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The following citations form the Subhash Kak's article address the contradictions of the domineering Indo-European linguistical postulates and its circular logics. In the process of developing the Indo-European linguistical hypothesis, key evidence was re-processed to support the concepts of the language tree model of its genesis, and the whole areas, peoples and archeological cultures were commandeered and re-attributed as Indo-European carriers. A systematic purge of the racial postulates and assumptions will allow an unburdened view of the linguistical interchanges and cultural evolutions, so necessary for the studies of non-IE, and specifically Dravidian, Finno-Ugrian, and Türkic peoples. |
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For a complete article click here: http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/ary2.pdf. |
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Over the protestations of its many critics, mainstream historical linguistics has remained within the parameters of 19th century thinking. In the meanwhile, archaeological discoveries have altered our understanding of ancient Eurasia (e.g. Renfrew 1987, Feuerstein et al 1995). The Indo-Europeans are seen to be present in Europe a few thousand years earlier than was supposed before. The Indian evidence, based on archaeology as well as the discovery of an astronomy in the Vedas, indicates that Vedic Sanskrit is to be assigned to the 4th and the 3rd millennia BC, if not earlier. The Indian cultural area is seen as an integral whole. The Vedic texts are being interpreted as a record of the complex trans-formations taking place in the pre-2000 BC Indian society (Shafferand Lichtenstein 1995).
But the whole edifice of historical linguistics related to the Indo-European family is based on the assumption that Hittite around 2,000 BC is the earliest member of the family and Vedic Sanskrit belongs to the period 1200-1000 BC. A major effort is needed to put together a new framework to understand the pre-history of the Indo-European language family.
Indian texts do not use the term Arya or Aryan in a linguistic sense, only in terms of culture. There is reference in the Manu Smrti where even the Chinese are termed Aryan, proving that it is not the language that defines this term. Although the term Aryan never had a racial connotation in the Indian texts, the scholars insisted that this was the sense in which the term ought to be understood. It was further assumed that Aryan meant European by race. By doing so Europe claimed for itself all of the "Aryan" texts as a part of its own forgotten past.
The texts cannot reveal the ethnic background just as Indians in the US who adopted the American names cannot be identified as ethnically Indian from their writing. The lesson is that the term "Aryan", misused by so many different parties, should be retired from the academic discourse.
The postulation of PIE together with a specific homeland in Europe or Turkey does violence to facts. There is no evidence that the natives of India for the past 8,000 years or so have looked any different from what they look now. The internal evidence of this literature points to events that are as early as 7000 years ago (Kramrisch, 1981) and its geography is squarely in the Indian region. If there was no single PIE, there was no single homeland either. The postulation of an "original home", without anchoring it to a definite time-period is to fall in the same logical trap as in the search for invasions and immigration. Tree or animal name evidence cannot fix a homeland. In the web of languages, different geographical areas will indicate tree or animal names that are specific to these areas. When the European side of the IE languages are examined, the tree or animal names will favor those found in its climate and when the Indian side of the languages are examined, the reference now will be to its flora and fauna. Colin Renfrew (1987) has pointed out how a circular logic has been used by linguists to justify what has already been implicit in their assumptions. Speaking of the work by Paul Friedrich (1970) on "Proto-Indo-European trees", Renfrew reminds us that the starting assumption there is that PIE was current in western Caspian and the Carpathians during the fourth millennium and the first centuries of the third millennium and then Friedrich proves that this was the PIE homeland! Reminds Renfrew: "[Friedrich's] assumption is highly questionable. So complete an adoption of one specific solution to the question of Indo-European origins is bound to have a considerable impact upon his analysis of the origins of tree-names, and the historical conclusions he reaches. It is scarcely surprising if his theory harmonizes with the historical reconstruction upon which it is based. It is perhaps reasonable that the historical linguistics should be based upon the archaeology, but that the archaeological interpretation should simultaneously be based upon the linguistic analysis gives serious cause for concern. Each discipline assumes that the other can offer conclusions based upon sound independent evidence, but in reality one begins where the other ends. They are both relying on each other to prop up their mutual thesis."
.We don't know who were the authors of the Vedas. They could have been bilinguals who knew `Dravidian' and `Vedic'; maybe their first language was really Dravidian even though they had Sanskrit names as has been true in South India for much of historical times; or they were purely Sanskrit speaking. No rhetoric or ideology can resolve this question. The use of a language in literature does not even mean that the speakers are a dominant elite.
.There are several problems with the idea of PIE. It is based on the hypothesis that languages are defined as fixed entities and they evolve in a biological sense. In reality, a language area is a complex, graded system of several languages and dialects of a family. The degree of homogeneity in a language area is a reflection of the linkages, or interaction within the area. For a language distributed widely in the ancient world, one would expect several dialects. There would be no standard proto-language. It is clear that language families belong to overlapping groups (Figure 1), because such a view allows us to represent better the complex history of the interactions amongst their ancestor languages. Such an overlap need not imply that the speakers of either group intruded into the overlapping region. We note further the warning by N.S. Trubetskoy (1939) that the presence of the same word in a number of languages need not suggest that these languages descended from a common parent: There is, then, no powerful ground for the assumption of a unitary Indogerman protolanguage, from which the individual Indogerman language groups would derive.
Figure 1: Overlapping language families
Figure 2: Indo-European and Indic families. The Indic family has the sub-families of North Indian and Dravidian
We know that the internal evidence of the Indian texts shows that the Vedas precede the Puranas. But since the Puranic themes are shown in the iconography of the Harappan times (2600-1900 BC), the Puranic material is taken to precede the Vedas so that the Vedas could be placed in the second millennium BC. I think the only logical resolution of all the archaeological and textual evidence is to assume that the Indic area became a single cultural area at least around 5000 BC. The Indian civilization was created by the speakers of many languages but the language of the earliest surviving literary expression was Vedic Sanskrit, that is itself connected to both the North and the South Prakrit languages, ie non-agglutinative Sanskrit and agglutinative Dravidic.
References
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Feuerstein, G. Kak, S. and Frawley, D. 1995. In Search of the Cradle of Civilization.
Wheaton.Friedrich, P. 1970. Proto-Indo-European Trees. Chicago.
Kak, S. 1994. On the classification of Indic languages. Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, 75,
185-195.
Kak, S. in press. Indic ideas in the Graeco-Roman world. Indian Historical Review, in
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Kramrisch, S. 1981. The Presence of Siva. Princeton UniversityPress.
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Trubetskoy, N.S. 1939. In Renfrew (1987) page 108.Vernant, J.-P. 1992. In Olender (1992).
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