why necessarily indo-european? why not just indian? this was my question exactly in
post # 45 ,assuming it influenced persian language, thus is the similarity in them.
Because believe it or not, Sanskrit is related to Celtic, Russian, Greek, Germanic and most other languages spoken in Eurasia, with the exception of Finnish and Hungarian (Finno-Ugric of the Uralic family), and Turkish (related to Mongolian in the proposed Altaic family). There are definite reconstructed cognates and similarities, coming from regular morphological changes.
The reason I don't subscribe to the OIT is because of the timescale necessary for the "descendants" of Sanskrit to migrate as far west as the Iberian peninsula and British Isles. That would necessitate a massive migration or invasion
out of India. And to the best of my knowledge, anthropology and genetics do not bear that out. It's more plausible imo that an ancestor language (let's say PIE, for argument's sake
) branched east and west from a central location. I think there were migrations all over Asia and Europe for milennia. Humans are like **** and are all over the place.
The problem with the AIT is that it says the indigenous Indian civilizations were massively overrun and exterminated by invaders from the north(west). It doesn't even consider the possibility of trickles of migrations both ways. A small group of PIE-speaking wanderers could have settled in the Indus Valley milennia before commonly believed, and built the IVC, their language diverging into Vedic Sanskrit from PIE, while those who migrated north began to speak Proto-Balto-Slavic (the forerunner of Russian and Polish), which diverged from PIE.
I think the whole thing hinges on the timeframe the speakers of PIE existed, and when they migrated. It may be milennia earlier than the commonly believed 4,000 BCE. I say it had to be much earlier by milennia to reconcile the age of Indian civilization and the relationships of IE languages, discounting the OIT.