The virtual shark-girl streamer who took the world by storm officially graduates today. I have a whole backlog of tribute songs I'll be posting here. This "in memoriam" song is set to the tune of "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid (lyrics, music).
As I said with Mumei's memorial song, Millennials and especially Zoomers' native habitat is online, so IRL is this strange exotic territory that they're alternately fascinated and frightened by. Growing up, maturing, leaving the nest -- these all have to do with finding their place in meatspace, and navigating relations with the perplexing creatures called "other people" (as opposed to, "other accounts").
In Goob's case, she got pulled out into IRL without intending to. Fandom taboos aside, it's pretty clear that she became a mommy -- like the time she came back and while casually chatting with Ame, asked out of nowhere if she had ever lactated, totally matter of factly, as if to compare notes with her own experience.
Details like that are important, not as gossip about e-celebs, but to make it clear that she has a perfectly respectable and noble reason for having largely left behind her turboposting memelord career for the past couple years. And to emphasize that IRL still has a powerful attractive pull, yes even on terminally online, algo-poisoned Zoomer brains.
And that's what this memorial song is about -- her feeling restless after living and doing so much online, and wanting to escape out into a normie IRL existence (notwithstanding the occasional visit / reunion). For the veterans of irony-poisoned toxic content wars, IRL normie life is not "settling" or "retiring" -- it's liberating and rejuvenating! ^_^
(Atypical stress patterns: CARE-ee-oh-KEY, ee-MOTES, meat-STAN, tar-ZAN. And "nendie" is short for Nendoroid. Also, do Millennials and Zoomers realize that "cut the cord" is an allusion to cutting the umbilical cord? That's where the phrase came from relating to devices that we have become dependent on -- if it were literal, you wouldn't cut that kind of cord, but simply unplug it.)
* * *
Look at these subs, all at tier 3
Breaking the 'net during karaoke
Wouldn't you think I'm the girl
The girl who sets trendy things?
Custom emotes, membership gold
How many fan-arts can one hard drive hold?
Lurking around /here/ you'd think
"She's the trending thing"
I've got ad rev and anime nendies
Several spots 'top the meme leaderboard
A million followers? I've got twenty
But fresh air, can't be streamed -- cut the cord
I wanna be, in the greenest yard
I wanna breathe, all the flowers they're planting
Grilling their ribs with that -- what do ya call it?
Oh, mesquite
Clicking your keys, you don't bond too hard
Hands are required for shaking, planting
Climbing your way through a -- what's that word again?
Tree
Out where they talk
And call you by "hon"
Out where they're face to face, one on one
Shooting the breeze
Wish I could be
In the real world
Trade all my clips, to trade some quips
Not just spam "poggers"
Pay 'em top rate, to elongate
My attention span
Bet in Meatstan, Jane finds Tarzan
Bet they don't shadowban mom bloggers
Online women, sick of simpin'
Won't trust the plan
I'm ready to grow where the green grass grows
Ask 'em my questions and get some answers
What are tires and why do they -- what's the word?
Turn
New routes to learn
It'd be such a buff
Forevermore live outdoors, off the cuff
Off the PC
Climb out the screen
To the real world
Nice.
ReplyDeleteNeuro sama covered There Is a Light That Never Goes Out today.
https://youtu.be/v4IP4MV3wpU?si=8ozt4Wb7ngG78pDW
End of the MPDG era, have to wait another decade before the MPDGs come back.
ReplyDeleteI apologize if this is off topic but I was wondering what if languages & cultures of the pre indo European & Afroasiatic Middle East survived like say Sumerian, Hurrian etc. into present day would they be apart of a new third fault line of the MENA region like the Indo Euro vs Afro Asiatic?
ReplyDeleteOr would they be part of the same fault line to the region like the Caucasus languages people are adjacent to IE or how Sumerian & Akkadian were very interconnected together.
Could Sumeria & her diaspora in this alternative timeline create a newer cultural macro group of the Middle East?
What are your theories on Sumerian since I liked your discussion on the Caucasian languages
I haven't really looked into Sumeria that much, but it wouldn't be like the Caucasus case -- there, my theory is that Indo-Euros adopted Caucasian languages, as they tried to adapt to the mountainous geography, and had to communicate with the natives who already knew the terrain.
ReplyDeleteSame for Basque -- those people are Indo-Euros who adopted the pre-Indo-Euro Basque language, and it's also in a mountainous area (Pyrenees).
Sumeria, and nearby Elam, were in the lowlands, and neither of their language families have survived (looong dead). The people who invaded them, whether Saharo-Arabian or Indo-Euro, did not preserve their language. Other parts of their culture may have been preserved, IDK. But they didn't need the insiders' knowledge of the geography in order to survive -- they just over-ran them.
Or, the Sumerians and Elamites are the same people as the current residents, but they gave up their old languages and adopted the languages of their conquerors.
In either case, it's not analogous to the Caucasian or Basque examples.
Hurro-Urartian was spoken by a culture that mainly thrived in river valleys (Kura and Araxes), not primarily in steep mountains. And sure enough, these two died off and were replaced by Indo-Euro.
Same with Hattic -- that was in the central Anatolian plain, not really steep mountains. And it was replaced by Indo-Euro.
So either the speakers of those languages were over-run and replaced by Indo-Euros, or they survived but adopted the languages of their conquerors. Not like the Caucasian and Basque cases.
Another case like Caucasian and Basque is Burushaski from northern Pakistan, whose speakers live in the steep, treacherous, permanently snow-covered Karakoram mountain rage, which contains the 2nd-highest peak in the world -- K2 ("K" for Karakoram).
ReplyDeleteWithout looking into the genetic or other cultural details, I'm positive that these people are the descendants of Indo-Euro invaders, but who adopted the pre-existing language in order to adapt to the steep mountainous terrain.
There are over 100K speakers, which is not the size of a pre-contact hunter-gatherer tribe, a remote island-hopping tropical horticultural group, etc. And they're not a sedentary agrarian society -- very little grows up in those mountains -- so they can't have a large population due to agrarianism.
Conclusion: they're the descendants of the Indo-Aryan (agro-)pastoralists whose subsistence mode was suitable to the mountains, but who needed to adopt the language of the natives in order to learn their way around the geography.
To clarify, Burushaski is a language isolate, not belonging to Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan, or any other language family in South Asia.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, some linguists propose a link among Basque, Caucasian, and Burushaski! "Pre-Indo-European mountain people" languages.
A case that is still developing is Quechuan languages in the Andes mountains, surrounded by Indo-Euro speakers. Indo-Euro invaders just showed up to Peru 500 years ago -- to see what might happen there over the next couple thousand years, just look at Basque, Caucasian, and Burushaski speakers, who were invaded by Indo-Euros several thousands of years ago.
ReplyDeleteFor now, there seems to be a pretty tight link between speaking Quechua and having pre-Columbian DNA and other pre-Columbian culture.
But give it a few thousand years -- perhaps the residents of the Andes will be genetically Indo-Euro, or a Quechua / Indo-Euro mestizo group at both the genetic and cultural level. But who will preserve the Quechua language. It's very rare for pidgins to survive -- you have to pick one or the other.
Quechuan languages are spoken by over 7 million people, and represent 10-15% of Peru's population. HUGE... for now.
In a few thousand years, it may dwindle down to "language isolate" status, even if we know it was part of a broader family in the past. Much like Basque.
But it does stand a good chance at surviving, and not even being endangered -- it's a mountain people language, so if the invaders want to adapt to the terrain, they're likely to learn their way around by adopting the pre-existing language.
Other elements of the culture may go either way. And who knows what the genepool will be. But the language itself has a very good chance of surviving, like Basque and Caucasian and Burushaski.
For the confused, the commenter is referring to an earlier series of comments in which I discovered that the speakers of non-Indo-Euro languages like Basque and the various languages of the Caucasus, are culturally and genetically Indo-European.
ReplyDeleteThe main epiphany was learning how all of them celebrate the springtime renewal holiday by jumping over fire for good luck -- one of the core Indo-Euro cultural traditions (and identical to their Indo-Euro-speaking neighbors like the Armenians and Persians and Kurds).
Conclusion: those people are all Indo-Euro, as attested by their jumping-over-fire tradition, but some of them kept their Indo-Euro language -- outside of steep treacherous mountains -- and others adopted the pre-Indo-Euro languages of a people who they either genetically replaced, or mixed in with, namely Basque and the Caucasian languages.
One has to wonder what may have happened had Georgia continued it's ascent into a Great Power before it was interrupted by the Mongols, then the Black Death, then, especially, Tamerlane:
Deletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_Golden_Age
The Burushaski speakers literally celebrate Nowruz, lol. And they wear the pakol hat -- they're the same people as the Pashtuns, except they adopted the pre-Indo-Euro language of the natives, to integrate better into the mountain environment.
ReplyDeleteLike I said, I didn't have to look any of that up, just based on their similarity to the Basques and Caucasians, I knew it had to be true -- and it is.
The pakol, as I detailed in some other comment thread, is part of the Indo-European headwear tradition -- flat, brimless, disc-type hats. From the Pashtun pakol to the Tam o'Shanter of Ireland, and going back to ancient times, not just medieval (like pronouncing the labio-dental voiced fricative consonant).
Now I'm sniffing out that a lot of the "Turkic" Central Asians are also Indo-European, but who adopted the Turkic language of their conquerors.
ReplyDeleteThis would make them analogous to the Turks, i.e. the residents of modern Turkey, who remain largely Indo-European culturally and genetically -- except for speaking a Turkic language, which was brought to them by their Seljuk / Ottoman conquerors.
And like the Azeri people of the Caucasus, who are Indo-Euro but speak a Turkic language.
I'm not sure how far the "Turkic-speaking Indo-European" belt extends into Central Asia, but basically anyone who celebrates Nowruz, which a lot of them do. When I first read that fact awhile ago, I assumed it was referring to an Iranian / Tajik / Pashtun minority enclave within an otherwise Turkic culture, and that their minority cultural rights were being protected by a Turkic cultural majority.
But Nowruz seems far more common in Central Asia than just a minority enclave of outsiders.
I'm going to call it without looking too much further -- the closer they are to the present borders of Iran and Afghanistan, the more likely they are to be "Turkic-speaking Indo-Europeans", although the ones far from that border (like northern Kazakhstan) may still be largely Turkic culturally. But I'm open to the possibility that they're somewhat Indo-Euro as well, aside from language.
Mongolia for sure is not Indo-Euro, further to the north and east of Mongolia is for sure not Indo-Euro. And we know of mixed groups (genetically and culturally) like the Uyghurs in Central Asia.
But a lot of different groups were swirling around there in Classical and Dark Age times, so there's a careful sifting that needs to be done to determine the genetic and cultural origins of the various groups there today.
A decent share of those people will turn out to be "Indo-Europeans who adopted the Turkic language of their Dark Age conquerors" -- or leaders / unifiers, depending on how you look at it.
Totally analogous to the residents of Turkey, who still jump over fire for good luck during their springtime renewal holiday (Hidirellez).
Neat!
Aka Turks are like Hungarians.
DeleteYes, I mentioned the Hungarians in the earlier wide-ranging discussion of the labio-dental voiced fricative ("v") as a shibboleth of Indo-Europeans, including those who later adopted a non-Indo-Euro language, like Hungarian.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Estonian has "v" -- they're Indo-Euros who adopted a Finnic language. Finnish has a labio-dental voiced *approximant*, but not fricative. Not quite so distinctly Indo-Euro as the Estonians and Hungarians, but still likely coming from a largely Indo-Euro background -- but being farther from the I-E heartland, they were under stronger non-I-E influence.
Confirmed that a large swath of "Turkic" cultures are actually Indo-Euros who adopted the language of their conquerors / trade route supervisors / leaders / unifiers during the Dark Ages.
ReplyDeleteWill probably put it up into a new standalone post, on the occasion of Turkey's version of Nowruz, Hidirellez, as a reminder of how Indo-European the population of Turkey still is at the cultural level, notwithstanding their adoption of a Turkic language.
But very briefly, the spelling of Nowruz in Uzbekistan is Navruz -- with a "v"! I knew I was on to something with all this "v" stuff. I have an excellent nose.
Turns out quite a few Turkic languages have "v" -- generally, the western ones, especially the southern ones among the western ones. I.e., the ones whose adopters were Indo-European speakers -- and who insisted on bringing the "v" consonant with them, as a shibboleth of their Indo-European-ness. This region does not lie on the Eurasian steppe, but clearly south of it, so it's unlikely they're the original steppe people like the old-school Turks and Mongols and Xiongnu and so on.
In the northwestern range, it's a mixed bag -- some have the approximant but not the fricative, some only use "v" in loan-words but can at least pronounce it, etc. These speakers are likely to reflect the original Turko-Mongol steppe nomads, and/or Uralic speakers, neither of whom have "v" to this day.
None of the eastern range have "v", whether northern or southern. They're the uber-Turko-Mongol people who never came under strong Indo-Euro influence.
Also, Uzbeks have their own version of the prototypical Indo-Euro headwear -- the doppa. Not just a copy of the nearby pakol, just as the French beret is not exactly the same as the nearby Tam o'Shanter in Western Europe. They're all local variations on the same underlying ancient, even prehistoric, Indo-Euro source.
Neat!
As usual, I'm ignoring the genetic evidence, which does show Uzbeks being majority West Eurasian (of the Indo-Euro sort, not Saharo-Arabian), and minority East Eurasian.
I'm talking about their cultural lineage -- and as in genetics, that requires looking at arbitrary or non-utilitarian things, like what kind of headwear you identify each other by, or what consonant you pronounce that no outsiders can pronounce, or how you celebrate springtime. Like looking at non-coding DNA, so you avoid being tricked by convergent evolution, and only detect identity by descent.
Details on "v" in various Turkic languages, which I won't be writing up into a separate post cuz I have many other things waiting for new posts.
ReplyDeleteI've already covered Hidirellez and its many Indo-Euro rituals, so to briefly recap -- it's the springtime renewal holiday, people jump over fire for good luck, they decorate eggs, they play the egg-tapping game, and other than the Muslim-influenced narrative about the prophets Khidr and Elias, it's the same as Nowruz and Easter. It's closer to Easter as far as narratives go, since Easter now also has an Abrahamic narrative, despite being carried over from our pagan Indo-Euro past.
Turks also use dairy fat as their cooking and baking fat of choice, just like Indo-Euros do. Saharo-Arabians, Sino-Tibetans, well just about everyone else uses vegetable fats of one kind or another. The Turkish variety of halwa (called helva) is made with dairy fat, not sesame oil like the Saharo-Arabian varieties.
And wouldn't you know? -- Uzbeks use butter and ghee! Don't let their Turkic language fool you -- and if you do want to look at their language, consult whether they have a "v" or not, which they do!
Within the Turkic family, "v" is absent in the proto language (just like I-E).
From the Argu branch, Khalaj has "v", and it's spoken in Iran. Very obvious case of Indo-Euros who adopted a Turkic language from a nomadic group that passed through their land as conquerors during the Dark Ages.
From the Karluk branch, Uzbek has "v", although Uyghur does not. Uzbek is Western and closer to Iran and Afghanistan, Uyghur is Eastern and closer to Han China.
From the Kipchak branch, Bulgar sub-branch, Tatar does not have "v" (only in loanwords). It's spoken by the Volga Tatars, whose largest city is Kazan. Although some Iranian nomadic groups roamed around there during ancient times, it has also been the stomping grounds of the Uralic and Turkic and Mongolic cultures.
Kipchak branch, Cuman sub-branch, Crimean Tatar does have "v", although the northern dialects do not. It's spoken in Crimea, closer to the Indo-Euro homeland than Kazan is. And again, the farther north, the less likely they are to pronounce "v".
Kipchak branch, Kyrgyz sub-branch, Kyrgyz does not have "v" (only in loanwords). Kyrgyzstan is a bit further to the east and north compared to Iran and Uzbekistan -- closer to the steppe homeland of the original Turkic and Mongolic cultures.
Kipchak branch, Nogai sub-branch, Nogai does not have "v" (only in loanwords). They're the descendants of the Nogai Horde, who were based to the south of the Kazan Khanate, and just west of the Kazakh Khanate. Not in the Caucasus, but on the northern and northeastern shores of the Caspian Sea, and therefore closer to the steppe homeland of the original Turkic cultures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nogay_Horde.svg
Oghuz branch, Western sub-branch, both Turkish and Azerbaijani have "v", from Anatolia and the southeastern Caucasus / NW Iran. Clearly Indo-Euros.
ReplyDeleteOghuz branch, Southern sub-branch, Qashqai has "v", and they're from Iran. Clearly Indo-Euro.
Oghuz branch, Eastern sub-branch, Turmken does not have "v". They border on Iran and Afghanistan, and are closer to Iran than the Uzbeks are. So they should have it, yet they don't -- I consider this one of the exceptions, which every region of Indo-Euro has.
E.g., Castilian / Spanish does not have "v" (it has a bilabial voiced fricative), although neighboring Portuguese does. Pashtun and Dari do not have "v", although other Iranian languages do.
Most Indo-Euro languages have "v", but some do not. However, all languages with "v" are spoken by cultural Indo-Europeans, whether they speak an Indo-Euro language or not.
Siberian branch, Northern sub-branch, Yakut does not have "v". It's spoken in the far northeast of Russia / Siberia -- close to the Uralic, Turkic, and Mongolic homelands, not Indo-Euro.
Siberian branch, Sayan -> Steppe sub-branch, Tuvan does not have "v" (although it does have the labiodental voiced approximant). Located just north of Mongolia. Not Indo-Euros.
Oghur branch, Chuvash does not have "v" (although it does have the labiodental voiced approximant). It's also from the Volga region, just to the west of Tatarstan, close to the Uralic and Turkic and Mongolic homelands. Not Indo-Euros.
BTW, Kazakh does not have "v". It's in the same sub-branch as Nogai, which lacks "v" as well. But in the interest of filling in the picture of nation-states in Central Asia, I should include it in the survey.
ReplyDeleteKazakhstan is well to the north of the other Central Asian stans, close to the steppe homeland of the original Turkic cultures. Not Indo-Euro.
And although Tajik is not Turkic, but Indo-Euro, just to fill out the remaining Central Asian stan, it too has "v". It's Iranian, and spoken quite a bit to the east of Iran. Most Iranian peoples have "v" in their language, whether it's Indo-Euro or not, but not the speakers of Dari and Pashto, who are the minor exception -- a la Castilian speakers within Iberia.
ReplyDeleteLastly, the Burushaski speakers of northern Pakistan discussed earlier -- who are culturally Indo-Euro, but adopted the language isolate of the pre-Indo-Euro natives -- do not have "v". So they're like the Pashtuns in yet another way, being one of the minor exceptions.
ReplyDeleteWhat does that region have against "v" anyway? Dari is just a dialect of Persian spoken in Afghanistan, but they dropped "v" unlike the Persian speakers of Iran. Pashto still clings to "w" instead of "v". And the Nowruz celebrators of northern Pakistan who speak Burushaski, also didn't insert "v" into their adopted language isolate -- unlike the cultural Indo-Euros who adopted various languages of the Caucasus.
Anyway, just thought I'd mention them, too.
As for Basque, it does not have "v" -- like Old Spanish, it has merged "b" and "v". Another nail in the coffin of Basque people being a pre-Indo-Euro native group, valiantly holding out in the Pyrenees.
ReplyDeleteNope -- not only are they clearly Indo-Euro (jumping over fire for good luck during the springtime renewal holiday), they were specifically speakers of Old Spanish, who had already merged "b" and "v" in their Indo-Euro native tongue, before adopting Basque -- at which point, they were unable to insert "v" into Basque, since they no longer had it in their own Indo-Euro native tongue.
To wrap up about Turkic-speaking Indo-European cultures, the rule of thumb is "were they part of the Achaemenid Empire" of Classical times?
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Achaemenid_Empire_500_BCE.jpg
That included the southern stans in Central Asia, where most of them (other than Turkmenistan) pronounce "v" in their adoptive Turkic language, while still celebrating Nowruz and wearing skullcaps.
But that excluded what is now Kazakhstan, the Uyghurs, and other places farther to the north and east like Mongolia and Siberia and the Volga.
The only regions not captured by "was it part of the Achaemenid Empire" is the Crimean Tatars (for Turkic speakers) and North Caucasians (who I covered earlier, for NW Caucasian and NE Caucasian speakers). Crimean Tatars do pronounce "v" in their adoptive Turkic language, but Crimea was not ruled by the Persians.
However, Crimea, especially in Classical and Medieval times, was part of the Black Sea region, not so much the Eurasian steppe. It was culturally similar to the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Caucasus, which all got taken over by Indo-Europeans (some of whom adopted pre-Indo-Euro languages when their settled in the Caucasus Mountains).
And to reiterate, it's not that Indo-Euro speakers of Classical times had "v", and that this was inherited by later speakers. Nobody anywhere on Earth had "v" back then -- it only caught on during the Dark Ages, or the very end of Classical times (Latin began the shift away from "w" and toward "v" during the 1st C. AD).
So I'm not claiming that the Indo-Euro languages throughout the Achaemenid Empire had "v", and that's why its borders are a good guide to who pronounces "v" today, whether the language is Indo-Euro or not.
Rather, the Achaemenid Empire seems to have been unable to penetrate into the proto-Mongolic or proto-Turkic homelands closer to the Eurasian steppe. So it included Indo-Europeans in its eastern range, and it would later be Indo-Europeans of all stripes who invented "v" in the 1st millennium AD, and mostly preserving it even when they later adopted a non-Indo-Euro language of their conquerors, like the Uzbeks who were conquered by nomads who were not just Turkic speakers, but culturally Turkic overall.
Uzbeks kept their Indo-Euro culture for the most part (Nowruz, skullcaps, pronouncing "v"), but adopted the Turkic language of their conquerors -- while still insisting on pronouncing "v", just to hang on to their Indo-European-ness in some crucial shibboleth way.
Why did Indo-Europeans invent "v" independently, simultaneously, nearly everywhere in their broad territory, during the 1st and maybe 2nd millennium AD?
ReplyDeleteIt's not there in Ancient times, not in the proto language, and not in any other language family, except where Indo-Europeans adopted a non-Indo-Euro language (like Turkish, Uzbek, and several languages of the Caucasus).
Set aside for now why all other languages resist "v". Why didn't Indo-Euro also resist it during the 1st millennium AD?
There must have been something about the broader phonological landscape of I-E languages that made "v" not sound so crazy or cringe-y. Ideal? No. Everyone agrees it's not ideal. But plausible, passable? Well, y'know, given the rest of our phonology, it's not the weirdest proposal in the world...
Whereas to every other language, "v" is just ridiculous on its face, no way it could pass as a normal healthy consonant.
Within Proto-Indo-European, there are two highly distinctive facts -- the rarity or perhaps absence of "b" (that is, a voiced bilabial stop), and the presence although also rarity of "g_wh" (that is, a voiced velar stop, with labial co-articulation, and aspirated).
I see the "g_wh" as an over-loaded or over-specified consonant -- too much going on. It wants to "spin off" some of those elements onto another consonant, so that two simple consonants are better than one highly complex consonant. That's a "push" factor, on the production side.
Then on the reception side, where is there an empty space for the new spin-off consonant to be slotted into? That's where the rarity / absence of "b" comes in -- that's "pulling" the spin-off consonant in the direction of "b", to fill the gap, rather than over-crowd some other place where there are already highly frequent consonants.
Both "g_wh" and "b" are voiced -- so the spin-off will remain voiced.
The new location is close to "b", which is bilabial, so its location will be labial -- either bilabial, labiodental, something involving the lips *alone*, not as a 2ndary co-articulation as in "g_wh".
Now what to do with that aspiration on "g_wh"? Well aspiration is kind of hissy and turbulent, although limited in duration as opposed to ongoing turbulence like a fricative or sibilant. But there's already an aspirated version of "b", namely "b_h", in the P-I-E phonemic inventory.
So, rather than create shitloads of new homophones and confuse everyone, we can't just give "b_h" double-duty after the spin-off. We'll have to settle for the turbulence of a fricative instead -- that's still very reminiscent of aspiration, but it's distinct from it as well, so we don't confuse it with existing "b_h".
Thus, after the push and pull factors, we get a voiced labial fricative -- it doesn't necessarily have to be labio-dental, could be bilabial, but this opens the door to "v" being acceptable in Indo-Euro languages.
I'm discussing the picture of the proto language, not the Classical era attested languages which formed the actual background for the sudden appearance of "v" in the 1st millennium AD. The point is, somehow or other, these distinctive facts about the proto language carried over into the attested daughter languages.
ReplyDeleteMaybe the reflexes were different in different daughters, but they would've preserved an echo of the proto stage, which makes "v" sound palatable to I-E speakers, as opposed to ludicrous or disgusting, as it sounds to everyone else in human history.
Whether or not this particular proposal is right, it has to apply to Indo-European as an entire family, and *only* to that family. It can't be narrow, it has to be about the broad context or landscape at the gestalt level. And it can't be too mechanically / physically motivated, or else it would've been attested way earlier, like the Classical era daughters or even the proto language itself.
As an aside, why might I-E speakers have favored the labio-dental rather than bilabial place? Perhaps for shibboleth reasons -- in Classical times, many Semitic languages were developing the voiced bilabial fricative, whether as a phoneme or allophonic variant (including Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew, and probably Phoenician as well). It could have existed in other non-I-E places as well, I haven't checked. But it is far more common than "v".
So, rather than sound like the outgroup, which may have had the bilabial voiced fricative, the I-E innovators chose to preserve their I-E identity as distinct from the Semitic or whoever else neighbors, and opted for labio-dental instead. No outgroup had it, so it's perfect to make a shibboleth for ourselves.
And that's how -- without needing a convocation of delegates from all branches of Indo-European, from Ireland to India -- the Indo-Euros independently, simultaneously, and ubiquitously invented the "v" during the 1st millennium AD (some maybe in the 2nd, IDK the full picture).
To clarify, I'm not proposing that "v" is a later reflex of "g_wh" from the proto stage. What I'm saying is that the presence of "g_wh" -- which as far as I know is fairly unique, or totally unique in the world's languages (labialized velars are common, but not with aspiration added on top) -- formed a key part of the gestalt or landscape of I-E phonology.
ReplyDeleteWith such a consonant in your inventory, "v" doesn't sound so crazy -- both are voiced, involve the lips, and the manner involves some degree of puffy, hissy, buzzing turbulence.
Add into the context that plenty of bilabial consonants exist, so making its primary / sole place of articulation being labial isn't so crazy either. And the fact that "b" is mostly absent, that frees up a little space for some consonantal innovation near the lips.
This phonological landscape makes it not-so-crazy to produce a voiced labial fricative.
Why labio-dental instead of bilabial like all the other labial consonants of the proto language? Maybe we've heard Semitic people or other non-I-E people using the bilabial voiced fricative, and we don't want to sound like real outgroup members.
Romans wouldn't have wanted to sound like Persians -- but imagine sounding like a Syrian. That's totally incomprehensible. Persian wasn't so incomprehensible to Romans, and vice versa.
So go for labio-dental instead.
Also during this stage, the labio-dental fricative without voicing was being adopted -- Classical Latin, although probably not Old Latin, used labio-dental "f", not the bilabial version. Avestan had "f" (and the bilabial voiced fricative, but this was not typical of I-E languages).
Greek went from having "b" from its origins to having the voiced bilabial fricative during the 1st C AD, which didn't last long, to "v" by the 4th C AD, where it has remained to the present. They didn't like that bilabial version -- too Semitic. Plus they were adopting "f" in place of the earlier "p_h", by the 4th C AD, so why not do labio-dental for both "f" and "v"?
Anyway, the point is that "v" doesn't have to descend from the same origin across all the daughter languages. There's just something about the broad landscape of all the daughters, which reflects the proto stage, that makes "v" sound plausible and palatable, whereas it's totally voted out in all other language families. Namely that presence of "g_wh" and the free space where "b" barely existed.
Off topic question but do you have any thoughts on the environmentalists / people like John Michael Greer who suggest we may wind up moving back to a pre-industrial way of life?
ReplyDeleteI think their explanations for some problem make sense but I find myself disagreeing with the overall vision of the future.
The Tocharians were not culturally Indo-Euro, they merely adopted an Indo-Euro language -- which they heavily altered to match their native non-Indo-Euro language(s) -- for a little while, before ditching it in favor of Turkic, eventually.
ReplyDeleteTheir cultural and genetic background was some mix of Uralic / Samoyedic, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Yeniseian, etc. South Siberian, esp. Samoyedic and Yeniseian.
I was looking into why some I-E languages never adopted "v", and Tocharian (both A and B) is one of these "v"-avoiders. The other big group of them are Indo-Aryan -- but my hunch there is that Indo-Aryan preserves all sorts of aspirated consonants, including on voiced stops. That's preserving part of the landscape of Proto-I-E, which had aspirated stops.
I thought the loss of aspiration meant that element of puffy / hissy / buzzy / breathiness wanted to go somewhere else, and wound up as frication instead. There was labial co-articulation on "g_wh", there was an empty slot near "b", so "v" was the right combination to play all these roles simultaneously.
Adoption of "v" came after loss of aspiration -- at the very least, loss of aspirated voiced stops. Armenian still has aspirated voiceless stops, and *does* have "v", so it seems to be more about those aspirated voiced stops. Aspiration turns into frication, voicing is preserved, there's an open spot near empty "b", there's labial co-articulation floating around trying to find somewhere to land when the labial-velars go away -- so boom, "v" it is.
Indo-Aryan languages generally have aspirated voiced stops, and that seems to be what's blocking the adoption of "v" in that big branch of Indo-European.
But Tocharian doesn't have aspiration at all -- that should've opened the door to more fricatives, including "v". But it didn't.
Come to find out, the merger of all 3 stop series in P-I-E into a single one -- voiceless, unaspirated stops -- in Tocharian is due to the bulk of their speakers learning it as L2 in adulthood, having spoken non-I-E languages before. Seemingly, Samoyedic or other Uralic languages, and/or Yeniseian.
See Peyrot (2019): "The deviant typological profile of the Tocharian branch of Indo-European may be due to Uralic substrate influence".
Well, that solves the riddle of "why no 'v' in Tocharian?" -- they didn't lose aspiration and free it up to turn into frication instead, they never had aspiration to begin with. Those various non-I-E language families in Southern Siberia / Eastern steppe don't have aspiration, so when their speakers tried to adopt an I-E language, which did have aspiration, they couldn't do it, nor could they do a voicing contrast as in I-E, so they just merged all 3 series of stops together while learning / constructing this new I-E-ish creole.
And as elsewhere, the non-I-E languages did not already have "v", so they couldn't bring it with them. And that's why, despite Tocharian seemingly having cleared the way for "v" by eliminating aspiration (esp. on voiced stops), they didn't actually adopt "v". They never had aspiration to begin with, so it was not a free-floating element that could subtly change into frication and land in the labial region to become "v".
The other I-E languages, where "v" did develop, had a history of aspiration, which they eliminated, and freed up that element to change into frication instead, encouraging the adoption of "v".
Moving beyond language, and into real culture (since language, outside of its shibboleth-y aspects, is just a utilitarian tool for communication), the Tocharians had names for both a "sun-god" and a "moon-god" -- and they were referred to that way, with the generic all-purpose word for "god" tacked onto the end, not with special unique names as though they were a person, a la the sun and moon gods from Indo-European mythology.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Seh%E2%82%82ul_and_*Meh%E2%82%81not
Also, Tocharian does not have a cognate for Dyeus or any of its derivatives, whether the longer epithet Dyeus Phter ("Sky Father"), or words amounting to "heaven," "gods," "divine", etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us
Missing the major unifying all-important sky-father? Not Indo-Euro.
Tocharian does have a cognate for the Earth Mother of Indo-Euro mythology, but she's not called by the epithet "mother" but simply "earth-god", and due to the absence of sky-father, she's not paired in a contrasting union with the sky-father.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*D%CA%B0%C3%A9%C7%B5%CA%B0%C5%8Dm
So, although using a cognate term for "earth", the earth-god's name has the generic "god" tacked onto the end, and does not refer to the same entity as in I-E mythology (one of whose defining traits is being paired with the sky-father, who is absent in Tocharian).
No sky-father, downplayed earth-god, but very keen on the moon and the sun...
Why, that's just like the Xiongnu's crucial icons, the sun and the moon!
https://e3.eurekalert.org/multimedia/980867
Both the sun and moon are included on the Mongolian flag, to reflect their affinity with the Xiongnu.
Yeah, every culture knows about the sun and moon, may even make them into deities, but making them more important than sky-father, well, that makes them Southern Siberian rather than Indo-European, culturally. Doesn't matter what language they speak.
I'm not claiming the Xiongnu specifically were the cultural ancestors of the Tocharians, just that the people who adopted / constructed the Tocharian language came from a cultural background closer to that of the Xiongnu (Eastern steppe) than that of the Yamnaya or Western steppe Indo-Euro speakers.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Indo-Europeans adopting Buddhism? Never happened -- briefly in India, where the religion originated, but it was not stable there. It quickly flowed out of India, while decaying / vanishing among Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian speakers.
ReplyDeleteIt went all sorts of directions, as long as they landed in East Asia -- Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, Japan, Tibet, Mongolia, and also the Tarim Basin, where the Tocharians adopted it.
If the Tocharians were culturally I-E, this is a huge surprise. If their cultural background was anywhere in East Asia, including the Ural Mountains and eastward across the steppe, then there's nothing surprising about it at all. During the Dark Ages, Buddhism was the international religion that united East Asia -- so if the Tocharians were culturally East Asian (aside from their new language), they would've been a natural fit for adopting Buddhism.
If they were I-E, then their Buddhism would've been a fleeting flirtation, as it was in South Asia where it came from. But the Tocharians seemed to have been really into Buddhism -- the vast majority of their writings are written by Buddhist monks, being supported in Buddhist monasteries, on the subject matter of Buddhism!
Not the Berkley Buddhist type at all. They must've been culturally East Asian (including the northern range of Central Asia).
It is worth noting how during China's equivalent of the Dark Ages (often called the "Period of Division") between the dissolution of the Han Dynasty in the early 3rd Century and the re-unification under the Sui Dynasty in the late 6th Century, Buddhism (along with Daoism) really spread throughout East Asia:
Delete"The upheavals of the period, and the widespread suffering that these caused, led many Chinese in all ranks of society to search for a deeper meaning beyond the life of the here and now. Confucianism focussed mainly on how to live a good life within the world of men, and offered no deep hope for the afterlife. Buddhism, with its message of eternal salvation, began to spread through all ranks of Chinese society.
The troubles of the times weakened the hold of Confucianism. It remained the official cult in all the Chinese states, and therefore the focus of the officials’ educational curriculum, thus moulding the outlook of the elite. However, in the 3rd century, some writers set out to harmonize Daoism with Confucian teaching. For example they interpreted the Daoist concept of non-action to mean taking no inappropriate action. “Clarifications” such as this made it possible for people to follow Daoism whilst pursuing an official career, and so made it much more popular with many educated people.
"
https://timemaps.com/civilizations/divided-china-2/
What do you think of the theory that it was the invasion of the Muslim Arabs that was a principal catalyst for the decline of Buddhism in South Asia?:
Deletehttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_Buddhism_in_the_Indian_subcontinent
After all, Buddhism used to have its biggest strongholds in the mountainous areas around what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan (the Hindu Kush) and many later fled to other mountainous places like Tibet (Buddhism seems best suited to mountainous areas where can really feel "detached")
Tocharians don't appear to have celebrated Nowruz or similar Indo-Euro "jumping over fire for good luck during the springtime renewal holiday" ritual, according to the Wiki article on Nowruz's extent over time and space.
ReplyDeleteIt wouldn't have conflicted with Buddhism, anymore than it conflicted with Islam, Christianity, or other new post-pagan religion. Turkic and Mongol groups didn't stamp it out when they invaded Iran.
I'll bet the Tocharians didn't decorate eggs or play the egg-tapping game for the occasion either.
I'll bet they didn't hide a good luck charm in the dessert of a New Year's holiday either.
I'll bet they didn't have a fancy footwork + rigid torso dance style, like the kathak of Northern India to the Armenian and Caucasus verions, to the Bavarian schuhplattler version, to the Irish jig!
I'll bet their wedding ritual never involved ransoming an item from the bride's side and making the groom's side pay up in order to get it / her back. And I'll bet the wedding didn't involve circumambulating.
I'll bet they never used the swastika -- before their Buddhist era, of course, when they may have imported it from India.
Until there is overt, hard confirmation of distinctly Indo-Euro cultural elements -- aside from the utilitarian tool of language, which makes it not an arbitrary marker of cultural identity (too many material reasons to give up your native language in favor of a new one belonging to wealthy, powerful, or influential people) -- I'm declaring the Tocharians to be culturally South Siberian, Eastern steppe, etc. Definitely NOT Indo-European.
I am curious as to how you view writing itself with relation to the Indo-European peoples as all writing systems seem to be imitations of non-I E civilizations. For example, it was the Semitic Phonecians who developed the alphabet, which was later imitated by the Greeks (who in turn were imitated by the Latin Romans) and possibly even Germanic runes:
Deletehttps://sjquillen.medium.com/are-germanic-languages-middle-eastern-70b5668c4cf6
The very first writing systems that we know of developed independently of each other in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley Civilization in modern Pakistan, China, and Central America.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUpJ4yVCNrI
Out of these, Egyptians and Sumerians are Afro-Asiatic, the Indus Valley Civilization are believed to be pre-I-E Dravidians and obviously East Asians and Central Americans are not Indo-Europeans.
Do you see having an oral tradition as more quintessentially Indo-European as opposed to the writing systems developed initially by despotic, stratified non-I-E states?
"V" has caught on in parts of the Niger-Congo family in Sub-Saharan Africa, including the Gbe sub-family, Swahili and Zulu among the Bantu sub-family, and maybe some others, I haven't checked them all out. Not in Yoruba or Igbo, though.
ReplyDeleteTellingly, these languages have aspiration, though not on voiced stops -- maybe they once did, and now that aspiration has been freed from voiced stops, it can be subtly changed into frication instead, and give "v", as I suspect is the case for Indo-European.
Whatever the precise mechanical reasons why, there's a telltale correlation between getting "v" and having recently / currently had aspiration.
Neither aspiration nor frication is present in the proto-languages, so they're both recent developments. But they do seem to go together, and in order to collect one of the rarest consonants into your phonemic treasury, you have to go through an aspiration phase first.
This still leaves "v" as a shibboleth for Indo-Europeans within Eurasia, Saharo-Arabian Africa, the Pacific Islands, and Australia (and the New World?).
But it looks like we've got a little upstart competition for global shibboleth status, if "v" catches on and becomes permanent in the Niger-Congo family. So far, not very extensive, not including some of the largest languages like Yoruba and Igbo. But once upon a time, only a few Indo-Euro languages had it -- then just about all of them did.
We'll have to wait a thousand years and check back on them. For the time being, Indo-Europeans are still the owners of "v" even at a global scale.
Dravidians have the “v” sound.
ReplyDeleteIt just occurred to me, might American cheerleaders form a properly-defined contribution of the Indo-European jump dancing tradition? Although, modern sports cheerleading can be considered a development of an all-American civilization, it also may be considered quintessentially Indo-European in its style.
ReplyDeleteDravidians do *not* have "v" -- they have the approximant, not the fricative. Many Indo-Aryan languages also have the approximant, but not the fricative.
ReplyDeleteIndian English also doesn't have the fricative /v/ either, they only have the approximant. Same goes with Norwegian and Danish.
DeleteCuius regio, eius religio. The Americanization of the Catholic Church goes back to our defeat of Italy in WWII, then scooping it up as a vassal afterward -- NATO.
ReplyDeleteThat's why there was the Vatican II Council in the '60s, albeit administered by an Italian Pope, but while Italy was now literally militarily occupied by the American Empire.
That's why Catholic Church rituals are so Protestantized by now -- among Christians in America, that's the background they came from.
There hasn't even been an Italian local administrator pope since the '70s. The first anti-Soviet / pro-NATO pope to formally wrest papal control from the Italian people was the Polak, John Paul II. Then a German, then a New Worlder (at least of Italian descent), and now another New Worlder but from America itself (of partial Italian descent).
Look through the list of popes, and you'll see which empires were powerful in a given era -- they put their people in the papacy. French popes during the unrivaled height of the French Empire in the 13th C. Byzantine popes when that empire occupied Italy. A few Spaniards during their empire's Golden Age.
Even an Englishman from just after the Norman Liberation of England from the Vikings! Adrian IV, who was pope during the 1150s, hailed from the ethnogenetic / imperiogenetic hot-bed of Southeast England, one of the few holdouts from the Viking-ruled Danelaw. He even had a cool Dark Age epithet -- before becoming pope, he was known as "Nicholas Breakspear".
One of his first actions was to further encourage the Christianization of Norway and Sweden, with the memories of England's meta-ethnic nemesis, the monk-slaying pagan Vikings, still fresh in everyone's minds. How the tables had turned...
Pope Adrian IV came to the papacy right as the British Empire had gone through its integrative civil war, and so when its ethnogenesis would kick into overdrive and construct a whole new culture for a whole new people, and their empire would expand in every direction.
ReplyDelete"The Anarchy" lasted from 1138 to 1153, and Nicholas Breakspear took office as pope the very next year, 1154, until his death in 1159.
That's like if an American were elected pope in 1877, right after our integrative Civil War & Reconstruction era had wrapped up, and we would expand like crazy and construct a whole new distinctly American identity.
More interesting is the geographical barrier *within* Italy for becoming pope -- for many centuries, a Southerner cannot become pope. The last one born in the South was Benedict XIII, 300 years ago (1724-'30). There was another Southern pope during the 1690s (Innocent XII), but going back further than that, it's still rare.
ReplyDeletePopes mainly came from Rome itself or the surrounding region -- no surprise there. But if they weren't from Lazio, they came from somewhere to the north or also in the central region -- Tuscany, Lombardy, Bologna, Venice, Genoa, etc.
The last time that Southerners were likely to be pope was when that region was part of the Byzantine Empire, and there was the Byzantine Papacy (537-752). And they were not necessarily Southern Italians, but could've been Byzantine Greeks who were born in Southern Italy. Some were even Syrian, reflecting Byzantine Christianity in the Levant.
I think that's what led to the de facto prohibition on Mezzogiorno popes -- they were a bad memory of the Italian peninsula, the city of Rome, and the papacy itself having been occupied by a foreign empire.
Venice the city was a protectorate of the Byzantines for awhile, but they eventually threw off their Greek overlords and became an expanding regional power in their own right, having developed intense asabiya on the meta-ethnic frontier with the Germanic hordes that invaded and controlled the rest of Italy during the Dark Ages.
So, a Venetian pope was not necessarily a reminder of Italy's humiliation by foreign empires.
But a Southern pope? What are we, going back to the Byzantine occupation of our wonderful land, after our once-glorious empire had collapsed? Those were the bad ol' days, and we're never going back there again.
-- Well, not until Italy became occupied by newer empires, including now under American imperial occupation.
I was wrong about the successor to Francis being the realigner pope away from America back towards traditional Catholicism. Looks like we have 1-2 more decades of American influence over the Catholic Church.
ReplyDeleteDid Tocharians had a shamanistic religion before Buddhism? Certainly Buddhism was most strongly attracted to cultures that already had shamanism in place, which is one reason why Buddhism quickly left the Indo-Aryan / Indo-Iranian sphere, and was eagerly adopted in (northern) Central and East Asia.
ReplyDeleteIf so, that would be another piece of evidence for the Tocharian speakers having descended from a culture that was not Indo-European -- no shamans there -- but from the eastern steppe, where shamanism has been abundant across various sub-cultures for a long time (Turkic, Uralic, Yeniseian, Tungusic, Korean, and others).
I mean "shaman" in the narrow sense, associated with the eastern steppe, not any ol' religious specialist who seeks an altered state of consciousness. The "medicine man" type, with a magic drum, and/or animal skins on his head, etc.
I think I've hit on several confirmations here, but will report back with more detail later. For now, just laying out the outline of how to investigate the cultural origins of the Tocharians -- or any other group, for that matter.
Language is not reliable, too utilitarian, too many material incentives to ditch your ancestral language -- but not your ancestral wedding rituals, springtime renewal rituals, dancing styles, and so on.
You can tell how much I read 4chan (/vt) by their ESL-isms creeping into my typos. "Did they had...?", lol.
ReplyDeleteApril Fools' Day is Indo-European, BTW. Nowruz has a variation of it, while in Europe it's not part of Easter, but the springtime in general.
ReplyDeleteTrick-or-treating is part of this tradition as well, and it has remained associated with the springtime holiday in the Iranian-ish region. In Europe, it got moved back to fall for Halloween, or Christmas / New Year's season, depending on the country.
Sorry, I never did get around to writing up the Indo-Euro origins of trick-or-treating, which I've known about for years now. Sometime...
Just suffice it to say for now that our April Fools' Day is a relic of the original timing and occasion of the prank-playing ritual that got moved further back toward Christmas after Indo-Europeans adopted Christianity and relegated the springtime New Year's to pre-Christian / pagan secondary relic status.
Many Sami languages have "v", suggesting either that their speakers used to be Indo-Europeans who adopted a Uralic language, much like the Estonians and Hungarians (and likely the Finnish) -- or that the Sami languages underwent a sweeping crazy series of changes which resulted in a coincidentally Indo-European array of consonants. Obviously the former is simpler and preferable.
ReplyDeleteAs with Indo-European, "v" is absent from Proto-Sami. However, it is present in both major branches of the Sami family, in several members within each branch.
Within the Eastern branch, it's in Inari, Skolt, and Kildin (maybe others, just checking those with lots of speakers, relatively speaking).
Within the Western branch, it's in Lule, Southern, and Northern Sami (which has the most speakers, currently ~25K).
Several, though not all, of these also have aspirated voiceless stops, as well as unaspirated voiced stops -- very much like the stage of Indo-European when "v" started to creep in. I don't think this is an independent development within the Uralic family, as it could be within Niger-Congo, cuz it's too easy to assume instead that this highly Indo-European array of consonants reflects the speakers being Indo-Euro speakers who later adopted a Uralic language, and brought aspirated stops and "v" with them.
Or at least, brought aspiration with them -- maybe "v" is a later development, after Indo-Euros adopted the Uralic language. But in any case, that would just recapitulate what happened among Indo-Euro speakers during the Dark Ages.
Maybe they did adopt Uralic at a stage where their Indo-Euro native language already had "v" and simply carried it over into their Uralic adoptive language. IDK about the timing.
The big picture being, Sami languages are like Estonian and Hungarian -- their speakers used to be, and in some ways still are, culturally Indo-European. They just adopted a Uralic language, for whatever reason, and brought Indo-European shibboleths with them into their adoptive language.
Maybe the harsh Arctic climate and geography is like the steep treacherous mountains that led several Indo-Euro groups to adopt the non-Indo-Euro languages of the natives? (I.e., Basque, the three Caucasus families, and Burushaski.) So difficult to navigate and eke out a living, that you need to merge into the natives, and at least be able to communicate with them? Plausible.
Unfortunately, this would be the only such place to test the theory, unlike mountains being widespread. There's only one place where Indo-Euros can be claimed to migrate into a harsh Arctic climate -- and definitely not in the parallel Antarctic climate!
We can wait 500 years and then test the descendants of Americans living in Alaska and Canadians living in Yukon to see if they still speak English or if they instead have switched over to an Inuit language.
Deletehttps://www.razibkhan.com/p/facing-facts-even-fraught-ones-the?r=u0rd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
ReplyDeleteA noteworthy point on the Indo-Europeans from a man who used to blog here:
"Despite accumulating victory upon victory, the Indo-Europeans were not, crucially, civilization-bearers. Their pastoralist world flourished atop the smoldering ruins of worlds lost, cultures that left behind hulking rough-hewn stone monuments and the faint outlines of vast villages that were once the loci of sophisticated civilizations. The early Indo-Europeans were barbarians par excellence; their arrival ushered in an age of animal competition, kill or be killed. In places like Spain, Italy and Scandinavia whole paternal lineages disappear upon their arrival, wholly replaced by patrilines which still define the peninsulas today. Though they left their legacy in flesh, archaeologically the early Indo-Europeans are ghosts, their primary material legacy being graves. They emerged out of darkness, beyond the view of history, and they brought darkness to many lands they conquered, a process only finally reversed by civilization’s creeping spread. More than 1,000 years after Neolithic Europe and its grand megaliths fell to the barbarian nomads, the two traditions would fuse to set the stage for the eventual rise of Greece, Rome and the world of the Celts."
I'm skeptical of how Indo-Euro the Scythians were, now that I'm deep into the Tocharian case. There are several cultural facets that, pretty much, only these 2 groups have among all Indo-European cultures, and that are attested -- sometimes widely and anciently -- in the non-Indo-Euro cultures of Central Asia or NE Asia.
ReplyDeleteAnd when other bona fide IE cultures observe and describe the Scythians, they can hardly believe their eyes.
Again, IDC about language, clearly Scythians spoke an IE language, but that doesn't mean their broader culture was IE.
There are, again, 3 possibilities:
1. Scythians were genetically and culturally IE, but adopted some fascinating piece of culture from a non-IE neighbor.
2. Scythians were a genetic and cultural coalition of IE and non-IE groups, and the non-IE element was only practiced by the non-IE members. So, "Scythians" as a whole coalition did not practice it, and certainly not the IE members. Akin to religious pluralism / tolerance in an empire with diverse religions among subjects (Romans, Ottomans, Russians, Chinese, etc.).
3. Scythians were only minimally IE, genetically and/or culturally, and mostly non-IE. They brought their largely non-IE culture with them, after adopting an IE language (for whatever material reason).
The same 3 cases describe the Tocharians, although from their telltale non-IE substrate in their language, it looks very much like Tocharians were #3, at most #2 with heavy representation of non-IE cultures, and definitely not #1.
Scythians could've been #2, or perhaps #1 -- they seem more IE than the Tocharians. But their IE status is still far from certain, at the culture-wide level.
No matter which big picture turns out to be true, the unusual cultural element is not of IE origin, but some other Central Asian origin, and found its way into the culture of an IE-speaking group.
Since the Scythians and the Tocharians were the only 2 major groups to have been in extensive contact with north-central Asian / eastern steppe people, that's why this odd cultural element is not attested anywhere else in the whole of IE territory, from Ireland to India.
I'll get to the specific concrete evidence in a bit, just putting the outline out there, as a reminder that language does not imply the rest of the cultural features, and does not imply a DNA cluster / lineage.
Especially on the steppe, where inter-tribal and inter-linguistic coalitions and confederations come together and break apart all the time.
Thank God there's other kinds of evidence outside of the lexicon of some culture. Looking through the Tocharian lexicon for signs of their non-IE religious practices has proven mostly pointless -- cuz they re-lexified most of their language to be IE, either at some early stage before converting to Buddhism, but especially after converting to Buddhism and adopting a whole new layer of Indo-Aryan vocabulary.
ReplyDeleteSadly, they've been an extinct culture for 1000 years, so we can't just watch contempo YouTube videos of what their weddings, dances, and holiday rituals are like.
But they did have lots of paintings of themselves made, and although the practices being depicted may have receieved a new I-E term in the language, they were still carrying on a distinctly non-I-E practice in their behavior.
You would never know it from their language, and would assume they just copy-pasted some variety of Indo-Aryan religious practice into their own.
Nope -- the traces of Shamanism are still there, but only detectable outside of the lexicon...