic, Italic, Germanic. Later emigrants developed Satem features: Baltic, Slavic. Along with the stay-behind Homeland language, Indo-Aryan, the last emigrants had been completely satemized: Armenian, Iranian. The second part is that the isoglosses not explainable by the former scenario are post- PIE area effects, which is why they affect historically neighbouring languages. Archaeologists (mostly assuming a North-Caspian homeland) have said that the North-Central-European Corded Ware culture of ca. 3000 BC was a kind of secondary Homeland from which the Western branches of PIE spread, again more or less radially, to their respective historical locations. Be that as it may, that or a similar culture may well have comprised a juxtaposition of IE-speaking communities before their further dispersal, living in close proximity to the next (though not to all), close enough to allow for the transmission of linguistic innovations.

• • Elst 2007

• However, it would be erroneous to infer from this that the homeland was in the

Kentum area. On the contrary, it is altogether more likely that it was in what became Satem territory, for example, as follows: India originally had the Kentum form, the dialects which emigrated first retained the Kentum form and took it to the geographical borderlands of the IE expanse (Europe, Anatolia, western China), while the last-emigrated dialects (Armenian, Iranian) plus the staybehind Indo- Aryan languages had meanwhile adopted the Satem form.

• • Elst, K: Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory, in Bryant, E. F. (2008). The Indo-Aryan controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge.

• Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995: 348–50) have

built an impressive reconstruction of such successive migrations on an impressive survey of the linguistic material. To summarize:

• Initially, there was a single PIE language.

The first division of PIE yielded two dialect groups, which will be called A and B. Originally they co-existed in the same area, and influenced each other, but geographical separation put an end to this interaction.

• In zone A, one dialect split off, probably by geographical separation (whether

it was its own speakers or those of the other dialects who emigrated from the Urheimat, is not yet at issue), and went on to develop separately and become Anatolian.

• The remainder of the A group acquired the distinctive characteristics of the

Tocharo-Italo-Celtic subgroup.

• While the A remainder differentiated into Italo-Celtic and Tokharic, the

B group differentiated into a “northern” or Balto-Slavic-Germanic and a “southern” or Greek-Armenian-Aryan group; note that the Kentum/Satem divide only affects the B group, and does not come in the way of other and more important isoglosses distinguishing the northern group (with Kentum Germanic and predominantly Satem Baltic and Slavic) from the southern group (with Kentum Greek and Satem Armenian and Aryan).

• • Elst, K: Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory, in Bryant, E. F. (2008). The Indo-Aryan controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge.

Deeper rootedness within Sanskrit

Elst writes: Another linguistic topic, first raised by Sri Aurobindo in a lecture on the Vedas ca. 1915 (published 1956)[64], is the deeper rootedness within Sanskrit. The word wolf/vṛka is taken to be related to the verbal root vṛk- ‘to tear’ (whence vṛkṇa ‘a cut, wound’), so ‘wolf’ would really mean ‘the tearer’, whereas elsewhere it only means ‘wolf’[65]. Likewise, it is claimed that only Sanskrit can deduce the pan-IE term name from a verbal root: nāma from nam-, namati ‘to greet’[66]. N. Kazanas (2015), p. 43-124, worked out an annotated list of 393 such roots. Thus while Latin pater seems isolated, Sankrit pitā, pitṛ can be interpreted as an agent noun from pā-, pāti ‘to protect’; and unlike Greek θυγάτηρ or English daughter, Sanskrit duhitā, duhitṛ finds an explanation within the language itself, cf. duh-, dugdha ‘to milk’ (i.e. ‘milkmaid’)[67]. This would indicate that the other languages have creolized somewhat, mixing each with the local substrate language of their respective newfound habitats.https://koenraadelst.blogspot.com/2021/04/ever-closer-to-bharopiyasthan-state-of.html ^[archive]

N. Kazanas (2015), p. 43, concluded: “Sanskrit appears to have lost far fewer items and preserves much greater organic coherence than the other branches. This supports the general idea that Sanskrit is much closer to Proto-Indo-European and that, since this could only happen in sedentary conditions, the Indoaryan speakers of Sanskrit did not move (much) from the original homeland”. ... “This then I call the Preservation Principle […]: the people or culture that has preserved most, ceteris paribus has moved least”[68].

Sanskrit and PIE vowels

The second element in the progressive separation of Sanskrit from PIE was the impression that the [a/e/o] differentiation in Latin and Greek was original, and that their reduction to [a] in Sanskrit was a subsequent development (as in Greek genos corresponding to Sanskrit jana). Satya Swarup Misra argues that it may just as well have been the other way around, and unlike the palatalization process, this vowel shift is indeed possible in either direction.13 Mishra cites examples from the Gypsy language, but we need look no farther than English, where [a], still preserved in “bar”, has practically become [e] in “back” and “bake”, and [o] in “ball”.

There are, however, excellent reasons to stick to the conventional view that the [a/e/o] distinctness is original and their coalescence into [a] a later development. Firstly, the reduction to [a) is typical of just one branch, viz. Indo-lranian, whereas a differentiation starting from [a] would have been a change uniformly affecting all the branches except one, which is less probable. Secondly, the different treatment of the velar consonants in reduplicated Sanskrit verb forms like jagAma or cakAra suggests a difference in subsequent vowel, with only the first vowel having a palatalizing impact on the preceding velar: jegAma < gegAma, cekAra < kekAra.

So, there is no reason to reject the conventional view that Greek vowels are closer to the PIE original than the Sanskrit vowels are. But here again, we also see no reason to make geographical deductions from this. India may as well have been the homeland of Proto-Greek, which left before the shift from [a/e/o] to [a] took place.

• • Elst 1999

Exchanges with other language families

Sumerian

A few terms exchanged with Sumerian, esp. karpAsa/kapazum, “cotton”, and possibly ager/agar, “field”, and go/gu, “cow” (to cite some suggestions from Gamkrelidze and Ivanov’s magnum opus), would confirm the presence of IE (though not necessarily of its PIE ancestor if Sumerian was the borrowing language) in an area conducting trade with Sumeria in the 3rd millennium or earlier.... Note however that the trade links between Sumeria and the Harappan civilization (“Meluhha” in Mesopotamian texts) are well-attested, e.g. the names Arisena and Somasena in a tablet from Akkad dating to ca.2200 BC.16 There are depictions of the Indian humped bull in Mesopotamia and even in Palestine. Some seals with Harappan inscriptions have been found in Mesopotamia. Elst 1999

Indo-Hittite

A third element which increased the distance between reconstructed PIE and Sanskrit dramatically was the discovery of Hittite. Though Hittite displayed a very large intake of lexical and other elements from non-IE languages, some of its features were deemed to be older than their Sanskrit counterparts, e.g. the Hittite genus commune as opposed to Sanskrit’s contrast between masculine and feminine genders, or the much-discussed laryngeal consonants, absent in Sanskrit as in all other IE languages.

It is by no means universally accepted that these features of Hittite are indeed PIE. Thus, the erosion of grammatical gender is a common phenomenon in IE languages, especially those suddenly exposed to an overdose of foreign influence, notably Persian and English. So, it is arguable that Hittite underwent the same development when it had to absorb large doses of Hattic or other pre-IE influence. In the past, the laryngeals have been explained by competent scholars (the last one probably being Heinz Kronasser, d. 1967) as being due to South-Caucasian or Semitic influence.

In any case, those who reject the laryngeal theory have definitely been marginalized. But for our purposes there is no need to align ourselves with these dissident opinions. Even if we go with the dominant opinion and accept these elements as PIE, that is still no reason why the Urheimat should be in the historical location of Hittite or at least outside India. As the first emigrant dialect, Hittite could have taken from India some linguistic features (genus commune, laryngeals) which were about to disappear in the dialects emigrating only later or staying behind.

Uralic

See Finno-Ugric languages

Semitic

One way to imagine how Semitic and IE went their separate ways has been offered by Bernard Sergent, who is strongly convinced of the two families’ common origin. He combines the linguistic evidence with archaeological and anthropological indications that the (supposedly PIE-speaking) Kurgan people in the North-Caspian area of ca. 4000 BC came from the southeast, a finding which might just as well be cited in support of their Indian origin. Thus, the Kurgan people’s typical grain was millet, not the rye and wheat cultivated by the Old Europeans, and in ca. 5000 BC, millet had been cultivated in what is now Turkmenistan (it apparently originates in China), particularly in the Mesolithic culture of Jebel. From there on, the archaeological traces become really tenuous, but Sergent claims to discern a link with the Zarzian culture of Kurdistan 10,000 to 8500 BC. Short, he suggests that the Kurgan people had come along the eastern coast of the Caspian Sea, not from the southeast (India) but the southwest, in or near Mesopotamia, where PIE may have had a common homeland with Semitic.25

However, those who interpret the archaeological data concerning the genesis of agriculture in the Indus site of Mehrgarh as being the effect of a diffusion from West Asia, may well interpret an eventual kinship of IE with Semitic as proving their own point: along with its material culture, Mehrgarh’s language may have been an offshoot of a metropolitan model, viz. a Proto-Semitic-speaking culture in West Asia. This would mean that the Indus area was indeed the homeland of the original PIE, but that in the preceding millennia, PIE had been created by the interaction of Proto-Semitic-speaking colonists from West Asia with locals. On the other hand, now that the case for an independent genesis of the Neolithic revolution (i.e. the development of agriculture) in Mehrgarh is getting stronger, we may have to reconsider the direction of such a process. Elst 1999

• The word for "wild bull/aurochs": • The Proto-Semitic word *ṯawr 'bull, ox' is found in all the major Semitic languages: Akkadian šȗru, Ugaritic ṯr, Hebrew šȏr, Syriac tawrā, Arabic ṯawr, South Arabic ṯwr. • In Indo-European, it is found in Italic (Latin taurus), Celtic (Irish tarb), Germanic (Old Icelandic ƥjórr), Baltic (Lithuanian taũras), Slavic (Old Slavic turǔ), Albanian (tarok) and Greek (taȗros). The Hittite word for "bull" is not known(GAMKRELIDZE 1995:483), and Armenian has borrowed a Caucasian form (tsul) for bull. • As in the case of "wine" this Semitic loan for "bull" or "aurochs" is completely missing in the three eastern branches Indo-Aryan, Iranian and Tocharian. Again it illustrates the phenomenon of migration of IE branches from east to west.

Dravidian substratum elements

The branch least affected by foreign elements is Slavic, but this need not be taken as proof of a South-Russian homeland: in an Indian Urheimat scenario, the way for Slavic would have been cleared by forerunners on the great IE trek to the West, chiefly Celtic and Germanic, and though these languages would absorb many Old-European elements as substratum features, they also eliminated the Old-European languages as such and prevented them from further influencing Slavic.

Either way, Indo-Aryan influence on Dravidian is certainly more profound than generally thought. Apart from the tatsama (literally adopted) Sanskrit words which make up more than half of Telugu or Kannada vocabulary, and which are attributed to the influence of Brahmin families settling in South India since the turn of the Christian era, many apparent members of the Dravidian core vocabulary as attested in Sangam Tamil are actually very ancient tadbhava (evolved and sometimes unrecognizably changed) loans from Sanskrit or Prakrit, e.g. AkAyam, “sky” (< AkAsha); Ayutham, “weapon” (< Ayudha); tavem, “penance” (< tapas); tIvu, “island” (< dvIpa); chetti, “foreman, merchant” (< shreshthI), tiru, term of respectful address (< shrI).30 It is not impossible that there ever was a pure Dravidian language in South India, but in the oldest texts already, we find a Dravidian written in a Brahmi-derived script and influenced by Sanskrit.

Many scholars now assume that there was a third language in northwestern India, which acted as a buffer between Dravidian and Indo-Aryan before being eliminated by the latter...Such a buffer language would at any rate explain, in an Indian Urheimat theory, why there is no Dravidian influence on IE as a whole, merely on Indo-Aryan and to a very small extent on Iranian (though it is remarkable that some of the words transmitted from Indo-Iranian to Uralic are usually credited with a Dravidian origin, e.g. shishu, “child”, and kota, “house”: another modest argument for an Indian Urheimat?). 27Shrikant Talageri: Aryan Invasion Theory, a Reappraisal, p. 156-175. To this effect, Thomas Burrow (in Thomas A. Seebok: Current Trends in Linguistics, Mouton, The Hague/Paris, vol.5, p.18, quoted by Talageri, op.cit., p.162) already wrote that “there has been a certain amount of controversy concerning the question of non-Aryan loan-words in Sanskrit, and some scholars (P. Thieme, H.W. Bailey) have adopted a sceptical position in this respect. Alternate Indo-European etymologies have been offered for words for which a Dravidian or Munda etymology had previously been proposed, in some cases successfully (…)but more dubious in other cases.” Elst 1999

• the reflexive personal pronoun ("self") *tan- found in Dravidian as well as in Sanskrit and Avestan. The word is clearly a Dravidian word: it is found in every single Dravidian language, and even rhymes with other pronouns, e.g. Tamil tān with nān. But tanū is found not only throughout the Rigveda, but also in the Avesta.

• At the same time, it may be noted that the Dravidian languages have borrowed Indo-Aryan words for northwestern animals (siṁha lion, uṣṭra camel, khaḍga rhinoceros) and not vice versa. This would not have been the case if Indo-Aryans had intruded into a Dravidian NW.

In fact, even the rare Dravidian word started entering the Vedic language towards the end of the Rigvedic period, e.g. kāṇá (one-eyed/cross-eyed) from Dravidian kaṇ (eye) in X.155.1, and the root √pūj (VIII.17.12) from Dravidian pū (flower), indicating interaction between the Vedic people and the people of the South. In later times, there was a massive influx of Inner Indo-European words, and even many Dravidian and Austric words, in the pan-Indian Sanskrit lexicons: e.g. heramba (buffalo) from Dravidian yerumai (buffalo).

Sino-Tibetan

There have been very early contacts between IE and Chinese, fossilized in IE loan-words in Chinese, e.g. ma (< *mra, cfr. mare, Sanskrit marka, “swift”), “horse”; quan, “hound”; sun, “grandson” (cfr. son); mi, “honey” (cfr. mead, Sanskrit madhu); gu, “bull”, and niu, “cow” (through *ngiu, from IE *gwou-); and, more recently, shi, “lion” (Iranian sher). Chang Tsung-tung has pleaded that there were linguistic and cultural contacts between Indo-Europeans from Inner Asia and late-neolithic Chinese peasants, who learned cattle-breeding from them.32 These loans generally came through Tokharic, which we know was the northwestern neighbour of Chinese for many centuries, at least since the turn of the 1st millennium BC when the Tokhars are mentioned in records of the Western Zhou dynasty, and until the mid-1st millennium AD.

The contact between Tokharic and Chinese adds little to our knowledge of the Urheimat but merely confirms that the Tokharic people lived that far east. The adoption of almost the whole range of domesticated cattle-names from Tokharic into Chinese also emphasizes a fact insufficiently realized, viz. how innovative the cattle-breeding culture of the early IE tribes really was. They ranked as powerful and capable, and their prestige helped them to assimilate large populations culturally and linguistically. But for Urheimat-related trails, we must look elsewhere.

Edwin Pulleyblank claims to have reconstructed a number of rather abstract similarities in the phonetics and morphology of PIE and Sino-Tibetan. Though he fails to back this structural similarity up with any (even a single) lexical similarity, he confidently dismisses as a “prejudice” the phenomenon that “for a variety of reasons, the possibility, of a genetic relationship between these two language families strikes most people as inherently most improbable.” He believes that “there is no compelling reason from the point of view of either linguistics or archaeology to rule out the possibility of a genetic connection between Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European. Such a connection is certainly inconsistent with a European or Anatolian homeland for the Indo-Europeans but it is much less so with the Kurgan theory”, esp. considering that the Kurgan culture “was not the result of local evolution in that region but had its source in an intrusion from an earlier culture farther east”.34 This is of course very interesting, (and it deserves being repeated that the Kurgan culture came from farther east), but: “It will be necessary to demonstrate the existence of a considerable number of cognates linked by regular sound correspondences. To do so in a way that will convince the doubters on both sides of the equation will be a formidable task.”35

As Prof. Ulrich Libbrecht writes, the Tibetans were not native to their present habitat, and immigrated there in the historical period: “The general ethnic movement of the Sinitic-speaking peoples was southward. The immigration of Tai- and Tibeto-Burman-speaking languages in Indochina has entirely taken place within the historical period. The same is true of the Chinese-speaking peoples from the middle part of the Yellow River basin towards the southern and eastern coast. Indications from Greek geographers and in Tibetan traditions teach us that the early centre of these peoples lay more to the north than present-day Tibet, viz. in the upper Yangzi basin. It is suspected that the centre of dispersion of the Sinitic languages was near the Koko-nor lake, at the borders of China proper, Tibet and Mongolia. From there, one branch spread eastward and formed the Chinese language; another went southward to form the Tibeto-Burman subgroup. The cause of this dispersal may well be found in the periodic droughts affecting Inner Asia in prehistoric and historical periods.”36

• • Elst 1999

There is the theory that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is a continuation of Uralic ("Indo-Uralic") after the latter had been adopted by an originally Northwest-Caucasian-speaking (NWC) population. Lexical items in common between NWC (now mainly Circassian) and PIE are few, and controversial. But two other things are emphatically in common and stand out: like the earliest PIE, NW Caucasian is an ergative language (a structure that developed into a different structure, viz. the well-known case system), and like PIE, it has numerous heavy consonant clusters, as opposed to the Indo-Uralic ancestress which, like her sister Dravidian, mostly has a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel sequence. But , the population that turned Indo-Uralic into PIE, some 6000 years ago, may as well have been Tibetan. Indeed, their putative homeland in Bactria-Sogdia borders on Tibet. Moreover, even a slightly more westerly Homeland might have been in touch with Tibetan through a westward Tibetan expansion. It has been established that NWC (and its probable offshoot Basque, another result of a long-distance migration, from the Caucasus to Sardinia, then France and Spain) is related to the Sino-Tibetan family. NWC may have come about as just such a westerly colony of emigrant Tibetan settlers. Given that the latter family is only spoken in East Asia (Tibet, China, Burma) and is a demographic heavyweight, it is unlikely that it moved from the Caucasus, an inhospitable place where we find only linguistic left-overs (e.g. Kartvelian or South-Caucasian, featuring Georgian, was once spoken in much of West Asia), to China. Rather, it is North-Caucasian that moved westwards starting from Tibet. At any rate, even lexical loans to or from SW Caucasian in PIE will often also be found in Tibetan. The implication is that some Tibetan words have crept into the pan-IE vocabulary, showing up in evolved form in Latin or Germanic. Such words form part of every comparative dictionary of IE (there are already a big handful), whose makers never realized such words’ status of loan-words. [1] ^[archive]

• Already two remarks: other leading linguists at these conferences were skeptical of this scenario, and the same linguistic traits (ergative structure, consonant clustering) equally count for Tibetan, the immediate neighbor of Manali and Ayodhya, where Aryan history began according to the Puranas. Just to say that this is not gospel truth, just a theory. But this is now the backbone of the belief in a westerly Homeland, and the Indian Homeland school should respond to it.[2] ^[archive]

Austronesian and Munda

A language family with unexpected similarities to IE, similarities which may provide a strong geographical clue, is Austronesian. This family of languages is the one with the second greatest geographical spread after IE: from Madagascar through Malaysia and Indonesia, Taiwan and the Philippines, to Melanesia and Polynesia, as far south as New Zealand, as far east as Hawaii and Easter Island. So, what is the relation of Austronesian to Indo-Aryan and to PIE?

According to Franklin Southworth: “The presence of other ethnic groups, speaking other languages [than IE, Dravidian or Munda], must be assumed (…) numerous examples can be found to suggest early contact with language groups now unrepresented in the subcontinent. A single example will be noted here. The word for ‘mother’ in several of the Dardic languages, as well as in Nepali, Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Gujarati, and Marathi (…) is AI (or a similar form). The source of this is clearly the same as that of classical Tamil Ay, ‘mother’. These words are apparently connected with a widespread group of words found in Malayo-Polynesian (cf. Proto-Austronesian *bayi …) and elsewhere. The distribution of this word in Indo-Aryan suggests that it must have entered Old Indo-Aryan very early (presumably as a nursery word, and thus not likely to appear in religious texts), before the movement of Indo-Aryan speakers out of the Panjab. In Dravidian, this word is well-represented in all branches (though amma is perhaps an older word) and thus, if it is a borrowing, it must be a very early one.”38

Next to AyI, “mother”, Marathi has the form bAI, “lady”, as in TArAbAI, LakshmIbAI etc.; the same two forms are attested in Austronesian. So, we have a nearly pan-Indian word, attested from Nepal and Kashmir to Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu, and seemingly related to Austronesian. For another example: “Malayo-Polynesian shares cognate forms of a few [words which are attested in both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian], notably Old Indo-Aryan phala- [‘fruit’], Dravidian paLam [‘ripe fruit’], etc. (cf. Proto-Austronesian *paLam, ‘to ripen a fruit artificially’…), and the words for rice.”39

Austronesian seems to have very early and very profound links with IE. In the personal pronouns (e.g. Proto-Austronesian *aku, cfr. ego), the first four numerals (e.g. Malay dua for “two”) and other elementary vocabulary (e.g. the words for “water” and “land”), the similarity is too striking to be missed. Remarkable lexical similarities had been reported since at least the 1930s, and they have been presented by Isidore Dyen in 1966.40 Dyen’s comparisons are sometimes not too obvious but satisfy the linguistic requirement of regularity. At the same time, this lexical influence or exchange is not backed up by grammatical similarities: in contrast with the elaborate categories of IE grammar, Austronesian grammar looks very unsystematic and primitive, the textbook example being the Malay plural by reduplication, as in orang, “man”, orang-orang, “men”.41

Yet, just as the Kurgan culture may be a secondary centre of IE dispersal, formed by immigrants from India, the supposed Southeast-Chinese Urheimat of Austronesian may itself be a secondary homeland. If there is to be a point of contact between PIE and Proto-Austronesian, it is hard to imagine it in another location than India.

For another alternative: suppose the Indo-Europeans and the Austronesians shared a homeland somewhere in southern China or Southeast Asia. An entry of the Indo-Europeans into India from the east, arriving by boat from Southeast Asia, is an interesting thought experiment, if only to free ourselves from entrenched stereotypes. Why not counter the Western AIT with an Eastern AIT? Just imagine, a wayward Austronesian tribe sailed up the Ganga led by one Manu who, as related in the Puranas, started Aryan history in the mid-Ganga basin (Ayodhya, Prayag, Kashi), and whose progeny subsequently conquered the Indus basin and expanded further westward. In that case, the elaborate structure of PIE would be an innovation due to a peculiar intellectual culture (let’s call it proto-brahminism) and to the influence of local languages, including perhaps a lost branch of Semitic spoken by colonists who had brought agriculture from West Asia to Indus settlements like Mehrgarh. This is of course a speculation, a highly provisional thought experiment made in order to accomodate the ‘theory’ of IE-Semitic kinship in the present ‘theory’ of IE-Austronesian kinship.

I will welcome any new evidence which forces us to take the southeastern scenario seriously. Until then, if there has to be a common homeland of IE and Austronesian, I consider India more likely. India, in this case, may have to be understood as including the submerged lands to its south which were inhabited perhaps as late as 5000 BC. The scenario that unfolds is of India as a major demographic growth centre, from which IE spread to the north and west and Austronesian to the southeast as far as Polynesia. Though disappearing from India, Austronesian expanded in the same period and just as spectacularly as IE. These two most impressive linguistic migrations would then have been part of one India-centred expansion movement spanning the Old World from Iceland to New Zealand.

• • Elst 1999

• Secondly, eastern contributions to Hindu tradition are not exclusively from the Mundas. The RAjasUya ceremony described in the Shatapatha Brahmana has an exact counterpart, not in Rome or Greece, nor in Chotanagpur or Japan, but in Fiji. The latter coronation ceremony has been analyzed into 19 distinct elements, and practically all of them are found in the RAjasUya.143 This island culture is part of the vast expanse of the Austronesian language family. As we have seen, a number of scholars have pointed out remarkable lexical similarities between IE and Austronesian. Unlike in the case of the Mundas, contacts of the Indo-Europeans with the Austronesians are hard to locate even in theory, unless we assume that the Austronesians at one time had a presence in India (and even then, India is a big place). Elst 1999

Witzel himself acknowledges that “Munda speakers immigrated”, as this should explain why in Colin Masica's list of agricultural loans in Hindi (which, in conformity with the invasionist paradigm, is very generous in allotting non-IE origins to Indo- Aryan words), Austro-Asiatic etymologies account for only 5.7%. In borrowing Munda words, the Vedic Aryans clearly did not behave like immigrants into Munda-speaking territory. This paucity of Munda influence in the agricultural vocabulary, soil-related par excellence, should also caution us against reading Munda etymologies into the equally soil- bound hydronyms, e.g. there is no compelling reason for a Munda etymology for Shutudri (Witzel diagnoses the usual Sanskritic interpretations as artificial “popular etymology”, p.374, but does not produce a convincing Munda alternative) or Gangâ, even when it is not impossible either. An interesting idea suggested by Prof. Witzel concerns an alleged alternation k/zero, e.g. in the Greek rendering of the place-name and ethnonym Kamboja (eastern Afghanistan) as Ambautai, apparently based on a native pronunciation without k-. Citing Kuiper and others, Witzel asserts that “an interchange k : zero ‘points in the direction of Munda’” (p.362), though this “would be rather surprising at this extreme western location”. Indeed, it would mean that not just Indo-Aryan but also other branches of Indo-Iranian have been influenced by Munda, for Kam-boja seems to be an Iranian word, the latter part being the de-aspirated Iranian equivalent of Skt. bhoja, “king” (Eric Pirart: “Historicité des forces du mal dans la Rgvedasamhitâ”, Journal Asiatique 286.2, 1998, p.542; he also gives an Iranian etymology to Vedic Agastya, from a-gasti, from Iranian gasta, “ill-smelling, sin”). Well, if the Mundas could penetrate India as far as the Indus, they could reach Kamboja too. But the interesting point here is that the “interchange k : zero” is attested in IE vocabulary far to the west of India and Afghanistan, e.g. ape corresponding to Greek kepos, Sanskrit kapi, “monkey”, or Latin aper, “boar”, corresponding to Greek kapros. Gamkrelidze and Ivanov have tried to explain this through a Semitic connection, with the phonological closeness (somewhere in the throat) of qof and ‘ayn. But if the origin of this alternation must be sought in a Munda connection, what does that say about the geographical origin of Latin and Greek? So, if we provisionally accept the presence of Munda loans in Vedic Sanskrit, we need not follow Witzel in accepting that this is a native substratum influence in a superimposed foreign language. Shrikant Talageri (The Rg-Veda, a Historical Analysis, forthcoming from Aditya Prakashan, Delhi 2000) has argued that the Rg-Veda shows a movement from the western Ganga basin to the Saraswati and Indus basins. This implies that as an eastern dialect of PIE (with the western dialects in the Indus basin soon to move out to central Asia and beyond, and to its east only other IA dialects), pre-Vedic and Vedic Sanskrit were more open to influences from the eastern immigrants from Southeast Asia, the Mundas. Elst 2007

• The Mundas, tribals whose language must have been spoken all around the Bay of Bengal, speak an Austro-Asiatic language related to Vietnamese. However, the jury is still out on whether their homeland (as well as the homeland of rice cultivation) was in India or in Southeast Asia. Elst 2018

• In a descriptive paper without explanatory ambitions, Isidore Dyen (1970) has presented some surprising commonalities in vocabulary between Austronesian and Indo-European. Others had noticed some of these, starting with Franz Bopp in the 1940s and Hans Jensen in the 1930s. Dyen’s comparisons are sometimes not too obvious but satisfy the linguistic requirement of regularity. They concern not just core vocabulary for “earth”, “water”, ”rice” et al., but even the pronouns (*aku, cfr. ego) and the first four numerals. This is a far more intimate relationship than between IE and any non-IE language in India, whether Burushaski, Munda, Kusunda, Nahali, Tibeto-Burman, Dravidian or Vedda; nor in Europe, whether Basque, Tartessian (a language attested in Spain since 600 BC; Clackson 2007:3-4), Caucasian or Finno-Ugric. To be sure, IE has shared its vocabulary lavishly with Dravidian and Finno-Ugric, but not such central items of the lexicon.

• a somewhat dated theory by the Marxist dean of Indian linguistics, Suniti Kumar Chatterji (in Majumdar 1951:150,156), viz. that Austronesian originated in India. Which is where not Chatterji but Talageri himself also locates the IE Homeland, thus bringing the two together. Even more eccentrically, Sergent (1995:398) places the contact between the two language groups in Northeastern China. But it is now generally accepted that the Austronesian Homeland was Southeast China, whence it made its spectacular expansion to the island world.

• The dominant opinion is that from Southeast China, Anatolian expanded in all seaborne directions spanning between Madagascar and Easter Island, hence its proposed substratum presence even in Japanese, a rather hard nut to crack for an Indian Homeland theory of Austronesian. However, just as the steppe culture is construed by Indian and Anatolian Homeland proponents as a secondary centre of IE dispersal, one could likewise imagine Southeast China as a staging area for the naval expansion of an Austronesian population that had freshly arrived there from elsewhere.

• It would be special pleading to have the Austronesians sail from afar, say from India, then regroup in Southeast China, then disperse again across the ocean. But they may have expanded from somewhere very near instead. A scenario with this effect is indirectly suggested by Oppenheimer (1998) in his thesis about Sundaland, the now-submerged region south of China and east of Vietnam. He describes it as an “Eden in the East” during the final centuries of the Ice Age, more than ten thousand years ago. In his view, the Neolithic Revolution first took place in this warm and fertile part of the world, but people were forced to flee when the ice melted and the sea level rose. During their emigration, they lost part of their innovative achievements but managed to take along others that gave them an edge over the populations they encountered in their lands of settlement. Suppose that some of them stayed in the surrounding lands (Southeast China) to become the Austronesians, while others moved west to India where they became the Indo-Europeans....In that scenario, we get India as the wellspring of Indo-European expansion westward, but at the price of positing an earlier “Aryan invasion”: not from the northwest but from the southeast, all the way from Sundaland.
  • Elst 2018 Some Unlikely Tentacles of Early Indo-European

• Isidore Dyen, in a paper presented in 1966 and published in 1970, makes out a case showing the similarities between many basic words reconstructed in the proto-Indo-European and proto- Austronesian languages, including such basic words as the first four numerals, many of the personal pronouns, and the words for "water" and "land". And Dyen points out that "the number of comparisons could be increased at least slightly, perhaps even substantially, without a severe loss of quality" (DYEN 1970:439). • a) The very first four numerals: Proto-Indo-European (*sem, *dwōu/*dwai, *tri, *qwetwor) and Proto- Austronesian (*esa, *dewha, *telu, *pati/*epati). • Compare Tocharian sas/se 'one', Romanian patru 'four', Welsh pedwar 'four' and Malay sa/satu 'one', epat 'four'. [Malay dua 'two' and tiga 'three' require no comparison]. • b) Personal Pronouns: I, we, you, he/she/it, (demonstr.) this/he: PIE *eĝh, *ṅsme, *yu, *eyo/*eya, *to/*eno. PA *aku, Tagalog ka-mi, Tagalog ka-yo, PA *ia, *itu/inu. • c) "Land" and "water": PIE *wer, *ters. PA *wair and *darat (Sanskrit vāri and dharā). (DYEN 1970:431).

Indo-Aryan, Prakrit

Prakrits and Indo-Aryan dialects in eastern India retained the r/l distinction, which is technically “pre-Indo-Iranian” since the “Indo-Iranians” of the Rigveda-Avesta-Mitanni records had merged r/l into r.

Archaic features and words are also found in eastern and southern Prakrits, which are missing in Sanskrit and Iranian: K.R. Norman, in his study of the variations between the OIA (Old Indo-Aryan: Vedic and Classical Sanskrit) and MIA (Middle Indo-Aryan: Prakrits), finds MIA dialects contain many forms “which are clearly of IA, or even IE, origin, but have no attested Skt equivalent, e.g. suffixes not, or only rarely, found in Skt, or those words which show a different grade of root from that found in Skt, but can be shown not to be MIA innovations, because the formation could only have evolved in a pre-MIA phonetic form, or because a direct equivalent is found in an IE language other than Skt” (NORMAN 1995:282).

Sinhalese

• What is more, s in such cases, and likewise other sound combinations deemed “not

allowed in Sanskrit”, could also be the original form, in a dialect which did not descend from Sanskrit. Indeed, in Shrikant Talageri's reconstruction of ancient Indian history, Sanskrit is not the mother of IA at all, there being IA dialects developing alongside Vedic Sanskrit in India's interior. Just as Vedic tradition is but one among several Indo-Aryan religious traditions, the traces of which are found in the Puranas, Vedic Sanskrit is but one among a number of OIA dialects. The progeny of the latter consists of the Indo-Aryan languages, especially their so-called deshî vocabulary, words seemingly unrelated to Sanskrit, being neither tatsama (pure Sanskrit “citation” words) nor tadbhava (evolved words having a Sanskrit correlate). Thus, the deshi word kuta, "dog", is used in most NIA languages, as opposed to the Sanskrit word shvan (cfr. Greek kuon, English hound), used only in Singhalese and Konkani. As Talageri has pointed out, the latter two languages both have a tradition of originating in the northwest, not far from the Vedic heartland; they also use tadbhava words for “water” and “horse” whereas most other NIA languages use deshi words (pânî c.q. ghora). Rather than to say that these deshi words are non-IE loans, they may often be native IA coinages which just happen to be different from usage in the northwestern dialect which became Vedic Sanskrit, and which was in some respects closer to Iranian than to the IA dialects of India's interior. Likewise, these inner-Indian IA dialects may have had phonological characteristics different from those of Sanskrit and permitting certain combinations and sounds patterns "not allowed in Sanskrit".

• • Elst 2007

Archaic words are preserved in Sinhalese which are not found in Vedic/Sanskrit: for example the word watura (English water, Hittite watar).

Agricultural terminology

In my paper, I argued that agricultural terminology in Germanic are usually taken to confirm the established picture. Words corresponding with Indo-Iranian terms, hence fully Indo-European, have an agricultural meaning in Germanic, but not in Indo-Iranian (Dutch tarwe/”wheat” but Sanskrit durva, “grass”, apparently the original meaning; or harvest but kṛpāṇi, “sword”, both from a root meaning “cut” but only in Europe specialized to an agricultural setting). The usual reading of this is that in their Russian homeland, the Proto-Indo-Europeans were pastoralists without agriculture, that the Indo-Iranians took this level of culture along with them to Afghanistan and India, while the European branches showed a quick immersion in an agricultural society, attested either by the specialization of Indo-European terms to agricultural meanings, or by borrowing agricultural terms from the Old European natives.

I then revisited a paper from 1979 by Colin Masica, as well as his 1991 standard handbook of Indo-Aryan linguistics, to evaluate his list of Indo-Aryan agricultural, botanical and pastoralist terms. Of these, over 9 % are deduced from Dravidian, mostly because corresponding Dravidian words are attested, sometimes just because they look Dravidian; likewise, over 5% of Munda. Some 24% are from Persian or otherwise foreign, and need not detain us here. Various Indo-Aryan or even Indo-Iranian groups amounts to some 44%, and the rest is unexplained. In fact, quite a few of the other categories are not securely explained either. Now, many of these words look perfectly Indo-Aryan, either because Hindi-speaking mouths have successfully integrated them, or because they simply are. The criterion that a word can only be Indo-European if it occurs in at least two branches, is conventionally assumed but in fact arbitrary. An Indian homeland would almost necessitate that numerous terms for Indian plants were forgotten along with the plants themselves by all non-Indian branches as people left India and never encountered, say, a banyan tree again.

According to Michael Witzel, some 4% of Rg-Vedic terminology is non-Indo-European. That would make the Rg-Veda the purest Indo-European text by far. And even that 4 % is a generous estimate, for the words he lists as borrowed have a disputed origin and some may just be Indo-European. Witzel lists bīja, “seed”, which exists also in Iranian, as borrowed from the purely hypothetical “Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex” language, but Masica opines that it is from Dravidian. As for parṣa, “sheaf”, I learned from another speaker that it is one of the few agricultural terms attested both in India and in Europe (Greek), viz. as part of the name of grain goddess Demeter’s daughter Persephone < perso-gwhen- = Skt. parṣa-han-, “sheaf-beater”, i.e. thresher. In Germanic, the number of words deemed loans has been halved in recent decades by identifying cognates in other branches, e.g. swim turns out to have cognates in Baltic and Celtic, though meaning “move” or “hunt”; it is not impossible that such cognates will yet be found for Sankrit too.

But not that there is anything against loans into Sanskrit or Indo-Aryan. Munda was the language of a rice-cultivating society around the mouth of the Ganga, Dravidian that of the Gujarat part of the Harappan area, dimly bordering on the Sankrit speech area (separated by the Rajasthan desert), which moreover was to assimilate many Munda- and Dravidian areas into the expanding Indo-Aryan community. Moreover, South-Indian kings invited Brahmin communities to settle and give Vedic prestige to their dynasties, upon which they integrated Dravidian words into later Sanskrit, e.g. mīṇa, “fish”, or kāṇa, one-eyed. This expansion is attested by well-known historical developments and doesn’t require, let alone prove, an Indo-Aryan invasion from abroad. As for the European branches, they borrowed words but often also gave a new agricultural meaning to general IE words, e.g. Skt. ajra, “empty land” but Latin ager, “field”. But this doesn’t mean that Sanskrit had no agricultural terms, e.g. sītā, “furrow” (from PIE seh, “sow”), kṣetra, “field”.

• • Elst 2018, [3] ^[archive]

The European vocabularies indicated a basic familiarity with agriculture but a loss of many terms which was made up for with the adoption of native European words or the agriculture-oriented reinterpretation of general words. Thus, Sanskrit ajrah simply means “a plain”, in Latin it has been agriculturized to the meaning “field”. The Sanskrit root kṛp-, “to cut”, has been agriculturized to “cut fruits from a tree”, “pick (fruits)”, as in Latin carpere, or to English harvest. Sanskrit durva refers to a wild plant, “bent grass”, while Dutch tarwe refers to agricultural produce, “wheat”. However, sometimes there is a common agricultural meaning on both sides. The Sanskrit word parṣa, “sheaf”, is related to a Greek word persè, which we still see in the agricultural goddess’s name Persephonè, “she who beats the sheaves”. Related to sow < seH, we have Latin sero and Sanskrit sīra, as well as Tocharian ṣito, Greek sitos and Sanskrit sītā. For “thresh”, we have Latin pinso, Sanskrit pinasti. For “chaff”, we have Latin palea, Sanskrit palāva. Latin alium, means “a kind of root” (whence “garlic”), and so did Sanskrit ālū before acquiring the modern meaning “potato”. For "grind”, we have Latin molo, Sanskrit mṛṇāti., related to English mill. The general word for “grain”, or specialized to “barley”, is *yewo-, attested in Anatolian, Baltic, Slavic, Greek, and Indo-Iranian. The best explanation is that they practised agriculture in India, then had to do largely without it when trekking through Russia, thus losing much of the terminology which had existed in India, and finally revived it in a form adapted to the European environment, with a locally adopted terminology. Elst 2018

North-Causasian

Ranko Matasović from Zagreb, Croatia, asked if there are loans in Indo-European from North-Causasian, and after surveying some candidates, he concluded that there weren’t any. If the Proto-Indo-Europeans had been their northern neighbours in their Russian homeland, they should reasonably have taken some loans with them to their respective historical habitats. I conclude that, like with Uralic, the homeland had no point of contact with North Causasian, and therefore was not in the peri-Caspian steppe zone.

• • Elst 2018, [4] ^[archive]

Etymological depth

From venting his impatience with the weird applications and implications of the laryngeal theory, Kazanas seemingly wanders off to land in a different line of argument, which proves highly interesting. He notes that the word daughter and its cognates in Germanic, Greek and Iranian “stand isolated without related stems in their languages”, whereas in Sanskrit, its root √duh has many other derivatives. In an earlier paper, Kazanas [2006] had elaborated this point in great detail with many more examples, e.g. English son being an isolated word while Sanskrit sunu is derivable from the root 2√su, ‘procreate’. There as here, he concluded that Vedic and even Classical Sanskrit preserve many more PIE elements than any other branch of IE, which tells on the Homeland question in that “preservation is easier for a sedentary people”. Moreover, once it has been attested that “the Vedics, though good at preserving PIE elements, do not preserve any memories of journeys leading to their habitat”, this lends all the more argumentative force to the conspicuous absence of Vedic migration memories as contrasted with such memories in some other branches of IE. In the present context, Kazanas applies this difference in etymological depth to some geographical terms common to Iranian and Indo-Aryan, but standing alone in Iranian while being part of etymological networks within Sanskrit: the hǝndu in Avestan Hapta-hǝndu has no other cognates in the language, while the Sanskrit lexeme sindh- is quite productive; and likewise, the hara- in Avestan Haraxvaiti stands isolated while the sáras (‘lake’) in Vedic Sárasvatī, has many cognates from Vedic √sṛ ‘run, flow swiftly’. This, while not amounting to proof, does constitute a serious indication for the Indian identity of the Iranian memories of origin. For those among us now tempted to suggest that this root must have been an “indigenous” non-IE root borrowed into invading Indo-Aryan, Kazanas reminds us that the Vedic root √sṛ is eminently IE, with cognates in some distant kentum languages. Elst 2018

Criticisms

• Though minoritarian, these criticisms have been uttered before by other fully qualified scholars, e.g. by Edmund Leach, whom Kazanas quotes as lambasting “such monstrous distortion of facts” and “concoction of non-facts (reconstructed asterisk words and laryngeals)” in order to maintain “an absurd notion like the AIT” [Leach 1990]; or in the denunciation of “the infamous laryngeal theory” by linguist Gyula Décsy [1991:17] as “a regrettable scholarly aberration which created only problems where there were none” [1991:30]....
• However, all the deductions that had to buttress any of these non-Indian Homeland hypotheses, can be shown to be either immature and superseded by newer insights or linguistically illegitimate: they combine legitimate linguistic categories with non-linguistic assumptions or leaps of faith. Thus, the linguistic distance between reconstructed Proto-Indo-European and Vedic Sanskrit, very small but not negligeable, does not imply anything firm about the geographical location of the Homeland,-- save for making close proximity to India very probable.
• Thus, a genealogical tree of IE languages suggested by much-acclaimed AIT author David Anthony is deconstructed as “not supported by any linguistic evidence at all” by Clackson (2013:277). Other proposed family trees allotting each language its place vis-à-vis the others has typically been deconstructed as untenable by yet other rivalling linguists. Here, a fact stands out more clearly that also counts, albeit less saliently, for other aspects of the AIT: the impression that the scientific approach has generated one theory of IE origins, is false.
  • Elst 2018

Armenian

Hrach Martirosyan, an Armenian working in Leiden, showed that Armenian shared many isoglosses (common linguistic innovations, starting with common new vocabulary) with Greek. These had had to have shared most of the way from the homeland, wherever it lay, to their historical habitats in Armenia and the southeast corner of the Black sea coast, c.q. in the southern Balkans and the Aegean Sea. This pleads against a Pontic (steppe) homeland, as Greek would probably have to go west through the Balkans while Armenian would have to go south through the Caucasus. By contrast, in an Indian homeland scenario, Greek and Armenian (as well as the extinct and little-attested Phrygian) would follow the same route, thus fitting these languages’ isoglosses.

• • Elst 2018, [5] ^[archive]

Greek

A number of cases can be cited that would fit an Indian but not a Russian Homeland scenario. Here, we will settle for a single example: the existence of several traits common to Sanskrit, Iranian, Armenian and Greek, but absent in the other branches. Thus, the prohibitive particle mā/mè; or the augment, a prefixed vowel marking the past tense (Greek e-lipon, “I left”, e-lexa, “I said”, Sanskrit a-dhāt, “he put”, a-gamat, “he went”). The languages have this innovations in common, so somehow they should have lived together for a while, after separating from the other branches. However, from a putative Russian Homeland, Greece and India are in opposite directions. By contrast, from India it all falls into place: Greek only left after staying for a while in the vicinity of Sanskrit and Iranian after the other branches had already departed. During that intermezzo, Greek innovated, adopted mè and developed the augment, and then it could depart. Elst 2018

• So, focusing on an isogloss uniting Sanskrit with Greek, the augment (initial vowel added to the imperfective forms of the verb), hard to explain if they left a Pontic Homeland in opposite directions, he remarked that the augment in the Sanskrit-to-Greek sequence of languages tends to behave differently in each of these languages. Well, of course their behaviour is less than identical. Greek and Sanskrit have grown so far apart as to become different languages, not mutually understandable anymore, with Greek e.g. losing the dual number and three of the eight cases. It is therefore only to be expected that the augment developed some idiosyncrasies in either of the languages as well. But the fact that they have the augment while the Western branches of Indo-European do not, remains hard to digest for a Pontic Homeland scenario and is eminently favourable to an Indian Homeland.[6] ^[archive]

Megacomparatism

Another line of proof would be furnished by megacomparatism, viz. the placement of PIE within the even larger and older structure called Nostratic, spoken during the Ice Age, perhaps 15.000 BC, somewhere is Asia. The very existence of this mega-family of languages (including Dravidian, Uralic, Transeurasiatic, Semitic and others) is in dispute, so it should not be relied upon too much. Its theorists rely on the presently prevailing assumptions about the homelands of its branches, including a westerly Homeland scenario of PIE: ”Since there is a fair amount of controversy surrounding this subject, it is necessary to survey current theories and to select the scenarios that seem most likely”. (Bomhard 2008:222) So, we are not dealing with an eccentric supporting the now-marginal OIT, but a faithful of a non-Indian Homeland. However, to the extent that the Nostratic theory is valid, it tends to support the OIT. Nostraticist Richard Bomhard follows Johanna Nichols (1997) in positing Bactria as the origin of the Indo-European expansion. Bactria is still in the steppeexpanse but is close to India and is at any rate the staging area for the emigrations from there. Following an earlier pioneer of the Nostratic theory, Aaron Dolgopolsky, Bomhard locates the Homeland of Nostratic in Syria or thereabouts, where the Neolithic Revolution was to take place. (Bomhard 2008:246) Within Nostratic, Bomhard sees a sub-grouping consisting of Indo-European, Transeurasiatic (Altaic) and Uralic, spreading out from Bactria. (Bomhard 2008:248) The PIE-speaking population expanded or migrated towards the Black Sea (in his opinion already in 5000 BC), and all the proposed evidence for a Pontic Homeland then fits in with his earlier Nostratic narrative and Bactrian Homeland. At that time, Dravidian was located nearby, in Gujarat. With PIE located just northwest of the Khyber Pass, at this time-depth they might as well have been in the vicinity on the other side of the Khyber Pass. Also, we are not sure about the ultimate location of Nostratic and the scenario of its early expansion, so a lot remains possible. At any rate, the Nostratic theory once more dashes the hopes of the AIT party to find any kind of evidence finally precluding an Indian Homeland. Elst 2018

Roots

Elst (2018) writes: In my 1999 book, in a discussion of linguistic paleontology, I remarked off-hand: “Often it is only in Sanskrit that this deeper etymology is still visible”, and then gave some animal names which in Sanskrit have a non-animal etymology whereas in the other branches they only mean the animal, e.g. Celtic-Germanic mare seems related to Sanskrit marka, “swift”, and within Sanskrit, the word wolf/vṛka is related to the root vṛk-, “tear”, whence vṛkṇa, “a cut”, “a wound”. Moreover: “The closeness of the animal name to its etymon in Sanskrit is also seen in the fact that one term can still denote two different animals which still have the same eponymous trait: pṛdāku can mean both ‘snake’ and ‘panther’ (from their common trait ‘spotted’), whereas the Latin and Hittite equivalents have only retained the latter meaning.” (Elst 1999:132)

While I left it at that and quite forgot about it, Nicholas Kazanas was working along the same lines and developed it into a very powerful type of evidence, showing the primacy of Sanskrit, or its closeness to PIE. Its anteriority to the closely-related Avestan can be demonstrated (Kazanas 2012), but its structural anteriority to other languages, including venerable Greek, is less often realized. Kazanas (2015:43-124) gives thorough proof of it, discussing 393 roots.. We have Greek pa-ter, but Sankrit pitā < *pa-tṛ < pa-, “to protect”; English name, but Sanskrit nāma < nam-, namāmi, “to address, greet”; Greek thugater and English daughter but Sanskrit duhitar < dugdha, “milk” (> “milkmaid”). The rootedness of Sanskrit words where other languages only have secondary derivatives as unrooted words indicates that Sanskrit is older and more fundamental whereas other members of the family partly have the character of creole languages in which IE has mixed with local Central-Asian and Old-European languages. As Kazanas (2015:43) concludes: “Sanskrit appears to have lost far fewer items and preserves much greater organic coherence than the other branches. This supports the general idea that Sanskrit is much closer to Proto-Indo-European and that, since this could only happen in sedentary conditions, the Indoaryan speakers of Sanskrit did not move (much) from the original homeland.” Whereas many Hindus wrongly assert that Sanskrit is the mother of all Indo-European (if not simply all) languages, it is not unreasonable to describe PIE (already without Anatolian) as pre-Vedic Sanskrit, not very different lexically and grammatically from the language attested in the Rg-Veda’s family books. A vowel conflation (e > a < o) and palatalization (k > c) may have taken place and a handful of words borrowed, but this is exactly the same difference as between classical Latin and medieval Latin (ae > e < oe, k > c, a few loanwords). Elst 2018

Animal names (Flora and Fauna)

Horse

• One question where linguistic panteontology has had an interesting say, is the position of the horse in IE history. The one credible attempt to give *ekwos roots in the basic PIE vocabulary, is through Greek ôkus, and Sanskrit âśu, "fast", related to Balto-Slavic ašu, "sharp" (Lehmann 1997:247). This leads to an interpretion of the name of the horse as "the fast one" (Meid 1989:15), though the derivation could also be reversed. Likewise, the Germanic word horse means “the runner”, cognate to Latin currere, “run”. So, those who see artificial coinage of Indian tree and animal names in Sanskrit as proof of the speakers' unfamiliarity with the trees and animals in question, should also deduce that this artificial coinage indicates the foreignness of the horse to the original PIE-speakers in their Homeland.
• Coming to livestock: *gwou-, "cow", and *su-, "pig" (whence later the diminutive *su-in-o, "swine", which is of the younger type) belong to the older category, while *ekw-o-s, "horse", belongs to the younger category. Some scholars deduce from this that the pig and the cow were domesticated earlier than the horse, which happens to tally with the archaeological data. But it might just as well be interpreted as an indication that the horse was not only not domesticated by the earliest Proto-Indo-Europeans, but was simply not known to them. After all, the inhabi­tants of the areas where horses were available for domestication, must have known the horse since much earlier, as a wild animal on a par with the wolf and the deer, and they would have had an ancient name for it. We shouldn't give too much weight to this, since wlkw-o, that old “wolf”, also belongs to the younger type. But if it matters at all that the term for "horse" is a younger formation (Meid 1989:14), it would indicate that the horse was not native to the Urheimat, and that the Proto-Indo-Europeans only got acquainted with it, as with the wheel, around the time of their dispers­al. In that case, India was a better candidate for Urheimat status than the horse-rich steppes.
• No doubt the first carts were drawn by cattle, but these were soon replaced with horses.” (Polomé 1982:158) The first vehicles predated both the integration of the horse in the IE-speakers’ lifestyle and the disintegration of PIE into its daughter languages. The importance of the horse as the defining animal of the IE expansion has been overdone.
  • Elst 2018 Some Unlikely Tentacles of Early Indo-European

• The word *ekw-o-s, ‘horse’, is a later formation in PIE.... To take two momentous inventions,

the IE words for ‘fire’ (*egnis, *pûr, *âter) belong to the older category, while the words for ‘wheel’ (*rot-o-s, *kwekwl-o-s) belong to the younger type, which indicates that the wheel was newly invented or newly adopted from neighboring peoples by the Proto-Indo-Europeans, whereas the use of fire was already an ancient heritage. Coming to livestock: *gwou-s, ‘cow’, and *su-s, ‘pig’ (with the younger diminutive *su-in-o, ‘swine’) belong to the older category, while *ekw-o-s, ‘horse’, belongs to the younger category. Some scholars deduce from this that the pig and the cow were domesticated earlier than the horse, which happens to tally with the archaeological data. But it might just as well be interpreted as an indica- tion that the horse was not only not domesticated by the earliest Proto-Indo- Europeans, but was simply not known to them; after all, the inhabitants of the areas where horses were available for domestication, must have known the horse since much earlier, as a wild animal on par with the wolf and the deer. We shouldn’t give too much weight to this, but if it matters at all that the term for ‘horse’ is a younger formation, it would indicate that the horse was not native to the Urheimat, and that the Proto-Indo-Europeans only got acquainted with it, as with the wheel, shortly before their dispersal. In that case, India was a better candidate for Urheimat status than the horse-rich steppes... If this is so, those who see artificial coinage of Indian tree names in Sanskrit as proof of the speakers’ unfamiliarity with the trees in question, should also deduce that this artificial coinage indicates the foreignness of the horse to the original PIE-speakers in their Urheimat. Conversely, if the irregularities in the various evolutes of *ekwos are taken to indi- cate that it ‘was borrowed, possibly even independently in some of the dialects’ (Lehmann 1997: 247), this would again confirm that the horse was a newcomer in the expanding PIE horizon. Could this be because the PIE horizon started expanding from horseless India? If this is not really a compelling argument, at least the converse is even more true: any clinching linguistic evidence for a horse-friendly Urheimat is missing.

• • Elst, K: Linguistic Aspects of the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory, in Bryant, E. F. (2008). The Indo-Aryan controversy: Evidence and inference in Indian history. London: Routledge.

See also

• Bangani language
• https://independent.academia.edu/DrimedSnyingpo ^[archive]

https://talageri.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-complete-linguistic-case-for-out-of.html ^[archive]

https://web.archive.org/web/20120503150424/http://voiceofdharma.org/books/ait/index.htm ^[archive]

https://www.archaeologyonline.net/artifacts/indo-european-urheimat-elst ^[archive]

http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/aid/urheimat.html ^[archive]

RV has some 20 dravidian loan words, dravidian languages have borrowed at least 50 percent of their vocabular from sanskrit, Creation of Tamil is attributed to Agastya (RV sage)Witzel acknowledges the "linguistic connections of Dravidian with Uralic" (p.349), which also point to the northwest outside India as the origin of Dravidian.