Quote: (02-18-2015 01:01 PM)Quintus Curtius Wrote:
Interesting thread. But I think we need to be very careful about drawing all sorts of unfounded conclusions from the available linguistic evidence.
It is true that the Indo-European family of languages is huge. The general consensus is that, many thousands of years ago, some vaguely defined group in central Asia spread out (or exerted influence) over a wide area, including Europe and northern India.
But beyond that, I am skeptical of the cultural and "racial" conclusions that I'm seeing in this thread here. Culture and ethnicity develop in response to local conditions: geographic, climatological, and various other factors. It's not surprising that we see a huge variance in cultures and ethnicity as we go from Europe to Northern India.
Ethnic traits (skin tone, facial features, etc) develop through the natural selection process, as nature's way of ensuring that the human organism is best adapted to the geographic conditions of his or her region.
But this has nothing to do with language. We have to be scrupulous about not mish-mashing a bunch of unrelated concepts together, which produce all sorts of unfounded conclusions.
So, I think we need to be very careful about drawing sweeping generalizations from these basic premises.
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As you probably know, Indo-European is simply the new preferred term for the same ethnic group which used to be called Aryans pre-WW2.
This is purely a political choice because the term Aryan is now so corrupted.
Language is not a good ethnicity indicator, case in point Turkish, which is a Mongolian steppe language but the Turks are not mongoloid.
This is because language can be forced upon a people like the Turks force their language today on the Kurds.
This is consistent with the idea of an invading people setting themselves up as a ruling class and forcing their language on others, while their genetic influence in posterity is slight, while their linguistic influence is large, case in point, all the Spanish speaking people in South and Central America.
Until WW2 the accepted theory was that of Aryan invasion from a northern homeland, mainly modern day Russia/Ukraine, in all scholarly circles. Americans were instrumental in this research.