Newsgroups: sci.archaeology,sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!rochester!rutgers!news.sgi.com!howland.erols.net!netcom.com!petrich
From: petrich@netcom.com (Loren Petrich)
Subject: Re: Etruscans [was: Re: The Coming of the Greeks]
Message-ID: <petrichE16GGA.EpA@netcom.com>
Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest)
References: <54q9ou$85o_002@dialin.csus.edu> <56sfdo$hma@fridge-nf0.shore.net> <petrichE14Gox.MzB@netcom.com> <32931066.253E@waterloo.border.com>
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 16:28:57 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu sci.archaeology:56267 sci.lang:64595

In article <32931066.253E@waterloo.border.com>,
Sanjeev Shankar  <sshankar@waterloo.border.com> wrote:
>Loren Petrich wrote:

>> of a lot of overland journeying. Consider how Sanskrit arrived in India
>> -- over a LOT of mountains in what is now Iran and Afghanistan.

>Yes, how did Sanskrit "arrive" in India??

	Its speakers were pastoralist nomads that carried their language 
from the Russian/Central-Asian steppes across the mountains to India.

	I note that Sanskrit is a member of the Indo-Iranian family, being
closest to Old Persian / Avestan. This family has several derived features
relative to Indo-European; one of them is the vowels. Three of the
original IE vowels, *e, *a, and *o, correspond well in the other IE langs,
such as Latin and Greek; Germanic obscures the distinction between *a and
*o -- but Indo-Iranian turns all three into a. However, there is a trace
of this feature in some of the ka/cha and ga/ja alternations -- the first
of the pair had a or o as the original vowel and the second one an e as
the original vowel.

	If Sanskrit had originated in India, that means that the
Indo-European homeland *must* have been in India. However, that means an
awfully long march from India to (for example) Italy; the
north-shore-of-Black-Sea Kurgan solution, for example, requires a *much*
shorter distance to both India and Italy. 

	There's an *excellent* work now out on comparative IE linguistics 
by Beekes (I forget the title); it can be ordered online from 
http://www.amazon.com.
-- 
Loren Petrich				Happiness is a fast Macintosh
petrich@netcom.com			And a fast train
My home page: http://www.webcom.com/petrich/home.html
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