Similarly, Mittani Indo-Aryan language is considered older than Vedic
or Avestan because it has aika instead of eka. Vedic is supposed to
have merged 'ai' to 'e', hence younger. But at the same time Mittani
contains satta for seven that corresponds to sound changes in
prakrits, which is much later than Vedic. But lingusists somehow came
to the conclusion that Mittani Aryan was older than Vedic. They also
base their conclusion based on one or two words and take that one
word as a proof of their assumption while ignoring others.

regards,
Mandar

--- In IndiaArchaeology@yahoogroups.com, "raonath" <raonath@...>
wrote:
>
> --- In IndiaArchaeology@yahoogroups.com, "munnubanerjee"
> <munnubanerjee@> wrote:
> > witzel claims that
> > dialects at peripheries of liguistic family distribution are
usually
> > more innovative then the ones at the center.
>
> There are quite a few IE-ists who claim that the center is
> more innovative than the periphery. You will find such claims
> in the cybalist (on Yahoo groups). I don't know if either one
> has empirical support.
>
> To go back to the question of innovations in Vedic vs Avestan:
> If language A is in all respects more innovative than B, it is
> likely that A evolved from B. In case of sister branches in IE,
> it is always the case that one "preserves" some traits more
> than the other. ["preserves" is in quotation marks because there
> may be changes but starting from a more archaic point.] Thus,
> in Sanskrit word-medial consonsnat clusters are generally
> better preserved, but word-final clusters are drastically
> simplified (compared to Greek and some extent Avestan).
> Iranian (including Avestan) merge *d and *dh (for example),
> but Sanskrit merges *g^ (>z in Avestan) and j from the secod
> palatalization. It is impossible to use these things for
> dating.
>
> Nath Rao
>