The Credo: Indo-european Linguistics

Husky · (This post was last modified: 04-07-2007, 10:23 AM by Husky.)

This thread is for discussing and collecting information on Indo-European Linguistics, IEL, the root of all IE beliefs.
It's also for discussing the place of Indo-European Linguistics, IEL in the anti-AIT perspective.

(Lots of the stuff - in my posts, leastways - will be a repeat of info from other threads in order to bring them together here.)

IE = Indo-European, also called 'Aryan'. These are terms that western scholarship uses to refer to a bunch of languages showing similarities which are therefore thought to be related. Western scholarship also applies these terms to the people who spoke/speak such languages.
IEL = Indo-European Linguistics, field of study of IE/Aryan languages
PIE = Proto-Indo-European, a hypothetical artificially constructed language thought to be the parent of all Indo-European/Aryan languages.

IEL is the root of all the following beliefs fundamental to the IE worldview:
(1) belief in interconnectedness of languages classified as IE through root-parent language PIE.
Remember that IE Studies does not submit just any connection between the languages, but states that they are connected in a particular manner: through PIE, the wholly hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language.
In other words, IEL states that all IE languages are genetically related through their common ancestral language PIE, making them a 'family' of languages.

(2) One of the implications of (1) is the belief in a bunch of ethnically homogeneous people who invented the PIE and spoke it originally: the Indo-Europeans, also called the Aryans

(3) From (2) follows the belief that these Aryans - thought of as being ethnically homogeneous and all - originally spoke their root language in a single stretch of land: their original homeland ('Urheimat')
It is not known where the Urheimat is. But don't worry. Various Indologists and other scholars of IE Studies regularly go off on flights of fancy to locate it in different locales in 'Eurasia' depending on their whims.

(4) One of the implications of (1), (2) and (3) is that presence of Samskritam in India - an IE language according to IEL - is to be explained by the hypothetical Indo-Europeans leaving their hypothetical Urheimat at some point and invading India (like they are also thought to have invaded Iran and other places where other 'IE' languages are found)

(In reality, the order was different: Samskritam 'discovered' by west -> similarity with Latin and Greek and other European languages -> 'IEL language family' -> India must have been invaded because Europe c/shouldn't have been: AIT -> Oryans did it -> definition of Oryans -> Oryans must have had a homeland <- AIT)

(5) Another implication of (1)-(3) is that the Oryans, being ethnically homogeneous, living together in a particular region and speaking the same PIE (thus all of them comprehending each other) must have had a single religious and mythological background
This is then the IE mythos/religio that indological scholars see everywhere in the religions and puranas of various 'IE' countries.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-22-2007, 07:31 AM by Husky.)

Hindus have long been uncertain of or even argued against the AIT (e.g. even from the time of Vivekananda and Aurobindo), but it's not been very long since people actually started questioning the IEL itself.

And yes, numerous scholars in IE Studies themselves have variously questioned:
(a) IEL: are all the languages that are considered Indo-European languages actually derived from PIE? Are they all related in the same way - that is, are they all genuinely IE languages?
(b) PIE: do the IE languages need to have descended from a common ancestor in order for them to show the similarities they have? Or are there other ways in which this could have been accomplished?
(c ) The Indo-Europeans/Aryans: is it necessary for there to have ever been a single ethnic group of people even if there had been a PIE? That is, single common language need not imply a single people who spoke it
(d) IE Urheimat and Mythos and IE 'culture': when such things as IEL, PIE and Indo-Europeans are not a given, how in the world could the IE homeland, religion and culture/society be?

I will repost relevant material on the above and examples for each (taken from other threads) in later posts.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-21-2007, 08:13 PM by Husky.)

Some of the different views in the anti-AIT camp seem to be:
(a) OIT (Out of India theory), but taking IE as a given.
Here, people believe IE languages, PIE and Indo-Europeans are all facts (rather than assertions) but argue that they originated in India, meaning that the Urheimat is set in India.

(b) Others think AIT is highly unlikely/certainly didn't happen, but also treat IE as a given, though they admit the origin of the PIE language and the manner of distribution of IE languages is still a mystery.

(c ) Others question the interconnectedness or organisation of the Indo-European language family itself. (Of course, it naturally follows that there can be no AIT if there can be no Aryans when all the languages classed as IE today need not even be connected via an ancestral language PIE). 'Let's remain skeptical about PIE and even the specifics of IEL'

(d) The other group of people one can identify holds views somewhere in the spectrum between (b) and (c ). Also part of the 'Let's remain skeptical' crowd.
These include some people in IE Studies. Bruce Lincoln, Stefan Arvidsson whom Rajesh_g mentioned in other threads

(c ) and (d) includes the people who question one or more of the points listed in post 2 above.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 04-07-2007, 09:59 AM by Husky.)

(Interlude to inject personal opinion.)

My own views on post 3 above:
I think the fact that there are different views on the matter of IEL is a good thing even within the anti-AIT camp, because:
(1) It breeds good discussion and further interest and investigation to find out the facts. Discussion might even lead to formulating new theories that better explain hard data;

(2) Having only one stance on the anti-AIT issue means that the opposition thinks they just need to thrash that one in order to feel they've scored a permanent victory,

(3) Whereas having many well-supported anti-AIT POVs will show Indians what a diverse set of equally likely alternative possibilities there actually are, which stand against the limited my-way-or-highway thinking of AIT.
So it's no longer reduced to an 'either-OIT-or-AIT' issue like the psecularists like to present it as, but will make people think: 'I didn't know there were so many alternative explanations'

(4) Being closed-minded to equally reasonable options never leads to truth. And we don't want to be like the indologicals of the IE Research group and deny the different viewpoints (expressed in post 3).

Personally, I don't buy the 'But of course, IE languages are a fact!' argument. For me the whole issue of both AIT and IEL is best left as dead - option (c ) of post 3, and I think those who are of a similar opinion need to be vocal about viewing it as dead. This might then perhaps even shock a few other Hindus/others into rethinking the entire matter for themselves.

Short-short summary of my take on IEL: shady characters with shady motives came up with AIT and its subsequent parent IE theory, and seriously shady characters still prop it up. And even without them, there's enough data to question it altogether. Conclusion: it's so dubious, let's leave it as that until and if ever we find out more hard evidence.

But no further clinching data either way is forthcoming or will be. As it is, much data can be construed as supporting IE family tree, but that's the nature of certain kinds of myth. Jeebus myth works in the same way. Hard to disprove the existence of a historically-silent jeebus/oryans. No trace of either. Burden of proof should be on IE/indological side, but clever them, they've made it the other way around.

And only in the linguistic field do they continue to come up with new 'proof' of Ze Oryans and Zeir Languages. But linguistic 'innovations' don't constitute new evidence (or any kind of evidence at all), of course. The kind of progress IE studies makes: linguists having walked face-in into a wall are still doing walking motions.

Bodhi · (This post was last modified: 03-22-2007, 02:18 AM by Bodhi.)

QUOTE(Husky @ Mar 21 2007, 10:32 AM)Hindus have long been uncertain of or even argued against the AIT (e.g. even from the time of Vivekananda and Aurobindo)
[right][snapback]65940[/snapback][/right]


Husky, challenge to the AIT fancies had started even before Vivekananda or Aurobindo. Credit goes, several decades before them, to Madame HP Blavatsky and her Theosophical Soceity, who were probably the first to openly challenge these theories.

Also Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati in 1860s (before Vivekananda) challenged such 'explanations' to the origin of Sanskritam. Although at some point in time, he did seem to harbour the opinion that 'Aryans' were a people, who did inhabitate India as their first home of choice.

03-22-2007, 06:12 AM

QUOTE Husky, challenge to the AIT fancies had started even before Vivekananda or Aurobindo.Â Credit goes, several decades before them, to Madame HP Blavatsky and her Theosophical Soceity, who were probably the first to openly challenge these theories.Â

Also Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati in 1860s (before Vivekananda) challenged such 'explanations' to the origin of Sanskritam.Â Although at some point in time, he did seem to harbour the opinion that 'Aryans' were a people, who did inhabitate India as their first home of choice. [right][snapback]65946[/snapback][/right]


I will follow-up on these superb leads. I will argue that IEL is NOT necessary for studying bharatiya languages, their formation and evolution. kalyan

To study language, choose bhaashya, reject IEL

http://docs.google.com/View?docID=ajhwbk..._620hs8zfc This monograph makes a plea for reclaiming bhaashya, study of bharatiya languages rejecting Indo-European Linguistics (IEL) which is a belief system. Arguments advanced by Koerner (see excerpts below) add urgency to this plea. Study of language in IEL was driven by ideology. As Koerner notes: " Marx, in The German Ideology written during 1845-1846, followed up on Napoleon's negative slant and used the term to refer to a false consciousness that is contradicted by the reality found in everyday material life. `Ideology' has since been much more a term of abuse than a well-defined concept of scholarly discourse. " Ideology is, simply, a cop-out, while hypocritically trying to provide a veneer of integrity in an essentially non-falsifiable discipline called IEL. Ideology meant rejection of reality. Bhaashya underscores reality. Patanjali notes that to study language, one does not go to a grammarian. We may add that one should go to a child who develops the language competence and establishes language as a social contract. We need to re-define study of language as bhaasha pariccheda (a treatise on nyaaya), in an objective pursuit to delineate contours of general semantics, recognition of meaning in children's words pouring forth as language to communicate in society and to advance knowledge systems for abhyudayam and nihs'reyas.

Thanks to Mayuresh Kelkar for the following URL.

kalyan

Linguistics and ideology in the study of language

by EFK Koerner (2001)

Excerpts:

â¦my paper deals with the discipline, the profession of linguistics, not language uses and linguistic discourses of any kind, if `linguistic' is interpreted in the sense of German sprachlich (French langagier), i.e., "pertaining to language", not sprachwissenschaftlich (French linguistique)â¦ The present paper deals with only three areas of long-standing scholarly research, namely, 1) `mother tongue' studies, 2) linguistic typology, and, in particular, 3) the search for the original Indo-European homeland in order to illustrate that these subjects were hardly ever argued without an ideological subtextâ¦ Mother-tongue ideologies in linguistics Christopher Hutton, in his very recent Linguistics and the Third Reich (Hutton 1998) has focused his attention on the idea of `mother tongue' in fact he speaks of `mother-tongue fascism' in German linguistics and how this emotionally charged concept, advocated by seemingly respectable representatives in the field of Germanistik could find themselves supporting the agenda of an anti-Semitic and xenophobic regimeâ¦

Language classification and typology â¦ Interestingly, embedded in the first 19th-century proposals of linguistic typology we find an implicit ideological underpinning. I may begin by referring to Friedrich Schlegel's (17721829) scheme distinguishing between so-called `inflectional' languages, i.e., the Indo-European languages, and those that have no inflection and are therefore called `isolating' (as Chinese has usually been thought of) or use a morphological technique which puts strings of forms to gether, but does not allow for a modification of the root, i.e., the so-called `agglutinating' languages (as American Indian languages are supposed to be like). This is found in nuce in Schlegel's 1808 Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, including the suggestion, albeit not explicit, of a ranking of the `inflectional' languages as farther developed and, hence, superior to all others. We may say, when looking at later developments in the field: first the languages are the target, then their respective speakers. Friedrich Schlegel's elder brother August Wilhelm (17671845) added the `synthetic'/`analytic' distinction in 1818, and we can find similar typological arguments in Wilhelm von Humboldt (17671835), in whose view the highest achievement of the human mind was that of the speakers of Ancient Greekâ¦The connection between language and the people who speak it has always been there, of course; it just needed to be argued that some languages and hence their speakers were more `primitive' than others. For instance, Franz Bopp (17911867), the supposed `founder' of comparative Indo-European linguistics, who, unlike his former student Au gust Friedrich Pott (18021887) and later August Schleicher (18211868), argued against the use of the term Indogermanisch (Indo-Germanic) and in favour of `Indo-European' as a more universal and, I suppose, `neutral' term, could be shown to have made connections, if not a direct identification, between language structure and the cultural state of its speakersâ¦Contrary to what Humboldt had argued for, namely, that the Melanesian lan guages constituted a language family unto themselves, and not at all related to Indo-European, Bopp maintained, ap parently being misled by the huge mass of loanwords found in these languages which could be traced back to Sanskrit, that they were indeed Indo-European. However, since the Melanesian languages showed, unlike Sanskrit, next to no inflec tion, Bopp remarked that their speakers had shed them as they had shed their clothes! (Bopp 1840b; cf. Buschmann's 1842 reply). In other words, in what started out as a strictly linguistic analysis, a parallel was drawn between the people on these tropical islands and the structure of their language (cf. Mueller-Vollmer 1993, for a detailed account of this sordid story). Similar, totally unqualified remarks could be found elsewhere in 19th-century linguistic scholarship. They were not systematic arguments, but they could be picked up by people with an antenna for them. For instance, in Schleicher's (18211868) Die Sprachen Europas, which contains important typological observations about languages throughout the world, not only Europe, we could also find the author passing a value judgment on English and by extension the English for their `debased' (herabgesunken) language (Schleicher 1850:231; cf. Koerner 1995b:156-158)â¦

The search for the original Indo-European homeland â¦ here again the focus in Mallory's (1976[1973]) overview has been on the various theories, linguistic, archaeological or other ( e.g., historical, cultural, religious) advanced since the 18th century, mostly deriving from linguistic endeavours, with extralinguistic considerations becoming more evident during the second half of the 19th century. Although it is obvious from his own account that a considerable number of authors had ideological, including at times religious and maybe even political, agenda, Mallory does not raise the issue of ideology, quite in line with traditional scholarly discourse in which this aspect of scientific endeavour has been regularly ignoredâ¦Both linguists and archaeologists have been obsessed with the desire to pinpoint the location of the homeland of the Indo-Europeans since the beginning of our studies, and their search has unfortunately not always been devoid of political motivation: the Germany of the 1930's and 1940's was locating it within the frontiers of the Great Reich; after Stalin's discovery of "real" linguistics [in 1950], [], some Soviet linguists placed it in the Slavic territory when dealing with the prehistory of the Russian language; []. (PolomÃ© 1995:281). .. Sir William Jones, in 1792, still adhered largely to traditional biblical scholarship, which set the date of the Flood as about 2,350 B.C.; his suggestion for the Urheimat was today's Iran (Persia). By the 19th century the idea of Hebrew as the lingua Adamica had been abandoned, and Babel was no longer used as an explanation for the varieties of languages in the world, though some of these ideas lingered on among members of the educated public. For the first generation of comparative-historical linguists, the general idea was that it must have been in Asia, not Europe. For Friedrich Schlegel (1808) it was clear that the original home of the Indo-Europeans must have been India, and Bopp followed him on this and many other ideas advanced by Schlegel. For Rask (1818) it was Asia Minor . The concept of ex oriente lux held sway for them and others at the time. By the mid-19th century, the situation began to change. For instance, while Schleicher (1850) proposed the Caspian Sea area as a possible location of the original seat of the Indo-European peoples, the British not German scholar Robert Gordon Latham (18121888) argued in favour of Lithuania rather than the Indo-Iranian area (Latham 1851). And from about that time onwards we can see the number of possible homelands proposed, not always by linguists but also by archaeologists, cultural historians, and amateur writers, beginning to multiply: from Anatolia to the Balkans, from the southern Russian steppes to northern Europe, to central Europe, and eventually to Germany. The arguments in favour of a particular location were manifold, and varied according to the authors' expertise, personal interests or beliefs and, maybe, prejudices. They could be based on matters of climate, geography, history, archaeology, myth, religion, and of course lan guage. More often than not, people seem to have picked a `pet' location first, and then engaged in selecting their `evidence' from any field in support of their `theory'. Adolphe Pictet's (17991875) introduction of `palÃ©ontologie linguistique' into the discussion in 1859 added a few more arguments to the debate, not all of them beneficial to the subsequent history of the subject. Pictet made an effort to re construct, on the basis of what could be regarded as the common vocabulary of Indo-European before the separation of the language into different subfamilies, indications of the shared experience, the flora and fauna, of these peoples, whose homeland he placed in India and Persia. Pictet used the term `Aryan' originally a linguistic term which the Indo-Iranians had applied to themselves (even though it is correct to say that it was meant by the Indo-Iranians to distinguish them selves from other ethnic groups) to also characterize these people as representing a superior race. (Cf. Trautmann (1997) on how British orientalism reveals the mutual reinforcement of linguistics and race theory from Sir William Jones' Ninth Anniversary Discourse (1792) onward throughout the entire 19th century and beyond, just to dispel the idea that `Aryanism' was a typically continental European idea.)â¦ So when Edgar GlÃ¤sser publishes an EinfÃ¼hrung in die rassenkundliche Sprachforschung in 1939, much what can be found in there, including the chauvinism, follows much of long-standing scholarship. As Hutton (1998:48) puts it, "GlÃ¤sser has served as a convenient `fall-guy' in various accounts of Nazi linguistics, but his `racial' linguistics was no more or less chauvinist than the `mother-tongue' linguistics of Kloss and Weisgerber." To return to the 19th century for a moment, racialist and what we now would call `white supremacist' views can be traced without any trouble in many scholarly writings, and to dispel the impression that it was largely a German affair, I could refer to books by American authors where we find such ideas expressed, one book entitled Lectures on the Arya (Pike 1873), another The Aryan Race: Its origin and achievements (Morris 1888), the latter affirming "all the savage tribes of the earth belong to the Negro or Mongolian race [], the Caucasian is pre-eminently the man of civilization" ( pp.23-24), and that it were these Caucasians who had "perfected the Aryan method of language" (p. 51). (Let us remember, however, that `Aryan' was widely used in lieu of `Indo-European' in the Anglo-Saxon world, at least until the early 20th century, and certainly not always with `supremacist' undertones.)

As we know, head shapes, skin pigmentation, hair colour and type (curley, straight, etc.) were taken as particular features to classify races or as we might prefer to call them today ethnic type, and we remember from Nazi progaganda that the so-called Nordic race was blond and supposedly exhibited an elongated head form (though it was only one of the race types admitted by the Nazis to the `Aryan' fold. (In fact there were altogether six recognized categories nordisch, westisch, ostisch, dinarisch , ostbaltisch anf fÃ¤lisch (Hutton 1998:323n.2) how else could Hitler, Goering, or Goebbels themselves have satisfied the `nordic' characteristics of blondness, trimness, or able-bodiness unless all sorts of allowances were made in Nazi discourse?)â¦

Post-World War II theories of the Indo-European homeland â¦ In her 1994 M.A. thesis, Katrin S. Krell has taken the time and effort to compare a series of lexical items reconstructed in Gamkrelidze & Ivanov (1994[1984]) and cited in other publications of theirs with the various available etymological dictionaries of Proto-Indo-European reconstructions and/or available cognates (Buck 1949, Pokorny 1959, Mann 1984, Watkins 1992), and found that there are simply no such lexemes to support, for instance, the following affirmation made by these scholars: Some of these animals [ i.e., `panther', `lion', `elephant', `crab', `monkey'] are specific to the southern geographic region, which rules out central Europe as a possible territory of habitation of the Indo-Europan tribes []. (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 1985a:11; Krell 1994:41-42). Likewise, reconstruction such as *Hwei- "bird", *kher- "crow, raven", *theth(e)r- "black grouse", and several other reconstructions by Gamkrelidze & Ivanov are not paralleled by any of the four above-cited authorities (Krell 1994:42). As the authors make an all-out effort to support their argument that early Indo-Europeans were agriculturalists, not (as Gimbutas and others would have it) essentially pastoralists with animal raising as their major food supply, they offer an array of reconstructions such as the following: *solkhu- "furrow", *serph- "sickle", *(e)s-en- "time of harvest", and *k'orau- "millstone", none of which are supported by Buck and the other scholars. By contrast, while there are indeed terms for `to plow' and `to sow' in the Indo-European lexicon in these dictionaries which would suggest that the Indo-Europeans had some familiarity with agricultural practice, there seem to be common words for `pasture (noun and verb)', `wool', and others not mentioned by Gamkrelidze & Ivanov, which are well attested in Pokorny (1959), Mann (1984), and Watkins (1992) such as those meaning such things as "to break in a horse", "to ride", and "to milk" (Krell 1994:45). Given these few examples, it would be rather difficult to decide, on palaeonotological grounds, in favour of the claim that our Indo-European ancestors were indeed agriculturalists, as the archaeologist Renfrew (1987) has argued on different grounds, but which Gamkrelidze (1990) supported enthusiastically, although their relative chronologies are some two thousand years apartâ¦

Desiderata in the linguistic historiography of past centuries Recent publications in other fields such as archaeology ( e.g., Arnold & Hassmann 1995) and folklore (e.g., Dow & Lixfeld 1994) have suggested it to me that the field of linguistics likewise was in need of similar kind of soul searchingâ¦In fact, Hutton's Linguistics and the Third Reich (1998) investigates by no means solely those horrendous twelve years of German history, but goes back well into the mid-19th century and even as far back as Sir William Jones' famous `philologer' passage of 1786 in an attempt to explain what is generally and erroneously taken as an aberration in linguistics (and other disciplines) during the 19331945 period in Germany where indeed we have to do with a complex of ideas and theories with a long scholarly tradition. Hutton's work brought home to me the urgency and heightened recognition that much more careful, detailed, and honest research needs to be undertaken in order to come to grips with what really happened in linguistics during the Nazi period and to what extent, apart from the particular external, political conditions which produced a certain number of careerists and a few charlatans, linguistics was indeed conducted along lines different from what had been done beforeâ¦

In other words, lest linguistic historiography be regarded as an exercise which takes `the high road' and chooses to leave difficult issues out of its (often `triumphalist') narrative, the field must learn to accept that linguistics, past and present, has never been `value free', but has often been subject to a variety of external influences and opinions, not all of them beneficial to either the discipline itself or the society that sustains it. In the final analysis, it comes to a matter of prise de conscience and of intellectual honesty and responsibility that linguists must become aware of the possible uses and abuses to which their research posture and their findings have been and could be put. Let us not be misled: the `generative paradigm' of so-called `modern linguistics' associated with the name of Noam Chomsky, both in its theoretical claims ( e.g., `universal grammar') and its research practice is far from being devoid of ideological content. To demonstrate this, however, would amount to another research project.

http://www.tulane.edu/~howard/LangIdeo/K...erner.html

See: Koerner, E.F.K . 2001. "Linguistics and Ideology in 19th and 20th Century Studies of Language". In Language and Ideology , Dirven, RenÃ©, Bruce Hawkins and Esra Sandikcioglu (eds.), 253â276

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-22-2007, 12:47 PM by Husky.)

QUOTE(Bodhi @ Mar 21 2007, 09:14 PM)Husky, challenge to the AIT fancies had started even before Vivekananda or Aurobindo.Â Credit goes, several decades before them, to Madame HP Blavatsky and her Theosophical Soceity, who were probably the first to openly challenge these theories.Â

Also Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati in 1860s (before Vivekananda) challenged such 'explanations' to the origin of Sanskritam.Â Although at some point in time, he did seem to harbour the opinion that 'Aryans' were a people, who did inhabitate India as their first home of choice.[right][snapback]65946[/snapback][/right]Thanks Bodhi.
I merely mentioned as examples the only two people whose statements of disbelief in AIT I had personally read. It's good to add Maharshi Dayanand Saraswati to that list.

Also, isn't Annie Besant the founder of the Theosophical Society? I now remember having read of her writings distrusting the AIT.

But of Madame Blavatsky I've only heard as being a dubious character. See here, from paper mentioned elsewhere in IF by Rajesh_G:
http://www.tobiashubinette.se/asianists.pdf
QUOTEMoreover, the American Sanskritist Revilo Pendleton Oliver was a racialist and anti-Communist, and a modern example of a scholarly proponent of âAryan Buddhismâ following VÃ¶lkisch and occult Racialists and Nazis like Madame Blavatsky and Savitri Devi is the Danish Indologist Christian Lindtner who is symptomatically also deeply engaged in the murky Holocaust denial business.39So Blavatsky was a racialist? (It is known that the Greek woman who dubbed herself 'Savitri Devi' was both a racist and nazi-sympathiser.)

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-22-2007, 07:30 AM by Husky.)

QUOTE(Husky @ Mar 21 2007, 08:02 PM)And yes, numerous scholars in IE Studies themselves have variously questioned:
(a) IEL: are all the languages that are considered Indo-European languages actually derived from PIE? Are they all related in the same way - that is, are they all genuinely IE languages?[right][snapback]65940[/snapback][/right]
An example for the above taken from IF article on AIT - footnote 51:
QUOTEIndo-European Pursuits, Scientific paths diverge in the quest for ancient Eurasians, Science News, Vol. 147, No. 8, 1995
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTEIn an ironic twist, Indo-Europeanâs close family ties have triggered an estrangement in the last decade between archaeologists and linguists, the two groups of scientists most involved in answering questions about the origins of modern Eurasians.
Many archaeologists have come to view this linguistic exercise as potentially misleading and, at best, secondary to excavations of ancient human settlements.Archaeologist John Robb of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, for instance
QUOTEargues that prehistoric Indo-European may elude curious linguists forever.
The growth of states and civilizations, which began around 6,000 years ago, probably wiped out the majority of languages that had flourished for the previous few thousand years in farming communities, Robb writes in the December 1993 ANTIQUITY. Linguistic loss was hastened in parts of the Indo-European world by the adoption of languages used in regional trade and the borrowing of words from foreign speakers. These words were eventually woven into entirely new âcreoleâ languages, Robb holds.
Indo-European tongues predominate today by happenstance. They were spoken just outside the range of civilizations expanding out from the Middle East and thus escaped this linguistic onslaught, the Michigan archaeologist says. Moreover, some languages now lumped under the Indo-European rubric may have acquired vocabulary and grammatical resemblances through random changes over time, Robb says.</div>

Husky · (This post was last modified: 04-07-2007, 10:11 AM by Husky.)

QUOTE(Husky @ Mar 21 2007, 08:02 PM)numerous scholars in IE Studies themselves have variously questioned:
(b) PIE: do the IE languages need to have descended from a common ancestor in order for them to show the similarities they have? Or are there other ways in which this could have been accomplished?
(c ) The Indo-Europeans/Aryans: is it necessary for there to have ever been a single ethnic group of people even if there had been a PIE? That is, single common language need not imply a single people who spoke it[right][snapback]65940[/snapback][/right]I've labelled the above (b) and (c ) to paste examples for each from elsewhere at IF.

(b) Example of doubting PIE:
In the following, Bruce Lincoln in Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship talks about the theory of the PIE-family-tree for explaining the similarities between 'IE' languages versus different means of how they could be related. (That is, there's no need to suppose there ever was an ancestral PIE from which IE languages descended. Rather, other equally-likely explanations exist to account for similarities of languages classed as IE.)

'Stammbaum theory' mentioned below is the theory of the family tree rooted in PIE:
QUOTEConceivably, the Stammbaum theory is correct, although its logic involves leaps that are open to question. First, it explains the relation among the Indo-European languages as the result of divergence from a hypothetical protolanguage, or Ursprache. In theory, however, one can also explain this as resulting from processes of convergence, rather than divergence, as N. S. Trubetzkoy argued in a famous article published on the eve of the Second World War. Pace the Stammbaum, Trubetzkoy offered a wave model, in which each group in a string of peoples had its own language and interacted socially and linguistically with its neighbors. [p. 212]

(c ) Example of doubting Indo-European people, even if scholars accepted PIE or at least accepted some connection between various languages classed as IE today:
(Also from Bruce Lincoln's writing - see Rajesh_G's post 87 of Unmasking AIT thread)
QUOTEOther authors have challenged the Stammbaum model on other grounds, observing that even if the historically attested Indo-European languages did descend from a single proto-language, the existence of this ancestral language by no means implies the existence of a single, ethnically homogeneous people who spoke it. Thus Franco Crevatin suggested that Swahiliâan artificial lingua franca, spoken across vast portions of Africa as an instrument to facilitate long distance tradeâmay be a better analogue than Latin for theorizing Proto-Indo-European. His desire, like Trubetzkoy's, seems to be to imagine a more irenic, more diverse past as a means to guard against scholarly narratives that encode racism and bellicosity. In Crevatin's view there was a Proto-Indo-European language and there were people who spoke it for certain finite purposes, but no community of Proto-Indo-Europeans. Similar is Stefan Zimmer's position, intended as a rebuke of racist theories, hypothesizing a protolanguage spoken not by an ethnically pristine Urvolk but by a shifting, nomadic colluvies gentium, a "filthy confluence of peoples,". [pp. 212-213]That is, both Franco Crevatin and Stefan Zimmer are suggesting that the people who spoke PIE were not necessarily a single ethnic human population (the Oryans), meaning that the Indo-Europeans (the people who spoke PIE) might have been people from many ethnicities who spoke a common language, for example as a means to facilitate trade.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 04-07-2007, 10:15 AM by Husky.)

QUOTE(Husky @ Mar 21 2007, 08:02 PM)numerous scholars in IE Studies themselves have variously questioned:
(d) IE Urheimat and Mythos and IE 'culture': when such things as IEL, PIE and Indo-Europeans are not a given, how in the world could the IE homeland, religion and culture/society be?[right][snapback]65940[/snapback][/right]Pasting an example of IE scholar who no longer believes in Indo-European mythological motifs (no longer believes in common mythology/religion of Indo-Europeans).
Bruce Lincoln's particular field is in fact IE mythology. That he now doubts it, says a lot:
Taken from Rajesh_G's post 114 of Unmasking AIT thread - below is IE scholar S. Arvidsson writing about Lincoln in book Aryan Idols:
QUOTEIn the 1990s, Lincoln continued to critically study the history of Indo-European scholarship, which resulted in Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (2000; a work that would have been very important to the ideas in my study had it been published before the Swedish edition). His studies of Indo-European mythology have now made him question the very belief in an objective historiography, and he sees the scientific search for knowledge as a site for political power struggles. The work of cultural studies is, according to Lincoln, "myth plus footnotes". In one of his latest articles, Lincoln has also chosen to modify the classification system of the history of religions. The myths that he earlier studied as "Indo-European" are now presented as "Eurasian" or as "Indo-European" (in quotation marks). With that, the category of religion that saw the light with Oriental Jones' discovery in 1786 is eliminated.

Husky · (This post was last modified: 04-07-2007, 10:17 AM by Husky.)

Post 2:
QUOTE(a) IEL: are all the languages that are considered Indo-European languages actually derived from PIE? Are they all related in the same way - that is, are they all genuinely IE languages?
Another example of the questionmark that people put on IEL. The following was recently posted by Honsol in the Unmasking AIT thread.
(I have yet to read the whole article, so someone please tell me if you find it doesn't belong here)
QUOTE(Honsol @ Mar 20 2007, 08:18 PM)http://www.gandirea.ro/linguistic_history_errors.php

Â There are few philologists that do not realize that linguistics is now in a deadlock. For 200 years now, since William Jones first had an inkling of and made his statements concerning the origin of SanÂ
skrit, Old Greek and Latin from a mother-tongue (1786), many a brilliant mind have tried to reconstruct this extinct source-lanÂ guage starting from its assumed offspring.

All such effort has proved useless: this mother-tongue is as little known now as it was 200 years ago, just as if nobody had ever even attempted to look for it.

1.2Â Â Â Â Â The "Getica" magazine is meant to bring to the public eye obvious facts that have resulted from researches that cannot be denied as far as science goes, demonÂ strating that the intuition of the revered
"Indo-European" scholars in the 18th and 19 th centuries was wholly unreal, that there was no need at all for the "Indo-European" language to be reconstructed. But, such as the Bible puts it: Having eyes see ye not (Mark 8/18).

The "Indo-European" is a logical conÂcept, by no means a language and as-such it has no functional worth, i.e. no com-municational value; it is an assumption, a wish nobody has yet or will ever fulfill by means of the methods linguistics uses for reconstruction.

This is the reason why we find it utterly unfortunate that there are "specialists" who ignore this elementary fact: that "there is no such thing like the "Indo-EuÂropean", that this is only a ghost invented from the need for some certainty, just a name thrown back upon some people and events 4000-5000 years old; the least we can say is that it is not wise to refer to this assumption as to some reality (also ref.to ref. 2 and other papers, both Romanian and foreign).

1.3Â Â Â Â One should not overlook the fact that, given the way it has been treated up to now, linguistics has never been and canÂ not possibly be a science proper, mainly because it has no law of its own, no scienÂtific means and methods that are univocal, generally valid, its matter has random developments and is impossible to order by laws, etc.[right][snapback]65900[/snapback][/right]

Bodhi · (This post was last modified: 03-22-2007, 08:53 AM by Bodhi.)

QUOTE(Husky @ Mar 21 2007, 09:11 PM)Also, isn't Annie Besant the founder of the Theosophical Society? I now remember having read of her writings distrusting the AIT.
[right][snapback]65964[/snapback][/right]


Theosophical Soceity was founded by Henry Steel Olcott - an American based in Sri Lanka, William Quan Judge an Irish from USA, and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky a russian-ukrainian-german living in India in 1875, same year as the founding of Arya Samaj by Maharshi Dayanand. Unlike Bramho Samaj, TS, headquartered in Chennai, had no hesitation in declaring Hindu/Vedic/Bauddha/Tantra roots.

Annie Besant did lead it later, much later, along with C.W. Leadbeater, until it was declared as all over by her wonderful protegee Sri Jiddu Krishnamurthy.

Annie Besant, and her Congress colleague BG Tilak, both had frequently written against AIT and other 'theories' of Indologists. From the platform of Congress both were promoting the Hindu-rooted nationalism, until they were made obsolete by MK Gandhi brand of Congress. On IE, Veda-dating etc, also we should read Orion by Sri Tilak. Download version is available from Google here. Thanks to Ramana and Hauma Hamiddha for finding this.

QUOTE(Husky @ Mar 21 2007, 09:11 PM)But of Madame Blavatsky I've only heard as being a dubious character...So Blavatsky was a racialist?
[right][snapback]65964[/snapback][/right]


Husky, I will read the paper you referred to. Although whatever little I have read of her writings, or known about her, doesn't reflect this. Doubtless, in modern history she was one of the first westerners to came to India to learn rather than to preach. Settled in Prayag, she said India (and Tibet) were her masters etc.

post #7, Kalyanji:
QUOTEI will follow-up on these superb leads.


I had onced chanced upon one of her articles she had published in 1879, which I had posted in AIT thread - Antiquity of Veda.

From the tone, it was very clear that she was engaged in an academic debate with Max Muller. If it were possible to somehow access the archives of 'The Theosophist' journal which she ran, we would have a lot of more information. (Theosophical Soceity still has its ancient office and library in Adyar, Chennai)

03-22-2007, 09:40 AM

I will cite an example of a tadbhava word, malaa in the Rigveda -- to highlight the importance of studying bharatiya languages as bhaashya (and not using the non-falsifiable IEL methods).

This is the Rigveda rica where the word, malaa occurs.

munayo va_taras'ana_h pis'anga_ vasate mala_

va_tasya_nu dhra_ji yanta yad deva_so aviks.ata

RV 10.136.02 The Munis, the sons of Va_taras'ana, wear the yellow (vestments of bark), they follow the course of the wind, when they have assumed the (power of) gods. [ i.e., by the might of their penance they become gods].

malai-ttal "to wear, put on" (Tamil)

ma_lai 1. anything strung together; 2. garland, wreath of flowers; 3. woman's necklace or string of jewels, beads, etc.; 4. a kind of poem; 5. line, row; 6. cord, bond; 7. woman who sings and dances; 8. woman (Tamil)

Thus, in Tamil, malai is attested as a verb, meaning, 'to wear'. In the context of this rica, the word mala_ should correctly be interpreted in context not as dirty or mud but as a a description of the vestments worn: that is, bark strung together like a ma_la_ or garland.

The entire rica should be viewed as a metaphor related to muni wrapped in wind and following the course of the wind. This is further amplified in the next rica. Muni is a celestial, anyone impelled by inner impulse.

The quote of Candrakiirti in Prasannapadaa was brought to my notice: "words are not policemen."

Yes, indeed. Words in bharatiya tradition, tatsama, tadbhava and des'ya, all words in all bharatiya languages are the received treasures which encapsulate the cultural continuum of Hindu civilization.

kalyan

03-22-2007, 10:39 AM

QUOTE(kalyan97 @ Mar 22 2007, 09:40 AM)I will cite an example of a tadbhava word, malaa in the Rigveda -- to highlight the importance of studying bharatiya languages as bhaashya (and not using the non-falsifiable IEL methods).

This is the Rigveda rica where the word, malaa occurs.

munayo va_taras'ana_h pis'anga_ vasate mala_

va_tasya_nu dhra_ji yanta yad deva_so aviks.ata

RV 10.136.02 The Munis, the sons of Va_taras'ana, wear the yellow (vestments of bark), they follow the course of the wind, when they have assumed the (power of) gods. [ i.e., by the might of their penance they become gods].

The su_kta 10.136 is by va_ras'ana munigan.a

The ris.igan.a -- seven of them -- are named:

first rica: ju_ti

Second rica: va_taju_ti (speed of wind)

Third rica: vipraju_ti (excited speed)

Fourth rica: vr.s.a_n.aka (one of S'iva's attendants; vr.s.a_n.a = sprinkling)

Fifth rica: karikrata (accomplishing)

Sixth rica: etas'a (variegated colour, shining, brilliant as Brahman.aspati; see RV 10.53.9)

Seventh rica: r.s.yas'r.nga

Devata_ of the su_kta are: kes'i_ (explained as agni, suryava_yu).

Ju_ti according to Pan. (3-3,97) means: going or driving , on , quickness , velocity , speed; also, impulse, incitement, energy; in AV 19.58 it is interpreted as 'flowing without interruption'. Ju_ti also means prajnaa (Aitareyaupanishad 5.2). Ju_ti is one of the 7 rishi named in the su_kta as the authors of the su_kta.

Now, the entire su_kta can be seen:

10.136.01 The radiant (Sun supports) Agni, the radiant one (supports) water, the radiant one supports the heaven and earth, the radiant one is for the visibility of the whole diffused (universe)-- this light is called the radiant one.
10.136.02 The Munis, the sons of Va_taras'ana, wear the yellow (vestments of bark), they follow the course of the wind, when they have assumed the (power of) gods. [ i.e., by the might of their penance they become gods].
10.136.03 Exhilarated by the sanctity of the Muni we have mounted upon the winds; behold, mortals, (in them) our forms!
10.136.04 The Muni flies through the firmament, illumining all objects, the friend of each deity, appointed for pious works.
10.136.05 The steed of the wind, the friend of Va_yu, the Muni, who is instigated by the deity, repairs to both oceans, the eastern and the western.
10.136.06 Wandering in the track of the Apsarasas and the Gandharvas, and the wild beasts, the radiant (Sun), cognizant of all that is knowable, (is my) sweet and most delightful friend. [Radiant Sun: or, Agni, or Va_yu].
10.136.07 Va_yu churned for him, the inflexible (thunder) ground it when the radiant (Sun), along with Rudra, drank the water with his cup. [With his cup: the cup is the sun's rays, which absorb the moisture of the earth; the agitation of the wind sends this moisture down again as rain; kunan nama_ = that which often guides but cannot be guided, i.e., the ma_dhyamika_ va_k; Rudra = the lightning, vaidyuta_gni].

The su_kta is an extraordinary explanation of the word, muni as a celestial being, who flies in the firmament. The vestment worn is described using the verb: mala_.

In this perspective, I would like the members of this forum thread to enlighten us on how IEL will help us in bhaashya (study of languages).

k

Husky · (This post was last modified: 03-23-2007, 08:27 AM by Husky.)

Post 6 (Kalyan97):
QUOTEhttp://docs.google.com/View?docID=ajhwbkz2nkfv_620hs8zfcThat link, hidden away in post 6, is brilliant. Everyone should read the doc at that link. I find it quite intensive reading, but thoroughly worth it. Besides the information, a new and far more useful paradigm is suggested there.

Pasting some excerpts relating to one of the many informative things from there. It's on how many PIE words have been reconstructed (according to their own rules for PIE):
QUOTEExtremely limited evidence from IEL for historical/cultural studies 
Mayuresh Kelkar noted: {quote} âPhilologist and their subset Indo-European linguists look for similarities in language, culture, artifacts etc to trace their ultimate origins. Out of the hundreds of so called "Indo-European" languages ONLY FOUR words can reliably be reconstructed (Melchert 2001). They are horse, yoke, bovine, and most crucially wool (wheel is conspicuously absent from this list). Two of them bovine and yoke are clearly irrelevant. Horse can be eliminated because:
1. There are five different roots for this word in "Indo-European" langauges. So it is not necessary that the PIE speakers (with the usual caveat assuming they ever existed) even knew about the horse or had anything do with its domestication.
2. When it comes to "Indo-Aryan" speakers, horse is not native to their present location in South Asia. But then the supposedly native inhabitants of that land have there own word for horse. Moreover, horse remains have been found in the region.
3. All archaeological evidence indicates that the initial domesticators of this beast were Uralo-Altaic speaking. That only leave ONE word and that is wool. Sheep did not become wooly till much later than the Neolithic period. This could perhaps put a firm date on PIE dispersal. But the sheep were hairy before they become wooly and thus the proto Indo Hittite word *hwln could have meant fleece which later on came to mean wool. Why debate about horses and wheels when these items cannnot even be linked with the supposed IE expansions? {unquote} http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/IndiaAr...gy/message/4351 
QUOTEMelchert, Craig (2001), âCritical Response to the Last Four Papersâ in Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family, Robert Drews (ed.), Journal of Indo-European Studies Monograph Number 38.

âBasing Grand Conclusions On Extremely Limited Evidence.â

âOf the lexical items discussed by Professor Darden, only horse, yoke, bovine, and most crucially wool (wheel is conspicuously absent from this list) clearly meet both criteria (for the validity of reconstructed PIE vocabulary).Â The word for harness pole is somewhat less secure due to uncertainties about its morphology.Â Hittite hissa matches Sanskrit isa- (the few Hittite spelling with e have no probative value), but their relationship to Avestan aesa and Greek oi** is anything but clear.Â The status of the verb to harness must be regarded as quite uncertain (a *ye/ o-present would be a trivial innovation in both Indic and Anatolian).

The limitations on Professor Dardenâs approach lie in the available data.Â The number of usable vocabulary items from the âsecondary products revolutionâ will be limited in the first place.Â When we then add the two strict but necessary linguistic requirements cited above, we are inevitable going to restrict the usable data set to a very few items.Â We are then likely to be left in the uncomfortable situation of basing grand conclusions on extremely limited evidence (Melchert 2001, p. 235, first two parentheses added).â
QUOTEMelchert provides a devastating blow, surveying the results of cumulative investigations of IEL. Only four semantics have been reliably reconstructed as relatable to indo-european: horse, yoke, bovine, and wool. Unfortunately, the âhorseâÂ word has five different roots and the region of âSouth Asiaâ where horse remains have been found have their own unique words for this beast; sheep became woolly only later than the Neolithic period and the indo-european word identified becomes a late innovation. The word for yoke has morphology uncertainties. This is the sum and substance of the grand-standing contributions made by IEL so far to history and cultural studies. 

Post 12 (Bodhi):
QUOTEI had onced chanced upon one of her (HP Blavatsky) articles she had published in 1879, which I had posted in AIT thread - Antiquity of Veda. ( http://www.india-forum.com/forums/index.ph...indpost&p=57629 )From that post I can't find anything racist about her... Maybe the Oleander paper ( http://www.tobiashubinette.se/asianists.pdf ) just meant to tag her with 'occult' while reserving the 'racialist and nazist' terms to describe Savitri Devi?

QUOTEAnnie Besant did lead it later, much later, along with C.W. Leadbeater, until it was declared as all over by her wonderful protegee Sri Jiddu Krishnamurthy.The first and, for the most part, the only place I came across the Theosophical Society was in the tv series 'Young Indiana Jones'. It had a very good episode on this, depicting not just Annie Besant but also a young Krishnamurthy - who was shown as very endearing and wise.

Post 14 (Kalyan97):
QUOTEI would like the members of this forum thread to enlighten us on how IEL will help us in bhaashya (study of languages).For me, IEL is useless (and most particularly so in the study of Indian languages). So I'm out, I'm afraid.

03-23-2007, 07:18 AM

QUOTE(Husky @ Mar 22 2007, 02:00 PM)Post 6 (Kalyan97):
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTEhttp://docs.google.com/View?docID=ajhwbkz2nkfv_620hs8zfcThat link, hidden away in post 6, is brilliant. Everyone should read the doc at that link. I find it quite intensive reading, but thoroughly worth it. Besides the information, a new and far more useful paradigm is suggested there.</div>

Thanks, Husky ji.

I want to delve further on bhaashya (study of language) and knowledge systems.

The questions raised by Prof. BVK Sastry ji are fundamental. Every Hindu and every student of sanatana dharma has to ponder on these questions and act to revitalise bhaashya (study of bhaashaa).

Formation and evolution of bhaashaa cannot be meaningfully advanced without the foundations and methods provided by Panini or Tolkaappiyan or Yaska. And, of course, the later elaborations of savants such as Patanjali, Bhartrhari, Acharya Hemacandra. We have the ancient texts and an extraordinary tradition exemplified by bhaashaa pariccheda, as an integral part of nyaaya, as a sine qua non for advancement of knowledge systems.

Will the debate started by Sastry ji be joined on bharatiya knowledge systems based on bhaashya?

Namaskaram. Kalyanaraman

Excerpts from BVK Sastry's email of 22 March 2007:

[quote] The good debate should focus on answering the issue and not respond based on who is asking. This calls for a global Hindu / Sanskrit / Vedic debate on the following points, beyond the 'faith'! Would the Panini experts wake up ? Would the Paninian research studies be supported really beyond lip sympathies and 'partial week wise support for a TA?

Would the real resources come up beyond cyber bits and glorified talks of 'great heritage' and 'Vedic antiquity' et al? If Sanskrit is lost for misinterpretation of its grammar-dictionary, will any Veda, Bhashya, Prayer, ritual mantras, Guru traditions, temples - survive the meaning and interpretation that is being offered? If this attack at the root of the tradition through the language gate is not recognized, and remedied properly, by an integration of the voice tradition (Shruti), then there is likely to be a greater danger of loosing the religious traditions and identity. For, corruption in language is a sure sign of the corruption of society! And if the goal is to surrender to a bloodless coup on 'Indian / Vedic / Hindu religious languages- traditions' religions, then tolerate the corruption the languages on the model of tower of Babel, on the same streak that has been there for the last three hundred years! And allow it to be percolated to the cyber space documents of 'Indian / Vedic / Hindu religious languages- traditions' on which the next generation of Hindus especially at US heavily depend upon!

Issues:

(1) Why Sanskrit ? Why Panini and Yaska - are critical for Vedic traditions and Hindus? What has been the consequence on Hindu/Bharatiya/ Brahmin/ Indic religious identities ? Why Panini is the anchor for the religious languages of Buddhism and Jainism?

(2) What is the scripting traditions of the religious languages of Indic origin? (By defocusing the verbiage as 'South Asian religions' there is a deliberate detour and dilution of the debate! It would be most appropriate to keep the title of the debate as 'Indian / Vedic / Hindu religious languages- traditions' rather than geo-centric names. No one studying Abrahamic traditions and religions marks it as a 'land centric-institution centric study!)

(3) What are the limitations on which the 1700-1900 views of 'Indian / Vedic / Hindu religious languages- traditions' has been built and brought forward as 'manuscript evidences' and 'material evidences' to play unevenly against the living oral traditions of 'Indian / Vedic / Hindu religious linguistic origin?' Why these are not being addressed and remedied as a consolidated view point?

Time to review- and act on for whom these jobs are cut out for: Are these the jobs for the temple priests ? Gurus running the meditation ashrams and global meditation resorts? Astrologers? Archaeological teams? DNA scheming genome project experts? Linguists of modern languages? Poorly paid researchers in the oriental libraries being guided by manuscript hunting-publication oriented scholars? OR an institution focused on the Education and Research?

The self review and action on these questions guide what Hinduism is going to be the flavor of the next generation! [unquote]

--- Michael Witzel <witzel@fas.harvard.edu> wrote:

>> Why Panini? This thread has been ongoing for a while > and it useful to
> prepare a summary now. > As we have stressed several times before, Panini's
> (PÄá¹ini's) work, the > Astadhyayi (Aá¹£á¹ÄdhyÄyÄ«), is critical for the > early history of S. Asia > in several respects:
>
> - Panini (PÄá¹ini, c. 500/350 BCE?) marks the end > of the Vedic period
> proper (he quotes some texts), and his correct > dating(*) would be of > signal importance to fix the lower limit of the > earliest S. Asian > texts, the Vedas. (**)
>
> - he obviously was a citizen of Gandhara (NW > Pakistan), > a province of the Persian empire (at minimum, after > 519 BCE); > therefore his work, which mentions the Old > Persian/Iranian word > for script (lipi/libi), is of signal importance for > the history of > writing in S.Asia. (***)
>
> - his text, though quasi-algebraically condensed and > cryptic beyond any > 'direct' way of reading, contains valuable data > for the culture and > geography of the Northwest (which is very little > known from other > Indian texts) and for S. Asia in general. (As > mentioned, Schwartzberg's > Atlas is useless in this regard)
>
> In consequence, we badly need to know when to date > him. He is, in many
> ways, the sheet anchor of early (literary) Indian > history.
>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> That said, we need a solid background on which to > base our studies of
> the Astadhyayi.
>
> This, however, does not exist, even after more than > 150 years of modern
> studies. As should be clear to all readers of this > list by now.
>
> Briefly:
> - we only have Vulgate editions of his text. None of > them is based on a
> critical edition (with stemma). > - worse, the various early testimonies of Panini
> (Mahabhashya, > Varttika, Kashika), too, do not have critical > editions. (****)
>
> As the nature of the Vulgate has been questioned > even by specialists of > Panini, this question must finally be taken up and > solved by studying > available MSS, though nobody seems ready to do so, neither in India nor outside.
>
> The same applies to the Mahabhasya (****) of Patanjali (c. 150 BCE)
> that quotes many, but certainly not all of Panini's rules. As mentioned, Kielhorn's 19th cent. edition is based only on "northern" (Maharastrian etc.) MSS. Southern, Nepalese, Kashmiri, etc. ones have not been used, nor have they been used in later editions. In sum: there is no critical Mbh. edition.
>
> I have bemoaned that already in 1986, and A. Aklujkar has done the same
> in 1993. Nothing has been done about it.
>
> (I leave aside the Aphorisms/Varttikas of Katyayana that precede
> Patanjali as they are embedded in his text. -- Of course, I also leave apart the complex issue of non-Paninean grammatical traditions: Candra, Katantra, Sarasvata, etc.)
>
> The same is true of the Kashika (c. 700 CE), whose text presents the
> first complete external testimony of Panini's Astadhyayi. It does not have a critical edition either.
>
> A. Sharma's 1969-85 Kashika edition makes use of some 8-9 MSS (C. & S.
> Indian), but it is not clear at all how consistently they have been used and quoted in the edition. In the end, we have to go back to the very MSS, which are not accessible easily, if at all, during a short visits to India. (see my msg. of March 7:
>
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Indo-Eurasia...ch/message/6244
> )
>> More or less the same, but in great detail, had already been said by BirwÃ© (who, laudably, has critically edited a largely post-Paninean text, the Ganapatha). His detailed review is in: Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlaendischen Gesellschaft (ZDMG) 123, 1973, 427-441 (which I may not have read then as I was working in
> Nepal those years). See a list of Kashika ed.s on p. 440-1. > The same criticism applies to the *completely> uncritical* editions of> the commentaries on the Kashika such as the Nyasa> (ed. Ramachandrulu,> Hyderabad 1985; not to speak others such as Raghuvir> Vedalankar's,> 1997). Ramachandrulu's book does not record the> variants nor even> indicate the MSS used, --except for very> occasionally mentioning> an/the unidentified 'muulapaaTha' or [an]other> printed edition[s].
> This 'edition' is of MS value only.>
> The Nyasa ed.s thus have just the value of any> traditional (often badly> written) MS. A Panini specialist on this list wrote> to me âtypically,> in private-- that the Nyasa commentary could be used> as a testimony for> the Kashika. This of course means: the blind leading> the dumb and muteâ¦
>
>> In sum, NONE of the Paninean grammar texts can be> relied on. We simply
> do not know where we can and where not.
>
> At best, we can *assume* that a certain text is> supported by later
> (sub)commentaries, but these too are unreliableâ¦
>
> Thus, I have to be direct and frank: what have> Indologists been doing?
> And what are they doing now?
>
> Now, luckily, the Paris-Pune-Roma team is preparing> a new 'critical'> edition of the Kashika, based on ten times more MSS> than Sharma's. But,> I see some dangers lurking there too (see next> message).
>
> Again, Panini specialists, wake up!
>
> Do the basic, preliminary work, instead of relying> on 19th cent.> pioneer editions. Get into the libraries and start> checking out a small> disputed section *across the board.* After> conducting such a pilot> project, expand, if and where necessaryâ¦
>
> If this is not done, Paniniyas must face the fact> (and criticism) that> their conclusions, especially in disputed sections,> can no longer be> taken for granted.
>
> They have merely been discussing the Vulgate with> the help of â¦ the> Vulgate tradition.
>
> (NB: if someone were to say: why don't YOU do it,> the answer is: I have> done my share, several critical editions and MSS> studies of Vedic> texts, and so have my students. And, I will do more> later, based on my> many microfilms, but only in my dotageâ¦)
>
> Now is the time for the Paniniyas to finally wake up> and actâ¦
>
> Cheers,
> MW

03-23-2007, 08:36 AM

QUOTEBy defocusing the verbiage as 'South Asian religions' there is a deliberate detour and dilution of the debate! It would be most appropriate to keep the title of the debate as 'Indian / Vedic / Hindu religious languages- traditions' rather than geo-centric names. No one studying Abrahamic traditions and religions marks it as a 'land centric-institution centric study!


Kalyanji, thanks for the refreshing informaion, but then BVK Sastryji expects too much from someone, who is reading 'Vulgate' Ashtadhyayi of Maharshi Panini! Vulgate : "The Latin edition of the Bible translated from Hebrew and Greek mainly by St. Jerome at the end of the 4th century; as revised in 1592 it was adopted as the official text for the RomanÂ CatholicÂ Church."

ramana · (This post was last modified: 03-23-2007, 08:41 AM by ramana.)

kaly boss, We need a clear logical demolition of this AIT & PIE nonsense that ordinary aam janata can understand. The reason is the poison pen of Romila types has spread far and wide and to own the space Indians have to be able to state clearly and unequivocally that AIT and all that is hogwash.

BTW I posted a link to an article on ancient Saraswati from Current Science in the Ancient Indian history post thread today.

QUOTELink to Saraswati- the ancient river lost in the desert

from Current Science.

Shouldn't we have a Saraswati thread as a sticky in the Indian history or Culture forum?

03-24-2007, 05:10 AM

QUOTE(ramana @ Mar 23 2007, 08:38 AM)kaly boss, We need a clear logical demolition of this AIT & PIE nonsense that ordinary aam janata can understand. The reason is the poison pen of Romila types has spread far and wide and to own the space Indians have to be able to state clearly and unequivocally that AIT and all that is hogwash.

I agree with you, Ramana ji. We have to remove the cobwebs which have accumulated in Bharatiya scholarship -- for over 200 years now --, admiring the fraud called William Jones. This accumulation is best exemplified by the adoration of IEL by the likes of Koenraad Elst. A non-falsifiable discipline CANNOT be demolished using the fraudulent rules of that very discipline. We have to re-discover bhaashya just as we rediscovered Sarasvati. There is no other civilizational area in the world which has such a rich tradition of bhaashya. The Mahes'vara sutraani are a pinnacle of achievement in the evolution of knowledge systems.

I will go through the Sarasvati thread and respond.

I would like to flag another dimension to the IEL belief system which is nowadays, sought to be buttressed by bogus DNA studies. What used to be called 'racism' is now-a-days called either 'ethnicity studies' or 'evolutionary biology'.

Here is a report on Nazi science. k

Nazi science in Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Copy of my letter to: bmbf@bmbf.bund.de is given below for reference (annexes not included).

See also:
http://www.sabha.info/research/aif.html

http://www.math.uni-hamburg.de/home/bandel...erabad_2006.ppt The show ain't amusing, it is shocking.

Namaskaram.

k

22 March 2007

For the attention of Federal Minister of Education and Research Annette Schavan

Federal Ministry of Education and Research
HeinemannstraÃe 2
53175 Bonn
Phone: +49 22899 57-0
Fax: +49 22899 57-83601

Dear Hon'ble Bundesministerin Dr. Annette Schavan

Re: "Allegations of Nazi science"

This is to bring to your notice some issues for investigation and remedial action.

Both Profs. Stoneking and Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany seek to prove Aryan Invasion Theory using Aryan Invasion Theory (a strange case of circular reasoning, this is non-falsifiable, and hence, NOT scientific research) . Prof. Hublin is supporting Prof. Stoneking who is propagating a White Supremacist theory and hence, what Prof. Stoneking himself calls, in his letter titled: 'Allegations of Nazi science'. This amounts to bible-thumping on the part of some reseaches citing the authority of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, because Aryan Invasion Theory was born and based on Biblical Creationism and Tower of Babel.

The researches of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology assume the truth of Aryan Invasion Theory (including migrations into India). Romila Thapar's paper cited as reference 17 in Prof. Stoneking's paper assumes the truth of Aryan Invasion Theory and is crucial to conclude that Aryan Invasion Theory is true. This level of intellectual sophistry, circular causation, is unbelievable.

I am appending in Annex 2 some fallacies in the researches of the Institute as brought out by HJ Bandelt and T. Kivisild (2006).

Prof. Stoneking notes in the summary of his research monograph: "â¦ We conlude that paternal lineage of Indian caste groups are primarily descended from Indo_european speakers who migrated from Central Asia ~3500 years ago." An extraordinary claim for a seemingly scientific paper to make !

In the text of the paper, the origin of R2 (M124), and L (M20) was estimated out of India (Central Asia) while it is proved now by current studies that R2 and L are Indian origin (Sahoo et al. 2006, Sengupta et al. 2006, Chaubey et al. 2007). Prof. Stoneking adds: " The central Asian Y chromosomes spread over the Indian subcontinent recently and in a rather short period of time, as suggested by the relative homogeneity and close relationship of all caste populations. A possible explanation for these patterns is that Indian caste paternal lineages are largely descended from the linguistically and archaeologically inferred dispersal of Indo-European-speaking pastoralists who mi grated from central Asia some 3500 years ago [2â4, 7â9]. "

Annex 2 exposes Prof. Stoneking's defense of his completely wrong data. It is surprising that wrong data should be used and such data should be misinterpreted just to prove the views of Romila Thapar about Aryan Invasion Theory which is an euphemism for Nazi Aryan supremacy Theory.

On January 26, 2007 I sent this mail to Max Planck Institute. The subject of the mail was: Prof. proves Aryan Invasion Theory using the Aryan Invasion Theory

http://www.sabha.info/archives/sabha_25jan2007.html#2

[quote] Thanks to SABHA for being the first to report this fantastic discovery to the gullible public.

Professor proves Aryan Invasion Theory using Aryan Invasion Theory!

Mark Stoneking of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany has proven the Aryan Invasion Theory using the Aryan Invasion Theory!

According to his paper titled 'Independent Origins of Indian Caste and Tribal Paternal Lineages,' the caste system in India is no more than 3500 years old because Romila Thapar says so. http://www.eva.mpg.de/genetics/pdf/Corda...ol2004.pdf

Moreover, the caste system was elaborated only within the last 3500 years [2,17], which constitutes a rather short period of time for observing such dramatic differences in Y chromosome variation between caste and tribal people at a pooled-data level.
. . .
It therefore appears that Indian caste and tribal paternal lineages derive from independent sources.

Reference number 17 - on which the Professor bases his claim - is a paper written by people who base their ideas on the assumption that the Aryan Invasion Theory is true.

Gadgil, M., and Thapar, R. (1990). Human ecology in India: some historical perspectives. Interdiscipl. Sci. Rev. 15, 209â223

Thus, in a display of academic brilliance, Stoneking uses Romila Thapar's claim that Aryans invaded India and introduced the caste system, and goes on to prove that Aryans invaded India and introduced the caste system!

You can contact Mark Stoneking at stoneking AT eva.mpg. if you wish to congratulate him for his brilliant piece of work which proves a Nazi theory and furthers the field of Circular Logic. Don't forget to copy your emails to SABHA and the members of the management of Max Planck Institute, whose email ids can be found here: http://www.eva.mpg.de/english/profil.htm

feedback@sabha.info [unquote]

I am also providing in Annex 1 subsequent correspondence with Prof. Stoneking and Prof. Jean-Jacques Hublin. (Letter of March 12, 2007 from Prof. Stoneking; letter of 5 March 2007 from Prof. Stoneking, my response of 13 March 2007; letter of 14 March 2007 from Prof. Stoneking; my response of 15 March 2007; further letter of 16 March 2007 from Prof. Stoneking; and letter of 18 March 2007 from Jean-Jacques Hublin, Director, Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Thanking you for your consideration and with the best regards,

03-27-2007, 04:57 AM

Mallory and Adams (2006) on the IE homeland question
âMany of the language groups of Europe, i.e. Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic, may possibly be traced back to the Corded Ware horizon of northern, central, and eastern Europe that flourished c. 3200-2300 BC. Some would say that iron age culture of Italy might also be derived from this cultural tradition. For this reason the Corded Ware Culture is frequently discussed as a prime candidate for early Indo-European; in the past it was even suggested as the Proto-Indo-European culture. However, the Corded Ware cannot even remotely explain the Indo-European groups of the Balkans, Greece, Anatolia, nor those of Asia. For the steppeland regions of Eurasia, the retrospective method takes us back through the Bronze Age Andronovo and Timber-grave cultures of the Eurasian steppe to the underlying Yamna culture of c. 3600-2200 BC. This method can supply us with an archaeological proxy for the Eastern Iranians but that is about all the retrospective method gets us. We may argue that the Yamna culture should minimally reflect the proto-Indo-Iranians if not more; however, we cannot do this by the retrospective method since there is no ancestral culture that territorially underlies the Iranians or Indo-Aryans, i.e. there is no specific culture X that both embraces the historical seats of the Indo-Iranians and can also be traced back to the Yamna culture. Similarly, there is no solid evidence in the retrospective method in Greece that takes us anywhere that we can confidently tie to one of the other two âancestral cultures,â nor Anatolia. Sooner or later the retrospective method leads us to a series is what seem to appear to be independent cultural phenomena that somehow must be associate with one another. In that lies most of the archaeological debate concerning Indo-European origins (Mallory and Adams 2006, p. 452).â
âAlthough the difference between the Wave of Advance and Kurgan theories is quite marked, they both share the same explanation for the expansion of the Indo-Iranians in Asia (and there are no fundamental differences in either of their difficulties in explaining the Tocharians), i.e. the expansion of mobile pastoralist eastwards and then southwards into Iran and India. Moreover, there is recognition by supporter of the Neolithic theory that the âwave of advanceâ did not reach the peripheries of Europe (central and western Mediterranean, Atlantic and northern Europe) but that these regions adopted agriculture from their neighbours rather than being replaced by them.
In short, there is no easy way to locating the Indo-European homeland; there is no certain solution (Mallory and Adams 2006, p. 453,).â
âAs both theories explain the Asian Indo-Europeans in the same manner, there is no dispute there although it does militate against one of the most attractive aspects of the âwave of advanceâ. The archaeological evidence for an expansion from the steppelands across historical Iran and India varies from meager to total absence: both the Anatolian and the Kurgan theory find it extraordinarily difficult to explain the expansion of Indo-European languages over a vast area of urbanized Asia populations, approximately the same area as that of Europe. To assert, as some supporters of the âWave of Advanceâ theory do, that only a major change such as agriculture could explain the distribution of Indo-European languages does seem to be contradicted by their own models. In terms of the Europeans west of the Black Sea, the Neolithic model provides a larger area for Indo-Europeanization, i.e. both south-east and central Europe. The steppe model is not nearly so secure for explaining central Europe. As for the peripheries of Europe, both confront analogous problems of language shift (Mallory and Adams 2006, pp. 462-3).â
âToday there is an entire school that makes a similar argument for local continuity in Northern India and argues that there in lies the homeland. In both casesâor any other case for regional continuity a solution is made for one area and the rest of the Indo-European world is forced to accommodate it, generally without the slightest credible evidence. No solution is valid if it only rest on local continuity, it must provide a viable model for the spread of all the Indo-European languages (p. 456).â
ââ¦ the absence of the evidence of the horse altogether from both Greece and Italy (but not India) before the Bronze Age makes it less likely that these were the earliest seats of the Indo-Euopreans (Mallory and Adams 2006, p. 449, parenthesis added).â
Mallory, J. P., and Adams, D. Q. (2006). The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. New York: Oxford University Press.

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