copernicus

Phaedrus, sorry to have annoyed you with some facts about writing systems. You seemed interested in learning something about the history of devanagari, and the web link I gave you merely documented what LP had told you. It is well-known that all modern alphabetic writing descends from hieroglyphics, and you don't need to ask people in a web discussion group to find that information out.

I would not dream of butting into a private conversation, but most of us just use email for that purpose. If you don't want to attract comments from others, then don't post in a public forum.

As for your last "response" to my post, I found nothing substantive to respond to. You merely repeated previous positions. You seem to want hard evidence for theories that you don't like (the idea of an Indo-European invasion or non-Indian urheimat), but you're quite content with little or no evidence for theories that you do like (the idea that PIE originated in northern India).

phaedrus

copernicus

Umm didnt want to get into one of these tit-for-tat conversations, but alas....

Phaedrus, sorry to have annoyed you with some facts about writing systems. You seemed interested in learning something about the history of devanagari, and the web link I gave you merely documented what LP had told you

*yawn* Facts which anyone can access (duh!!) and in case you didnt "comprehend" my earlier post, this is a discussion where participants ask each other their opinions on the subject. No one should presume the other persons' knowledge ......

It is well-known that all modern alphabetic writing descends from hieroglyphics, and you don't need to ask people in a web discussion group to find that information out.

sigh….refer above mate and it is a discussion and during the course of such a discussion, participants ask each questions to each other to ascertain the others position on a particular topic, and here it was how the writing came into being in the subcontinent.

I would not dream of butting into a private conversation, but most of us just use email for that purpose. If you don't want to attract comments from others, then don't post in a public forum.

The problem is people like you tend to forget that in the first place you are supposed to respond to posts directed at you and talk about others. And as I have pointed out, you haven’t added value to my knowledge or the thread by pointing out the obvious which even a teenybopper would have found out by doing a web search. Try to realize the context in which comments are made before starting to shoot out blanks.

As for your last "response" to my post, I found nothing substantive to respond to. You merely repeated previous positions. You seem to want hard evidence for theories that you don't like (the idea of an Indo-European invasion or non-Indian urheimat), but you're quite content with little or no evidence for theories that you do like (the idea that PIE originated in northern India).

Ohh yeah, whenever you find your position and comprehension levels questions you can always fall back on this position. And you yet again seem to repeat your presumptions. A simple question didn’t you understand this bit in my last post to you????? In case you didn’t “COMPREHEND” my last post…..here it is again….

Having failed to make your case in favor of an Indian homeland for Proto-Indo-European, you fall back on the straw man argument over whether the migration was violent or peaceful, something for which there is no solid evidence one way or the other

When did i even try to make a case for an Indian homeland? I just provided a link to an article when the thread started moving towards linguistic evidence.

This is where this whole thing about homeland started. Does my original reference to this particular article in any way suggest that i was making a case for an "indian homeland"?? Observe the word "crutch".

And there is no solid evidence for anything, only theories based on the current corpus of evidence be it archeological or linguistic or genetic..

All of my posts are still there for anyone to read. Unfortunately for your case, so are yours, eh "mate"?

Zigjackly and since i had a very good sleep, i'm in the mood to spend some time pasting something

copernicus

I didn't presume your knowledge, and I gave you a reference to back up the facts, as they are understood by most scholars. You demonstrated an ignorance of those facts, and you asked for information in a public forum. I understand your use of sarcasm and condescension as a means of trying to recover your dignity. Perhaps I could have been more diplomatic in the way I responded to your post. My apologies if I've offended you.

You keep accusing me of failing to respond to all your points, and it is true that I don't respond to every statement you make, many of which are redundant. This kind of forum doesn't lend itself to that kind of detailed exchange, as it leads to a combinatorial explosion of textual nitpicking. Your posts tend to be quite lengthy, and I have asked you to try to be more succinct. So, in the name of good netiquette, I edit replies down to what I think are the essential points, and we don't always agree on what is essential or what has received a satisfactory reply.

Here is an example of a typical exchange between us:
I've made clear in sufficient detail (to me, anyway) why I thought the Elst article was weak, and lpetrich did produce the kind of detailed critique that you seemed to want. The fact that you constantly hold it forth as evidence that the "linguistic evidence is weak" means that you give it some credence. Your "crutch" remark was a metaphorical barb directed at linguistic data, not the ideas in the article. You keep calling attention to that word as if it implied that you were taking no position on the article itself. The fact that you continue to rely on it as evidence for your views belies your demurrals about the north Indian "urheimat" proposal. You claim you never asserted it, yet you continued to defend the article that asserted it. Why don't you answer this question? What do YOU think is more likely given all that you know about Harappans and Aryans--that Proto-Indo-European originated inside or outside of India? Stop saying that you never made any claims. Just tell us your current opinion, no matter how tentative.

Regarding the Keyoner quote, you think that you responded to my criticism of you by saying that the single site in question was so important and the individual involved was so distinguished. In fact, this is nothing more than the tired old fallacy of "appeal to authority". It did not address my point at all, which was that you can't use a single archeological site (no matter how important) or the status of an individual to make the generalization that there was no "invasion". There could be many explanations for the state of that one site that are compatible with the invasion theory. For example, it might not have been populated at the time of the invasion. The Harappan culture could have collapsed long before the Indo-Europeans arrived. Or the inhabitants could have surrendered peacefully. It doesn't take a genius to poke holes in your counterevidence to the AIT.

If you believe Parpola's theory, there were two waves of "invaders". Maybe the first wave found the land as uninhabited as the moon, or maybe the locals welcomed them with open arms. The second wave--that of the tribes we now call "Aryan"--was almost certainly violent, as it is (according to Parpola) recorded in the Hindu literature. The point of all this is that the Aryans themselves were Indo-Europeans and their language and culture were imported from outside of India. This is the essential claim of the so-called "AIT" or "AMT". I think that I made this point earlier, and you just don't seem to accept it. Let's move on.

A final question: Do you accept the view that devanagari essentially derives from external sources and is not evolved out of the harappan script? I don't recall you taking a stand on this. What is your current view, given what you now know?

[ August 16, 2001: Message edited by: copernicus ]

lpetrich

LP:
India is not the only place with a literacy gap; Greece had also had one.

Phaedrus:
What would the gap suggest? And why didnt the residents share their script with the incoming populations?

LP:
That literacy gaps have happened more than once.

As to why the script was not shared, that's an important and interesting question.
I suspect that the script was used only by a certain subset of society,
and that when that subset was dispersed or destroyed, the script went with it.
But whatever had happened, it had happened more than once in humanity's recorded history.

That was when the Brahmi script was invented.

Phaedrus:
Thats fine, what i am asking is, why did it take them so many years to invent the script and if they didnt have any inkling about writing, how were they able to invent writing which is similar to semitic after so much time passed since their arrival in the sub-continent.?

LP:
The Brahmi script was not invented from scratch, but was either partially borrowed from some Semitic script or else inspired by some such script. Imagine some trader visiting the Middle East and returning with news of something very interesting that his fellow traders there had been doing: they had made marks that represent speech, with a mark for each speech sound. So he decides to do that with his native language, and the rest is history.

For some reason, written language is very difficult to invent from scratch; that has been done only a few times in humanity's history. However, it is much easier to acquire an existing writing system, especially an alphabetic one, and stimulus-diffusion writing invention of writing has happened several times. The very idea that writing is possible has sometimes inspired its invention.

What would you consider proof, Phaedrus?

Phaedrus:
Archealogical evidence and clear linguistic proof of the tribes having knowledge of building chariots and the description of the path they took to the indus valley and carrying of parts of the chariots in the moutain terrains and assembling the same in the valleys as u postulated.

LP:
And what would you consider specific evidence of that? One serious difficulty with the archeology of certain sorts of nomadic tribes is that they leave very little archeologically-accessible evidence behind. And if the incoming Aryans had been like that, which is very likely, then we are stuck without whatever it is that Phaedrus considers proof.

The early Iranians were culturally similar; there are remarkable similarities, as Witzel and others have pointed out.

Phaedrus:
How does this answer my question ?... And how come nomadic tribes have learnt how to build chariots { i wonder how a nomadic horde of barbarians wrote (or constructed verbally) books like the Vedas }? And if they had the knowledge, are there any other sites which fall in the "supposed path" they took to the subcontinent, which have the remains?

LP:
Chariots were invented in the south Russian steppes at about 2000 BCE or thereabouts -- invented by the same sort of "nomadic horde of barbarians". Are you suggesting that such people could not have invented chariots? And if not, then why not?

And as to having verbally constructed works like the Vedas, it is possible to be completely illiterate while memorizing a great quantity of oral lore. Consider how the Homeric epics had been transmitted; these had been recited orally by professional bards for at least a couple of centuries before they were officially written down.

The Harappan society may have collapsed before the invasion.

Phaedrus:
And whom did the tribes "invade" as you keep saying???? A ghost town??

LP:
Yes, ghost towns. And in their later years, the Harappan cities had clearly been on the way to becoming ghost towns.

copernicus

In fact, toddlers have been known to invent spelling for English words based on the names of alphabetic letters on toys. (See work by Charles Read)

As you know, alphabetic writing is the most recent type of writing, having been preceded by syllabaries. What gave rise to alphabetic writing was the borrowing of syllabaries into languages that had different syllable structure. Devanagari was not quite the pure alphabet that the Greeks developed, but its inventors did the same thing that the Greeks did--created vowel symbols that were distinct from the consonants. Writers also used a slant stroke below the symbol to indicate the pure consonant. Indians, like the Greeks, developed a very advanced linguistic science, and much of this surely developed from the way their writing system made them aware of the phonemic principle.

Yes, the Indo-European culture seems to have been suffused with the bardic tradition. In fact, the Celts actually suppressed writing during the Roman period. Consequently, we have very little knowledge of the Celtic languages that were spoken from Ireland to Asia Minor. Luckily for the Indic branch, their societies were heavily exposed to the Semitic writing systems. Harappans, like the Egyptians, may have limited writing to their priest caste. Look at what happened to hieroglyphics. It was lost until Champollion's work on the Rosetta Stone led to its rediscovery. We have not yet found a Rosetta Stone for Harappan.

[ August 17, 2001: Message edited by: copernicus ]

phaedrus

copernicus

I didn't presume your knowledge, and I gave you a reference to back up the facts, as they are understood by most scholars. You demonstrated an ignorance of those facts, and you asked for information in a public forum.

Sigh you continue to display your poor levels of comprehension inspite of me trying to explain to you why asking the other person a question doesnt indicate lack of knowledge rather it indicates clarifying positions.

I understand your use of sarcasm and condescension as a means of trying to recover your dignity. Perhaps I could have been more diplomatic in the way I responded to your post. My apologies if I've offended you.

Well atleast you were able to comprehend that part. Dont apologise my friend, i guess its just genetic Not your fault you see. And I am here to learn and understand and share rather than being bothered about dignity on trivial issues which you seem to be doing

You keep accusing me of failing to respond to all your points, and it is true that I don't respond to every statement you make, many of which are redundant. This kind of forum doesn't lend itself to that kind of detailed exchange, as it leads to a combinatorial explosion of textual nitpicking. Your posts tend to be quite lengthy, and I have asked you to try to be more succinct. So, in the name of good netiquette, I edit replies down to what I think are the essential points, and we don't always agree on what is essential or what has received a satisfactory reply.

Well quite a lengthy paragraph, which in a nutshell seems to indicate that you will use your own parameters to “wiggle out” whenever you cant substantiate your own statements. Netiquette?? Yeah sure, you have displayed that for sure in this thread and forum. Wonder why i dont have such conversations with other participants? Maybe i respect their views/knowledge and they are more interested in sharing of views rather than being obtuse?? And being solipsistic in nature does not help in a public forum Textual nitpicking ??? I would call it exposing lack of logical sense.

I've made clear in sufficient detail (to me, anyway) why I thought the Elst article was weak, and lpetrich did produce the kind of detailed critique that you seemed to want. The fact that you constantly hold it forth as evidence that the "linguistic evidence is weak" means that you give it some credence. Your "crutch" remark was a metaphorical barb directed at linguistic data, not the ideas in the article. You keep calling attention to that word as if it implied that you were taking no position on the article itself.

I don’t understand it, you seem to understand my metaphorical usage and yet seem to think I have taken a position on the article. {given Elst’s reputation among indologists (which I have already indicated earlier) tends to make me cautious }. I give it credence as to how linguistic evidence could be tweaked around, a point I made earlier and which you don’t comprehend. As I keep repeating myself what is linguistics, can it in isolation provide proof? As Renfrew rightly pointed out, it has to be a combination of various disciplines. And no you didn’t make anything clear as I have pointed below….

The fact that you continue to rely on it as evidence for your views belies your demurrals about the north Indian "urheimat" proposal. You claim you never asserted it, yet you continued to defend the article that asserted it.

Unadulterated crap….yet again I say to you, instead of shooting your mouth, show me even one post where I defended the article or made a case for a indian homeland??? I was merely asking the participants why they find the article totally wrong, and here is what our final conversation on the issue was….
What say you now?

What do YOU think is more likely given all that you know about Harappans and Aryans--that Proto-Indo-European originated inside or outside of India? Stop saying that you never made any claims. Just tell us your current opinion, no matter how tentative.

Nothing is conclusive and we require more concrete proof to talk about either option. Though I am aware of current stand of the issue among indologists and the ongoing discussions among them.

Regarding the Keyoner quote, you think that you responded to my criticism of you by saying that the single site in question was so important and the individual involved was so distinguished. In fact, this is nothing more than the tired old fallacy of "appeal to authority".

Appeal to authority??? And what have you done through out the thread?? Gave your own research findings??? For example, when you pointed out to the harappa site (which btw everyone was aware of ) and the conclusions of three scholars on the Indus script???? Isnt that appeal to authority, or as usual “in your mind” it is right???
You said “others show evidence of a violent end” what are these sites??? You for one keep talking in generics and not facts.

. For example, it might not have been populated at the time of the invasion. The Harappan culture could have collapsed long before the Indo-Europeans arrived. Or the inhabitants could have surrendered peacefully. It doesn't take a genius to poke holes in your counterevidence to the AIT.

So we are back at square one….so whom did the incoming populations invade then? And all those are just speculations and cant be backed up by any concrete evidence for now. And how did you poke holes? You just keep poking yourself all the time and think “in your mind” that your doing that to others.

If you believe Parpola's theory, there were two waves of "invaders". Maybe the first wave found the land as uninhabited as the moon, or maybe the locals welcomed them with open arms. The second wave--that of the tribes we now call "Aryan"--was almost certainly violent, as it is (according to Parpola) recorded in the Hindu literature. The point of all this is that the Aryans themselves were Indo-Europeans and their language and culture were imported from outside of India. This is the essential claim of the so-called "AIT" or "AMT". I think that I made this point earlier, and you just don't seem to accept it. Let's move on.

Nope you kept harping about invasion and violent invasion and what not and now you say this. As indicated by parpola ( appeal to authority?? ) if at all there was an invasion it was outside the continent.

A final question: Do you accept the view that devanagari essentially derives from external sources and is not evolved out of the harappan script? I don't recall you taking a stand on this.

I know what the academic stand on the issue (ie, IE origin), which is what I thought till I got involved in this discussion. But since the start of the thread have been reading the posts at some indology discussion lists and doing some research of my own and currently changed my stance to “not sure”.

So basically my take out on the whole issue is nothing is final and all we have are hypotheses, some of them currently more credible than the others. We need lot more archeological evidence and other types of evidence before saying AMT is correct or Out of India theory. I am aware of the current stance of most of the indologists that the latter would run into some rough weather compared to the former, but I will just keep my views open and continue to follow the research being done.

I suggest that you take a look at these discussion lists where you can follow that latest (for example, Sumero Dravidian links..etc…http://loga.tripod.com/tdraphil5.htm, ancient sea-farers and how some challenge the generally accepted linguistic methodology….etc) among the scholars indulging in the area. Beware they too indulge in tit-for-tat ;-) and bickering…but some work is done alright
http://www.indology.findhere.com/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indology

Viewpoints

About the comment that illiteracy and rote memorization of reasonably complex ideas goes together, I would say that it *is* possible, but what argues against that being the case with the transmission of vedic wisdom is the vast ritualisitc tradition as well as the humongous corpus of knowledge that came down. We should also not lose sight of the epic commentaries that were composed on vedic concepts, which would presuppose not only rote memorization and downward transmission in the oral tradition but also in-depth analysis and understanding of notions that are even in this day and age beyond easy grasp of most lay individuals.

phaedrus

LP

That literacy gaps have happened more than once.

As to why the script was not shared, that's an important and interesting question.
I suspect that the script was used only by a certain subset of society,and that when that subset was dispersed or destroyed, the script went with it.But whatever had happened, it had happened more than once in humanity's recorded history.

Umm as i mentioned in the previoius, what would the gap suggest?

Now if you say it was used by only a subset and yet the residents of Harappa have moved away before the incoming populations arrived, how could they have been destroyed or dispersed? And what about the speculation that the indus language could be similar to Brahui and kurukh? And take a look at www.indusscript.net....and those disucssion lists which i have posted in the response for copernicus, lots of food for thought there.

The Brahmi script was not invented from scratch, but was either partially borrowed from some Semitic script or else inspired by some such script. Imagine some trader visiting the Middle East and returning with news of something very interesting that his fellow traders there had been doing: they had made marks that represent speech, with a mark for each speech sound. So he decides to do that with his native language, and the rest is history.

Umm now comes a small problem. If we look at the traditional lore of the Purânas and the testimony of the Pali canon, Magadha witnessed great and prosperous empires (say like the Nandas), a long time before the Mauryan dynasty. Do we assume that practical affairs such as the keeping of records and accounts in a fabulously wealthy empire like that of the Nandas could have been kept in order without any form of writing at all ??

And what would you consider specific evidence of that? One serious difficulty with the archeology of certain sorts of nomadic tribes is that they leave very little archeologically-accessible evidence behind. And if the incoming Aryans had been like that, which is very likely, then we are stuck without whatever it is that Phaedrus considers proof.

Exactly my point, so we sit and speculate what happened so many years based on some literary works and our perception of the structure of the same. Dont you think it is far-fetched? How many times linguistic predictions were proven to be right by later finds?

Chariots were invented in the south Russian steppes at about 2000 BCE or thereabouts -- invented by the same sort of "nomadic horde of barbarians". Are you suggesting that such people could not have invented chariots? And if not, then why not?

Could you provide a link for that?

And as to having verbally constructed works like the Vedas, it is possible to be completely illiterate while memorizing a great quantity of oral lore. Consider how the Homeric epics had been transmitted; these had been recited orally by professional bards for at least a couple of centuries before they were officially written down.

Umm i thought my question implied why would nomadic tribes indulge in construction of such oral epics? Isnt that the forte of established civilizations?

Yes, ghost towns. And in their later years, the Harappan cities had clearly been on the way to becoming ghost towns.

How can anyone invade a ghost town? Here is an article I found which sort of gives the overall view A mystifying script

What about the indigenous cultural continuity as suggested by Shaffer?

And finally anything in response to the “what happened to this series”?

Off me goes to home...fagged out....

lpetrich

So what? This arcane knowledge can be transmitted down the generations even if only some small subset of the population understands it; consider many of the more technical sorts of things in our society.

And continuing with the analogy with the Homeric epics, we find that they transmit some interesting details of Mycenaean times, such as boar's-tusk helmets. These had gone out of style after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces, meaning that descriptions of them had been faithfully preserved for half a millennium before those descriptions were written down.

Also, the Iliad has the interesting curiosity that the soldiers in it go to battle riding chariots, but that they get off of chariots in order to fight. It is as if chariots had been remembered by not how to fight with them; this would be likely if chariots had become uncommon in the Greek Dark Ages (that literacy gap).

Finally, the Iliad has only one mention of writing, 6:150-190, and that is of some tablet with magic signs on it that was described as very wicked.

In conclusion, it is clear that the Indian literacy gap, like the Greek one, had been partially filled with a tradition of memorizing big epics. But there is a difference in cultural continuity with the previous literate period: Greece's oral tradition had many memories of the Mycenaeans, while India's had no clear memory of the Harappans.

lpetrich

[a lot of stuff by Phaedrus and Copernicus on netiquette and the like...]

Phaedrus:
[about Elst] I give it credence as to how linguistic evidence could be tweaked around, a point I made earlier and which you don’t comprehend. As I keep repeating myself what is linguistics, can it in isolation provide proof? As Renfrew rightly pointed out, it has to be a combination of various disciplines. And no you didn’t make anything clear as I have pointed below….

LP:
So what? That's typical example of your dragging in irrelevant issues and constructing straw theories, Phaedrus. Linguistic evidence is NOT used in isolation; the positions that Elst criticizes are examples of linguistic evidence used alongside of other evidence, such as the distribution of wild plants and animals. Domestic ones are better suited for this sort of work, however, because they lack the circumstances that cause transference in the names for wild ones, such as moving from the range of one variety to that of a similar-looking variety.

Phaedrus:
So we are back at square one….so whom did the incoming populations invade then? ...

LP:
The descendants of the Harappans.

Phaedrus:
Umm as i mentioned in the previoius, what would the gap suggest?

LP:
That the authors of the Vedas had been unfamiliar with the Harappans, giving a sequence like

Later (had writing)
Vedas (had no writing)
Harappans (had writing)

Phaedrus:
Now if you say it was used by only a subset and yet the residents of Harappa have moved away before the incoming populations arrived, how could they have been destroyed or dispersed?

Phaedrus:
And what about the speculation that the indus language could be similar to Brahui and kurukh? ...

LP:
Which is what the AIT guys say, guys like Parpola and Mahadevan; they propose that the Harappans had spoken a Dravidian language.

Phaedrus:
Umm now comes a small problem. If we look at the traditional lore of the Purânas and the testimony of the Pali canon, Magadha witnessed great and prosperous empires (say like the Nandas), a long time before the Mauryan dynasty. Do we assume that practical affairs such as the keeping of records and accounts in a fabulously wealthy empire like that of the Nandas could have been kept in order without any form of writing at all ??

LP:
We can check on whether there is any writing to be found in Nanda remains.

Phaedrus:
... How many times linguistic predictions were proven to be right by later finds?

LP:
Consider Mycenaean Greek and Hittite.

Mycenaean Greek had separate symbols for syllables with Kw, as opposed to those with K, T, and P, where the capital letters represent consonants with the same articulation, but with different voicing (T means t, th, and d); this phonetic value is deduced from Indo-European comparative linguistics, and it represents a set of sounds that was turned into other sounds (K, T, P) in the classical-Greek dialects (not to mention the modern-Greek ones!). Thus, "horse" is i-kwo in the Mycenaean records and hippos in classical Greek (kw->p), and "four" is kwe-to-ro in Mycenaean and tettares/tessares in classical Greek (kw->t). The Kw is evident in the Latin forms equus and quattuor.

Hittite had -hh- where most IE languages have no special sounds, but where the presence of "laryngeals" had been deduced. For example, Greek pu:r, Hittite pahhur, "fire".

Phaedrus:
Umm i thought my question implied why would nomadic tribes indulge in construction of such oral epics? Isnt that the forte of established civilizations?

LP:
So you are claiming that only settled people would ever be willing to compose big orally-transmitted epics?

Among nomadic people, the transmitters of these epics would wander along with the rest of the group.

Yes, ghost towns. And in their later years, the Harappan cities had clearly been on the way to becoming ghost towns.

Phaedrus:
How can anyone invade a ghost town? ...

LP:
E-Z. Just walk in. Phaedrus, your kvetching strikes me as EXTREMELY stupid. It makes me wonder how serious you really are, Phaedrus.