Along the forest trajectory as well there is evidence of either an early Indie presence or undifferentiated Proto-Indo-Iranian or Proto-Indo-Aryan. A… - Johanna Nichols

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Along the forest trajectory as well there is evidence of either an early Indie presence or undifferentiated Proto-Indo-Iranian or Proto-Indo-Aryan. Among the Indo-Iranian loans into early Finno-Ugric are some so phonologically archaic that they could well be Proto-Indo-Iranian... Iranian, but not Indo-Aryan, regularly reflects PIE s as h, so this Finno-Ugric form looks more Indie than Iranian. Abaev also cites some less well attested forms that could be specifically Indie... These borrowings would have taken place somewhere in the vicinity of the southern Ural Mountains. They were received from a steppe language and incorporated into Finno-Ugric as it began its spread along the forest trajectory. This linguistic evidence for an Indie or Proto-Indo-Iranian wave preceding Iranian on the steppe is weak but legitimate. In partial confirmation of it, Kuz’mina identifies the Andronovo culture of eastern Kazakhstan in the mid-second millennium BC as Indo-Aryan..... There is also evidence for Indo-Aryan along the steppe trajectory in the form of a set of Crimean place names which Trubač identifies as Indo-Aryan. This evidence is even weaker—place names in general have poor diagnostic value since they lack denotational meaning—but carefully researched and again legitimate. If Trubačv is right there is evidence for an Indie advance to the western steppe. Taken together, the Finno-Ugric and Crimean evidence are consistent with the assumption of a short-lived Indie or Indo-Aryan presence at the frontier of the Iranian spread on the steppe, in addition to the well-known Indie frontier in northeastern Mesopotamia and India.

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About Johanna Nichols

Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is a linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. She earned her PhD in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation entitled, "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax."

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The Iranian family, which was next to sweep across the steppe and deserts, finds its region of greatest diversity in the central Asian mountains, and its ancestral Indo-Iranian family finds its own greatest diversity in the mountain region from central Asia to northern India (i.e. Bactria- Sogdiana and parts just south).

The vast interior of Eurasia is a linguistic spread zone—a genetic and typological bottleneck where many genetic lines go extinct, structural types tend to converge, a single language or language family spreads out over a broad territorial range, and one language family replaces another over a large range every few millennia. The linguistic geography of the central and western grasslands, from at least the Neolithic until early modern times, has consisted of an overall westward trajectory of language spreads... The central Eurasian spread zone... was part of a standing pattern whereby languages were drawn into the spread zone, spread westward, and were eventually succeeded by the next spreading family.

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These cases indicate that a sufficiently early split shows up along more than one trajectory, and it follows that any development within the PIE locus should be evident along all three trajectories. This is precisely what happens with the centum-satem division.... In view of its attestation along all three trajectories, the centum-satem split must have arisen in the eastern part of the range, in or near the locus. ... Since in the west the satem languages are the later entrants wherever the chronology is clear, and the frontier languages are centum, the satem side of the isogloss must have been to the east. Since satem languages are most numerous in the south, while centum languages predominate in the north and the centum language Tocharian appears far to the east of the locus as well as somewhat to the north, the satem side of the isogloss must have lain not just to the east but specifically to the southeast.... Since the centum-satem division is visible along all three trajectories, it arose in or near the locus after the spread began and spread outward after the centum languages had begun to spread.

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