The Saker's got another comment about The Borderland. In it, he relates that Ukrainians sometimes claim that Sanskrit was born there - "Proto-Sanskrit" anyway, whatever that means. I'd float an alternate location for the trail of what would, in the trans-Indus Iron Age, be defined as Sanskrit (and the Prakrits).
I understand that what Russian Slavs call "Ukraine" was the Yamnaya heartland: where arose the common ancestor to Indic (incl. Sanskrit... and old Mitannian), Iranian, the three Baltic language-families (incl. Slavic), Greek, aaaaand Armenian. Even Balts like Marija Gimbutas - who further hated the Yamnaya / Kurgan invasions as 'androcratic' - have argued for an Aryan invasion from Ukraine. It's recently known through the R1a Y chromosome as well.
Maybe proto-Indo/Iranic was spoken in Ukraine. The Iranic Scythian languages certainly were spoken there. But we're on the trail of Sanskrit, of "Indic".
The first recorded "Indic" words are Mitanni. We first read these words as jargon, in the Bronze Age after they conquered Hurri lands which were literate, so could transcribe the cant of their non-Hurri conquerors.
We never read an "Indic" (or Iranic) word in the Bronze Age literatures west of Mitanni: nothing in Palaic, Luwic, or Mycenaean, or Hattic, or the big orangutan in the region: Knesian. To the north, once we get a record in Late Antiquity, we see many an Iranic loanword; never an "Indic" one. And if a Semite or an Egyptian ever uttered an "Indic" word, he was quoting a Mitannian.
Proto-Indic, I conclude, differentiated itself from Iranian somewhere around modern Tehran. (Calling it "Indic" is, thereby, a misnomer.) Thence it moved west and east; to be supplanted in its own heartland by (related) Iranian.
No comments:
Post a Comment