Ancient Indo European Languages

A fresh and original translation from Sanskrit of the dashrajnya hymn (hymn 7.18 of Rig Veda) describing this defining battle between Aryan king Sudas and his Aryan as well as non-Aryan foes. The decisive battle led to the uprooting of many tribes from the Sapta Sindhu area.

Many existing beliefs are shown to be merely due to misunderstandings. Further, it is shown that the existing translations fall well short of the true meaning.
For example, no Matsya tribe was involved in this battle.

Part One of this paper provides a case for rejecting the Autochthonous Aryan theory and proposes an alternative to the Aryan Migration Theory, i.e. it examines why the genetic input from Central Asia may have been extremely small and how the Spread of IE language and culture in India might have occurred in trickle in scenarios i.e. when movements of IE speakers were small. It suggests that the IE speakers first migrated into and settled in the northernmost tip of the subcontinent, trickled into the plains due to climatic changes in the northernmost tip of India, synthesized with the Harappans, fused with them and got the upper hand when the transfers of population from North-West India into the Gangetic plains took place around 1900 BC, and then desynthesized with whatever was left of the Harappan civilization till it vanished around 1400 BC. Cultural contacts with West Asia and then with South India would complete the process of Spread of IE language and culture in India. This pape...

Pour ne pas abandonner a une pure equivocite la polysemie du terme grec “Sophia”, lequel va de la simple sagacite du dechiffreur d'enigmes a la science universelle parce que premiere, nous proposons de relire les textes fondateurs de la philosophie a la lumiere d'une methode nouvelle: le comparatisme indo-europeen, methode qui a deja prouve ses vertus systematisantes en grammaire et en mythologie. L'Inde, ayant elle aussi valorisee la parole vraie comme une figure de l'excellence spirituelle supreme, occupe dans cette comparaison une place privilegiee. La fameuse " theorie des idees " de Platon, veritable cœur de la sagesse grecque, se revele ainsi deductible de la difference archaique entre noms de la langue des dieux et noms de la langue des hommes, difference instituee notamment par les poetes vediques et presente dans la plupart des cultures indo-europeennes. Alors s'estompe l'antagonisme entre les champions de la parole que sont les sophistes e...

It will be argued that the cuneiform writing system, the Sumerian and Akkadian lexicon, and the place names of Southern Mesopotamia preserve traces of an early Indo-European language, indeed the earliest by more than a millennium. Furthermore, this evidence is detailed and consistent enough to reconstruct a number of features of the proposed Indo-European language, Euphratic, and to sketch an outline of Euphratean cultural pat- terns. © 2008 Bull. Georg. Natl. Acad. Sci.

Based on previous research on the very strong correlations between the Burushaski and Phrygian languages, expanded in this article, we discuss in detail the direct mythological correspondence between Burushaski hargín ‘dragon’ and Phrygian argwitas ‘dragon’. We also contemplate a possible etymology for Indo-European *silVbVr- ‘silver’. The proposition of a historical link between Burushaski and Phrygian is reconsidered, as well as the gene evidence that locates the Burusho within North-Western Indo-European. Keywords: Burushaski, Phrygian, genetic classification, IndoEuropean, mythology, names for ‘dragon’ and ‘silver’.

This hymn pertains to the river crossing event of the Rigveda.

A massive and continuous flood stopped the Bharatas in their tracks. Their guide Vishwamitra then organised a sacrifice and composed this hymn to mollify the rivers' fury. Amazingly, the rivers did subside for a while, just enough for the army to cross over.

This fresh translation of Rig Veda's hymn 3.33 brings out the meaning clearly. It shows there was no real or imaginary dialogue between the sage Vishwamitra and the rivers. Rather, this was Vishwamitra's prayer to the rivers in which the Bharata army joins in at the very end.

The article explores the syntax of Hittite mān “if/when”. It is standardly supposed to be one of the few Hittite subordinators which is clause first/initial. I provide data that it can be clause second, just like virtually any other Hittite subordinator. The issue thereby sheds light on the more general issue of distribution of subordinators in clause initial/first vs clause second positions in Hittite which is argued to be a common ½ position.

This paper presents a detailed etymological analysis of words for ‘fox’ in Indo-European (IE) languages. We argue that most IE ‘fox’-words go back to two distinct PIE stems: *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- ‘fox’ and *ulp-i- ‘wildcat, fox’. We provide a revised analysis of the etymology and relationship among the various Indo-Iranian ‘fox’-words, and we argue that Baltic preserves remnants of the ḱ-suffix found in Greek, Armenian, and Indo-Iranian. Additionally, we describe how *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- was borrowed from Indo-Iranian into Uralic and we outline the relationship among the reflexes of this word in various Uralic languages. Finally, we reconstruct the paradigm of *h₂lō̆p-eḱ- as a unique type of hysterodynamic stem, which nonetheless has close parallels in PIE. We observe that a similar ḱ-suffix is found in PIE adjectives and animal names.

Abstract This paper aims to ascertain the place of the Ukrainian linguist Oleksandr Popov (1855–80) in the history of Indo-European and typological studies. Remaining largely unknown in the west, Popov left a trailblazing contribution to the reconstruction of IE noun inflection. Critical of Curtius’ approach nourished by the idea of linguistic absolutism, Popov offered a systematic analysis of the accusative, nominative, and vocative cases taken in their interdependency. In view of the interchangeability of the independent accusative and the independent nominative, Popov argued that the accusative case might have emerged before the vocative and even prior to the nominative, with a possibility of the nominative arising before the accusative. The Ukrainian linguist based his reconstruction on the distinction between the ‘active’ and ‘passive’ entities encoded by the nominative in *-s and the accusative in *-m respectively, thus anticipating discussion of the active typology of Proto-IE in the 20th century. By providing a detailed survey of Popov’s theory, the author highlights its pioneering character in the light of modern comparative-historical and typological views.

Recent challenges to Chomsky's poverty of the stimulus thesis for language acquisition suggest that children's primary data may carry "indirect evidence" about linguistic constructions despite containing no instances of them. Indirect evidence is claimed to suffice for grammar acquisition, without need for innate knowledge. This article reports experiments based on those of

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Paradigmatic morphology is a central and crucial concept for several branches of comparative linguistics. The observation of shared paradigms in languages which were not suspected of having a common ancestry stands at the cradle of modern genealogical linguistics and dominates the discussion(s) about not firmly established or merely putative language families or phyla to this day, the very different morphological techniques different languages use for the formation of paradigms mark the beginning of language typology, now a major pillar of the language sciences, and the question, to which degree languages—closely, distantly, or not at all related with each other—may borrow morphological paradigms (part or whole) from each other or might have done so in the past (which, if true and not properly detected, might lead to superficially persuasive, but factually erroneous, claims and hypotheses of genealogical relatedness) continues to be an important theoretical and practical issue in co...

This paper reports the findings of a study designed to investigate the types of supportive discourse moves employed by Persian speakers in their Requestive Speech Acts. 372 respondents took a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with six scenarios ranging from formal to informal ...

Ancient Greek features a wide array of means to encode reciprocity. Even though reference grammars do mention most of these strategies, they have not been brought together and compared in a systematic way so far. In this paper, we provide a thorough corpus-based description of the three most widespread reciprocal markers in Homeric Greek: the pronoun allḗlōn, the middle voice, and the use of preverbs. Our analysis is couched within current descriptive models of reciprocal constructions developed in linguistic typology. As we argue, Homeric Greek offers a remarkably complex picture, whereby these strategies synchronically cover different semantic and syntactic sub-domains of reciprocity, and thus partly stand in complementary distribution. Already in Homer, the pronoun allḗlōn is the most productive marker of reciprocal situations, with the middle voice and preverbs playing a more limited role. By adopting a diachronic perspective, we also show that this distribution can partly be ex...

In this study, we present and analyze co-constructions from L2 English data collected at the European School in Luxembourg. Co-constructions are morpho-syntactic structures split across two speakers, in which a second speaker completes a grammatical structure initiated by the first speaker in conversation. The corpus features multilingual 13-14 year old language learners interacting in an English classroom as they work on a collaborative group-writing task. Five types of co-constructions emerge in our data: locative phrases, want/let, copulas, transitives, and nominal compounds. The analysis centers on the morpho-syntactic structures involved, with consideration of the sequential environment where co-constructions occur. The featured examples complement and expand what we know about co-constructions in two ways. First, the data suggest that L2 language learners engage in co-constructions just as native speakers (NS) do, irrespective of their L2 learner status. Second, L2 co-construc...

This thesis describes and analyzes multiple preverb composites in a sample of ancient Indo-European languages, including Vedic (Rg-Veda), Homeric Greek (Iliad, Odyssey), Old Church Slavic (Codices Marianus, Zographensis, Suprasliensis), and Old Irish (Milan and Priscian Glosses). While preverbs and single preverbation are two well-studied topics in Indo-European linguistics, this is not the case for multiple preverb composites, whereby two or more such morphemes attach onto the same simplex verb (e.g. Ved. adhi ni √dhā- ‘over-down-put’ →‘deposit for’, Hom.Gr. ep-ana-tithēmi ‘on-upward-put’ → ‘shut’, OCS prědъ-po-lagati ‘in front of-along-lay’ → ‘distribute to’, OIr. do·aithchuiredar ‘to-back-put’ → ‘return’). After an introduction describing the aims of this work and the sample texts, the present thesis opens with a theoretical chapter devoted to the tools necessary to study preverbs (Cognitive Grammar, grammaticalization theory, semantic roles, aspect and actionality), and with a g...

In my study The Odyssey of Gauls and Slavs from North-Western India to Europe, I conclude, on the basis of linguistic, genetic and archaeological studies that the peopling of Europe took place from N-W India, Pakistan, Iran, the Caucasus and Anatolia, creating a proto-Indo-Mediterranean culture.

This work starts with the premise that the Albanian language is one of most ancient languages in the world and stands in the root of the common trunk of the Indo-European languages. The common pre-Indo-European origin is preserved in the present Albanian language almost in the same conditions that this language was spoken 2-3 thousand years ago. Further in the work arguments are set forth regarding Albanian language priorities as a synthetic-analytic type language and the role of the Albanian language as the key in analyzing the Indo-European language system is presented. Regardless the tendencies toward analytic features the Albanian language, at the same time, preserves also useful elements from the synthetic features. Continuing, the Albanian language geopolitical positioning is presented from the point of view of the Indo-European languages differentiation and concentration in the EU context and Euro-Atlantic countries integration, supposing the conditions of each language in re...

For thousands of years the Eurasian steppes have been a centre of human migrations and cultural change. Here we sequence the genomes of 137 ancient humans (about 1× average coverage), covering a period of 4,000 years, to understand the population history of the Eurasian steppes after the Bronze Age migrations. We find that the genetics of the Scythian groups that dominated the Eurasian steppes throughout the Iron Age were highly structured, with diverse origins comprising Late Bronze Age herders, European farmers and southern Siberian hunter-gatherers. Later, Scythians admixed with the eastern steppe nomads who formed the Xiongnu confederations, and moved westward in about the second or third century bc, forming the Hun traditions in the fourth–fifth century ad, and carrying with them plague that was basal to the Justinian plague. These nomads were further admixed with East Asian groups during several short-term khanates in the Medieval period. These historical events transformed th...

There are two competing hypotheses for the origin of the Indo-European language family. The conventional view places the homeland in the Pontic steppes about 6000 years ago. An alternative hypothesis claims that the languages spread from Anatolia with the expansion of farming 8000 to 9500 years ago. We used Bayesian phylogeographic approaches, together with basic vocabulary data from 103 ancient and contemporary Indo-European languages, to explicitly model the expansion of the family and test these ...

The Hittite state was founded c. 1650 BC and developed thereafter. The Hittites were able to establish their rule in Anatolia’s hostile landscape and overcome the difficulties it presented to create an empire, an objective that they achieved with the aid of their remarkable organizational skills. Despite the frequent occurrence of geographical names in the state archives, only a small number of them can be safely localized and, although Hittitology is a 100-year-old field, the regional names have only recently been determined. This article serves as a general introduction to the Hittites as well as a review of the problem of geographical names, revealing the complexity it presents.