# Indo-Iranians and language innovations



## mojobadshah

If languages have a lot of innovations like Indo-Iranian languages does it mean that they have been separated from PIE longer?


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## entangledbank

No, there's no reason to suppose so. The 'molecular clock' of mutations/innovations doesn't seem to tick regularly enough to be a reliable guide to separation in time. Icelandic, for example, has hardly changed in grammar or vocabulary for a thousand years. Then there are the confounding influences - on vocabulary at least - of borrowing: English and Japanese have massively changed in this respect, where the borrowing is well known; and Hittite, Greek, and Germanic all have lots of vocabulary that can't be explained by the assumed time or space distance of separation. I can't think offhand of a corresponding example in grammar. Well, possibly some of the features of Bulgarian that came from the Balkan Sprachbund, not from any particular separation from other Slavonic languages.


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## ancalimon

I think Indo-Iranian languages were influenced by its neighbors much more than Indo-European languages, being closer to the homeland of people that spoke different languages.

So, for example while most of the Indo-European languages has the word "fire", Persian for example has the word "ataş" which seems to be a borrowing from Turkic "od" meaning fire.


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## Wolverine9

ancalimon said:


> So, for example while most of the Indo-European languages has the word "fire", Persian for example has the word "ataş" which seems to be a borrowing from Turkic "od" meaning fire.



No, either the Turkic _od _is from Iranian or they're unrelated.


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## ancalimon

Wolverine9 said:


> No, either the Turkic _od _is from Iranian or they're unrelated.



I will create new topic about the word "OD" which is Turkic in origin so as not to derail the topic, and they surprisingly seem to be related.


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## mojobadshah

ancalimon said:


> I think Indo-Iranian languages were influenced by its neighbors much more than Indo-European languages, being closer to the homeland of people that spoke different languages.
> 
> So, for example while most of the Indo-European languages has the word "fire", Persian for example has the word "ataş" which seems to be a borrowing from Turkic "od" meaning fire.



I think Indic may have been influenced by neighbors, but the only loanword into Avestan I'm aware of is shaitan from Hebrew which doesn't appear until middle Persian or Pahlavi commentaries on the Avesta.


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## mojobadshah

entangledbank said:


> No, there's no reason to suppose so. The 'molecular clock' of mutations/innovations doesn't seem to tick regularly enough to be a reliable guide to separation in time. Icelandic, for example, has hardly changed in grammar or vocabulary for a thousand years. Then there are the confounding influences - on vocabulary at least - of borrowing: English and Japanese have massively changed in this respect, where the borrowing is well known; and Hittite, Greek, and Germanic all have lots of vocabulary that can't be explained by the assumed time or space distance of separation. I can't think offhand of a corresponding example in grammar. Well, possibly some of the features of Bulgarian that came from the Balkan Sprachbund, not from any particular separation from other Slavonic languages.



It sounds like your talking about a few unexplainable words or are you talking about entire languages?  I'm not totally convinced. Is it possible that that IS what the innovations mean in Avestan and Sanskrit?


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## Wolverine9

mojobadshah said:


> I think Indic may have been influenced by neighbors, but the only loanword into Avestan I'm aware of is shaitan from Hebrew which doesn't appear until middle Persian or Pahlavi commentaries on the Avesta.



No, there are loanwords in Avestan (e.g. _m__ūža "name of an ethnic group"; __shaitaan _isn't a loanword in Avestan but rather Pahlavi), but they haven't been studied in as much detail as the loanwords in Sanskrit.  This article about loanwords in Proto Indo-Iranian might also be of interest: Lubotsky


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## mojobadshah

Wolverine9 said:


> No, there are loanwords in Avestan (e.g. _m__ūža "name of an ethnic group"; __shaitaan _isn't a loanword in Avestan but rather Pahlavi), but they haven't been studied in as much detail as the loanwords in Sanskrit.  This article about loanwords in Proto Indo-Iranian might also be of interest: Lubotsky



He's wrong about skr. rishi Av. ereshi.  They're related to German Raisen "to rave or rage" because IIr. priests consumed psychedelics in order to write their poetry or hyms to the god(s).  This is according to M.L. West.  He could be wrong about others.  

Is it possible that Muza is n Iranian ethnonym for a foreign ethnic group?


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## mojobadshah

Both Avestan and also Sanskrit preserve evidence of the laryneals.  Is it possible that like Anatolian languages IIr. split from PIE early but maintained contact with the Greco-Armenians and that is why there are so many I novations?


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## Wolverine9

A few points.

- Lubotsky says: "In general, we can state that although the foreign origin of some of the words is open to
doubt, there is a small, but undisputable body of loanwords in Indo-Iranian."

- _m__ūža _is the Avestan adaptation of a foreign ethnonym, i.e. a loanword.


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## Wolverine9

No, Pahlavi has several loanwords from Aramaic, Greek, other Iranian languages, Sanskrit, Arabic, and maybe others.


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## ahvalj

Actually, the ancient Indo-Iranian languages (Vedic and Avestan) are the major source of reconstruction of the original IE grammatical system: at around 1000 BC they were grammatically considerably more conservative and transparent than the two other attested branches, Anatolian and Greek. The rapid destruction of the IE heritage began after that period and was largely parallel to the development in many other IE branches, occurring just several centuries earlier than in Celtic, Romance and Germanic. The preservation of the flective grammar in the center of the IE area (Baltic and Slavic noun and syntax, Romance and Greek verb) contrasts with its destruction (or restructuring as in Tocharian, Armenian and Ossetic) in the IE periphery.


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## ahvalj

By the way, I don't believe in linguistic phylogeny. It mimics the evolutionary approach in biology while forgetting an essential difference between the biological and the linguistic evolution: the biological lineages split forever and have no mechanisms to influence each other on the genome level, so that there is now generally no problem to distinguish between shared innovations (homologies) and parallel ones (analogies) in the DNA, all of which makes it possible to reconstruct the scientifically justified evolutionary tree, whereas languages keep influencing each other after having splitted (e. g. the indefinite article in Romance and later Germanic languages and countless other examples), which leaves us no accurate tool to evaluate what is inherited and what is borrowed if the earlier state of the language is not attested sufficiently well. So, all these trees of the last two centuries that shuffle various IE groups are nothing more than intellectual exercises that should not be taken too seriously. We simply don't know the order in which IE branches splitted and don't have approaches to learn it other than constructing the time machine.


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## Ben Jamin

Wolverine9 said:


> No, either the Turkic _od _is from Iranian or they're unrelated.



"ataş" looks as if it was a direct decendant of PIE "ater" (fire).


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## ahvalj

Ben Jamin said:


> "ataş" looks as if it was a direct decendant of PIE "ater" (fire).


The etymological dictionary by Rastorguyeva and Edelman 2000 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJd0x4SEwwSzRrd3M/edit?usp=sharing) suggests "åzær" as the inherited modern Persian reflex of this IE word (page 318) and "åtæš" as the Avestan borrowing in Persian (p. 322).


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## fdb

ahvalj said:


> The etymological dictionary by Rastorguyeva and Edelman 2000 (https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_7IkEzr9hyJd0x4SEwwSzRrd3M/edit?usp=sharing) suggests "åzær" as the inherited modern Persian reflex of this IE word (page 318) and "åtæš" as the Avestan borrowing in Persian (p. 322).



We have discussed this in some detail before:

http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2673666&highlight=fire


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