Indo-European linguists (IEL) attempt to study the history of languages by reconstructing hypothetical words from cognates attested in real languages. For example, a hypothetical proto word *snusos meaning daughter-in-law has been reconstructed based on the following cognates attested in real languages (McWhorter 2001): Sanskrit: snusha, Greek: nuos, Old English: snoru, Armenian: nu, Russian: snokha, Albanian: nuse, Latin: nurus.
Limitations of Indo-European Linguistics
Mayuresh Kelkar
Indo-European linguists (IEL) attempt to study the history of languages by reconstructing hypothetical words from cognates attested in real languages. For example, a hypothetical proto word *snusos meaning daughter-in-law has been reconstructed based on the following cognates attested in real languages (McWhorter 2001): Sanskrit: snusha, Greek: nuos, Old English: snoru, Armenian: nu, Russian: snokha, Albanian: nuse, Latin: nurus.
An entire language labeled as Proto-Indo-European (PIE) comprising only of such reconstructed words has been created by the IEL. A relatively small community of people, located in a relatively small geographic area is supposed to have taken this hypothetical PIE language with them, when they supposedly invaded (or migrated according to the revised version of the theory) all across the vast Eurasian continent resulting in the present distribution of "Indo-European" languages. According to the "Aryan Invasion Theory", one such group of people labeled as "Aryans" brought some Indo-European languages to Iran, Afghanistan and South Asia presumably conquering the natives and imposing their language and culture on them.
No matter how rational and imperative the reconstructed language appears to be, there is no agreement among scholars as to exactly who these PIE speakers were, what they looked like, where and how long ago they lived, and most importantly, what compelled them to wander around aimlessly over many millennia. The search for the original "homeland" of these PIE speakers has been going on for nearly two centuries with no apparent end in sight.
Over seventy possible candidates for the putative homeland of the "Indo-Europeans" have been proposed, none of them acceptable to all the researchers (Alinei 1998). The search for the homeland has been tainted by ethnic and nationalistic biases prompting Demoule (1980, p.120) to quip, "we have seen that one primarily places the IE's (Indo-Europeans) in the north if one is German....in the east if one is Russian, and in the middle if, being Italian or Spanish, one has no chance of competing for the privilege (as quoted by Lal 2005, p.64)." According to Garrett (n.d.), "It is a truism that the discovery of Indo-European and the foundation of the academic discipline of linguistics were substantially fuelled by nationalism. I suggest that the nationalist ideologies lurking behind our field refract the same sociological forces that shaped its object of study. Our conception of Indo-European emerged from the analysis of national literatures and cultural traditions, and the canonical branches of the family emerged through the creation of national identities."
IEL as a legitimate field of scholarly inquiry was launched in the hay day of imperialism. The results from comparative linguistics were quickly pressed into service by the colonizers to establish their alleged superiority over the colonized. Language was often equated with race ignoring the objections from the scholarly community. The emerging nations of Europe often identified themselves as a linguistic community, and they expected others to do the same. Hence India was and is still seen today by some as two nations speaking the so called "Aryan," and "Dravidian" languages united into a country only through the "efforts" of the European colonizers. The truth is that Indians speak languages belonging to six major linguistic families and as yet, no one knows for sure where on earth any of these families have might have originated and when.
Livingston (2003) quoting (Drews 1988) describes how linguistic studies eventually acquired a racial color. "It is an unfortunate coincidence that studies of the Indo European language community flourished at a time when nationalism, and a tendency to see history in racial terms, was on the rise in Europe. There was no blinking the fact, in the nineteenth century, that most of the world was dominated by Europeans or people of European descent. The easiest explanation for this was that Europeans, or at least most members of the European family, were genetically superior to people of darker complexion. It was thus a welcome discovery that the ancient Greeks and the Persians were linguistically, and therefore one could assume biologically, "related" to the modern Europeans. The same racial stock, it appeared had been in control of the world since Cyrus conquered Babylon. This stock was obviously the white race. INDIA, IT IS TRUE, PRESENTED A PROBLEM, AND REQUIRED A SEPARATE EXPLANATION. ARYANS HAD INVADED INDIA NO LATER THAN THE SECOND MILLENNIUM BC, AND SUCCESSFULLY IMPOSED THEIR LANGUAGE ON THE ABORIGINAL POPULATION, BUT THE ARYAN RACE HAD EVIDENTLY BECOME STERILE IN THAT SOUTHERN CLIME AND WAS EVENTUALLY SUBMERGED BY THE ABORIGINAL AND INFERIOR STOCK OF THE SUBCONTINENT (emphasis added, Drews 1988 in Livingston 2003, p. 8)"
The main obstacle in locating the homeland of PIE speakers could be the method of reconstruction itself. In the absence of written records one can only guess what certain words could have meant at certain points in time. Also, the rate at which languages change or "evolve" can only be guessed. Hooker (1999) summarized the problem thus: "From a superficial point of view, it is an easy matter to arrive at the underlying lexicon common to the Indo-European people prior to their dispersal, then to predict the type of material culture which would have marked the Indo-Europeans, and finally to match this culture with one actually attested in the archaeological record. BUT NEITHER THE ASSUMPTION NOR THE METHOD IS ACCPETABLE. The assumption is false, since to construct a "proto-lexicon" takes insufficient account of LINGUISTIC, and especially SEMANTIC change: it is one thing to extract a basic vocabulary which might be thought common to the Indo-Europeans before their migrations; quite another to be sure that the items of this vocabulary has the same meaning throughout the ‘Indo-European Era' that they bore in the historical language. But, even if these objections would be overcome, a set of lexical terms (which is a pure abstraction) cannot be transferred bodily to a material culture whose attributes are known only through the medium of archaeology. Some artifacts, some animals, some trees named in the proto lexicon will be present in a given culture but some will not. A satisfactory marriage between the linguistic and the archaeological data can never be achieved (page 49-50, emphasis added)."
Languages cannot exist without a group of real humans using them. There is no conclusive evidence to prove that languages evolve like living organisms do. A language could be transferred without a corresponding transfer of genes and / or material culture. In the words of DeGraff (2001), "Notions such as language birth, age, and death are also assumed implicitly and a-theoretically when we use terms such as "Proto-Indo-European", "Latin", "Old French", "Middle French", "Modern French", etc., as classificatory devices. But, notwithstanding the popularity and sophistication of Stammbaumtheorie qua "Tree of Language" (cf. Darwin's Tree of Life), old vs. new linguistic species cannot be discriminated by any measure that looks like biological genetic criteria (e.g., DNA, interfertility). There is no clear notion whereby E-languages can be taken to reproduce like living organisms. Neither do we have clear linguistic-structural analogues for the DNA sequences that have now become so handy in tracing biological phylogenesis."
IEL and their cohorts in other linguistic discipline have been criticized for taking their reconstructions as facts and thus blurring the line between reality and illusion. "From the remarks of Saukkonen, Raukko and Östman Raukko and Östman I (Smit) conclude that they totally fail to understand the basic tenets of historical linguistics - first of all, that language history is something which has REALLY HAPPENED, not just determined by the eye of the beholder, and that it can be researched by using certain methods, that the aim of these methods is to uncover reality and that its results are no mere "theoretical or methodological constructs.... "THIS CONFUSION TENDS TO MAKE HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS A MEANINGLESS, SPECULATIVE GAME in which the actual goal of any historical linguistics - uncovering REAL PAST LANGUAGE CHANGES - is no longer attainable (Smit 2001, emphasis added)."
To review the genetic and archaeological evidence, or rather a lack there of in support of the invasions / migrations imagined by the IEL is beyond the scope of this short essay. The interested reader is referred to Oppenheimer (2003), Olson (2002), Bryant (2001), Kenoyer (1998), Lal (2005, 2002, 1997), and Alinei (2004). The unproven and occasionally wild speculations coming from the pseudo-science of Indo European linguistics must not be treated as actual history. The conclusions reached by IEL could be no more than a fairy tale. As the Harvard archaeologist Lamberg-Karlovsky (2002) puts it; "once upon a time-no one really knows how long ago-there was a community that spoke a language known today as Proto-Indo-European (p. 63)."
Bibliography
Alinei, Mario (2004), "The Paleolithic Continuity Theory of Indo-European Origins: An Introduction," available at www.continuitas.com/intro.pdf retrieved on October 2005.
Alinei, Mario (1998), "Towards an Invasionless Model of Indo-European Origins: The Continuity Theory," available at http://www.continuitas.com/invasionless.pdf retrieved on October 10, 2005.
Bryant, Edwin (2001), The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture, New York, London: Oxford University Press.
DeGraff, Michel (2001), "On the Origins of Creoles: A Cartesian Critique of Neo-Darwinian Linguistics," Linguistic Typology, 5 (2/3), 213-310.
Demoule, Jean-Paul (1980), "Les Indo-Europeans: Ont-ils existe?" L'Histoire 28, 108-20
Drews, Robert (1989), The Coming of the Greeks, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Garrett, Andrew (n.d), "Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and Chronology," available at http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Egarrett/IEConvergence.pdf Retrieved on October 10, 2005
Hooker, James T. (1999), The Coming of the Greeks, Claremeont, California: Regina Books.
Lamberg-Karlovsky, C. C. (2002), "Archaeology and Language: The Indo-Iranians," Current Anthropology, 43 (1, Feb), p. 64-75.
McWhorter, John (2001), The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark (1998), Ancient Cities of the Indus Civilization, Karachi: Oxford University Press and American Institute of Pakistan Studies.
Lal, B. B. (2005), The Homeland of the Aryans: Evidence of Rigvedic Flora and Fauna & Archaeology, New Delhi: Aryan Books International.
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Livingston, David (2002), The Dying God: The Hidden History of the Western Civilization, New York: Writers Club Press.
Olson, Steve (2002), Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past through Our Genes, Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Oppenheimer, Stephen (2003), The Real Eve: Modern Man's Journey out of Africa, New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers.
Smit, Merlijn De (2001), "Uralist against History" available at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/3093/Uralists_Against_History.htm retrieved on October 10, 2005
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