Aryan Invasion/migration Theories & Debates -2

[dhu]

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Yet attempts to construct a highly articulated Indo—European family tree beg one
crucial question: Why are well—established subgroups like Greek and Indo—Iranian
defined by many distinctive innovations, while higher—order groups are defined by
only a few? Even if we can add structure to the Indo—European tree, the subgroups
in (1) are still in some sense the ‘real’ ones, and the intermediate nodes in (2) are
nameless precisely because we do not need to refer to them. This requires an
explanation.

According to Nichols, the explanation has to do with the dispersal of Indo—
European. She argues that<b> ‘[m]ultiple branching at or near the root of a [family]
tree points to abrupt dispersal of the protolanguage in a large spread’ (Nichols
1997b: 371). </b>A ‘spread zone’ is defined as ‘an area of low [linguistic] density where
a single language ... occupies a large range, and where diversity ... is reduced by
language shift and language spreading. A conspicuous spread zone is the
grasslands of central Eurasia, in which ... four different spreads have carried
different language families across the entire steppe and desert as well as into central
Europe and Anatolia’ (Nichols 1997b: 369). In reverse chronological order, these
four spreading families are Mongolian, Turkic, Iranian, and Indo—European.
Nichols’ dynamic approach to linguistic geography is original and creative, and
I have no quarrel with the general model she proposes, nor with the specific claim
that central Eurasia has represented a linguistic spread zone in several cases. For
the Indo—European case, this does conflict with the standard archaeological view of
the so—called ‘homeland’ and the dispersal of the family. The standard view is that
the language corresponding to Proto—Indo—European was spoken somewhere in the
Pontic—Caspian steppe – in other words, just north of the Black Sea and Caspian
Sea.

<b>What Nichols calls the ‘locus’ of Proto—Indo—European was, on the standard
view, not far from the area where Proto—Indo—Iranian later emerged.</b>
For Nichols it is important that Indo—European ‘has the greatest number of
primary branches of any known genetic grouping of comparable age’, since this is
‘the hallmark of <b>a language family that enters a spread zone as an undifferentiated
single language and diversifies while spreading’ </b>(Nichols 1997a: 138).
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