Monday, November 29, 2021

The West/East Divide among Indo-Aryan languages

Came upon two linguistic papers which clarify the relationship of Aryan languages of India with the other old language families, namely Dravidian & Munda families.

india language family map
Language Family map of India


indo aryan language tree



Both papers do an objective analysis of modern western and eastern indo aryan languages and compare their features with Munda languages. The brief conclusions are below.

Peterson 2017 concludes:

1. In the preceding pages we have shown that there is a very clear structural division between the western and non-western Indo-Aryan languages of South Asia, which we refer to here as the “Indo-Aryan east–west divide”. Furthermore, western Indo-Aryan languages form a quite distinct group, showing no especially close structural affinities with either Dravidian or Munda, whereas the eastern Indo-Aryan languages cluster rather closely with the Munda languages.

2. These facts strongly suggest that at least the eastern half of the Indo-Gangetic Plain was once predominantly inhabited by pre-Munda Austro-Asiatic–speaking ethnic groups. In this scenario, speakers of Indo-Aryan languages, who had originally entered South Asia via the northwest, will increasingly have come into contact with these AustroAsiatic speakers during their gradual eastward movement, and it is presumably during this time that the eastern Indo-Aryan languages began to converge towards Austro-Asiatic.

western IA is distant
Western IA languages are distant from all others


The most important detail is this (bolded emphasis is mine)

Furthermore, these tools show that the eastern Indo-Aryan languages cluster more closely with Munda than with the western Indo-Aryan languages in structural terms. However, Figure 5 surprisingly does not suggest a long-term, intense contact situation between (western) Indo-Aryan and Dravidian involving largescale language shift to Indo-Aryan by ethnic groups who formerly spoke Dravidian languages.
Also,
With respect to this exposed position of western Indo-Aryan the most likely conclusion is that these languages have not been subject to large-scale, intense contact with other language families of the subcontinent for an exceptionally long time. Two main possibilities present themselves here:

 – First, that western Indo-Aryan never was in a situation of intense language contact with another family in South Asia, which can be due to any number of causes, e.g. military conquests in which other ethnic groups were either annihilated or driven out of north western South Asia. If so, western IndoAryan has then retained its distinctive Indo-Iranian traits and/or has undergone developments since then which are unique in South Asia to this group. 

 – The second possibility is that this group did have intense contact at a very early time with another language family, but with a family which is most likely no longer extant. However, after this very early period this part of the subcontinent was presumably predominantly Indo-Aryan speaking and contact with speakers of languages belonging to other families would have been limited, so that this group does not cluster with any other group.

The author of the paper found no systematic contacts between western IA and Dravidian or Munda language families. Of course, option 1 above makes most sense, but not because of military conquest (for which there is no archaeological proof), but because NW India is where the aryan speakers have stayed for long. 


We also know that the steppe ancestry in northern India is only to the tune of 15-25%. So the natives were definitely not driven out. If these steppe ancestry carrying people were the ones who introduced Aryan languages into India, there would be intense contact between proto Sanskrit and the native language. But we see no such thing in the Vedic literature, or in the modern languages of the region.

The second paper is very recent, published in August 2021. Ivani et al 2021 states

In conclusion, we found evidence of the presence of an east–west divide in the Indo-Aryan languages of our sample. The presence of the geographical divide is clear from the exploration of the entire dataset (217 traits for 27 Indo-Aryan languages) and also by investigating in detail each of the main feature sets (Questionnaires A, B, and C), each of them treating different domains and with a specific depth. We obtained similar results by observing individual feature groups, where we have found clear presence of an east–west divide in most of them. Not surprisingly, not all the features under investigation show an east–west divide (such as negation and echo formations), and this different behavior offers significant insights in attesting the depth of this divide, and which grammatical domains are involved in language contact. All the languages included in the respective eastern clusters for the entire set, and each main feature group and feature subgroups that show a geographical divide, have a higher similarity to Munda. 

 

Now that it is clear that eastern IA languages have had contact with Munda language. Question is how? The authors say

It seems that the most likely candidate is that of a substrate, resulting from the gradual wholesale shift from Austro-Asiatic to Indo-Aryan. As was just noted, there is clear evidence that Austro-Asiatic influenced eastern Indo-Aryan, otherwise we would not expect to find such clear evidence of an east–west divide there. However, as Austro-Asiatic is now largely confined to peripheral regions of eastern India and has all but vanished from the Indo-Gangetic Basin, we conclude that these languages have disappeared from these regions as entire ethnic groups which once spoke them have given up their traditional languages in favor of Indo-Aryan, a process which is still taking place in this region today.


We know from Tätte, K., Pagani, L., Pathak, A.K. et al.(3) that Munda speakers entered east India from SE Asia sometime after 2200 BCE. This information plus the above information now starts telling us a story.

1. Munda speakers in eastern India became IA speakers over time.

2. Western IA languages show limited contact with Munda or Dravidian speakers. This makes the case for Munda or Dravidian natives in North, west and NW India problematic.


References

1. Peterson, John. "Fitting the pieces together – Towards a linguistic prehistory of eastern-central South Asia (and beyond) " Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, vol. 4, no. 2, 2017, pp. 211-257. https://doi.org/10.1515/jsall-2017-0008

2. Ivani, Jessica K., Paudyal, Netra and Peterson, John. "Indo-Aryan – a house divided? Evidence for the east–west Indo-Aryan divide and its significance for the study of northern South Asia" Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, vol. 7, no. 2, 2020, pp. 235-274. https://doi.org/10.1515/jsall-2021-2029

3. Tätte, K., Pagani, L., Pathak, A.K. et al. The genetic legacy of continental scale admixture in Indian Austroasiatic speakers. Sci Rep 9, 3818 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-40399-8


Also read

Ancient ancestral south indians (AASI) came from the east, not straight from Africa!

Brahmins from NW india have ~15% frequency of European mtDna - New paper


46 comments:

vAsiSTha said...

IA languages originally did not interact with Dravidian and Munda people in NW india.

What happens to languages when they replace another language is clearly seen in eastern IA language families. This never happened with western IA branches because they never encountered a local population which was Munda or Dravidian

Bruin said...

Western Indo-Aryan and Eastern Indo-Aryan are extremely similar in one aspect - retroflexion - and in this they are united. Retroflexion is also the most distinct characteristic of IA languages that separates them from other IE branches. So at some point in time, they imbibed this character insitu from another language family.

There was a fascinating see-saw battle that occupied linguists for most of the 70s, 80s and 90s. There were two schools - the Convergence and the Subversion schools. The convergence school argued that the retroflexion in Sanskrit was a result of bi-directional exchange between Dravidian and IA groups of equal power and the whole process was achieved organically in an infinite amount of time.

The subversion school argued that retroflexion was an outcome of a unidirectional exchange between unequal groups and it took place in a short amount of time. The scholars involved in these discussions were Hock, Emeneau, Thomason & Kaufman, Bloch and from an earlier century - Caldwell and Konow.

One of the most fascinating features of the Rgveda is that it retains no memory of this linguistic mixing. All the way from the Old Books to the New Books - the density and spread of retroflexion heavy words are uniform. There is no significant uptrend from the Old to the New. Emeneau, the Oxford linguist, noted this specifically to comment that the Rgvedic composers were very comfortable and familiar with their retroflexion - they wore it like their skins! Therefore it must have been a convergence that caused the retroflexion in Sanskrit. HH Hock, earlier a subversionist, was won over by Emeneau’s reasoning and data. He became a convergence advocate.

These linguists, most of them, have passed on and did not live to see the impact of genetics. But we do and we can look at the data of Narasimhan/Shinde’s.

If we try to figure out which South Asian Bronze Age genetic cline could have been the most fitting candidate for the composition of the Rgveda, it has to be the Indus Valley Cline. The magic ingredient is the Andamanese Hunter Gatherers (AHG) component - that must have provided retroflexion from a deep past. This is the only cline that presents a fit to the model of the Convergencers.

If i were to offer a third possibility - which I admit sounds bizarre, the IA pulse moved out of the Gangetic Plains into India's North-West.

It ties in with textual evidence - Eastern rivers show up first in the Rgveda, then the Indus and its tributaries (strange, right??). Common etymolgies with Iranians start showing up in the New Books of the Rgveda but not in the Old Books. All these discoveries, courtesy Talageri.

Coming to one specific weaknesses in the linguistic papers you referenced, Sinhala is a IA language that is actually Western IA with clumps of Eastern IA distributed throughout and also Vedda terminologies. The Eastern IA influence is courtesy Magadhi, that arrived with Buddhism. But Western IA?? I think that the original subcontinental settlers in Srilanka from Vanga preceded the Munda arrivals in the subcontinent!

vAsiSTha said...

I would have expected sinhala to be very eastern IA like, more like odiya and magadhi. It's interesting if it's not

Bruin said...

For some time, Srilankan historical research suffered from a Buddhist creationist overhang - that everything good (language, philosophy, culture) was brought by the arrival of Buddhism to the island.

THe below blog summarises this perfectly -

https://www.colombotelegraph.com/index.php/a-language-called-sinhala-through-a-glass-darkly/

Linguistics ceases to be a science beyond a point thanks to creation of arbitrary classifications in order to meet constraints. Sinhala is classified as an isolate - neither Western IA or Eastern IA.

At least in light of newer genetics papers like Tatte, we can start to understand the dynamics behind Sinhala.

The original Sinhalese that existed before the arrival of Magadhi Prakrit with Buddhism did not exhibit any characteristics proving a Western or Eastern IA provenance (Sugath De Silva, 1981). So clearly pre-Munda.

The time-frame consequences of this conclusion in light of new genetic evidence is pretty interesting!

postneo said...

There was a publication by chaubey et al that adna introduction of Munda speaker to the subcontinent is recent(late bronze age)

vAsiSTha said...

i believe the Munda paper says they entered post 2200bce

3rdacc said...

A pre-Buddhist arrival of IA tribes to Sri Lanka can probably explain its archaic features.

postneo said...

On retroflexion:
PIE was probably never a single language but a collection of different dialects spread over a smaller area than what it is today. Its possible that the eastern ones had retroflexion whereas the western ones that spread more did not. Also phonemes are longer lived than language families and the regions through which they spread were not retroflexion areas.

Separately Veddas dont have retroflex phonemes and are a strange outlier in the subcontinent. Where retroflexion is spread from Pashtin and Tajik at one end to Australia even

tim drake said...

"There was a publication by chaubey et al that adna introduction of Munda speaker to the subcontinent is recent(late bronze age)"

@postneo, I don't think there was any aDNA involved in that estimate but anyways, it's not like eastern india was void of people by the time munda people arrived, folks were indeed there and from mundas genomic analysis, the author of that paper inferred that the population X with whom Mundas mixed in eastern india, they had even more AASI than the present day Paniya people. Can it be that it's the population X which was spread in eastern gangetic plains and which would have made a significant impact both on Mundas languages and incoming IA speakers is responsible for the closeness of eastern IA languages and mundas languages ?

vAsiSTha said...

Mundas first mixed in SE India.. so this higher aasi population you're referring to is likely below Orissa coast

tim drake said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
tim drake said...

"so this higher aasi population you're referring to is likely below Orissa coast"

I assumed that an AASI continuum would have existed right from the foothills of himalayas near Nepal. Kusunda people of Nepal(who speak a supposed language isolate) are pretty high AASI . On top of that, eastern gangetic plains castes and tribes are quite high AASI with AASI increasing as one goes down the social ladder. It's for these reasons that I hypothesized the language of this then unadmixed AASI-rich population of eastern gangetic plains who must have made some linguistic impact both on Mundas and incoming IA speakers, might be responsible for this closeness of eastern IA languages with Munda languages !

vAsiSTha said...

Chaubey jis Munday paper says that north Munda languages are an offshoot. So the southern Munda languages came first from se asia.

द्रोहयूवंशी said...

I'm not understanding how sinhala is an Arya language, while Tamiz /kannada /Telgu which sound very much like samskirt ain't Arya languages
Puzzling me

Fernz the Great said...

Sanskrit in fact originated from Old Malayalam.

Manipravalam is 100 per cent Sanskrit Malayalam.

Ordinary Malayalam is 85 per cent Sanskrit.

Malayalam is recognised by UNESCO and the Indian Constitution as a classical language i.e. it did not originate from another language.

Sanskrit isn't a classical language.

Tamil is 50 per cent Sanskrit.

Sinhala is from Bengali.

Fernz the Great said...

Life comes in various shades of grey. There are exceptions, qualifiers, caveats, ifs and buts.

Black and white only, black only or white only isn't the sum total of life.

Benjie said...

Vedic word Yadu probably derived from Dravidic YADu meaning goat. Jaat is possibly related. One Jaat gotra is called Adwaal meaning keeper of goats. Here also Dravidian influence is seen. More instances may be found. This needs more study.

3rdacc said...

@Benjie

Yadus were in Sapta Sindhu before they went down to South India.

Pk6 said...

Comments here are turning into fringe linguistic theories, instead of conversation about genetics. Dravidian is heavily influenced by Sanskrit. Sanskrit in return is also influenced by Dravidian and Munda to great extent.

Indo-Iranian does not show such influences. Iranic languages do not show Dravidian and Munda influences.

@Vasist

Where was this IndiaN branch before it migrated to South Asia?

vAsiSTha said...

Pk6..
I think it was in India already by 10kbce.
Waiting for old samples to confirm

Pk6 said...

@Vasistha

It's unclear what you mean by that. Is this IndiaN same as what is found in SIS and Rakhigarhi samples?

vAsiSTha said...

IndiaN is what is found in Irula and Rakhigarhi sample, giving almost 100% of th iran like ancestry.

And also gave part of the iran like ancestry (not all of it) to ShahrISokhta main population, Gonur main population, sarazm main population and steppe_en main population.

populations which dont seem to have this IndiaN ancestry are tepe Hissar.

the above is preliminary, based on the new qpgraph project im undertaking to differentiate between various iran like ancestries in iran, india and SC asia.

vAsiSTha said...

What can be clearly seen is that BMAC and ShahrISokhta had IndiaN ancestry before Tepe Hissar like population gave a big chunk of ancestry to them.. between 50-80%. Thats how you see the anatolian farmer ancestry in these pops.

Pk6 said...

@vAsiSTha

Link to your blog was posted by Razib Khan on GNXP. Any response to Razib and Matt's comments?

https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2021/11/29/open-thread-11-29-2021-gene-expression

Razib "The big issue here is the space of graphs is big. Is this the best option? Sarazm seems to post-date the emergence of the proto-Yamnaya genetic matrix as outlined by David Anthony in his interview with me."

Matt "Re; South Asian related ancestry in Steppe_Eneolithic, I think where I would criticize that graph is just from a quick look seems like there are lots of minimal drift edges to nodes labelled things like “IndiaN”, where I’m not sure they really imply that there is lot of shared drift or where the mystery node was actually living...
It does seem like from Davidski’s Global 25 that there are links between the Sarazm_Eneolithic with both the Indus_Periphery and present day South Asian samples beyond what would be found for a model of TKM_Neolithic (Turan Neolithic) and CHN_Tarim_EMBA (North Eurasian HG)."

vAsiSTha said...

@pk6

"The big issue here is the space of graphs is big. Is this the best option?"
I dont know what he means. I included minimum number of populations required to make sense for EHG, CHG, Iran, indian pops, ANE. making the residual fstats fit with such a large no of populations is not easy. Thankfully, anatolia farmer is not a part of any of these populations so i could avoid using that.

"Sarazm seems to post-date the emergence of the proto-Yamnaya genetic matrix as outlined by David Anthony in his interview with me."

point 1: I never claimed sarazm has provided ancestry to steppe_en or yamnaya. I say that there is a component which provides ancestry to both sarazm and steppe_en and that is why G25 shows the excess allele sharing.
for 1, sarazm has anatolian component (probably from tepe hissar) which is missing in Steppe_en. so i could never make the claim that Sarazm has provided ancestry to yamnaya, and i never did.

point 2: There is no EHG in sarazm, ie. there is no steppe_en admixture into sarazm_en. so as such, Sarazm is completely independent of Steppe_en or yamnaya and therefore their relative ages don't matter much for the point im making.

wrt Matt
"there are lots of minimal drift edges to nodes labelled things like “IndiaN”, where I’m not sure they really imply that there is lot of shared drift or where the mystery node was actually living..."

Minimal drift edges dont matter, what matters is that the source of Iran like ancestry in Irula and Steppe eneolithic is close to the node i call 'commonindoiran' in my graph. Whereas Ganj Dareh farmers are around 50 drift units from it.

I call the node IndiaN because it supposedly gives 100% of the iran like ancestry in Irula tribals, who are deeply based in the south of India.
Till now, no other group in iran or SC asia has this feature. They are always admixed with a tepe hissar like population whose iran source is closer to ganj dareh farmers.

where this IndiaN popualtion existed is of course a mystery, but my guess is 7000bce Jeitun or Mehrgarh culture, as i have written in the post also.
i will reiterate - this IndiaN is named so not because of location, but because it provides all of the Iranlike ancestry in Irula.

postneo said...

Sarazm has artefacts from as far away as Balochistan, so the its quite tenable that there was a widespread IndiaN population which contributed to Sarazm and places further south.
I think its also that true the modern Iran population is more west shifted than Ganj Dareh which is more Baloch like.

postneo said...

Since the post is on languages. Theres an important isogloss that splits both ancient and modern indian IE languages

1) strong gendering: not only nouns but verbs have gendered seen in dravidian and north central indian languages. e.g. hindi, Tamil

2) moderate gendering sanskrit has gendered nouns and gender in past participles only ..so hindi etc are quite divergent from that. Interestingly Pashto and old slavic seem to be like sanskrit ??

3) weak gender: western IE languages have no gendered verbs but retain it in pronominal declension

4) no gender: eastern indian languages like bengali completely lack gender. Munda, Hittite are like this

So perhaps PIE was itself strongly gendered or developed close to languages that were. Both semitic and and dravidian languages satisfy that criteria.




Totso said...

@PostNeo @Vasistah

Maybe of interest to you guys...

Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia, Mark Pagel, 2013

https://www.pnas.org/content/110/21/8471

On the Homelands of Indo-European and Eurasiatic: Geographic Aspects of a Lexicostatistical Classification, Alexander Kozintsev 2020

https://www.academia.edu/43594756/On_the_Homelands_of_Indo_European_and_Eurasiatic_Geographic_Aspects_of_a_Lexicostatistical_Classification_2020_

Alexander Kozintsev (2020) places PIE near Eastern Central Asia in his new study.

"Conclusions
The two-dimensional (quasi-areal) model combined with the traditional genealogical model and the geographic approachoffers a useful tool for reconstructing language relationship and, indirectly, population history. The application of these methods to Eurasiatic languages has resulted in the second scenario of Eurasiatic (and, respectively, IE) dispersal, placing its center in eastern Central Asia. This is an alternative to the first scenario, outlined in my previous study, where this center was placed in western Central Asia mostly on the basis of archaeological and genetic evidence.With regard to IE, Scenario 2 is but an extension of Scenario 1. With regard to other branches of Eurasiatic,Scenario 2 may appear preferable to Scenario 1 because itminimizes the total length of migration routes. But this applies only to the time after the split of common Eurasiatic. Because we don’t know the routes the speakers of proto-Eurasiatic had to take before they had reached their last common homeland,wherever it was situated, making a choice between the two scenarios is impossible. Both alternatives appear to be viable working hypotheses"

A Listless Traveller said...

This supports the model proposed by Parpola in "The Roots of Hinduism": Two waves of Indo Aryan migration. The first arrives when IVC is in late harappan phase, interacts and intermingles with the proto-Dravidian speaking IVC folk, picking up religious ideas and linguistic influences. According to Parploa, it is the spiritual practices of this group that was compiled in the Atharvaveda at a much later date. It is this group that continues to spread Eastward.

The second group arrives after several hundred years, at a point in time when proto-Dravidian has all but disappeared from North Western India. This second group are the ones who composed the Rigveda, where at places one sees a clear antagonism against the spiritual practices of the first group.

The fact that the language of the Atharvaveda retains certain archaic features of proto-Indo European that are absent from the Rigveda also supports this hypothesis.

vAsiSTha said...

@totso

Yeah I did mail a few articles to prof kozintsev

vAsiSTha said...

@A listless traveller

Parpola has retracted that hypothesis based on Jamieson's critique. You can read his retraction in his new paper on Sanauli protochariots.

3rdacc said...

@A Listless Traveller

Dravidian IVC does not seem likely. There is not a single trace of a dravidian substratum in the northwest. The Dravidian IVC hypothesis was based off the old idea that Iran_N populated the subcontinent, bringing dravidian langauges from the middle east. However there is now ample evidence showing IndoIran_N type ancestries originated in India.

Pk6 said...

@vAsiSTha @AListlessTraveller

Parpola says the same thing in his Sanauli paper, repeats the two wave theory. Jamieson's critique in the study is not related to that theory.

@3rdacc

There is no such "ample evidence".


vAsiSTha said...

"This is, of course, the beauty of Parpola’s (more or less invisible) first wave of Indo-Aryans, who arrived early enough to run across the last of Harappan culture, scoop up what they wanted, and carry it further into the subcontinent. It almost seems that the posited first wave exists in this schema primarily to be the conduit of Harappan materials into the later world of Hinduism. (Jamison 2020: 243)"

This is from parpolas paper where he quotes Jamison's criticism on 2 wave theory.

However, you are right, Parpola does not retract his 2 wave theory but rather doubles down. There is no chance however that he is right.

"It seems, then, that the earliest Aryan-speaking immigrants to South Asia, the Copper Hoard people, came with bull-drawn carts (Sanauli and Daimabad) via the BMAC and had Proto-Indo- Iranian as their language. They were, however, soon followed (and probably at least partially absorbed) by early Indo-Aryans, for the horse is depicted already in the BMAC-type bifacial seal from Prabhas Patan (Somnath) in Saurashtra, Gujarat (Joshi & Parpola (eds) 1987 CISI 1: 359)."

I mean, intense storytelling, but unlikely to be true. There will be 0 steppe autosomal ancestry in Sanauli 1900bce.

Pk6 said...

@Vasistah

Sanauli is atypical burial for IVC. At the same time there isn't anything about it that you can directly connect it to Indo-Aryan or Vedic burials either.

Bruin said...

Parpola's theories, once relevant and even mainstream - are now descending into farce - as newer archaeological discoveries are emerging as challenges. He is now riding the proverbial tiger, as we shall see. If he cannot hold onto it, he will be eaten.

Sinauli is that tiger. Consensus is arriving among Indian archaeologists that it is the "Mohen-jo-daro" of the BA Ochre Coloured Pottery culture (OCP). There is an equally adamant camp this is just the trans-Yamuna cousin of the Harappans. Remember that today Sinauli is 6 kms to the east of Yamuna. But 4000 years ago, it was on its banks.

Parpola's insistence that the "chariots are mere bullock carts" is his way of holding on to the tiger's tail. Sinauli C14 dates are very precise and "too early" for a IA invasion into India.

Remember that the Dravidian word for horse is totally different from the IA one. If these so called IAs had come over the Sapta Sindhu and crossed the Yamuna into the East with horses, surely they would have left the word among the Harappan regions which they penetrated. Hence the theoretical contortions.

The fact that a century of Harappan excavations has not turned up a single vehicle (toy or real) with the form factor of the Sinauli chariot is even more crucial. This is a different localised culture with battle-riding innovation on the east bank of the Yamuna.

Another important materiality - the whole chariot was inlaid with bronze sheets. A prime reason why it did not rot away (unlike the Steppes chariots, whose mere lower wheels and treads existed).

Pk6 said...

@Bruin

Let them first publish Sanauli aDNA and those Harappan "horse bones" aDNA first. They have been talking about it for over a year now and still they have nothing.

postneo said...

Chariots wheels and horses are not language markers, But in childish overreach, they went out of their way to deny the presence of an animal whose range would never have been restricted and whose presence is unsurprising.

vAsiSTha said...

Unless the putative indo Aryans flew without leaving a trace anywhere, there is no chance of steppe ancestry in 1900bce haryana. Soon, there will be a paper on another sample from much later - it won't have steppe.

Bruin said...

@Pk6

Sinauli and Horse aDNA are indeed sought for and anticipated. The onus is on the Establishment.

But the archaeo, linguistic and genetic evidence are at odds already.

Parpola thinks that Sinauli were first wave of IAs (without horses). The Rakhigarhi Woman (Narasimhan, Shinde) who lived 400-700 years prior to the Sinauli C14 dates, has no admixture. So it is clear they arrived in this window, in Parpola's theory.

Parpola also holds and has held, for most of his life that IVC was Dravidian speaking. Now this is the jam he finds himself in.

The Dravidian word for horse is "kutiray". David McAlpin clearly establishes that this word has Elamite connections at the cognate level.

Now Shinde/Narasimhan 2019 established that there has been no genetic input to the IVC from West Asia/Anatolia.

How do you even reconcile all these conflicting statements that Parpola keeps on making?

Anonymous said...

From what i remember from one Niraj's Rai, "horses" aDNA to be published not really horses but pony/onager kind of equids. Lets see.

Anonymous said...

"Now Shinde/Narasimhan 2019 established that there has been no genetic input to the IVC from West Asia/Anatolia."

@Bruin, IVC was likely a cosmopoliton area, i find it really hard that we won't find any west asian kind of admixture especially in aDNAs from pakistani IVC sites. Lets see


If i am not wrong then didn't the the Shahr-i-sokhta IVC peripheries' iranian related ancestry came from two sides - one related to Gan dareh like Iran_N and other related to Indian_N ?

vAsiSTha said...

Shahr-i-sokhta main population has a lot of tepe hissar like Anatolian rich ancestry..
Same with bmac.

Assuwatama said...

Some lines from old Persian


1 : adam : Dârayavaush : xshâyathiya : vazraka : xshâyatha : xshâyathiy

2 ânâm : xshâyathiya : Pârsaiy : xshâyathiya : dahyûnâm : Visht

3 âspahyâ : puça : Arshâmahyâ napâ : Haxâmanishiya : thâtiy :

4 Dârayavaush : xshâyathiya : manâ : pitâ : Vishtâspa : Vishtâspahyâ : pitâ : Arsh

5 âma : Arshâmahyâ : pitâ : Ariyâramna : Ariyâramnahyâ : pitâ: Cishpish : Cishp

6 âish : pitâ : Haxâmanish : thâtiy : Dârayavaush : xshâthiya : avahyarâ

7 diy : vayam : Haxâmanishiyâ : thahyâmahy : hacâ : paruviyata : âmâtâ : ama

Assuwatama said...

Pali: Dhammapada 103:

Yo sahassaṃ sahassena, saṅgāme mānuse jine;

Ekañca jeyyamattānaṃ, sa ve saṅgāmajuttamo.

Greater in battle than the man who would conquer a thousand-thousand men,

is he who would conquer just one — himself.





Ardhamagadhi: Saman Suttam 125:

Jo sahassam sahassanam, samgame dujjae jine.

Egam jinejja appanam, esa se paramo jao.

One may conquer thousands and thousands of enemies in an invincible battle;

but the supreme victory consists in conquest over one's self.

Assuwatama said...

If I am not wrong then from Sanauli we had some combs with camel and Peacock motifs on them. There are 0 peacocks in steppe and the camel wasn't of Bactrian double hump variety.

Pottery of Sanauli aren't the same as those of Andronovo culture.


(2000bce-1800bce) In all Likely hood Sanauli skeletons belonged to locals.