Authors: Christopher I. Beckwith
Tags: #History, #General, #Asia, #Europe, #Eastern, #Central Asia
Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (77 page)
Due to this incredible, unpre ce dented closeness, Indo-Europeanists believe, “The Indo-Iranian languages clearly derive from an ancestor intermediate between Proto-Indo-Europe an and the earliest individual Iranian and Indo-Aryan languages, i.e., one can reconstruct a Proto-Indo-Iranian language.”
16
However, the astounding closeness of Avestan and Vedic Sanskrit, together with the other points noted above, allows—or perhaps, demands—a very different conclusion. Avestan looks less like an Iranian language than like a phonologically Iranized Indic language.
17
The many inexplicable problems of Avestan and the culture thought to be represented in the text of the
Avesta
can be accounted for as an artifact of Iranians having adopted an oral religious text—clearly a heterodox one by comparison with the Vedas—from an Old Indic dialect. As required of Indic religious practitioners, they memorized it exactly, but in the process, or afterward, it underwent specifically Iranian sound shifts in the mouths of the Iranian-speaking oral reciters. As noted above, Avestan is known exclusively as a literary language of the Zoroastrian religion—it is not known where it was spoken or even if it was ever spoken at all (which seems unlikely)—and it is only attested quite recently.
18
Simple phonological change due to Iranian speakers attempting to preserve an Old Indic dialect text orally over a long period of time would thus explain virtually everything about Avestan. If nevertheless Avestan can still be shown without question to be a genuine Iranian language (which seems unlikely), it would have to constitute an independent sub-branch of its own. If not, and the language is removed entirely from the Iranian family tree, Iranian would then make internal linguistic sense as an Indo-European daughter family. The theory of a Proto-Indo-Iranian language—a striking exception to the otherwise exclusively radial, non-nodal
Stammbaum
of the Indo-European daughter families (despite the many attempts to construct other models)—would then have to be abandoned, along with much else based on the Indo-Iranian theory. In particular, theories about the culture of the putative Proto-Indo-Iranians and chronological theories concerning the movements of the Proto-Indic and Proto-Iranian peoples would need to be thoroughly revised, but so too would almost everything else in early Indic and Iranian studies.
The Indo-European Creoles
Each of the Indo-European daughter languages—the ancestors of the modern Indo-European languages—retains the bulk of the Indo-European basic lexicon and a significant amount of Indo-European morphology, but it has some local loanwords and, in particular, distinctive phonology. This distribution of features is characteristic of creoles. It must be understood that the term “creole” is not precisely delimited by specific features. It is used for everything from languages containing loanwords—and all known languages contain loanwords—to languages that have undergone major structural changes due to convergence with other languages.
In this book, “creole” is used to refer to languages that have undergone significant changes due to convergence with other languages, but not the kind of radical simplification of structure that is stereotypically said to characterize creoles, the usual (if not the only) example being Haitian Creole, a form of French. As many have noted, modern Indian English—the native speakers
19
of which have full English grammar and lexicon, with a very small number of Indian loanwords—has a phonological structure more akin to Indian languages than to English or other Germanic languages. Although some have claimed that this is a unique artifact of British colonial policies,
20
one must wonder why the same (actually, worse) policies in North America did not produce another creole there. Leaving aside the political aspects involved in such judgments, it is clear that in the former case the English speakers succeeded in imposing their language to some extent but not in eliminating the ruled people, unlike in the latter case. The result of the former was and is a creole. Much the same can be said of other modern Englishes spoken around the world in areas where English is an intrusive language, some with more “creolization” than others.
It is known from observed and recorded modern contact situations that creoles are produced in a very short period of time, not centuries or millennia. Languages are not spoken unchanged over millennia, nor do they take millennia to undergo major changes. That is, the daughter families of Indo-European could not have developed by glacially slow changes over millennia, as the old idea of Indo-European has it, and as most Indo-Europeanists still believe. Modern evidence, as well as modern research on languages undergoing change, shows that the traditional theory is typologically unprecedented and therefore, essentially, impossible. Languages do undergo some internal changes, very slowly, over time, but because these changes can never be isolated from external influences, it cannot even be shown that slow chronological change actually takes place purely on its own without external stimuli.
21
Nevertheless, leaving aside the probable fact of the latter type of change, it is unquestionably the case that major language shifts take place as a result of contact. The Indo-European daughter languages, or branches, are thus to a greater or lesser extent creoles, including even the very earliest recorded Indo-European languages: Hittite, Old Indic, and Mycenaean Greek. This is certainly not unusual. It has been said that “all mature languages are creoles.”
22
What is unusual is the idea that Indo-European, uniquely among the languages of the world, should have preserved its ancestral form (Proto-Indo-European) for thousands of years, then broke up purely via internal chronological change over more thousands of years, and finally developed into the attested daughter languages, all without any creolization. Creolization is explicitly rejected as a factor in the development of the Indo-European daughter languages
23
despite the fact that the daughter languages are mostly attested first in areas quite distant from the areas where the other daughter languages are first attested, and none of them are attested in the Proto-Indo-European homeland region until after they are attested elsewhere. That means the Indo-European speakers must first have settled in areas where other peoples already lived and mixed with them, producing different creoles of the inherited language, before their languages are first attested.
In addition, the astonishing fact (for the traditional theory) that none of the Indo-European daughter languages were spoken outside the world area where they are first attested cannot be overlooked, as it has been. Early Italic is unknown outside the region of Italy, Greek outside the region of Greece, Tokharian outside the Tokharian region of East Turkistan, and so forth.
24
Moreover, the spatial arrangement of the daughter languages according to isogloss information corresponds to their spatial arrangement geographically—that is, their attested earliest locations.
25
The traditional theory is typologically unprecedented anywhere in the world and does not accord with the evidence.
Each Indo-European daughter language—the protolanguage in turn of an Indo-European daughter family—is thus a creole, the result of immigrant speakers mixing with local people who spoke different languages. The immigrants’ Indo-European language was spoken by their local wives and children with a local accent and some grammatical changes, producing a dialect or creole which was simply an altered local version of the dominant Indo-European language.
The reconstructibility of Proto-Indo-European morphology has been seen as evidence of the incredible conservatism of Indo-European languages by comparison with other languages. But there is considerable evidence against this idea of Indo-European’s incredible—or more accurately, unbelievable—conservatism and slow phonological change over thousands of years: Hittite and the other Anatolian languages. The oft-repeated theory that the Anatolian languages were spoken in Anatolia for thousands of years before they were first recorded is based on the old idea of slow chronological change. Yet Anatolian languages and cultures are so full of local, non-Indo-European elements that it has been difficult to find any vestiges of Indo-European religious beliefs and sociopolitical practices among them. How could they have adopted so much from non-Indo-Europeans, but somehow magically preserved a highly archaic “pure” Indo-European language, or an “Indo-Hittite” or “Pre-Proto-Indo-European” language, as some would have it? Because some of the complex morphophonological features reconstructed to Proto-Indo-European have been shown to be restricted to the Group B languages,
26
or should be so restricted—Proto-Indo-European is based largely on the early forms of those very languages (Greek, Latin, Germanic languages, and Sanskrit)—the absence of those features in Anatolian is not surprising. The putative conservativeness of Proto-Indo-European morphophonology is actually evidence for the recentness of the daughter languages’ separation. They may have diverged after the departure of the Proto-Anatolian speakers, but the appearance of the latter in Anatolia still cannot be dated much earlier than the nineteenth century
BC
. Significant phonological and lexical changes happened at the point in time (within one generation, or at most two generations) of the intrusion of an Indo-European group into areas where the local language was different, or when an Indo-European group was linguistically heavily influenced by a non–Indo-European group, as happened with the formation of Group B. The major structural changes distinguishing each daughter language from each other and from Proto-Indo-European thus did not take centuries to develop. Certainly some changes, once initiated, did take centuries to work themselves out, but that is a different matter. Observation of the way the phonology of daughter languages develop in modern times—Indian English being one of many well-known examples—indicates that creolization, as in the scenario presented here, is the main driving force.
27
The complexity of the changes in Indo-European would seem to be explained by the stages of the migrations, of which there were at least two for most, perhaps all, of what became the Indo-European daughter languages: first from the common homeland to some intermediate place or places (this is clearest in the case of Group B), and then again to the final destinations where the languages are first attested.
The Indo-Europeans, particularly the warrior segment of the population, had an extremely patriarchal, male-dominated society. In many cases, they and their mixed descendants were heavily outnumbered by the original inhabitants and eventually disappeared, leaving only some linguistic residue such as the names of their kings and gods and some other cultural words (as happened in the Mitanni kingdom and elsewhere in the ancient Near East), or even a few short inscriptions (as happened with many languages once spoken in Southern Europe). In other cases the Indo-Europeans imposed their language and maintained it long enough that it could be relatively well recorded. Both scenarios were played out time and again. The most important of these two processes for linguistic history is the second, because it provides sufficient material for careful reconstruction.
28
The relevance for Central Eurasian history is clear. The Indo-Europeans spread from their homeland in Central Eurasia to other parts of Central Eurasia as well as to parts of the Eurasian periphery. They accepted elements of the local cultures with which they mixed and also spread crucial aspects of their own culture. In so doing, they spread the earliest form of the Central Eurasian Culture Complex extensively enough that it survived and became the dominant culture of Central Eurasian peoples in protohistorical and early historic times, as described in the prologue and elsewhere in this book.
1
For an excellent, readable survey, see Mallory (1989). On the competing theories, see Mallory and Adams (1997, 2006).
2
One of Grassmann’s (1863) contributions was to show that the phenomena he discusses, those described by Grassmann’s Law in the strict sense (one of the most important single discoveries in Indo-European linguistics), apply only to Greek and Sanskrit. They cannot be reconstructed back to Proto-Indo-European. He thus demonstrated formally that convergent phenomena affected nongenetic subgroups of Indo-European after the primary divergence had taken place. My formulation of three groups or “waves” of Indo-European divergence (Beckwith 2007c) depends ultimately on Grassmann’s work.
3
A
phoneme
is a meaningful unit of linguistic sound, defined by the opposition of contrasting phonemes. For example, the English words
pat, bat,
and
fat
are distinguished by their initial consonants; there is thus said to be a phonemic distinction in English between /p/(an unvoiced labial stop), /b/(a voiced labial stop), and /f/(an unvoiced labiodental fricative), which are all phonemes in the language.
Allophones
represent recognized subphonemic distinctions, for example, the sounds written with the letter
p
in
pot
and
spot
are not the same phonetically. The
p
in
pot
is aspirated [p
h
], whereas the
p
in
spot
is unaspirated [p]; the difference between these two allophones, however, is not meaningful (or
phonemic)
in English, so only one letter is needed to write the phoneme /p/.
4
Szemerényi (1996), Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995).
5
This appendix is a brief, highly simplified summary of the argument and data presented in Beckwith (2007c), q.v. for details.
6
Szemerényi (1996).
7
With the exception of Avestan; but see below on the putative Avestan evidence for Iranian having belonged to Group B. Poorly attested languages are not included.
8
This comment was made by an anonymous reviewer of the manuscript of this book.
9
The opinions of individual scholars have varied greatly over the past century, some having argued for dates as much as a millennium younger than that, and others for dates several millennia earlier. For a discussion of such views, including those influenced by Indian nationalism, see Bryant (2001).
10
EIEC
306–307. Both also have been shown to contain some “late” intrusive elements. Bryant cites T. Y. Elizarenkova’s demonstration that some Middle Indo-Aryan features are “present in Vedic, but absent in Sanskrit” (Bryant 2001: 138), indicating contamination of the oral tradition by later dialect forms during its transmission. Unfortunately, the intrusive elements do not provide a sure means to date the composition of the texts or the earliest date at which they could have been memorized or otherwise recorded.
11
EIEC
307. Even Middle Persian and other Middle Iranian languages are attested much earlier than Avestan, many of them in extensive literary texts. On the mythical lost libraries of Avestan and Middle Persian texts, see endnote
111
.
12
If the Indo-Iranian theory is accepted, Avestan is certainly a more “archaic” form of Iranian than Old Persian, but Avestan could have been spoken in an isolated area for a very long time—and thus preserved much of the ancient “Proto-Indo-Iranian” structure—before Zoroastrianism was adopted by the Persians and the Avestan texts became known in the general Iranian-speaking world. However, it is uncertain if Avestan really is an Iranian language to begin with.
13
Schmitt (1989: 28); cf. the perceptive remarks of Kellens (1989) in the same volume.
14
Noted as early as Remy (1907) and repeated very widely; cf. Bryant (2001: 131).
15
EIEC
304; cf. Mallory (1989: 35); cf. the comments of Schmitt (1989: 26–27).
16
EIEC
303–304.
17
The early Indo-Europeanists considered Avestan to be an Old Indic dialect; see the discussion in
chapter 1
and notes thereto. Avestan could perhaps be an Iranized creole of the Old Indic dialect, that is, an actual language that was once spoken, but this seems much less likely. Still another possibility, that it is an Indicized Iranian language, is ruled out by the difficulty of explaining the many elements not found in any other Iranian language but typical of Old Indic.
18
In the text I have followed the view that the hostility thought to be shown in the
Avesta
toward Vedic religious elements suggests ethnolinguistic animosity between the early Indians and Iranians, but it has been argued that the apparent demonization of the Vedic elements is not consistent. Resolution of this point also depends on the results of the reconsideration of the
Avesta
and Avestan.
19
Many Indian speakers of Indian English have acquired it as a second language and thus speak it much less well.
20
Cf. the comments and references in Hock (1999b: 149). It should also be noted that comparisons of the Indo-Aryanization of northern India and the Anglicization of India under the British generally include ahistorical preconceptions. The British may have come from far away to India, but they did not “conquer” India, at least not in the usual sense, and certainly not suddenly. It took them centuries to gradually end up in a position of dominance there before they finally took over.
21
For further discussion and references, see Beckwith (2006a).
22
Haiman (1994: 1636).
23
Arguments about the chronology of Indo-European are more or less all still based on the slow chronological change theory, as are the highly charged disputes over the dating of the daughter languages and their speakers. Leaving aside nonscholarly motivations, much of the Indo-Aryan migration debate is founded upon linguistic naiveté (e.g., Bryant 1999, 2001).
24
As noted above, Old Indic is first attested in the area of upper Mesopotamia and the Levant, and only later in India, but this is clearly due to the migrating Indic speakers being separated by the migrating Iranian speakers.
25
Hock (1999a: 13–16).
26
Grassmann (1863), Beckwith (2007c).
27
Cf. Lefebvre et al. (2006).
28
It is also possible to observe the same process in action today, because Indo-European languages, especially English, Spanish, and Russian, continue to spread at the expense of native languages in large parts of the world. Indo-European languages are dominant territorially today in every continent except Africa; demographically, the main exceptions are East and Southeast Asia.
