The Asian Capitulation

[onawah]

issue resolved

[Michel Leclerc]

Posted by shaberon (here)

Posted by Baby Steps (here)
Generalisation is also risky but in the Far East in general there is little to compare with the democratic ideas born in Ancient Greece , or much philosophy regarding innate rights and freedoms possessed by the individual .

Greek civilization was born in India:

The work traces the pattern and functioning of republican governments at the time of the Buddha (sixth and fifth centuries BC) Panini (fifth century BC), Kautilya (fourth century BC), Alexander (327-325 BC), the Mauryas (321-184 BC) the Mauryas (184-72 BC) the Sungas (184-72BC) and the Guptas later.


No shortage of evidence that Greeks were educated there. The language and mythos are Sanskrit cognates. Thoroughly. I would be surprised if they came up with anything on their own, until Aristotle betrayed Plato.

Similarly, the city of Rome betrayed and destroyed the Golden Age of Latin culture.

The superb Indian educational system was devoured by European colonialism starting with the Portuguese Vasco da Gama. Then thanks to the British, it became dysfunctional and stagnant, while being commanded to flood China with opium.

Dear Shaberon, thank you but... this is “way off the mark”. As far as I know it has become fashionable now in certain Indian circles to claim that all Indo-European cultures are "out of India", coming up again with the linguistic nonsense that Sanskrit is the mother of all Indo-European tongues etc.

“The languages and myths are Sanskrit cognates.” What does that even mean?

The languages – I take it that you mean (pre-)Classical Greek and Vedic/Sanskrit – are indeed cognates in the etymological sense of “cognate”, i.e. “born together” – to an extent. They are not twins, but rather distant cousins. A classical, and actually inexpugnable, argument against Vedic/Sanskrit being the originator of the other old Indo-European languages (like classical Greek, old Armenian, Church Slavic, Proto-Germanic, Latin, Old Celtic etc.) is that tens of hundreds of Vedic/Sanskrit words can be shown to have evolved in a certain way from an older language (Proto-Indo-European), whereas the (roughly speaking) European languages derived from Proto-Indo-European have more or less kept the old forms, ut diversely, distributively, i.e. Latin kept for instance word A but not B or C, whereas Greek kept B but not A or C, and Celtic C but not A or B, whereas Vedic has A, B and C but all in a specifically evolved way.

To be more clear for the non-specialist reader here: you will be aware of the so-called centum/satem divide in Indo-European languages (the word meaning "hundred" in Latin and Old Persian respectively). The Latin CeNTuM (pronounce KeNTuM), de Greek heKAToN (as in hectolitre), the Germanic HuNDred show their similar origin: a Proto-Indo-European word which has been reconstructed as something like KMToM. Latin kept it almost intact (only transforming M into N), Greek transformed M into a vowel (A) and transformed the final M into N like Latin did with the first, and Germanic dropped the final M, softened the T into D, transformed the first M into N like Latin did, and typically transformed the “explosion“ sound K into a "friction" sound H (compare CaNine with HouNd, CaPtive with HaVe (German HaBen) etc.). What did the Satem languages (typically Sanskrit and its daughter languages, Old Persian and its daughter languages, and Slav(on)ic and its daughter languages) do? They transformed the initial K “explosion” sound of KMToM into a friction sound S(h). Apart from this major difference the A of SaTeM was the result of a transformation of the M like the A in Greek heKAtoN did, and the T and the M of KMToM were kept. (SaTeM is Old Persian, Sanskrit being closely similar has SHaTaka.)

In which way is this an argument? Well, in the overall majority of languages one notices that "friction" sounds (like S in Sanskrit and H in Germanic) may derive from "explosion" sounds (the K of KMToM) but not the other way around. K’s are transformed into H’s or S‘s, but H’s or S’s are extremely rarely transformed into K’s. This shows that Latin centum, Greek hekaton, nd Germanic hundred cannot have originated from satem. The form satem just shows that it was derived from Proto-Indo-European kmtom, which was more or less kept or transformed otherwise (Germanic H) by the centum languages.

Incidentally one can notice exactly the same evolution in what became later of the Latin CeNTuM pronounced KeNTuM. Italian (closest to Latin) transformed it into cento, which is pronounced like chento; Castilian Spanish transformed it into cien, pronounced thee-en (th as in thirst), which in many Latin American countries is pronounced see-en, and French transformed it into cent pronounced sah-n (the n being a nasalisation of the preceding sah). The three "friction" sounds CH, TH and S evolved from K (and did not precede it in time) exactly like Satem evolved from K of KMToM and did not precede it.

This is a simple demonstration. The "Out of India" linguists need to establish highly contorted "historical linguistic" rules in order to explain the phenomena.

Important to understand is that this only tells us that Proto-Indo-European had a consonant system (and a vowel system, besides) of which Vedic and Sanskrit departed quite sharply – although the Proto-Indo-European origin of Vedic/Sanskrit (like the similar origin for Latin, Celtic etc.) is firmly established. Theoretically it could then be construed that Proto-Indo-European was spoken in India, and that all the other Indo-European cultures migrated from there. However, a close examination of the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary shows a probable origin around the Northern shores of the Black Sea (the old theory), and more probably (now that we know about the Dardanelles catastrophe and the transformation of the quite smaller Black “Lake” into the three times larger present Black Sea in the 6th millenium BCA) around all shores of the Black Lake – there the Indo-Europeans most probably lived as a seafaring civilisation, which by its very lakeshore-dwelling nature explains the close kinship of all then Proto-Indo-European dialects now languages.

As for the myths – please try and read and/or consult the work of the famous French Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumézil. It is abundantly clear that the mythologies of the Vedic/Sanskrit, Persian, Armenian, Greek, Albanian, Baltic, Slavonic, Latin, Germanic and Celtic civilisations are related but that does not point to a supposed common Indian origin but again to the existence of an Indo-European civilisation.

Finally, in defense of the Greek world: you definitely underestimate the antiquity of Greek literature. The great epics Iliad and Odyssey (admittedly shorter than the Mahabharata and Ramayana) date back to the 7th century BCA at the latest which versions have been shown to have been written by a single hand (unity of style and language: Homer, of course) whereas similar versions for the Indian epics date back at least half a millennium later. The Greek literary miracle par excellence however is the existence of the great lyrical poets from the 6th century BCE onwards – to mention just one, the unequalled Pindar - and more so even the triad of tragedians Aeschylus (Aischulos), Sophocles and Euripides.

(By stating this, I do not wish to diminish in any way the great religious literature in the Old Indian world represented by the Vedic hymns. But these are hymns belonging to religious offices, they have a specifically liturgic nature (similar to Zarathustra’s Gathas). The Greek names are names of individuals with a highly individual tone and style, they could be our contemporaries. The Vedic hymns are more like “David”’s psalms, the Greek lyrical poets maybe like Jeremiah and Ezekiel. The Greek tragics found a lonely correspondent in the book of Job, which has convincingly been demonstrated to have been a play. Indian drama was probably contemporary with the Greeks, but was forgotten because of the emergence of later geniuses like Kalidasa (5th century of the common era).)

Greatness is everywhere. At least in the realm of the masterworks of the human spirit, we should not give in to the temptation of unipolarity and hegemony.

Moreover, Vedic/Sanskrit and Greek – and Latin, Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Arabic, Babylonian cultures (and quite a few more!) were written cultures.

But black Africa, American native peoples from North, Middle and South, Polynesia etc. all brought forth oral – quite probably (very) old but not written – epics and songs of the greatest value.

The one poem sung by one unique poet from one unique Amazonian tribe of just 100 people is a diamond.

[onawah]

For that matter, all our current languages probably originated in Atlantis, and before that, Lemuria...
A fact which, if considered fully, would logically put to rest any such arguments about where the original cradle of civilization was located.
Taken to the furthest extent, that would make the point entirely moot since there were likely civilizations even before Lemuria.
And the discussion could be enlarged to encompass the supposition that has been put forth by The Michael Teachings (which make a lot of sense), which is that nations go through many cycles, beginning with infancy and progressing to sophistication, and then beginning all over again.
See: https://www.michaelteachings.com/sou...countries.html

[Michel Leclerc]

Posted by onawah (here)
For that matter, all our current languages probably originated in Atlantis, and before that, Lemuria...
A fact which, if considered fully, would logically put to rest any such arguments about where the original cradle of civilization was located.
Taken to the furthest extent, that would make the point entirely moot since there were likely civilizations even before Lemuria.
And the discussion could be enlarged to encompass the supposition that has been put forth by The Michael Teachings (which make a lot of sense), which is that nations go through many cycles, beginning with infancy and progressing to sophistication, and then beginning all over again.
See: https://www.michaelteachings.com/sou...countries.html

I agree with you philosophically Onawah. A point of interest is however that the Atlantis and the Lemuria origins are scientifically studied – although "Atlantis” and "Lemuria” are not necessarily the names used by linguistics to call these originator languages by.

In another post, I think, I wrote about the Nostratic hypothesis – which has strong evidence supporting it. Statistical analysis of the vocabularies of the following language "macro-families":
– the Indo-European macro family (Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavonic, Latin, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, Iranian, Northern Indian, ...)
- the Hamitic (Berber, Pharaonic Egyptian, ...) and Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic, the Ethiopian languages, Aramaean, Babylonian/Assyrian, ...) twin macrofamily,
- the Dravidian languages (South India: Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Kanada),
- the Uralic languages (Sami (Lappish), Finnish, Hungarian),
– the Altaic languages (the Turkic ones with Turkish, Azeri etc., Mongolian, Korean, Japanese)
– Georgian from the Kaukasian languages
who are known to be kindred (!), show that a possible closeness (similar to the one of the Indo-European languages around the Black "Lake") date back to the 10,000 or 11,000 BCE timespan. This means that they were probably separated by the ±12,000 year old Flood Graham Hancock has been speaking about. And that in itself more or less justifies calling the Nostratic group "Atlantean".

More hypothetical (but not without evidence!) is the idea that the Nostratic group was once unified with the Sino-Tibetan group as well as with the Austric group which more or less covers the languages of South East Asia and the Polynesian group.

A matter of a lot of debate is the relatedness of this latter “hypermega” (or “Meta-Nostratic”) (my label in this post) group with the various language families of Subsaharan Africa and Native America. Individual families are suggested to be akin but the study of these links is often the work of relatively isolated researchers and therefore remain quite speculative. But this field is really the one where the “Lemurian” hypothesis may play a role, because such widespread relatedness presupposes a worldwide civilisation.

Yet, linguistic speculations should also tread with caution, as linguists often tend to overlook the impact of natural catastrophes upon language evolution. The "Black Lake" hypothesis for Indo-European is still a matter of debate – in part because the scale of the catastrophic event is not readily understood by language specialists. Over such time stretches interdisciplinary research is essential. It has been shown for the cooperation of geologists and archeologists, but is equally true for linguists: they can be helped by their colleagues from other fields of research, and they can help them with their own contribution.

[Rahul]

Thank you Michel for your replies. It struck me, while reading through your first reply, that I either know or know of several Indologists and cultural specialists from the region of Belgium and Holland. They too are well versed in languages and linguistics. There is one gentleman I knew some years ago who was the head of a Unesco convention, from the region, and a linguist. What is it I wonder that makes it so?

But as for your main point about Greek versus Indic (that was Shaberon's post, although the 'vs' wasn't the subject), I do have a couple of responses.

First about "As far as I know it has become fashionable now in certain Indian circles to claim that all Indo-European cultures are 'out of India' ". Yes it has. I would say it is not fashionable, it is the equivalent of political correctness in those circles. What are those circles? They are generally understood to be, in India as much as in the West, as the supporters of the current ruling political party that has styled itself as representing Hindu India. What I'd like to clarify is that these circles, are supporters of a political order (whose origin and rise to power has much to do with the original subject of my post, Asian capitulation). This is not a genuinely apolitical Hindu view, quite simply because the need to dwell on differences and historical or cultural precedence does not arise for such a Hindu.

Second about the fount of languages being Sanskrit and this being the position of the 'out of India' adherents. It might help Project Avalon readers to very briefly learn here that this has directly to do with two competing theories, these being what is called the Aryan invasion theory and the other being the out of India theory. These posit, respectively, that the very ancient Vedic philosophy and culture was brought into the Indic territory by those from outside it, and its counterblast which is that Vedic organisation, language, religion and social structure spread to nearer Asia (from the Indic territory) and then farther away, which the locus being north-central India.

As to the second point, I think it is untenable to claim any founding provenance for any ancient language and cultural medium. My reason for saying so is that from the time of the European (followed by American) interest in the Orient, and the first generation of Indologists, the basis of their work has been surviving texts, commentaries on those texts, and then translations and interpretations. However, Asian cultures and social systems in early antiquity (and before then) were actively and primarily oral, relying on metre and memory for transmission fidelity.