The Shatterer Again — On Leopards Rather Than Elephants
Shrikant G. Talageri
I thought there was an end to the nonsense written by this "shatterer " of my article after I had replied to him in full. But the truly stupid never learn. Apparently someone pointed out to him that he himself had got "shattered" after I responded to his "shattering" article. To which the "shatterer" writes as follows (the tweet is of today, i.e. 8/11/2022):
I was aware that there was no logic or sense in what this man writes, and the only thing he knows is to quote textbook paragraphs irrelevant to the discussion, or to list out, Witzel-like, the things I have not "mentioned" (again without any logic as to why my failure to "mention" them is relevant in any way to the point under dispute or discussion) or in this case "not addressed".
But the above tweet is so silly and hilarious that I feel I have to comment on it. And, not being on twitter, my comment has necessarily to be on my blog.
Firstly, my "shattering" of the "shatterer's" "shattering" article on my Elephant article had nothing to do with leopards. So where the leopards enter into any "shattering" activity from either side is a big mystery to me.
About leopards, I had, in my Elephant article, written the following:
"The leopard,
with a proto-form *perd is found in four branches: Indo-Aryan pṛdāku, Greek pardos/pardalis,
Iranian Persian fars-, and Anatolian (Hittite) paršana". And I had pointed out
a few paragraphs later that the common words for the leopard did not
automatically prove an Indian Homeland because it could be argued that "Lions,
leopards, and even tigers, were found in parts of Iran, West Asia and the
Caucasus region in early historical times. Likewise monkeys were found as far
as West Asia in earlier historical times. Names for these animals may therefore
have been known to the PIE language speakers in their steppe homeland".
I had made it very clear that:
"All these arguments can be argued against, but here we will deal only with the word for "elephant", since it is the most important and significant, for two reasons:
1. The word is found distributed over the entire spectrum of Indo-European languages: it is found in both Asia and Europe, in both the south-easternmost branch (Indo-Aryan) as well as the north-westernmost one (Germanic). It is found in all the oldest recorded Indo-European languages: "the earliest attested Indo-European languages, i.e. Hittite, Mycenaean Greek and Indo-Aryan" (MALLORY-ADAMS 2006:99), as well as in the oldest attested "North-western" or "European" IE languages in southern Europe (Latin), northern Europe (Gothic) and eastern Europe (Old Church Slavonic). It is found in Anatolian (Hittite) as well as in five other branches: as per Mallory and Adams, the criterion for determining a word to be definitely Proto-Indo-European is "if there are cognates between Anatolian and any other Indo-European language", to which they add: "This rule will not please everyone, but it will be applied here" (MALLORY-ADAMS 2006:109-110)!
2. Unlike the other animals named above, the elephant is found in only one of the historical Indo-European habitats: that of Indo-Aryan. There are two distinct species of elephants: the Indian elephant (elaphas maximus), found in India and in areas to its east (i.e. southeast Asia), and the African elephant (loxodonta africana), found in sub-Saharan Africa, in both cases far from the historical habitats of all the other branches of IE languages other than Indo-Aryan".
So isn't it rather a case of tilting at windmills when this man coolly tries to shift the discussion away from the subject of the Elephant and convert it into a discussion on the leopard in which I am supposed to be guilty of "quoting half a paragraph, while neglecting & not addressing the other half of which directly contradicts what Talageri is claiming"! I never quoted the paragraph he shows in his tweet, and so the question of "neglecting and not addressing the other half", i.e. the references to the Turkish, Kazakh and Mongolian, simply did not arise at all.
In fact, it is Sameer himself who neglects and fails to address half of my paragraph (see above) where I refer not just to the Persian and Hittite words, but also to the Indo-Aryan and Greek words, which do not figure in his tweet (either in his quoted paragraph, nor in his comments alongside the paragraph). And how does anything in the paragraph he quotes contradict what I have written? Incredible stupidity!
Even in my reply ("Indian Fauna: Elephants, Foxes and the AIT-OIT Debate") to his "shattering" article, I had written: "About his criticism of my citing the common words for tiger, lion, monkey and leopard in my earlier article. It is not I who have discovered them to be common words, it is Gamkrelidze and Ivanov who have cited them (whether as original PIE words or "wanderwörter") in order to suggest that animals well to the south of the temperate regions have common names and that the Homeland may lie well to the south of the Steppes: they suggest Anatolia. Many other western scholars, who cannot be accused of pro-OIT intentions, have also accepted these correspondences without necessarily taking them into consideration for locating the Homeland outside the Steppes", and again reiterated that the discussion was not about the leopard but about the elephant.
So, however much he may try to evade and escape the issue, let me bring it back to the elephant.
He refuses to accept that the four Indo-European words are derived from *ṛbha/ḷbha (ivory, elephant), from an original root (I am giving the Vedic form of the root rather than reconstructing a "PIE" one) *rabh/*labh: Vedic ibha, Latin ebur, Greek erepa/elepha, Hittite laḫpa, each of the four word words individually bearing a distinct resemblance to the word *ṛbha/ ḷbha.
But his pretense to be a textbook citer gets completely shattered when he is not able to explain how these four Indo-European languages happen to have such similar words for ivory/elephant when the elephant was not found either in the Steppes or in the historical areas of any of the branches other than Indo-Aryan. Then, without bothering to cite a single scholar, without giving a single protoform (or even a group of different protoforms) from Africa or "pre-Aryan" India, and without showing how and by which rules of phonetic derivation these words were derived from any such protoforms, he very breezily informs us that "words for “elephant; ivory” were getting borrowed around in the area in antiquity. The ultimate origin might be an Afroasiatic (or another African) language, or it might be India, or a mixture of both".
For someone who so very pompously and superciliously rejects the derivation from *ṛbha/ḷbha, in spite of (a) the very close resemblance of the four Indo-European words to *ṛbha/ḷbha, (b) the parallel semantic example of hastin, and (c) the connected etymology of the Vedic ṛbhu from *ṛbha/ḷbha, in a show of being a stickler for strict phonetic rules of derivation, Sameer does not find it necessary to be equally circumspect when suggesting alternate derivations.
So, I again put it as follows: the discussion can only proceed further (although I can sense many people yawning already and wondering when this quibbling will end), and/or Sameer can only save his face, by providing textbook quotations from other scholars of such words which are "mixtures" of "both" African and Indian words, and giving the specific African and (non-IE) Indian words which got "mixed" together to produce these four Indo-European words for ivory/elephant, and naming the specific African and (non-IE) Indian languages from which those words arose. A short description of the way in which those diverse words met together before getting "mixed" and the phonetic rules explaining these "mixtures" would also help.
Like it or not, the common Indo-European words for ivory/elephant prove the Indian Homeland or OIT.
Final postscript added 9/11/2022:
In a display of brazenness and naivete, the shatterer has put up one more tweet:
My last response because, as I pointed out above, he has completely lost it, and I cannot keep humoring him forever:
It is not my call to "reconstruct PIE". It is his call to reconstruct the "mixtures" of "non-Aryan" Indian words and African words, to point out which Indian and African languages they came from, how they managed to join together and get "borrowed" only by four IE languages (but not by the Caucasian, Uralic, Altaic, Sumerian, etc. languages), and so on. While going about it, he could also reconstruct one common PIE word for "fox", explaining all the anomalies. Happy nightmaring!
Incidentally, his pathetic and desperate attempt, to suggest that the laryngeal H in the Hittite word obliterates all the massive evidence for the common PIE word, is not endorsed by any scholar as an argument. Gamkrelidze postulates two forms of the common PIE word, one form with and one without a laryngeal: "*lebh-onth-/*leHbho- 'elephant; ivory'" (GAMKRELIDZE 1995:765). So it is now Sameer's nightmare to reconstruct one common PIE protoform for "fox", and to produce the various Indian "non-Aryan" and African words for elephant and ivory and explain the full process of how they got "mixed" together to produce the various IE forms.
But instead of getting down to serious work, this childish man (see the emoji in the above tweet) now apparently childishly and repeatedly takes my name (or should I say does my nāmasmaraṇ) in his tweets on other topics, whether the occasion calls for it or not, making the most inane personal remarks. And his friends and fans still cite his "shattering" article, ignoring all that followed! Well, people have different ways of reacting to defeat in debate!
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