re: #255 The Ghost of a Flea

The theories that don’t involve Clancy Brown acting like a complete nutter with a big sword tend to slip from my recall.

But you’re absolutely correct that there’s multiple ideas about how the language moved—doubtless things have moved on since the Kurgan hypothesis, and likely with good reason, so I ain’t going to argue. I haven’t kept up on theories and don’t really have a strong opinion, but I used to be a little wary of the old linguist theories that had Indo-European as the language of some conquering group. Now that I’ve glanced at the concept, I guess I’ll go look at what the newer thinking is saying.

i once read an interesting book where an archaeologist tried to track down the archeological culture most likely to be the aryans properly so called, that is, the people who wrote the bhagavad gita and the vedas, the people supposed to have brought indo european sanskrit to india and who claimed to have invaded and conquered it

about two thirds of the way through the book he says “you will have noticed by now that i haven’t found anything that looks remotely like archeological evidence of an aryan invasion”