On a First Reading of Mallory.

JoatSimeon at aol.com JoatSimeon at aol.com
Sat Feb 27 19:51:32 UTC 1999


>In a message dated 2/26/99 6:39:03 PM Mountain Standard Time,
>rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu writes:

>Or perhaps Indo-Aryan-Greek-[maybe] Armenian moved into the steppes, and then
>split with the Greco-Armenians going into the Balkans and the Indo-Iranians
>remaining the steppes --while most of the other IE-speakers, except for the
>Tocharians & the Anatolians remained in and around Hungary. At this point, IE
>may have still been amorphous enough [in that it was mutually comprehensible]
>that the "innovative center" shifted from Hungary to the western steppes.

-- this is an unnecessary multiplicaton of hypotheses again.

The simplest explanation is that Indo-Aryan evolved "in situ" from early
central-eastern Indo-European in the Ukraine and points east. Proto-Tocharian
was isolated at the extreme eastern end of the IE spectrum, moving southeast
into the Tarim and east of that into the Shansu prairies, where it remained
until historic times and where it had relatively little contact with the
'innovating core' of IE.

The Anatolians (or rather a group of PIE-speakers linguistically ancestral to
them) moved off into the NE Balkans relatively early -- early in the 4th
millenium BCE.  Somewhat later, when the proto-Graeco-Armenian congolmerate
moved south, they pushed east into Anatolia.

The Greek-Armenian whatever had started moving southwest into the northern
Balkans by the time Indo-Aryan was developing its peculiarities, but broke
contact before satemization.  Later the proto-Greeks moved south into Greece
proper around the end of the 3rd millenium BCE, followed to the north by the
Macedonians, the proto-Phyrgians and Armenians, and the Illyrians.

Meanwhile, the western fringe of the IE-speakers had moved west and north-west
(possibly leapfrogging inhospitable areas and 'backfilling' later), and is
represented by the Corded Ware archaeological complex.

The western IE speakers remained relatively undifferentiated until the 2nd
millenium BCE; the easternmost of them (proto-Balto-Slavic speakers) retained
some contact with the Indo-Aryan speach-area.  In the late 2nd millenium BCE,
a secondary set of migrations moved the western IE stocks into the positions
in which they emerge in historic times.

That, I think, ties up the whole problem with a ribbon.

Of course, there are probably some IE language-families that vanished without
a trace.



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