03.31.09
Empires of the Silk Road
I have just been looking at: Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Hardcover)
by Christopher I. Beckwith
Our discussions of PIE (proto-indoeuropean…) and the homeland question are discussed in this book, which takes no final position, but which tends toward assuming a central Eurasian source.
More to say when I finish reading it, but there are many disccusions of IE linguistics that are worth the price of the book. The trickiness of the Indo-Iranian and Indic streams of PIE are given a twist: Avestan is so close to Vedic Sanskrit that the author suspects that it is wrongly associated with the Indo-Iranian branch!!!! etc…
Another interesting idea that clicks: the emergence of the many IE languages is the result of creolization, an obvious explanation.
More later….