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Elegant-Road t1_j0rgk7w wrote

Reply to comment by lax_incense in Greek Hinduism - any surviving legacy? by Isabella1293

Curious, why couldn't have Sanskrit been the influence on Latin, Persian etc ?

Could the Indo-Europeans be native to India who migrated west and took their ideas there?

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Re-Horakhty01 t1_j0ridz8 wrote

Weh hsve archeological evidence pointing it to being the other way around, and linguistic evidence backs this - the northern Indian languages shares descent but not the southern Dravidian language group for example. Plus we can see the evidence of the linguistic and cultural drift from the common source up in the steppe rather than a spread from India west.

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DarshJalan t1_j0rjdbb wrote

Can you give me the source of those evidence.

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Re-Horakhty01 t1_j0rmwlr wrote

Well, linguistically the Indian subcontinent is only home to a single branch of the wider Indo-European language family, the Indo-Aryan branch, and you'd expect that the originating region for the wider family to be home to multiple branches. Plus you have the inter-relation of Greek and Indo-Aryan language evidenced here: https://hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/ejvs/article/view/19770

Of coutse the southern Dravidian language and cultural groups are distinct from the northern groups, but it seems likely that some form of migration by cousins to the Hittites, Slavs, Celts and so on did occur very anciently.

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DarshJalan t1_j0rtg9x wrote

The paper you linked argues that the inscription found in Crete can probably be an indo Aryan language. Doesn't mean that it wasn't the other way around. Also one of the major issues with Indian archeology is that ancient Indians didn't really keep a lot of records and most of the records were passed orally rather than in any written form

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Re-Horakhty01 t1_j0rud7g wrote

That the text predates the oldest sanskrit we've found by a couple of centuries implies to me that the spkit between the two cultures was prior to the migration into India. The trail of material evidence, not just inscriptions, does point to an origin of the ancestral peoples of the Indo-European culturo-linguistic familoty being from around the Black Sea area. More than likely an immigration of a people descended from that ultimate ancestral group mixed with the descendants of the Harrapan civilisation.

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DarshJalan t1_j0s2e9w wrote

Considering that we still don't know how old Sanskrit is, it is wrong to claim fully that the text predates Sanskrit. Again, ancient Indians never kept record. The oldest Sanskrit text that was found is a massive religious collection of hymns. That same trial for all we know could be backwards.

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Re-Horakhty01 t1_j0uc19x wrote

Except that we'd expect multiple branches of the language family closer to the origin point, not less, and we see this with the Proto-Indo-European languages, with a cluster of branching as the Proto-Slavs, Proto-Celts and Proto-Italics splinter off moving west and south away from the Black Sea whilst there's not so much branching going on when you get down into India. This suggests the origin up in the steppe.

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DarshJalan t1_j0ula3a wrote

I don't get that tbh. Shouldn't there be more clusters branching out the further away from origin a thing is? Like tree branches?. Also proto slavs, proto Celts and proto italics being younger than Sanskrit should be proof that argues for this

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Re-Horakhty01 t1_j0umlol wrote

They aren't younger than Sanskrit, I am not sure where you got that idea from. As for the clustering, this is the Linguistic Center of Balance Principle . Essentially the idea is that if people migrated out from a location you're going to find the languages and cultures that came out of these peoples in greater proximity together nearer to the homeland because people will be splitting off along the path of migration. Thus India is unlikely to be the origin point of the Indo-European languages as there's only the Indo-Aryan branch present, representing only the strand of the migrations whilst it's likely to be out near the Black Sea because the closer you get to that area the more frequent and closer together the Indo-European language branches get.

People are more likely to stop at a shorter distance and settle down, and the others from their group just keep going, so the shorter distance is more densely populated with the languages descended from the original group than the other way around.

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Kered13 t1_j0rmeke wrote

Archaeological and linguistic evidence points overwhelmingly elsewhere. The prevailing hypothesis on the origin of Indo-European languages is the Kurgan Hypothesis. It suggests an origin in the Pontic steppe among a migratory people, who then spread westward into Europe and east and then south into Persia and India.

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