Where did proto-IE language start?

[LeBrok]

I think It 's not easy to link a language to genetic based only on actual scarce data. But concerning the PIE origins, the Steppe scenario is already questionable and don't have easy answers to :
1 how does people from inland Steppe with no particular naval knowledge have replaced the langage of Indian experienced sailors, If not how come do we, European and India, have that langage in common

That's your assumption. They as well could have come from part of steppe with Black and Caspian Sea access and some of them were fishermen and sailors.

Also te RigVeda mention a lot of Naval episode it's not at all a Steppe people story, It's completly an Indus valley culture product transmited in Sanskrit an IE language, for example we could find animals like Elephant totaly unknown and meaningless to Steppe people.

Keep in mind that RigVeda was written down first time a thousand years after invasion of IEs. It is understandable that after such long time you will find tons of local influence, editing and improvements. I've never read Rig Veda, but i'm sure you will find many stories involving horses, and battles on horses and chariots. Horse is an animal that wasn't and is still not very popular in India, and chariot in India is very misplaced war machine. Vegetation is so dense in India that chariots were more ceremonial than used in battles. However it is a perfect vehicle to maneuver around open steppe.

 

[Voyager]

Keep in mind that RigVeda was written down first time a thousand years after invasion of IEs.

I am not a specialist of India culture. But RigVeda apparently had been composed around 3500 years ago when the India culture was still flourishing. Do you say that the RigVeda were first composed in an unknown language and then written and translated in a Sanskrit long time after?
Specialists seem to say that it was composed, at the very beginning, in Indo-Aryen language around 1500 BC when India culture was still blooming but I don't know what is their rationale. It should be interesting to look more closely. But if it's correct it is before the supposed arrival of the Steppe people when the India culture was regressing after 1000BC.

Vegetation is so dense in India that chariots were more ceremonial than used in battles. However it is a perfect vehicle to maneuver around open steppe.

There are any kind of landscape in India valley, desert, plains , forests in the North. look at goggle image on Lothal an ancient India harbour 3700BC.

 

[Voyager]

I believe the migration was largely a done thing by 3,000 years ago. Dating the Rigveda to a few centuries before that poses no problem, especially as portions of it describe the conflict between incoming Aryans and the natives.

After the Kurgan theory rationale, the migration must have begun after 1000 BC, before there is no archeological sign of cultural regression. The RigVeda had been composed of course in a favorable period for India culture then before the regression. I am a layman in this domain but apparently, the war described in the Rigveda (Mahabharata) refers traditionaly to a civil war 5000 years ago (after wikipedia), then much before the Steppe people arrival.

To summarize, we should have Steppe people that replaced completly the language of the Indus even the naval terms otherwise there would be absolutly no reason for example to have common terms like Nautic, Naval etc terms deriving from the Sanskrit word Nau for ship, but these Steppe people would have kept the Indian culture tradition, praised Harappan Heros in Vedic texts and adandoned their own Steppe culture. Most of all, do we find Kurgan tombs in India? Is there any archeological evidences of a Steppe invasion in India?

 

[bicicleur 2]

The same way the rest of their language was replaced, I would imagine. It's not like all Indians lost the native terms, just (eventually) the majority.

As for Proto-Indo-European naval knowledge, we know they were familiar with boats, rowing, seas, waves, etc.



I believe the migration was largely a done thing by 3,000 years ago. Dating the Rigveda to a few centuries before that poses no problem, especially as portions of it describe the conflict between incoming Aryans and the natives.



Indo-Europeans weren't strangers to naval battles at that point in history, at least to the west. I don't see why it couldn't be so in the east, especially with the natives having such an advanced naval tradition to build on/co-opt.

As for elephants, what's meaningless on the steppe becomes quite relevant when the people you're fighting have tamed elephants, what?

rig veda aryan migration 1700 BCE after Indus civilization went into decline and 400 years after invention of the war charriot

 

[Athiudisc]

After the Kurgan theory rationale, the migration must have begun after 1000 BC, before there is no archeological sign of cultural regression. The RigVeda had been composed of course in a favorable period for India culture then before the regression. I am a layman in this domain but apparently, the war described in the Rigveda (Mahabharata) refers traditionaly to a civil war 5000 years ago (after wikipedia), then much before the Steppe people arrival.

I'm certainly no expert either, but my reading lines up more closely with bicicleur's dating:

In order to explain the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages, the Indo-Aryan migration theory states that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in the Indian subcontinent from the north-west some time during the early second millennium BCE. Evidence for such a theory includes the close relationship between the Indo-Iranian tongues and the Baltic and Slavic languages, vocabulary exchange with the non-Indo-European Uralic languages, and the nature of the attested Indo-European words for flora and fauna.

The earliest attested Sanskrit texts are religious texts of the Rigveda, from the mid-to-late second millennium BCE.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Historical_usage

Most of all, do we find Kurgan tombs in India?

Not that I've ever heard of.

 

[LeBrok]

I am not a specialist of India culture. But RigVeda apparently had been composed around 3500 years ago when the India culture was still flourishing. Do you say that the RigVeda were first composed in an unknown language and then written and translated in a Sanskrit long time after?
Specialists seem to say that it was composed, at the very beginning, in Indo-Aryen language around 1500 BC when India culture was still blooming but I don't know what is their rationale. It should be interesting to look more closely. But if it's correct it is before the supposed arrival of the Steppe people when the India culture was regressing after 1000BC.

I'm saying that Sanskrit was the language of Steppe invaders, who conquered India around 2,000 BC. By 1,000, when it was written down, Sanskrit and IE beliefs are somewhat modified by Indian culture, hens local elements in it, like elephants.

There are any kind of landscape in India valley, desert, plains , forests in the North. look at goggle image on Lothal an ancient India harbour 3700BC.

Please be reasonable, don't compare few fairly flat enclaves in India, possibly suitable for chariots to vast expanse of the central asian steppe totally suitable for chariots and home for millions of horses. Should we mention again that horse is not important to Indian culture, however essential to all the steppe once?

 

[LeBrok]

After the Kurgan theory rationale, the migration must have begun after 1000 BC, before there is no archeological sign of cultural regression. The RigVeda had been composed of course in a favorable period for India culture then before the regression. I am a layman in this domain but apparently, the war described in the Rigveda (Mahabharata) refers traditionaly to a civil war 5000 years ago (after wikipedia), then much before the Steppe people arrival.

To summarize, we should have Steppe people that replaced completly the language of the Indus even the naval terms otherwise there would be absolutly no reason for example to have common terms like Nautic, Naval etc terms deriving from the Sanskrit word Nau for ship, but these Steppe people would have kept the Indian culture tradition, praised Harappan Heros in Vedic texts and adandoned their own Steppe culture. Most of all, do we find Kurgan tombs in India? Is there any archeological evidences of a Steppe invasion in India?

Pre-Scythian-Saka-Sibirian kurgans (Bronze Age)[edit]

In the Bronze Age, kurgans were built with stone reinforcements. Some of them are believed to be Scythian burials with built-up soil, and embankments reinforced with stone (Olhovsky, 1991).
Pre-Scythian-Saka-Sibirian kurgans were surface kurgans. Underground wooden or stone tombs were constructed on the surface or underground and then covered with a kurgan. The kurgans of Bronze culture across Europe and Asia were similar to housing; the methods of house construction were applied to the construction of the tombs.^[9] Kurgan Ak-su - Aüly (12th–11th centuries BC) with a tomb covered by a pyramidal timber roof under a kurgan has space surrounded by double walls serving as a bypass corridor. This design has analogies with Begazy, Sanguyr, Begasar, and Dandybay kurgans.^[9] These building traditions survived into the early Middle Ages, to the 8th-10th centuries AD.
The Bronze Pre-Scythian-Saka-Sibirian culture developed in close similarity with the cultures of Yenisei, Altai, Kazakhstan, southern, and southeast Amur regions. In the 2nd millennium BC appeared so-called "kurgans-maidans". On a prepared platform were installed earthen images of a swan, a turtle, a snake, or other image, with and without burials. Similar structures have been found in Ukraine, India and South America.^{[citation needed]}
Some kurgans had facing or tiling. One tomb in Ukraine has 29 large limestone slabs set on end in a circle underground. They were decorated with carved geometrical ornamentation of rhombuses, triangles, crosses, and on one slab, figures of people. Another example has an earthen kurgan under a wooden cone of thick logs topped by an ornamented cornice up to 2 m in height.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan
I don't have time to check the links, but supposedly kurgans were found in India.

Can you check all the Indian naval vocabulary? I bet there will be some words remaining from previous Indian civilisation. Pay attention that not all the original language was replaced in India, half of population still speak Dravidian.

We had an extensive discussion about this subject here:
http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads/29705-Corded-Ware-Iranic-Aryan-split-of-IE

 

[Taranis]

I wonder if Indo-European language might come directly from Indus valley civilisation after all. Concerning Genetic hints , there are some basal R1b testers from Pakistan & India. May be Steppes people came to Indus Valley but I doubt they brought IE language with them.

If you look at the relationship of the Indic languages inside the Indo-European languages, the out-of-India scenario makes absolutely no sense. The general agreement (it would be worthwhile that both Kurgan and Anatolian schools are in agreement here) is that the Anatolian language family diverged first from the Indo-European languages. The other branches of Indo-European split up later. Inside Indo-European, the Indic languages are most closely related with the Iranian languages (e.g. Persian, Kurdish, Pashtoo and Ossetian) and with the Nuristani languages, and they share a number of commonalities there. Beyond that, and this is significant, you have a common innovation (Satemization) that is shared - even if it was an areal feature (which it probably was, in my opinion), which puts the Indo-Iranic languages closer with Armenian, Balto-Slavic and some of the "Paleo-Balkan" languages.

The majority of Indo-European branches is located in Europe (Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Italic, as well as the Paleo-Balkan languages of which one was the ancestor of Albanian). That should give you some pause.

We have a recent example: Steppe People were like the Barbarians invading the Roman Gaul by land crossing the Rhine in 406, and we all notice that French language kept mainly a Roman language with very few words borrowed from the Germans, because Roman Gaul were already in advance over the Invaders. Same thing between Steppes people and Indus Valley Civilsation.
I notice also some inconsistencies. The Kurgan theory predicts a 1000 BC Steppe turnover in Indus Valley, but Sanskrit writtings existed already much before 1000BC then Sanskrit could not derive from the IE brought by supposed Steppe invaders. The Rigveda is an old ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrits texts older than 1000BC. The IE Sanskrit language were already there in Indus valley much before 1000BC and it was not a Dravidian language. Dravidian has nothing to do with the IE language, ship in Sanskrits is prounouced Nau, in Dravidian (Tamoul) it's Kappal with a Ka root.
The Steppe theory looks like leaking from every where.

What writings before 1000 BC are you refering to? I sincerely hope you are not refering to the "Harappan" script, because this is essentially undeciphered and if it is a purely logographic script, essentially undecipherable. Instead of Vedic Sanskrit, you could just as well claim that the Harappan script encodes Dravidian, or, if you want to be genuinely creative, maybe Proto-Algonquian...

If you are refering to the Mitanni, well, bear in mind that although these words came from a language similar to (Vedic) Sanskrit, they are loanwords in Hurrian, a non-Indo-European language that was spoken in the ancient Middle East (eastern Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia). It is also noteworthy there that the Mitanni loanwords in particular include terminology for horses and chariots.

One important issue to consider about Indo-European is the presence of common terminology for wheel and wheeled vehicles (I might want to remind you here that the English word "wheel" is a cognate with the Greek word "kyklos" and the Hindi word "chakra"). The Proto-Indo-Europeans had a common word for 'wheel' (derived in turn from the word for 'to turn', which suggests that this was indeed a new technology invented by the Proto-Indo-Europeans themselves), and the invention of the wheel is an event that can be narrowed down very precisely in archaeology, and for that reason the Out-of-India scenario is absolutely untenable.

 

[bicicleur 2]

I'm certainly no expert either, but my reading lines up more closely with bicicleur's dating:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Historical_usage



Not that I've ever heard of.

this Vedic invasion was the first of many R1a-Z93 invasions into South-Asia.
here is another one 200 BC :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Scythians

I don't know about their burial rituals
Are there any kurgans in India?

 

[Voyager]

I'm certainly no expert either, but my reading lines up more closely with bicicleur's dating:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit#Historical_usage

The date of invasion is not always very clear some time is 1000BC. In this case,It 's around 2000BC and we are talking of Indo-Aryans invasion but the problem is who were these Indo-Aryans? To my understanding the Kurgan theory says that some nomad tribes came from Pontic-Steppe then went through several different cultural stages Sintasha , Andronovo, BMAC, etc... to finaly arrived in North India at the proper time. All these stages are necessary to explain why they lost completly their initial Steppe origins to become adequate Indo-Aryan in India but hopefuly they kept transmitting their IE langage all along from the Steppes.
Isn't it faboulous , let 's take for example the word 'knee' It is "genou" in French pronouced "ja-nu" It is exactly the same word in Sanskrit "जानु" pronounced exactly the same way "ja-nu"! There are more examples. So you have words following two different cultural paths during thousand years one complicated path to India another to Europe independant each other and these words are finaly pronouced the same ways in Europe and in India. I think it's too marvelous.

 

[bicicleur 2]

The date of invasion is not always very clear some time is 1000BC. In this case,It 's around 2000BC and we are talking of Indo-Aryans invasion but the problem is who were these Indo-Aryans? To my understanding the Kurgan theory says that some nomad tribes came from Pontic-Steppe then went through several different cultural stages Sintasha , Andronovo etc... to finaly arrived in North India at the proper time. All these stages are necessary to explain why they lost completly their initial Steppe origins to become adequate Indo-Aryan in India but hopefuly they kept transmitting their IE langage all along from the Steppes.
Isn't it faboulous , let 's take for example the word 'knee' It is "genou" in French pronouced "ja-nu" It is exactly the same word in Sanskrit "जानु" pronounced exactly the same way "ja-nu"! There are more examples. So you have words following two different cultural paths during thousand years one complicated path to India another to Europe independant each other and these words are finaly pronouced the same ways in Europe and in India. I think it's too marvelous.

French and Indian .. the split must have been >5000 years ago ..

 

[Voyager]

What writings before 1000 BC are you refering to? .

In fact I was referring to the RigVeda. Of course we have no written doc of that age in hand but at least some expert says that the text was composed, I suppose in written maner, before 1000BC, apparently they didn't use clay tablet like the Sumerians. I am a layman on this subject I rely on expert.

 

[Taranis]

In fact I was referring to the RigVeda. Of course we have no written doc of that age in hand but at least some expert says that the text was composed, I suppose in written maner, before 1000BC, apparently they didn't use clay tablet like the Sumerians. I am a layman on this subject I rely on expert.

I find it more plausible to assume that the Rigveda was transmitted orally, simply because the Harappan script became extinct without any descendant scripts (in that way, you have a similarity to Linear B - even if we do not know what language was encoded by the script, or even what type of script it actually was). The oldest writing systems actually used to write down Indic languages is the Old Brahmi script (from which the great variety of scripts used today in India and Southeast Asia derive), which itself was derived from the Aramaic alphabet (though in my opinion, an additional input from the Old Persian script is also somewhat plausible). The Aramaic script (and language) itself was disseminated further east through the (first) Persian Empire.

 

[Voyager]

Looking for some interesting hints on possible routes of IE words, I found examples like "Cucumber", "Cucumis" in Latin cognate to "कर्कटी "‎(kakaṛī) in Sanskrit. The Causasian-Steppe origin doesn't seem obvious in this case? This vegetable doesn't grow in the Steppe but originated from India , it was already cultivated there 3000 years ago, known to the Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Jews. In this case this IE word comes directly from South Asia.

 

[bicicleur 2]

Looking for some interesting hints on a possible route of IE words, I found examples like "Cucumber", "Cucumis" in Latin cognate to "कर्कटी "‎(kakaṛī) in Sanskrit. The Causasian-Steppe origin doesn't seem obvious in this case? This vegetable doesn't grow in the Steppe but originated from India , it was already cultivated there 3000 years ago, known to the Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Jews. In this case this IE word comes directly from South Asia.

so I guess there was an Indian word for cucumber 3000 years ago and it was taken over in the Latin world

 

[LeBrok]

Looking for some interesting hints on possible routes of IE words, I found examples like "Cucumber", "Cucumis" in Latin cognate to "कर्कटी "‎(kakaṛī) in Sanskrit. The Causasian-Steppe origin doesn't seem obvious in this case? This vegetable doesn't grow in the Steppe but originated from India , it was already cultivated there 3000 years ago, known to the Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Jews. In this case this IE word comes directly from South Asia.

So you find that cucumber possibly doesn't fit Steppe Hypothesis. How about horse domestication and expansion with Stepp People? How about archeology of the steppe? How about wheel vocabulary Taranis mentioned. How about DNA movement? You are so hung up on the smallest things that you missing the big picture.

Cucumber seeds could have been easily transported to Europe by traders from India during or before Roman Empire. They also brought the name for it. That's it.

 

[Taranis]

Looking for some interesting hints on possible routes of IE words, I found examples like "Cucumber", "Cucumis" in Latin cognate to "कर्कटी "‎(kakaṛī) in Sanskrit. The Causasian-Steppe origin doesn't seem obvious in this case? This vegetable doesn't grow in the Steppe but originated from India , it was already cultivated there 3000 years ago, known to the Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks and the Jews. In this case this IE word comes directly from South Asia.

In linguistics, there is a concept called "wanderwort" (German for 'wandering word'), which refers to a word that was almost certainly borrowed, but its ultimate origin is sometimes opaque. The word for 'wine' (borrowed from Latin in all language families of northern Europe - i.e. Insular Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Uralic) is a very good example, even if we know the origin (the Roman Empire) there. The word for 'cucumber' in my opinion is also one such word.

Also, another major point against the Out-of-India hypothesis: Sanskrit has a number of words in it that seem to have been borrowed from Munda (or, a language related to the Munda languages - that language family also the most likely candidate for the "Harappan" language, in my opinion) as well as some vocabulary also borrowed (or shared with) the Dravidian languages (the other major language family of India). If PIE was spoken in India, as you assert, shouldn't all the daughter branches of IE have Dravidian and Munda loanwords in them?

 

[Garrick]

In fact I was referring to the RigVeda. Of course we have no written doc of that age in hand but at least some expert says that the text was composed, I suppose in written maner, before 1000BC, apparently they didn't use clay tablet like the Sumerians. I am a layman on this subject I rely on expert.

Of course there are more hypotheses. Main hypotheses are Kurgan and Anatolian. I more prefer Anatolian hypothesis, but it can be link between both hypotheses, they do not absolutely exclude one another. Even Armenian hypothesis can have make sense. Even Paleolithic Continuity is interesting, although with much less probability and probably it is good for better understanding this very complex matter.

If I understand you speak about Indigenous Aryan hypothesis (please correct me if I'm wrong). Where the records of this hypothesis is based? Kurgan and Anatolian hypotheses are founded on scientific evidence.

 

[Voyager]

In linguistics, there is a concept called "wanderwort" (German for 'wandering word'), which refers to a word that was almost certainly borrowed, but its ultimate origin is sometimes opaque. The word for 'wine' (borrowed from Latin in all language families of northern Europe - i.e. Insular Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic and Uralic) is a very good example, even if we know the origin (the Roman Empire) there. The word for 'cucumber' in my opinion is also one such word.

Also, another major point against the Out-of-India hypothesis: Sanskrit has a number of words in it that seem to have been borrowed from Munda (or, a language related to the Munda languages - that language family also the most likely candidate for the "Harappan" language, in my opinion) as well as some vocabulary also borrowed (or shared with) the Dravidian languages (the other major language family of India). If PIE was spoken in India, as you assert, shouldn't all the daughter branches of IE have Dravidian and Munda loanwords in them?

I don't think I ever asserted that PIE was spoken in India. For the moment , I test the robustness of a theory like PIE from the Steppe. Obviously some words , I don't know how many and I don't know when, came directly from IE spoken people from India but this doesn't prove that PIE were talked in India as you said this could be wandering words.
And certainly the PIE from India theory has failures.
Concerning your question, Why is there any Dravidian loan words in the Western languages? I read that there is only a dozen words of Dravidian origin in the RigVeda, then it 's quite logical that the Dravidian is not visible.
Just a question, may be it's obvious for some of you but how do we presume that Steppe people were talking IE 4000 years ago because, as far as I know, we have no direct IE testimony among them like the Vedic corpus composed in India at least 3500 years ago? I am afraid in such Steppe theory is that we use the aim of the demonstration for proof.

 

[MOESAN]

Isn't it faboulous , let 's take for example the word 'knee' It is "genou" in French pronouced "ja-nu" It is exactly the same word in Sanskrit "जानु" pronounced exactly the same way "ja-nu"! There are more examples. So you have words following two different cultural paths during thousand years one complicated path to India another to Europe independant each other and these words are finaly pronouced the same ways in Europe and in India. I think it's too marvelous.

french oil dialects underwent a late 'satemization' process (interesting to look for underlying reasons) and latin 'word' *genuculum based upon 'genu(s) became *'genouil' (Poitou dialects: 'genoil', 'geneuil' /zhënol'//zhënoy//zhënöl'/) before being simplified into official french 'genou' /zhënoo//zh'noo/; look at verb 'agenouiller'. SO the today similarity in pronounciation is partly an hazard concerninng the end of the two words: the french has a suffix which was phonetically partly erased- latin 'genus' would have given *'gen' not 'genou'. Convergence (palatalization) for the word root, but NOT DIRECT derivation nor loan from indic! I never heard indic dialects knew an evolution /ol/ >> /ow/ >> /oo/ nor /ucul-/ >> -ouil ?