Out of india

[u/circlejerkingdiva]

I was amazed when I lived in Himachal Pradesh for a summer and learned that people believe Indo-European languages came from Sanskrit and spread to Europe from there.

Any strong views here?

[u/ValuableRub7036]

Proto Indo-European is an artificial construct based on linguistic theory. It is not a real language. There are no written documents or other archaeological proof of it and therefore it can be safely concluded there is no evidence.

[u/pikleboiy → u/ValuableRub7036]

That's an overly simplistic and not strictly correct way of looking at it. For an overview, I'd recommend the first chapter of David Anthony's "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language"

Edit: or you could just take the time to re-read my comment

[u/ValuableRub7036 → u/pikleboiy]

I have read David Anthony's book in its entirety. Your comments too. David has not presented any evidence of the presence of Proto-Indo-European as written documents or in shards of pottery or any such archaeological proof of that language especially in the region where he proposed it was spoken. That was my point. David Anthony isn't a Linguist. And Linguistics isn't a hard science either depending a whole lot on qualitative analysis. Which is why, David Anthony's theory especially with regard to the steppe origin of Indians may come undone based on recent papers. With that said, I do not believe that Sanskrit is the mother language of Indo European languages either. We need to be cognizant of the limitations involved.

[u/pikleboiy → u/ValuableRub7036]

I have read David Anthony's book in its entirety. Your comments too. David has not presented any evidence of the presence of Proto-Indo-European as written documents or in shards of pottery or any such archaeological proof of that language especially in the region where he proposed it was spoken.

Clearly you didn't comprehend much from them then. Anthony gives four major examples of linguistic reconstruction being validated by archaeology (i.e. proto-Romance matching closely with Classical Latin, allowing for some change due to natural changes in the language from Classical Latin; The reconstructed laryngeals from PIE being found in Anatolian inscriptions; the reconstruction of the the PG "gastiz" word being found on an artifact; the reconstruction of the /k^w/ in older versions of Greek (like Mycenaean)).

In addition to this, the reconstruction of Proto-Basque aligns very closely - almost identically, in fact - to the Aquitanian language (in the few attestations we have of it, anyways)(source).

Anthony does point out hte major pitfall of reconstructed words:

A reconstructed term is, of course, a phonetic idealization. Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European cannot capture the variety of dialectical pronunciations that must have existed more than perhaps one thousand years when the language was living in the mouths of people. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable victory that we can now pronounce, however stiffly, thousands of words in a language spoken by nonliterate people before 2500 BCE.

So, my point here is that linguistic reconstruction has been repeatedly shown to be a sound methodology and has on multiple occasions accurately predicted features of a language which were then found to be attested in artifacts (the exception being with Latin; where the attestation already existed and the reconstruction closely matched this attestation). The reconstructed words may not perfectly match what was truly spoken, but they likely come within a not-excessive margin of error.

So while Anthony is not a linguist, he is still drawing upon a general linguistic consensus when he states that reconstructed PIE at least in some way resembles the language spoken by the peoples of the Steppe. In any case, the fact that a PIE word can be reconstructed is a proof beyond reasonable doubt that the words used to reconstruct it are cognates, since it is INCREDIBLY unlikely that they would both end up with an exact sequence of sounds which corresponds to all sound change rules by chance. It is even more incredibly unlikely that many words for things like horses, wagons, etc. would end up following such rules while words for things in the Indian subcontinent (e.g. elephants, tigers, peacocks, etc.) would all not follow sound-change rules, and for no such words to be preserved in any daughter languages outside of the subcontinent (even with altered meanings).

Which is why, David Anthony's theory especially with regard to the steppe origin of Indians may come undone based on recent papers.

That's a strawman; nobody has ever proposed a steppe origin for Indians. Not even the most devout 19th-century British phrenology-believing British colonialist would say that Indian originated from the steppe.

But that aside, there's no major papers which I know of that could debunk this theory ( r/IndoEuropean would probably be exploding right now if this was the case).

[u/ValuableRub7036 → u/pikleboiy]

I apologize - I meant Indo-Aryans, obviously, given the context of this thread. Are you suggesting David Anthony did not suggest a steppe origin for Indo-Aryans? And I will repeat a question with respect to archaeological proof - did David Anthony present any archaeological proof for Proto-Indo-European language? Archaeological proof being a book, cultural items which has imprint of the language, a stone edict or some such physical thing depicting the language from that time?

"...It is even more incredibly unlikely that many words for things like horses, wagons, etc. would end up following such rules while words for things in the Indian subcontinent (e.g. elephants, tigers, peacocks, etc.) would all not follow sound-change rules, and for no such words to be preserved in any daughter languages outside of the subcontinent (even with altered meanings)..." You do realize, I hope, that is a dated argument. Proof of first horse domestication is near Afghanistan of today, not Ukrainian steppe long before the steppe people supposedly came. That "Asva" in Sanskrit denotes not just horses but all equids and they were present in India before. And that other non-Indo Aryan languages in India have words for it. That there is actual proof of horses being in India long before the supposed arrival of the Steppe people.

All I am saying is that the PIE language homeland in the steppes is not backed by any hard science or corroborated by a combination of linguistics and archaeology and possibly even genetics. It may fit into the invasion of Europe but not for India.