Re: Neo Iranians: The Case of Azeri Turks
Yeah, I believed in Mallory's stance on that matter for a while too, but there are contrasting theories that hold good ground too. Apparently the idea that Aryans originated from the south of the Black Sea is not seen as such a joke anymore in academic circles. Nonetheless, the general consensus is that they lived around the Black Sea.
The main differences between theorists today lie in what economic and lifestyle factors influenced the diffusion of PIE through it's migrants leaving the homeland. Other problems include the reality of Hittite and Tocharian being these sort of outliers of Indo-European languages in their grammars in a way that suggests they split from PIE very early. My professor for one of my classes has shown me that this is especially the situation with Hittite in terms of morpho-syntactic structure for masculine-feminine-neuter distribution in the vocabulary. Their genders were not categorized like any Indo-European concept we are used to seeing. They had 2: 1 was a hybrid of masculine and feminin, and 2 was a hybrid of feminine and neuter. The feminine gender if you will was understood through morphemes from both categories, and the vocabulary for feminine words did not share/switch between the two categories, each word apparently would keep to one of them even though semantically they were both feminine.
The system it used sheds light on a very archaic feature of PIE that did not seem to survive anywhere else, and early Mycenaean Greek inscriptions from 1700BC, which are neither far away geographically nor chronologically, show evidence that the female gender has completely diffused from the masculine and has assumed what was once the archaic neuter morpheme.
Perhaps you find this domain of inquiry boring and not bearing much insight on anything you're interested in, and that's understandable because you don't seem too concerned with the human language faculty and how our inquiry of what it's managed to produce throughout history, growing out of several thought provoking socio-linguistic circumstances, reflect us today and how we've emerged to have all our modern day diversities and similarities, what tools humanity has used to shape the world as it has, etc...
Oslonor, it is quite pointless to cite the origin of Aryan peoples if you don't give a damn about the progression of one of the most observable relics of their legacy, their language family. You place way too much importance on genetics of human populations and we all know that this domain of inquiry is not the same one that was involved in bringing about these theories of homelands of a linguistic group known as PIE. Tying the two together along such rigid, fanatical lines is just so "folk" motivated as I like to call it, it's like your out there to prove something to the world about this aspect of your inner pride and put many people down while you're at it. I know many example of people from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds including my own who do the same, and hell even I've done it, but now I'm not for it because it's not the right attitude if you want to sit down and learn about human evolution through all the scientific means we have available to us today, in fact, it's not the right attitude if you want to learn anything substantial at all.
If you want to debate about small noses vs big noses, fine, but what does the origin of the Aryan homeland have anything to do with it? And as Armenian has already implied with his messages, big noses and small noses are plentiful all around Eurasia and ethno-linguistic ancestry isn't strong enough of a factor to keep big noses from emerging in any group. To link big noses to Turks is just wrong on so many levels....
Originally posted by oslonor
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The main differences between theorists today lie in what economic and lifestyle factors influenced the diffusion of PIE through it's migrants leaving the homeland. Other problems include the reality of Hittite and Tocharian being these sort of outliers of Indo-European languages in their grammars in a way that suggests they split from PIE very early. My professor for one of my classes has shown me that this is especially the situation with Hittite in terms of morpho-syntactic structure for masculine-feminine-neuter distribution in the vocabulary. Their genders were not categorized like any Indo-European concept we are used to seeing. They had 2: 1 was a hybrid of masculine and feminin, and 2 was a hybrid of feminine and neuter. The feminine gender if you will was understood through morphemes from both categories, and the vocabulary for feminine words did not share/switch between the two categories, each word apparently would keep to one of them even though semantically they were both feminine.
The system it used sheds light on a very archaic feature of PIE that did not seem to survive anywhere else, and early Mycenaean Greek inscriptions from 1700BC, which are neither far away geographically nor chronologically, show evidence that the female gender has completely diffused from the masculine and has assumed what was once the archaic neuter morpheme.
Perhaps you find this domain of inquiry boring and not bearing much insight on anything you're interested in, and that's understandable because you don't seem too concerned with the human language faculty and how our inquiry of what it's managed to produce throughout history, growing out of several thought provoking socio-linguistic circumstances, reflect us today and how we've emerged to have all our modern day diversities and similarities, what tools humanity has used to shape the world as it has, etc...
Oslonor, it is quite pointless to cite the origin of Aryan peoples if you don't give a damn about the progression of one of the most observable relics of their legacy, their language family. You place way too much importance on genetics of human populations and we all know that this domain of inquiry is not the same one that was involved in bringing about these theories of homelands of a linguistic group known as PIE. Tying the two together along such rigid, fanatical lines is just so "folk" motivated as I like to call it, it's like your out there to prove something to the world about this aspect of your inner pride and put many people down while you're at it. I know many example of people from all kinds of ethnic backgrounds including my own who do the same, and hell even I've done it, but now I'm not for it because it's not the right attitude if you want to sit down and learn about human evolution through all the scientific means we have available to us today, in fact, it's not the right attitude if you want to learn anything substantial at all.
If you want to debate about small noses vs big noses, fine, but what does the origin of the Aryan homeland have anything to do with it? And as Armenian has already implied with his messages, big noses and small noses are plentiful all around Eurasia and ethno-linguistic ancestry isn't strong enough of a factor to keep big noses from emerging in any group. To link big noses to Turks is just wrong on so many levels....
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