Top 3 Igor M. Diakonoff Quotes

Russian historian and linguist (1915-1999)

Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff (12 January 1915 – 2 May 1999) was a Russian historian, linguist, and translator and a renowned expert on the Ancient Near East and its languages. His brothers were also distinguished historians.

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Alternative Names: Igor Diakonov • Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff • Igor Diakonoff

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The Proto-Indo-European term for 'horse' shows only that horses were known (nobody doubts this); it does not mean that horses were already domesticated.

This thesis will receive—and has already received—cheers from dilettantes. Dilettantes desperately need one thing: the proof that the population of the Armenian Plateau spoke Armenian ever since the Palaeolithic period, if possible.

From our point of view there was no migration as such. . . .There was a gradual spread from one center in all directions. In the course of such a spread the groups of dialects and specific isoglosses that had developed were maintained. . . .The biological situation among the speakers of modern Indo-European languages can only be explained through a transfer of languages like a baton, as it were, in a relay race, but not by several thousand miles' migration of the tribes themselves. (152-153).