28.04.09
More on OIT
Comment on OIT/AIT
James said,
27.04.09 at 6:44 pm ·
“While I remain open to the OIT hypothesis, it won’t work in its current form, and in fact doesn’t seem to work, at the moment.The complexities of PIE linguistics make life difficult for the OIT claims.”
Personally, I’m not sure that we will ever resolve this issue because the same problems arise with the AIT. The issues are complex because scholars don’t really agree on the methodology to derive the etymology of IA words (Doniger’s examples aren’t as clear cut as she makes them sound). This also doesn’t take into account its relationship with Uralic and the fact that Bangani seems to show centum features. Elst also brings up the Lateral Theory:
“However, it would be erroneous to infer from this that the kentum area, i.e. Western and Southern Europe, was the homeland. On the contrary, it is altogether more likely that the Urheimat was in satem territory. The alternative from the angle of an Indian Urheimat theory (IUT) would be that India had originally had the kentum form, that the dialects which first emigrated (Hittite, Italo-Celtic, Germanic, Tokharic) retained the kentum form and took it to the geographical borderlands of the IE expanse (Europe, Anatolia, China), while the dialects which emigrated later (Baltic, Thracian, Phrygian) were at a halfway stage and the last-emigrated dialects (Slavic, Armenian, Iranian) plus the staybehind Indo-Aryan languages had adopted the satem form. This would satisfy the claim of the so-called Lateral Theory that the most conservative forms are to be found at the outskirts rather than in the metropolis.”
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/articles/aid/urheimat.html