A highly contentious proposal that Burushaski, most commonly thought of as a language isolate, is in fact a deviant member of Indo-European has recently earned some attention in the popular press (much of it crippled by serious misunderstandings about what exactly Indo-European is, or — even worse — the idea that Burushaski was only just discovered by linguists). I haven’t had the opportunity to read this latest edition of The Journal of Indo-European Studies, but earlier versions of the same argument have left me no more moved than this enthusiastic amateur attempt to similarly prove that “the Turkic languages could be a lost “satemized” branch of the Indo-European family”. (Which is not to say that no long-range relationships involving Burushaski are worth contemplating — more on this shortly.)
In combination with recent discussions of Indo-European migration at Dienekes, however, this is as good a reason as any to share a passage from Frye (1996: 32-33):
From stories by the Burushaski speaking people of Hunza in northern Pakistan that their ancestors lived in the Yarkand-Khotan regions of Xinjiang, one might suggest that the proto-Burushaskis extended over a much larger territory before the coming of the Indo-European speaking peoples. Burushaski is unrelated to the Tibeto-Burman, Dravidian, Altaic or Indo-European families of languages and, like Basque in the Pyrenees and several tongues of the Caucasus, may be a relic of languages spoken by aborigines in Central Asia before the expansion of the Indo-European speakers. For the latter ranged far, from India and China to the Atlantic Ocean mostly in the second millennium B.C.E.
Thus, before the coming of the Indo-Europeans, we may assume that Central Asia was occupied by a number of peoples, speaking languages which have disappeared, or of which the last traces are Burushaski and Dravidian speakers. Possibly long vanished Elamite, or languages related to Mannean or Urartian, also had representatives in Central Asia, but the population and settlements of aborigines were probably small and few.
This Urheimat story is somewhat easier to swallow than Čašule’s Phrygian exodus, but it nonetheless managed to catch me by surprise, so further references — if any readers are aware of them — would be appreciated.
I’ll keep this brief and close by noting that, if George van Driem’s exciting speculations in Languages of the Himalayas indeed hold water (and perhaps that’s a large if), the Burushos’ relation to IE expansion could be far more nuanced that of singlemindedly retreating victim. Follow-up to come…
[EDIT: Victor Mair and his camp have suggested Frye's claims above re: pre-Tocharian Tarim Basin peoples have little in the way of substantiation, which is a little troubling if true given the specificity of that claim about Hunza Burusho traditions.]
Works Cited:
Frye, R. N. (1996). The heritage of Central Asia, from antiquity to the Turkish expansion. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers.
van Driem, G. (2001). Languages of the Himalayas: An ethnolinguistic handbook of the greater Himalayan Region: Containing an introduction to the symbiotic theory of language. Leiden: Brill.
The Burusho are people of power…it is said an emissary of Aldebaran was born to them. The stars sing from their bosom!
Ilija Casule has kindly sent me his upcoming paper on Indo-European-Burushaski kinship terms. Although originally (back in the late 1990s-2000s) I wasn’t struck by any specific similarities between Indo-European and Burushaski, I haven’t read Casule recent book or the JIES articles. As far as kin terms are concerned, it’s indeed striking that Burushaski has a very productive kin term suffix -caro (< *taro, *-staro) corresponding to the old and largely inactive IE suffix -ter found on all basic IE terms and in all branches of IE, including Anatolian (e.g., Luwian duuttari 'daughter," Lycian kbatra). This match makes Burushaski kin terms look indeed like Indo-European (e.g., Bur bapocaro 'grandfathers; fathers', IE pHter 'father', mamocaro 'mothers,' IE meHter 'mother'). A crucial test may come from the Burushaski yas(t), yascaro, yastaro 'man's sister'. Casule compares it with IE swesor. The semantic match is perfect (Ego Sex tends to get lost from kin terms over time, so Burushaski would preserve the earlier stage in the semantic evolution of the IE Ego Sex neutral 'sister' term), but there's no sound correspondence accounting for the IE s- / Bur y-. Casule proposes dissimilation s-s > y-s. But it’d be great to have this kind of critical example reflect regular sound correspondences to the dot, without the need to invoke phonologically typical but not common-descent driven change. If proves to be right, then it easily beats the connection between Bur yas(t) and Chechen zuda ‘woman’ that Blazek and Bengston advanced. There’re other examples where the proposals are semantically very tight and painless. To compare, Nostratic and Dene-Caucasan hypotheses are generally built (at least when it comes to kin terms) on very fuzzy semantic links. It’s the question of whether formal correspondences between IE and Burushaski are solid. Semantically, Burushaski and IE kin terms map onto each other well, I thought.
So the Burushaski-IE proposal may indeed be worthy of a serious discussion, but it may not end up being a valid grouping.
I have a couple of posts up on Burushaski (http://kinshipstudies.org/tag/burushaski/) and will have more once I update myself on the recent developments in the IE-Burushaski link.
Cašule’s theory of Burushaski being a member of the IE family (not merely a relative) is a *crackpot* one, to say the least. Not only Burushaski’s morphology and core lexicon (including numerals) are highly un-IE, but also most of its proposed correspondneces are questionable.
Also IE *swesōr ‘sister’ compares to NC *sswēsǝ ‘bride’. As cognate, Starostin proposes Burushaski *dasén ‘girl, young woman’.
Brushaski is a Indo Tibbiten faimly language!