Aryo-Baltic

The Indo-Iranian language family comes from Andronovo and Sintashta; we may even know what their elites called themselves, which - well, it got coöpted by people who don't belong to it. These people (and admittedly the people who got them wrong) all belong to a greater family with various isoglosses with other members of that family.

Axel Palmér has now constrained the basal isoglosses. The IndoIranian branch is sister to BaltoSlavic. That was already intuited in the nineteenth century but it coincided with the centum/satem split, which shift observably keeps happening - if you thought "centum" is pronounced "sentum" or "tschentum", you've just done it yourself. Besides Romance, another example is Armenian: satem, by the time anyone records it, but by then so heavily Parthianised that in the nineteenth century most scholarship thought it was full Iranian. (It is not.) So clearly satem wasn't enough. You have to mark when it happened. And you need other isoglosses.

INTERJECT 6/21/2025 Further knocked out of the running are coincidences. One example which this book doesn't note is πέλεκυς "axe" which sounds like a Sanskrit word paraśú. The Greek probably comes from Semitic. Sanskrit before the Achaemenids had little Semitic contact.

Kudos by the way to Brill, who've allowed this beautiful book into open-access. And h/t Razib Khan who considers this about the last word.

It is not that big a beautiful book. Casuals may skip most of the third chapter where the data, which in research-papers is usually the Supplement.

The Urheimat of BaltoSlavoIndoIranian was Fatyanovo-Balanovo. That'd be Russia, north of Yamnaya-now-Ukraine. They got up there around 2600 BC before any Finns or Hungarians showed up, then 2100 BC the Aryans moved east to Sintashta. The latter, wainriders now, seem to have conquered the Bactria-Margiana ArchaeoCulture in north Afghanistan which collapsed in 1700 BC. There, picking up words which the Balts never got, and the Slavs could pick up only millennia later from Scythians on their way back.

I still don't know what to make of the eclipses however.