The Death of Proto-Indo-European fiction peddled by the lying bible thumping racist filth

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It is almost IMPOSSIBLE to find any field or theory where the
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https://medium.com/@subhashkak1/the-death-of-proto-indo-european-2ba0df1cb2cd

The Death of Proto-Indo-European

By Subhash Kak

Jul 2, 2018


In the 19th century, linguists came up with the idea that nearly all
modern European languages are descended from an ancestor language called
Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which they proposed was spoken prior to about
3500 BCE. The idea of PIE was to play a powerful role in recent world
history.

Inspired perhaps by the Biblical notion of an original language of the
Garden of Eden, linguists labored to reconstruct the vocabulary and
grammar of PIE, and for this they used theories related to sound shifts
and certain ideas about the antiquity of languages. A lot of “analysis”
went into finding the original homeland of PIE, and it was usually
located in Ukraine or Southern Russia.

A linguist named August Schleicher even created a fable called The Sheep
and the Horses in imagined PIE to amuse himself and future generations
of students.

The philologist Arthur de Gobineau argued that the languages of Europe
were closest to PIE, marking the Europeans for superior character and
access to scientific knowledge. From there the special role ordained for
the Europeans in maintaining colonies in Asia, Africa and the Americas
was not a big jump. British historians saw the British Empire as
historic fulfillment of a divine mission.

Trying to outdo the English and the French who had shut them out of the
closed markets of their colonies, the Nazis in Germany declared that
they were the master race, inhabiting a region not far from the homeland
of the PIE. Academics with minds marinated in 19th century racism
continue to spin the most fanciful derivations of PIE words.

All right, it is sad history. Shall we say it was a good idea that was
put to evil ends by unworthy people? That doesn’t make the theory wrong,
or give us license to announce the death of PIE.

PIE Homeland

PIE as generally understood considered the original homeland to be
somewhere in Europe, north of the Caucasus, and it assumes a certain
time span, considerably before the time for which we have records.

The first substantive records in any IE language are in Sanskrit. The
earliest period from which we have these records is conservatively taken
to be 2000 BCE and in fact could be half a millennium older if we
consider the astronomical evidence within the Vedic books, which has
become properly understood only in the recent decades.

Furthermore, the conservative date for the drying of the Sarasvati
River, the preeminent river of the Ṛgveda, extolled as going from the
mountain to the sea (RV 7.95.2), is seen as 2000 BCE. There is much
additional evidence related to the continuity in the arts and cuture and
the remembered tradition. The idea of PIE requires antiquity much
greater than that of the Vedas.

New research calls into question both the elements on which the idea of
PIE stands. In one recently reported research, bones of 45 ancient
humans from the Caucasus region, from a period some of which are as late
as 2500 BCE to 1200 BCE, were analyzed for their DNA. The research
showed that these ancient people moved predominantly from the south to
the north. This indicates that the IE languages perhaps arose south of
the Caucasus Mountains, spreading to other parts of Europe as people
migrated north from this region.

If PIE lay south of the Caucasus and Indo-European (IE) languages in
Europe are much younger than presumed before (and as late as 2000 BCE)
then there is no period that can be assigned to a hypothesized parent
language, and PIE is dead.

More on PIE and Archaeology

If the periods necessary for the evolution of modern IE languages from
PIE are no longer supported by the evidence, and if there was no PIE, we
must accept some other process, perhaps an amalgam of diffusion with
movement of people as the lesser vehicle, that led to the spread of IE
languages.

PIE is based on analogies and models from the hard sciences that do not
apply to language. Contrary to what is assumed in PIE, the scientific
study of genetics (a field that arose after the naïve genetic notions of
philology had become frozen) tells us that diversity arises out of the
complex relationship between the genes of a large host population and
not from a family of uniform characteristics.

The diversity of the languages around 4000 or 5000 BCE, the period when
the PIE speakers are supposed to have lived in their homeland, is likely
to have been much greater than the subsequent period, just as was seen
in America when the Europeans arrived.

The selection of the PIE homeland was based on a selective use of words
of the supposed common vocabulary of the IE languages. It was suggested
that since there are common words for many blood relatives, and not the
same number for in-laws, therefore in the original society the
relationship with the in-laws was not close. Going by this method, the
people in the homeland knew butter but not milk, and snow and feet but
not rain and hands.

This is not all. A certain chronology was assigned to the oral texts,
and then certain changes were postulated that agreed with the assumed
model. In circular reasoning, these changes were now taken as the proof
that the model was correct. The logic was somewhat like a fisherman
using a net of a certain cross-wire size and then arriving at the
inference that the lake has no fish below that size.

An attempt to connect archaeology to PIE was made by Marija Gimbutas in
her kurgan hypothesis. She traced the language back to the Yamnaya
people, herders from the southern grasslands of modern-day Ukraine, who
domesticated the horse.

But new research suggests that around 2500 BCE, Yamnaya genes replaced
about seventy-five percent of the existing human gene pool in Europe.
This is very late, and it leaves no room for the development of a PIE
within Europe.

Evidence from India

The evidence from India provides a picture quite consistent with the
facts that have emerged.

The earliest geography known to the Ṛgveda is the region of the Seven
Rivers in Northwest India, but this does not rule out the presence of
related languages beyond the borders of India. Our knowledge of Vedic
astronomy shows that the earliest remembered period in the hymns comes
from late 4th millennium or early 3rd millennium BCE, which is prior to
the supposed entry of the IE languages into Europe.

Later books, such as the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa, which belong to the 2nd
millennium BCE, speak of the expansion of the Vedic religion into
regions called Uttara Kuru and Uttara Madra beyond the Himalayas to the
northwest. Aitareya Br. 8.14 says Uttara Kuru had Vedic consecration for
their kings. Ptolemy knows of these regions as Ottorokorrha and
describes them lying between the Aral and the Caspian Seas and
Megasthenes and Strabo are emphatic that the Uttarakuruvah
[Hyperboreans] are connected with the Indians.

The connections between the Vedic and the Slavic people could have
emerged through the agency of the mediating Vedic states of Uttara Kuru
and Uttara Madra, and from them certain ideas were passed further on to
the languages of north and south Europe.

There is also evidence of the interaction between the Vedic people and
West Asians through the Mitanni Empire, which, in turn, explains many
commonalities between the Sanskritic and the Semitic worlds.

A reasonable way to understand the spread of IE languages is through the
process of diffusion together with some movement of people in a manner
that is not so different from the spread of Indian culture in Southeast
Asia.

PIE was based on many fanciful assumptions. In retrospect, we can
characterize the labors of the linguists who created it as no worse than
the scholiasts in the Middle Ages who used reasoning to determine how
many angels can be accommodated on the tip of a pin.

See also:
1.The Indian Caesar and the City
2.Vocabulary Diversity and Ancient Migrations