Some important papers that discuss the three different possible loaning events of Indo-Iranian. It's well known that Indo-Iranian (henceforth, Aryan) had a limited agricultural vocabulary, and skipped many of the agriculture-related semantic shifts that characterize PIE > Proto-European as the livestock breeding Yamnaya shifted to a more farming culture after contact with the European Neolithic. Fatyanovo-Balanovo, the pre-Proto-Aryan culture, mostly survived of foraging and livestock breeding, with very little to no macrofossil evidence for any kind of agriculture, though some slash and burn has been suggested based on circumstantial evidence. This means it's important to pay close attention to the agricultural vocabulary of Aryan, since this would mostly have picked up from one of the many farming oriented Turan Neolithic societies in Central Asia, or later from the Harappans or Elamites. We also know that it's pretty likely that the Proto-Aryans (Abashevo? Sintashta-Petrovka?) were in direct contact with the Proto-Uralics (Sejma-Turbino Metallurgists?) and there is clear evidence of borrowings from Proto-Aryan into Uralic, though the reverse is less studied, and even lesser studied are possible Proto-Iranic and Proto-Indic borrowings in Uralic, as well as parallel borrowings by different branches of Uralic. Regardless, the Uralic borrowings are certain, and merit a review paper of their own.
The three kinds of loaning events in Aryan likely are
1) Into/from Uralic?
2) From BMAC/Turanian Neolithic?
3) From Dravidian/Language X into Indo-Aryan & Elamite > West Iranian?
The first one offers the best overview on the Uralic situation.
Indo-Iranian borrowings in Uralic : Critical overview of sound substitutions and distribution criterion
This dissertation discusses the Indo-Iranian loanwords in the Uralic languages. The loanwords that have been suggested in earlier research are critically analyzed and commented based on modern views of Uralic and Indo-Iranian historical phonology and etymology. The etymologies are analyzed on the basis of the general methods of loanword research: arguments of phonology, distribution and semantics are taken into account. In addition to the analyzis of older etymological proposals, also some new etymologies are presented. Also the research history of the topic is discussed. The aim of this study is to establish rules for the sound substitutions and bring new light to the relative chronology of the loanwords. Because the phoneme systems of Proto-Indo-Iranian, Proto-Iranian and later Iranian languages were very different from those of Proto-Uralic and its daughter languages, the phonemes of the Indo-Iranian donor languages have been substituted in various ways in the Uralic languages. Differences reflect both conditional developments (different substitutions in different environments) and chronological differences, and it is often difficult to distinguish between the two.
The second paper by Alexander Lubtosky reviews the substratum (collection of possible non-Indo-European origin words) in Aryan and lists out likely/unlikely inherited vocab, as well as the basic laws for establishing non-IE words in Aryan, and possible Wanderworts.
In my paper, I shall apply this methodology to the Indo-Iranian lexicon in search of loan words which have entered Proto-Indo-Iranian before its split into two branches. As a basis for my study I use the list, gleaned from Mayrhofer's EWAia, of all Sanskrit etyma which have Iranian correspondences, but lack clear cognates outside Indo-Iranian. The complete list of some 120 Indo-Iranian isolates is presented in the Appendix. The words of this list are by default characterized by the first of the above-mentioned criteria, viz. limited geographical distribution, but this in itself is not very significant because thelack of an Indo-European etymology can be accidental: either all other branches have lost the etymon preserved in Indo-Iranian, or we have not yet found the correct etymology. Only if aword has other features of a borrowing, must we seriously consider its being of foreign origin.The analysis of phonological, morphological and semantic peculiarities of our corpus will be presented in the following sections, but first I would like to make two remarks.
I use the term substratum for any donor language, without implying sociological differences in its status, so that substratum may refer to an adstratum or even superstratum. It's possible that Proto-Indo-Iranian borrowed words from more than one language and had thusmore than one substratum.Another point concerns dialect differentiation. In general, we can speak of language unity as long as the language is capable of carrying out common innovations, but this does not pre-clude profound differences among the dialects. In the case of Indo-Iranian, there may have been early differentiation between the Indo-Aryan and Iranian branches, especially if we assume that the Iranian loss of aspiration in voiced aspirated stops was a dialectal feature which Iranianshared with Balto-Slavic and Germanic (cf. Kortlandt 1978: 115). Nevertheless, Proto-Indo-Iranian for a long time remained a dialectal unity, possibly even up to the moment when the Indo-Aryans crossed the Hindukush mountain range and lost contact with the Iranians
The last paper is really a chapter by Martin Kümmel for the book 'Language Dispersals Beyond Farming' and so specifically takes a look at the agriculture related vocabulary of Aryan.
Agricultural terms in Indo-Iranian
The article investigates the agricultural lexicon of Indo-Iranian, especially its earlier records, and what it may tell us about the spread of farming. After some general remarks on “Neolithic” vocabulary, a short overview of the animal husbandry terminology shows that this field of vocabulary was evidently well established in Proto-Indo-Iranian, with many cognate terms. Words for cattle, horses, sheep and goats are well developed and mostly inherited, while evidence for pigs is more limited, ad the words for donkey and camel look like common loans. A more extensive discussion of plant terminology reveals that while some generic terms for grain are inherited, more specific words for different kinds of cereals show few inherited terms and/or irregular variation, and the same is even clearer for pulses and some other vegetables. The terminology for agricultural terminology is largely different from that of most European branches of Indo- European. The conclusion is that the cultural background behind these linguistic data points to spreading of a mainly pastoralist culture in the case of Indo-Iranian.
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