How Far Back in History Does the European Race Go?

Etype shares a great many myths about “Aryans,” by which means I am not sure what.

The greatest number of linguistic precursor markers for the Aryan language that is shared throughout the globe and the greatest concentrated number of speakers of that language is German.

However this is not to be discussed, as Nazi anthropology and Germans are to be repudiated as thoroughly as possible…even if this means twisting common sense…which is easy enough these days…witness the small-pox blanket myth, something so simple anyone should have been able to refute it…yet for some reason it ran around loose like a dog no one dared collar…even if the entire idea was completely, spuriously insane.

Anthropology like most science, is filled with many of these myths that are demonstrably insane.

The idea that science is a warehouse of verities and not something the state would notice might be good to bolster various spurious arguments for collective mind control is itself deluded.

If there is any truth to the original findings, and need I remind you it was in Germany where the science of modern anthropology and anthropological linguistics originated and developed… later post-war jury rigged for British propaganda purposes. Then possibly the Aryans originated around the Baltic during a thermocline some 10.000 to 30.000 years ago.

Recently excavations found Lithuanian settlements that contained bronze tools and evidence of textile clothing that were carbon dated to 40,000 years old. However this totally uproots many favorite common theories, so you don’t hear much of it.

But it is more certain than any opposing theory, despite the latter’s currency, that Europeans are older than 10,000 years old, has more consistent evidence than any prevailing idea, whatever sanction our betters lay on it.

On that topic, the evidence for the out-of-Africa theory is actually paper thin, the fossil record to support it could fit on a garden table…and does not account for the fact glaciers swept Europe and N Asia in this time period, and this may be why the oldest fossils are found in Africa to date….

The African genesis theory is mostly supported mostly by group think and the fact that opposing theories sound a lot like Europeans who prefer logic to what the established state says is good for them to think.

There is absolutely no reason for anyone to think that the Aryans were not much the same as today’s European, other than what seems the knee jerk need to conform to common fallacy – such as Europeans evolved in isolation the last 10000 years.

The “Aryan” language is most closely related to Persian or Sanskrit and the other Indian languages, not German.

As far as “Aryans’ originating 10-30,000 YBP in the Baltic region, I do not know what he means by Aryans. He means White people? White people originated around Finland 9-11,000 YBP.

I know nothing of 40,000 YBP Lithuanians, but 35,000 year old Europeans look nothing like Europeans. There’s nothing remotely European about them. They may look a bit like African Hottentots.

The traditional European phenotype only dates back 10,000 years. Before that, Europeans looked very different.

In fact, the African genesis theory is pretty uncontroversial in anthropology today. It is only rejected by nonscientists, mostly White nationalists and White racists with an axe to grind against Black people.

The “Aryans” only date back to 5,000 YBP. That’s it. If you are talking White people, well, White skin and blue eyes go back 9-11,000 YBP. Before that, European skulls and genes look more Arab than anything else. Going back ~20,000 YBP, European skulls look most like the skulls of the Indian tribes of NW America such as the Makah of Washington state. Going back 35,000 YBP, the oldest Europeans do not look like any known race. They may look more like a Bushman than anything else.

Why the Rig Vedas Cannot Overlap with the Indus Valley Civilization

This is one of the classic Hindutva claims of course. But it can’t possibly be true.

See new commenter Rupert from India for more:

1. The Aryan invasion (in India) also suggests that Aryans might have migrated to India from northwest.  This doesn’t mean nobody was there at the time of migration. So can be called as a invasion.

2: There is  strong evidence in the Rigveda for a migration from the northwest. The geographical information given in the Rigveda changes from the beginning of the book to the end in a sequence supporting a migration from the northwest.

3. The migration derived from the Rigveda cannot be dated back before Indus Valley civilization. Because then it should be dated before 7000 BC.  The language spoken by the present people there is a Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) derived language. So if it is dated back before 7000 BC,  the period of Sanskrit derived language speaking people would be from 7000 BC until present. But the Indus people (7000 BC- 1300 BC) spoke a language which is still hardly known.

This suggests there would not be any time overlap. Carbon dating calculations proves the Indus Valley period. So the mistake could only be about the date of the migration. It cannot be dated back before the Indus Valley civilization. From that it is confirmed that the Rigveda occurs after the Indus Valley Civilization.

4. Indus valley civilization itself encompassed the entire Bronze age (3300 – 1300 BC).  If the migration happened after the Indus valley civilization as mentioned in point 3, the Rigveda can not be dated back before 1300 BC.

5. There is some evidence which suggests the IVC period and the Rigveda cannot be overlapped.

• There is no reference in Rigveda to the big cities or important places of the IVC.
• There is no evidence in Rigveda about the Indus peoples’ architectural skills.
• There is no evidence in Rigveda about the tubed drainages found in the Indus valley.
• There is no evidence in Rigveda about water reservoirs or ponds found in Indus valley.
• There is no evidence in Rigveda about water urn burials found in Indus valley.

6. The Rigveda people might not have even known about the IVC as the civilization was destroyed without a trace. This suggest the migration  happened long after the IVC.

7. The Rigvedic people might not have even known about cotton. This could have happened if they had an alternate source.

The “no cotton in the Rig Vedas” line is used by Hindutvas to say that the Rig Vedas must predate the IVC considerably, as we know the date cotton was introduced into the region.

The language of the IVC is generally thought to be something along the lines of proto-Dravidian, which may have a deep time depth along the lines of ~9000 years.

Who Were the Aryans of the Vedas?

The Vedas were written no earlier than 3400 YBP. The latest Vedas were written ~2500 YBP. So the Vedas were written between 2500-3400 YBP.

Who were these people, where did they live, and what was their society like? Let’s have a brief overview of the Vedic Aryans.

They spoke a language called Vedic Sanskrit that produced a large volume of literature.

They had a patrilineal society with the beginnings of a class structure with nobles, priests/poets and the rest of the people. These later evolved into the Indian castes. They were organized in clans, tribes and tribal unions. The tribes were led by chiefs often nominated from the highest nobles. They engage in continuous warfare with each other and with the non-Aryan dasyu, mostly over land, cattle and water rights. The Arya are semi-nomadic cattle herders who also herd sheep, goats and horses. They engage in some minor agriculture as a sideline, mostly growing barley. For sports and in battle they use horse-drawn chariots and also a sort of all-terrain vehicle called a vipatha that can move over rough terrain.

They have a complex religious pantheon, including Gods of nature such as a wind God, a fire God Agni, female water gods, a father god in heaven and a mother god on Earth, and a goddess of dawn.

There are also moral gods of law and order and the typical warrior god Indra. The gods keep everything moving smoothly in heaven and on Earth. All of these deities, though are under a supreme deity, which is an active positive force of truth, Rta, later to evolve into the Hindu concept of Dharma. This force pervades the entire universe and controls all behavior of the gods and men. Every year, the gods battle their adversaries – the Asura, and every year, the gods win, for now. This dualism was later used by Zoroaster to create his dualistic religion, Zoroastrianism.

All of the gods but especially Indra and Agni are worshipped in elaborate rituals. These ceremonies occur at specific times of years, are lorded over by priests, and are public rather than private. The gods are invited to the ceremony, and the gods seat themselves on the grass next to the sacred fires. People then offer the gods meat or grain cakes and the drink Soma along with alcoholic beverages. Skilled poet orators entertain the gods with bardic poetry. These men compose hymns, often after deep concentration but sometimes right on the spot, meant to praise the nobility and invite the gods. The rites of passage as such for men involve a period of study of traditional knowledge after which they roam the countryside searching for some cattle with which they and start their capital. As soon as cattle are acquired, they are fully admitted into adult society and allowed to marry.

The Aryan Migration Theory: Last Word

It has been known for 150 years now that the Indo-Aryan languages came from outside of India. The evidence is overwhelming, primarily linguistic, but there is also some archeological evidence. In scholarly circles, there is no debate on the Aryan Migration Theory (AMT) and there has been little debate for 150 years. It is only among Indian nationalists and a few hacks and kooks that it is not accepted.

1. There is a substrate of a language that looks like a Munda language in the Rig Vedas. A Munda language was probably spoken in the Punjab when the Aryans migrated there. About 4% of the words in Rig Vedas are these early Munda loans. None of these Munda loans are found outside of Indic.

They would be found all through IE if the Out of India Theory (OIT) was true. The OIT holds that Aryans inhabited North India for 8,000 years, all the while the Dravidians were in South India and Munda tongues were in East India. Obviously, the Aryans came into Punjab and there mass language shift from a Munda language to Indo-Aryan (IA). The language shift is evident in the sparse Munda loans into Vedic Sanskrit.

There are also a few place names left in North India from the original Munda language of the Greater Punjab area. There are some river names left in Eastern Punjab and Haryana where the local Indus Valley Civilization (IVC) continued for some time after the arrival of the Aryans. These names would not be there if the OIT was true.

There are a large number of IA words for local plants and animals and for agriculture that have been borrowed from the Munda language of Punjab. There would be no reason for the IA people to borrow these terms if the IA people were native to Punjab. Instead, this borrowing is precisely what we would expect to see when pastoralists from Central Asia move into the tropics, encounter new plants and animals and start farming – they borrow the terms for these new living things and technologies from the locals.

This is particularly so in the case of farming, which was left to the local people – the Sudra caste. The IA people only brought a few farming related words with them from Central Asia – the remainder were borrowed from the new locals.

40% of Hindi agricultural words still derive from an unknown pre-Munda language of the Indo-Ganges Plains. Nahali, a small language in Madhya Pradesh, at successively lower levels of its vocabulary, displays high levels of borrowing from earlier tongues. 36% of vocabulary is of Kurku (Munda) origin and 9% is Dravidian. At the oldest level, 24% have no cognates in any known language and appear to have derived from the oldest language known from India.

2. There is an old set of shared loans between proto-Indo-Aryan and proto-Iranian for a number of agricultural and other cultural items that appeared in the Bactria-Margiana (BMAC) 3700-4200 YBP. The BMAC is located more or less in present day Turkmenistan. Obviously, these shared loans were picked up by the proto-Indo-Iranian people as they moved down from the steppes of Kazakhstan and Russia into the BMAC, conquering the people who lived there.

There are references in the Rig Vedas to the conquest of the BMAC peoples by the Arya. For this sequence of events to have occurred, the Indo-Aryans would have had to have moved through the BMAC during this time period and later moved into Iran and India, not the other way around. The language of the loans is not known, but it is apparently the language of the BMAC people.

So there is a BMAC or Central Asian substrate in Indo-Iranian. A possible guess for the language of the BMAC people might be a relative of the Burushaski language of northern Pakistan.

The substrate of the Rig Vedas is a Munda language. The substrate of the earlier Proto-Indo-Iranian language is the language of the BMAC. This sequence is not possible under the OIT and is only possible under the AMT.

3. There are early Indo-Aryan loans into the Caucasian language of the Mittani, who lived in northern Iraq and Syria. These loans are dated to ~3400 YBP. These loans are from an earlier form of Indo-Aryan than is used in the Vedas. Therefore, the Vedas must have been composed 3000-3500 YBP and could not have been composed any earlier.

Also, the Mittani could not possibly have come out of India as the OIT demands, since the IA loans do not show any Indic influences. Nor could the loans have come from Iran, as there are numerous IA Gods in the Mittani texts who are marginalized or do not exist in Iran. The loans must have come from somewhere else, apparently the north.

4. We have numerous references in the Vedas to battles between the Arya with their stone forts, metals, horses and chariots against the more sedentary peoples living in South Asia at the time.

5. There are pottery shards in the BMAC that resemble that shards found in the steppe culture to the north. This indicates that there is cultural resemblance between the two cultures. The suggestion is that the shards are Indo-Aryan and appear first on the steppes and then again in the BMAC with its conquest by the Aryans.

6. The chariot appears in the Urals 4000 YBP and then spreads rapidly in many directions with the spread of IE languages, to Europe, to China via the Tocharians and of course to India and Iran via the Aryans. The horse also appears in South Asia (Pakistan) 3700 YBP in conjunction with the chariots. The modern horse is not native to South Asia, so obviously it came from outside, obviously from the Aryans. The indigenous horse of South Asia, the Siwalik horse, was long since extinct.

7. There are specific Punjabi and Uttar Pradesh loans in Vedic Indic that are not found in Iranian. Therefore, Iranian could not possibly have come from Indic as the OIT demands. The languages must have split in the BMAC, one line going to Iran and another line going to India.

8. The Soma ritual originates in the high mountains of Central Asia  – the mountains of Iran, the Himalayas and the Pamirs – with the proto-Indo-Iranian peoples. The original name for the plant is a Central Asian term amsu . This term is borrowed into Indo-Iranian and eventually becomes soma, etc. Later, it moves down into Iran and India and appears in the Vedas. Therefore, the Aryans brought the Soma ritual with them from Central Asia to Iran and India.

9. There is tremendous evidence for a common Indo-Iranian language, mythology and ritual. This shared heritage is not possible with the OIT. It is only possible if there was an Indo-Iranian people, who then split into the Iranian and Indic branches.

10. The Vedic branch of IA becomes innovated and Indianized (in particular, the retroflex consonants) after its arrival in Punjab, while the Iranian branch escapes this development because it did not enter the subcontinent then. In addition, Iranian lacks any specific Indic terms. According to the OIT, the Iranian branch must be Indianized too, or else all of the Indic terms were somehow lost in Iranian.

Since it is not, both branches came from outside India, to the northwest. Iranian languages cannot possibly have come from the Punjab. An early date for Iranian to leave India is preposterous, and Old Iranian (Avestan) is too archaic to have left India after the Vedas. All this means that Iranian and Indic must have split before the Vedas and thus, not inside India. The OIT for Iranian lies in ruins.

11. Zero specifically Indic words are found in IE languages outside of India. For the OIT to be correct, many Indic terms should be found in all the other branches of IE. After all, the Gypsies left India 1000 years ago and took a large specifically Indic set of terms with them to Europe and beyond.

12. Retroflexion. According to the OIT, all branches of IE would have had to have lost their retroflexion after they left India. How likely is that? What we do find, though, is that those branches of Iranian which move east to abut the Indic languages do acquire retroflexion. Since retroflexion is in general not present outside Indic or languages abutting Indic, it must be a late development in IE specific to Indic and cannot have been part of the original IE language as required by the OIT.

Retroflexion only effects those moving into the Indic plain and the eastern Iranian lands, but everyone moving out of South Asia somehow loses it. This does not make sense.

13. Chariots. For the OIT to make sense, chariots must be exported from India 7,000 YBP. However, chariots only appear 4000 YBP in the Urals and NW Kazakhstan and from there spread from Ukraine to Mongolia. The western IE languages retain an IE root rotho for wheel because they had already moved away before the chariot had actually been developed in the Urals. Everyone to the east uses the IA form ratha. This could only be the case if the IA languages moved south from Urals.

Further, according to the OIT, chariots that appear in the Rig Vedas must show up in the text before they have even been invented. Linguistics shows that the word must have been innovated in proto IA at the Urals, for it is present in both branches of IA. This word, along with its invention, can be proved to have been innovated in the steppes and and then carried into India and vice versa could not possibly be the case.

14. Lack of tropical core vocabulary in IE. The core vocabulary of IE shows that the IE homeland was a temperate or even cold place. The plants and animals in the IE language include such cold weather animals, plants and weather words as the otter, beaver, wolf, bear, lynx, salmon, elk, red deer, hare, hedgehog, mouse, birch, willow, elm, fir, ash, oak, beech, juniper, poplar, apple, maple, alder, hazel, nut, linden, hornbeam, and cherry in addition to snow.

A few of these are found in South Asia, but most are not. There are no specific Indic plant and animal names found outside of India, even where these plants do occur outside of India. The OIT would assume retention of at least some of these terms, would it not? Instead, what we find is that a few core IE terms are modified inside India to apply to new plants and animals.

For instance, IE beaver bheber is adopted for the mongoose in South Asia, since beavers do not exist there. IE willow becomes reed, cane in India. So we see that IE temperate plant and animal terms are adopted for the newly encountered tropical living things in India. The flow is into India, not out of India.

For the OIT to be right, the IE languages would have had to have coined these terms after they left India. However, this is not what happened. Instead, the words were IE words from the core IE language itself, which, according to the OIT, was only spoken in India. But these plant and animal names could not possibly have been created in India because most don’t even exist there.

For the OIT to be correct, IE core vocabulary should indicate a tropical climate.

15. Early loans in very early IE. The earliest loans in IE are from Semitic languages of the Middle East. This is possible with an IE homeland in SW Russia or Anatolia, but not possible if the IE homeland is in India, as the OIT requires.

16. Typological features of IE. The typological features of IE are between Kartvelian in Georgia and Uralic in the Urals, as we would expect with an IE homeland in SW Russia, and unlikely with an IE homeland in India.

17. Skeletons. Where are the Indian bones? The OIT requires not a trickling out of India, but a massive migration out of the Punjab. Yet Indian bones look remarkably different from Middle Eastern and European bones. With the massive migration out of India required by the OIT, we should find Indian bones in all of the branches of IE. One would have to argue that the IE speakers who left India did not look like the rest of the Indian people.

18. Facial characteristics. DNA analyses of burials in the Kurgan area near the IE homeland 6000 YBP shows that 60% of the early IE people there had light hair and green or blue eyes. How many Indians, even North Indians, have light hair and light eyes? Almost none. Clearly, the Kurgan peoples were a European type of people. They moved down into Iran and India and mixed with the darker folks already there, creating the present day swarthy peoples of South and Central Asia.

19. Very early Proto IA loans in Finno-Ugric. The homeland of the Finno-Ugric people is somewhere in the Urals. The homeland of the Proto Indo-Aryan people is also somewhere in Urals, especially at the very southern end. The only way for these early PIA loans to get into Finno-Ugric is if the PIA homeland is in the Urals. It’s not possible with the OIT, which generally makes a separate Indo-Aryan branch impossible anyway.

20. Vedic is later than Hittite. For the OIT to be correct, Vedic must be the most ancient branch of IE of them all, very close to Proto IE itself. Yet Hittite, attested from 4000 YBP, is earlier than Vedic. In fact, it is later than Eastern IE, Proto IA, and even pre-Vedic, so Vedic must be a fairly late development in IE. In fact, Vedic is even later than the early forms present in Mittani 3400 YBP.

21. Sanskrit is the most ancient language in all of IE and looks a lot like the original IE language. This is the OIT claim. In fact, IE does not look much like Sanskrit at all. And Sanskrit is not even the oldest attested IA language. Vedic comes first, then Epic Sanskrit and then Classical Sanskrit, and Vedic itself cannot possibly be older than 3500 YBP. The IE language is dated to 6500-8000 YBP (I favor the earlier date). Epic Sanskrit appears only 2500 YBP and Classical Sanskrit comes even later.

22. Lack of IA archeological sites. This is a classic OIT argument. Actually, we do have quite a few site. From the original Proto-Indo-Iranian sites in Sintashta southeast of Urals to the BMAC in Turkmenistan to the Yaz Culture in northeast Iran to the Swat Culture in the Swat Valley of Pakistan to the Cemetery H Culture in Punjab to the Copper Hoard Culture to the south, to the Painted Grey Ware Culture to the south and east, we have a long stretch of cultures that have long been associated with the AMT by archeologists.

Cemetery H in particular shows a possible move away from IVC culture. While the pottery is of course the same, there is a new design on the pottery. On funeral urns we see a small picture of a man with a bird inside of him. This seems to indicate the Vedic belief that the souls of men could fly like birds. Cemetery H also shows a new burial style – cremation and deposit of remains in burial urns. These changes in culture are probably due to Aryan influence.

The ideal Aryan archeological site, however, has typically not yet been found. The ideal site would have the remains of horses and their furnishings, chariots, A Vedic ritual site with three fireplaces west of a river, a flimsy and primitive building pattern of bamboo huts, tools made of stone, copper and bronze, gold and silver ornaments, food consisting of barley, milk products and the meat of cows, sheep and goats. However, the pottery style would remain local, as the Aryans did not innovate pottery.

Such a site has continued to elude searchers, but one has been found in Swat. Swat is mentioned in the Vedas as Aryan territory – suvastu.

23. No Aryan bones. Another OIT argument. It’s quite common for migrations to not be represented by skeletal remains. The remains of the Huns, a large force of proven invaders who conquered Hungary have only just been found in the past 20 years. The most recent research indicates that the Aryans left language, but few genes, in India.

This is reasonable and is often the case with many migrations and invasions. The Huns left as little genetic imprint on the Hungarians as the IA people did on Indians. The Magyars also left their language in the Danube, as the IA people left their IA language in India.

24. European appearance of Indo-Iranian peoples. There is no getting around it. The speakers of Indo-Iranian (II)languages often look strikingly European. This is particularly the case of Iranians, who consider themselves White, or Europeans outside of Europe. The speakers of II languages in Afghanistan often look very European. People in northern Pakistan are some of the most European looking people in the region. Punjabis often look very European, and they look much different from the South Indians to the south.

For the OIT to be correct, this should not be the case. All across the region, all II speakers should look like South Indians, and so should the Punjabis of North India. That II speakers look so European is evidence that they are partly descended from the very European looking peoples of the Kurgan culture of southern Russia. They moved south and east into Central and South Asia, bred in with darker locals, but still retain a strong resemblance to their European roots.

25. LANDSTAT photos indicate the drying up of the Sarasvati River 3900 YBP. A stable of the OIT argument. Since the Sarasvati is mentioned as “the great river” in the Vedas, this proves that the Vedas are much older than 4000 YBP, despite the copious linguistic evidence. The problem is that LANDSTAT photos cannot indicate geographic times.

Further, the Sarasvati River situation is very tricky. The situation as represented in the Vedas is the same situation as exists today. The upper Sarasvati is a significant river, and this is where the settlements were. The lower Sarasvati had already begun to dry up, and by the time of the Vedas it emptied into an inland lake. In a few places, the lower river goes underground in the alluvial Punjabi plains and disappears.

Archeological investigation indicates that settlements along the lower river were abandoned as the river dried up around this time. As you can see, the “Sarasvati River dried up” meme is a huge red herring.

26. No memories of an Aryan migration. Another OIT line. First of all, it is quite typical of most people to have no memories or false memories of wherever they came from. The Romans said they came from Greece. The Gypsies say they came from Egypt.

However, the Vedas do contain vague references to former habitations, such as what appears to be the BMAC and there are references to journeys over mountains and mountain passes. Many place names in Afghanistan are from proto-II words from Central Asia and often lead back to ancient Central Asian enemies of the Arya referred to in the Vedas. One of these is the Parni, associated with the BMAC and later with a northern Iranian group. They had stone forts and well-built cow stables in northern Iran that look a lot like earlier BMAC structures.

The route of migration did not take place over the high passes of the Himalayas and the Pamirs. Few groups have migrated over these treacherous mountains in the last 2000 years. Instead, the migration went from the BMAC down through northern Iran to Herat in West Afghanistan to the Gomal River in near Ghazni in East Afghanistan to the Swat Valley.

There are frequent references in the Vedas to southward and eastward movements of various groups of Arya. There are no references to westward groups as would be required by the OIT. Some of these movements to the south and east are described in military terms as victorious conquests. There are also references in the late Vedas of movements of the Arya east from the Afghan/Pakistan border to Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and all the way to Bihar.

27. Archeoastronomy. OIT proponents like to push this theory. Supposedly, the positions of stars are mentioned in the Vedas. By analyzing the positions of stars in the Vedas, we can make claims about when the Vedas were written via tracking the movements of stars in ancient days.

However, archeoastronomy is a field in poor standing. All we can learn for sure from archeoastronomy is that the Vedas were written some time in the past 8,000 years. All else is up in the air.

The Indian Astrophysicist Rajesh Kochhar has clearly mentioned that the astronomical data in the Vedas is not reliable.

28. The association of Andronovo culture with Indo-Iranians is controversial. So say the OIT proponents. This is not true.

Andronovo is a culture associated with the proto Indo-Iranians that stretched, in its formative location, around northern Kazakhstan and and west into Russia to near Samara, then down to the Caspian Sea, covering most of the northwest quadrant of Kazakhstan.

Later its borders enlarged. At maximum, its northern boundary was from Samara in the Volga Basin east to Anzhero Sudzhensk northeast of Novosibersk in southern Siberia.

The eastern boundary bordered on the Afansevo Culture in eastern Kazakhstan, southern Siberia and Xinjiang. Andronovo did include part of Xinjiang in the far north where the Altai Mountains come down.

The eastern border then encompassed most of eastern Kazakhstran except the area east of Balquash Koli, moving down to the border with Kyrgyzstan in the south, encompassing most of Uzbekistan except the far south, the northern half of Turkmenistan all the way to the the southeastern shore of the Caspian Sea. The Aral Sea was the realm of the Andronovo People.

The relation of Andronovo to the Indo-Aryan people in particular, as opposed to Indo-Iranians in general, is more controversial, but has been suggested by some experts.

29. Chariots could not go over the Hindu Kush. Another OIT argument. But as noted above, the Aryans did not move down through the Hindu Kush; instead, they came east from the BMAC through northern Iran to Herat in west Afghanistan east to around Ghazni over to the Bannu region in the NWFP of Pakistan. That’s a much easier route than the Hindu Kush.

30. There was no invasion. The invasion scenario has been replaced in the past 40 years to a migration scenario. It seems more likely that instead of defeating the Dravidian people and pushing them to the south, or destroying the IVC, instead the Aryans merely profited from the collapse of the IVC that was already underway.

31. There was no genocide of the Dravidian people, all Indians look alike genetically. No one ever said there was a genocide of the Dravidians by the Aryans. Instead, the Aryans moved in, and there was intermingling and intermarriage with the Dravidians, the combined result being the culture of the Vedas.

32. The linguistic evidence. The case for the AMT and the total non-case for the OIT is made by the linguistic evidence. Everything else is secondary. The case was clinched by Hock 1999 (see references).

33. Indians descend overwhelmingly from the Paleolithic population of India. It’s true that 80% of Indian genes go all the way back to the Paleolithic era. But 80% of European genes go all the way back to the Paleolithic too. Same in Britain. Therefore, Europe and Britain has never experienced any migrations of invasions in the past 10,000 years. The Aryan genetic footprint on Indian genes, if it exists, is doubtless less than 10% of the total. It’s well known by now that the Aryans left language, but few genes, in India. Identifying genetic history with linguistic history is naive.

Keep in mind that the Aryans were probably installed a superstrate over the existing Dravidian population. The Aryans were probably no more than 10-15% of the population genetically, and the remaining 85-90% were Dravidians.

34. How could a more primitive people like the Aryans replace the language of the more civilized people, the IVC Dravidians? So ask the OIT theorists. However, let us note that Greek speakers in the Levant, Aramaic speakers in Mesopotamia, Coptic speakers in Egypt and Romans in northern Africa all got their languages replaced by the culturally inferior Bedouins of Arabia. This sort of thing happens all the time.

35. There is no solid proof an Aryan migration to India in archeological terms. This is true as far as it goes, but all it means that is that archeologists typically refuse to characterize migrations in terms of who is migrating where. While there is no archeological proof for an Aryan migration, there is also no proof for Greek, Germanic, Italic, Celtic or Armenian migrations in those branches of IE either.

36. The Rig Veda says that the Sarasvati River flows to the sea. According to OIT folks, since the river dried up 3900 YBP, if the Vedas discuss it flowing the sea, they must have been written before 4000 YBP. However, this statement is only in one sentence of the Vedas, and the word “sea” in question is actually samuda, which Sanskrit experts say can mean lots of thing, but in this case means and inland sea or lake as formed by a river emptying into a desert. Which is what the Sarasvati did. The Sarasvati never emptied into the sea at any time.

37. Horses. OIT proponents keep claiming that they have found horse bones or evidence of horses on seals or objects at some early date. None of this has been confirmed, and some cases have involved overt fraud by Indian nationalist “scholars.” The earliest confirmed horse in the region is at Pirak 3800 YBP. Many horse remains have been found after that, but none earlier.

38. The AMT was invented by Max Muller in 1848. Muller as a British spy – agent – whatever who was sent by the British to falsify the history of India so the Indians would lose their national pride. Hence, the AMT is a British conspiracy. Yes, OIT supporters actually say this. The long version is that he was hired by the British East India Company as part of a nefarious plot to denigrate Hinduism.

First of all, the theory was not invented in 1848 nor was it invented by Muller, as it substantially predates 1848 and Muller was not the first to come up with it.

There is no evidence at all that the AMT was hatched as a British conspiracy (other popular theories say that the entire linguistic community was in on this conspiracy), nor has anyone offered any reason how or why the British could profit by making up the theory of a Bronze Age culture in India. Or why the British, who supposedly hated Indians and thought they were inferior, would invent a theory that said that Indians were in part related to the great British people.

References

Hock, Hans H. 1999. Out of India? The Linguistic Evidence. In: J. Bronkhorst & M. Deshpande, Aryan and Non-Aryan in South Asia: Evidence, Interpretation and Ideology, 1-18. Harvard Oriental Series. Opera Minora, Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA. 

Kochhar, Rajesh. 2000. The Vedic People: Their History and Geography. New Delhi: Sangam Books. 2000.

More Out of India Madness

We continue to have crazies coming here proposing the OIT (Out of India Theory) of Indo-European. The theory is a pitiful joke and has virtually no support among any mainstream academics. In fact, it is so ludicrous that the mainstream does not even bother to respond to the respond to the arguments, because they are deemed not worthy of response.

What is sad, and frightening, is that almost every intelligent or intellectual Indian I have ever met is a fervent supporter of the OIT. They have all the arguments down pat, and they roll them right out for you. Supporting the OIT goes along with opposition to the Aryan Migration Theory (AMT) which the Indians hate. The idea is that “our history came from the White man.”

Indians hate Whites, mostly due to British colonialism, so the idea that the White man came to India and gave them quite a bit of their civilization and their religion is resisted ferociously.

What’s pitiful is that the smartest Indians believe the most insane and stupid things. There is something deeply sick and wrong with Indians, and Indian nationalism and Hindu nationalism are exemplary of that sickness. As with all fanatic nationalisms, Indian nationalism stems from deep-seated feelings of inferiority. This sense of inferiority was magnified by colonialism.

In recent years, the rejection has spread to all things Western. I know an Indian man who almost refuses to patronize Western medicine, I suppose because it is the medicine of the White man. Instead, he believes in some weirdness called Ayurvedic medicine. His fury and hatred towards Western medicine is shocking to behold.

Nevertheless, their ridiculous arguments must be refuted, because they have so much support inside India, along with some support outside of India.

That they have support outside India can be seen in the comments of Sojournertroof in the comments section. This fellow is an anti-White White man. He supports the OIT simply because it is anti-White, that is, the OIT is in opposition to the AMT which is seen as a pro-White theory.

Hydrology. Much of the OIT is based, believe it or not, on hydrology. It is true that rivers in the north of India all have Indo-Aryan names, not Dravidian or Munda names. Dravidian and Munda were the language families spoken in India before the arrival of the Indo-Aryans. The idea is that since the Indo-Aryans were migrants, some of the earlier names should have been retained. Since they were not, obviously, the Aryans must have been indigenous to India.

What must have occurred was total replacement of the earlier names with new names for the rivers. As language replacement in North India was total (all North Indians speak Indo-Aryan languages) apparently they changed the old names of the rivers to new Indo-Aryan names.

The Sarasvati River. This is one of their favorite arguments. The argument goes something along the lines that this river existed 6000 YBP, and therefore the OIT is correct.

No one quite knows what river we are referring to here. The Sarasvati appears to be two rivers. The earliest Rigveda references are probably to the Helmand River in Afghanistan. Later references are to the Ghaggar River. But the Sarasvati is always this sort of mystical unseen river in the Rigveda. It became fuzzy and mystical early on. So all arguments about the Sarasvati are null and void anyway.

The OIT is counterintuitive. Exactly what evidence is there that IE speakers left India, moving north towards the steppes 6500 YBP, then moved to Persia 5000 YBP, then moved to Arabia and Anatolia 4000 YBP? Yet somehow it took them a full 2,500 years to even cross the Ural River. The theory is insane.

After much debate, in the 1990′s, the Journal of Indo-European Studies (JIES) granted the OIT folks a chance to show their stuff. The issue was so contentious that JIES had to void peer review in order to publish the issue, which was authored by an OIT proponent named Kazanas. Kazanas is a crank operating out of Greece who has picked up on the OIT. In the next two issues of JIES, Kazanas was utterly demolished, and the matter has not come up again.

Lack of memories of an Urheimat. An Urheimat is a homeland. The homeland of the Indo-Aryans is in the north, on the steppes of Russia. Yet there is a lack of legends of memories of this homeland or any migration, so this is said to be evidence that there was no AMT. However, most peoples lack memories of their migrations from wherever they came from to wherever they ended up. This is true even in Europe. The Greeks had no memories of any immigration to their lands, though they clearly came from somewhere.

Nevertheless, Harvard professor and Sanskrit expert Michael Witzel notes:

It has frequently been denied that the Rig Veda contains any memory or information about the former homeland(s) of the Indo-Aryans. [...] However, in the RV there are quite a few vague reminiscences of former habitats, that is, of the Bactria-Margiana area, situated to the north of Iran and Afghanistan, and even from further afield.

Such a connection can be detected in the retention by the Iranians of Indo-Aryan river names and in the many references in the RV to mountains and mountain passes.

Also, there are some sources in the Vedas or in the Gathas that point toward a migration of the Indo-Iranians from Central Asia, including the Zend Avesta – Vendidad: Fargard 1:

“…There (Airyanem Vaejah – “Land of the Aryans”) are ten winter months there, two summer months; and those are cold for the waters, cold for the earth, cold for the trees…”

That is a description of the cold steppes of Central Asia. There are also descriptions of warfare being waged by the semi-nomadic Vedic and Avestan populations against urbanized people who were not “Arya.”

The sequence of the AMT was as follows: The speakers of the linguistically slightly later, though still pre-Iron Age Indo-Aryan language, then moved into Arachosia (*Sarasvatī > Avestan Hara aitī), Swat (Suvåstu) and Punjab (Sapta Sindhu), before 3200-3000 YBP – depending on the local date of the introduction of iron.

We can trace the movements of the AMT by the introduction of iron, that is, they brought metals with them, in particular iron smelting technology. They also brought stone forts, chariots and horses. We can trace all of these things in the archeological record and they are powerful evidence for the AMT.

Recently, Armenians have come out with an Armenian Theory of Indo-European which states that Armenia was the homeland of Indo-European. It is almost universally rejected, yet pitifully it has much more support for it than there is for the OIT.

Genetic evidence. One of the major R1 clades, R1a1, associated with Indo-European, has indeed been traced back to India. However, this is not evidence for the OIT, since this clade goes back to 18,000 YBP, long before IE existed into far pre-IE times. Long after the clade was birthed, some members of the clade left India to go towards Europe and the steppes, where they became the IE peoples. There is a lot of debate going on now about R1a1, but none of the points being debated detract from the theory of Bronze Age Indo-Aryans moving into India.

There are also reports that there are little to no Central Asian genes in Indians, that is, there are few if any genetic markers of Aryan migration. Yet many invasions leave no genetic trace later on, and genetics generally gives little to no support for or against prehistoric migrations. It’s quite common. For instance, there is no trace of Italian genes in the British, but does this prove that there was no Roman invasion? Clearly, there was a Roman invasion.

There are also few to no Central Asian genes in Europeans either, but Europeans speak IE languages, and these languages came out of the steppes. By the way, there are also no South Asian genes in Europeans. We should expect some of those if OIT is correct, no?

Anthropomorphic evidence. What do IE speakers look like? They look like Europeans. Even the IE speakers in Central and South Asia look quite European. Afghans, Pakistanis, Iranians and North Indians look strikingly European. This is because of their IE roots. The IE people were an European/Caucasoid appearing people. Notice the striking difference in appearance between North Indians and South Indians or Dravidians.

If IE speakers all came out of India and moved to Europe, everyone should look like people from India. But this is not the case. Even Iranians don’t look like people from India. No one does. Only people from India look like Indians.

There is indeed a Dravidian substrate in Indo-Aryan, which is what would be expected if Dravidian speakers gave up speaking Dravidian and started speaking Indo-Aryan. It’s true that there are few Dravidian loans, and the substrate cannot be seen in hydrology. But the substrate is nevertheless clear, as is influence on Indo-Aryan from Munda languages.

Thomason and Kaufman note that the substrate looks like what we would expect in the case of language shift, and language shift is what occurred as Dravidian speakers shifted to Indo-Aryan. The Dravidian speakers appear to have shifted to Indo-Aryan yet retained their Dravidian accent.

Among IE tongues, only Indo-Aryan has a full set of phonemic contrasting retroflex consonants. Dravidian also has a full set of phonemic contrasting retroflex consonants dating all the way back to proto-Dravidian. Obviously, this set was borrowed from Dravidian into Indo-Aryan.

In terms of Dravidian loans, there are in fact some:

Parpola writes:

…numerous loanwords and even structural borrowings from Dravidian have been identified in Sanskrit texts composed in northwestern India at the end of the second and first half of the first millennium BCE, before any intensive contact between North and South India. External evidence thus suggests that the Harappans most probably spoke a Dravidian language.

Mallory:

The most obvious explanation of this situation is that the Dravidian languages once occupied nearly all of the Indian subcontinent, and it is the intrusion of Indo-Aryans that engulfed them in north India leaving but a few isolated enclaves.

Zero evidence of Munda and Dravidian influence in the rest of IE. If IE came out of India, all IE languages should show influence of Munda and Dravidian. Instead, only Indo-Aryan does. Therefore, Indo-Aryan moved into India and came in contact with Munda and Dravidian, and IE could not possibly have come out of India.

No accounting for IE once out of India. The OIT is great at talking about the Indian origin of IE, but is terrible at anything outside of that. There is no account of models of language development of IE after leaving India, or how IE is supposed to have spread elsewhere. Once IE is out of India, the OIT folks forget about their theory. It’s crazy.

Timeframes in the Rigveda. There is no reliable historical dating of anything in India prior to the 1500′s. So all Indian texts prior to that time must be treated very dubiously in terms of dating. There is no way to date anything in the Rigveda reliably, since the Rigveda uses no reliable method for dating.

Hindu culture is strongly ahistoric. It is not interested in dates and events. The fact that Hindu culture is so hostile to history itself and so lacking any sense of history is what opens up this whole field for debate. Hindus simply lack the ability to imagine that there is such a thing as historical change.

Archeoastronomy. This is a very dubious field. B. B. Lal uses archeoastronomy in an effort to buttress his OIT. However, the use of this method is treacherous. The model attempts to date astronomical events on the basis of astronomical calculations and is rife with error and speculation. Nevertheless, there are archeoastonomical journals. Lal’s theory has never been submitted to or discussed in any of these journals, therefore the validity of his claims is dubious. Even Lal notes that his theory is widely discredited.

The Bangani language. This language is referred to nowadays as Garhwali. Claus Peter Zoller claimed to have found Centum elements in Garhwali, which if true, would boost the OIT. Centum is part of the Satem-Centum split in IE that occurred about 4000 YBP with the splitoff of Indo-Aryan from the rest of IE. The split occurred on the steppes of Central Asia. Zoller made his claim eight years ago. No one believed him at the time, and that’s where the debate stands.

It appears that what he found instead dates from the Indo-Greek or Kushan periods of Indian history and has somehow persisted for about 2,000 years. That’s remarkable if true, but in no way does it support OIT. At any rate, most scholars don’t even believe that there is any Centum left in Garhwali, and most who do are fringe cases. Bangani-Centum is discredited and lies in ruins.

Occam’s Razor. OIT is so complex. India is a marginal area of IE distribution, not a central area. The main area of IE languages, with the greatest variety, is in Europe, especially southeastern Europe. This is obviously the linguistic center of gravity for IE. If OIT was true, we would not expect India to be such a marginal territory for IE languages.

OIT requires more and longer migrations than the standard theory in order for all of the branches to leave India. It requires a much more complex chronology in terms of isoglosses and archeology. The archaic shared isoglosses such as Satem/Centum are in Central Asia. Further, it requires the re-invention of the chariot by Indians, since they could not have acquired the Aryan chariot from Aryan migrants.

It requires all sorts of complex arguments of internal Indo-Aryan development to explain what appears to be substrate influence from Dravidian. In addition, all of this internal mess must have occurred in a short period of time – from the time between when the last Indic group left India to the beginning of the writing of the Rigveda. In contrast, the Dravidian substrate theory is much simpler.

The Kurgan theory is better. The Kurgan people fit the accepted time frame, expand their territory archeologically with time and have the basic cultural patterns of an IE people close to the center of linguistic diversity. Therefore, the Kurgan theory fits the IE model much better than OIT.

OIT requires an early dating of the Rigveda. The Rigveda is the ultimate book of Hindu literature. OIT proponents take the Rigveda back as far as 6000 years, but this is not possible, as the split between Indic and the rest of Indo-Aryan happened no earlier than 4000 years ago, even according to OIT. Furthermore, such an ancient date for the Vedas would have to reflect a Stone Age society, and the Vedas do not reflect that. The Rigveda cannot possibly be dated further back than 3,500-4000 YBP.

OIT seems to require a 7000 YBP date for the Rigveda. This is beyond the realm of possibility. Chariots? Horses? Stone forts? Metals? The culture of the early Rigveda is 2nd millennium BCE – 3,000-4,000 YBP. The Bronze Age. It’s as clear as air.

Vedic is much older than Hittite. This is a central claim of OIT folks and is necessary for their argument. It’s patently ridiculous.

Sanskrit is archaic. So what? So are Greek and Hittite, and none date back but a few thousand years. Ancient traits in IE are most commonly observed in Baltic and Hittite. Do IE reconstructions appear Vedic? Not at all. PIE look nothing like Vedic.

Horses. Horses are not indigenous to India. Horses are often seen on Vedic Aryan seals dating back 2,500-3,000 YBP. Obviously, horses, along with iron, came with the Aryan migrants.

PIE culture. The reconstructed PIE language does not fit with India. It fits with a much colder place, probably to the north of India on the steppes. India had a highly civilized culture before the arrival of the Aryans – these were the Dravidians. The PIE people did not have a highly civilized culture – instead, they were nomads, pastoralists and horse-riding warriors.

For OIT to be correct, the highly civilized Indians would have had to have lost the civilization and degenerated into a less civilized nomadic culture without writing or architecture (they lost their writing and architecture with the move to the steppes) after they left India, which then went to Europe.

This does not follow according to history. Less civilized cultures develop into more civilized ones and not the other way around. According the standard theory, less civilized Aryans contacted more civilized Dravidians and the result was Indian high culture – the Aryans went from a less civilized stage to a more civilized one, as we expect.

Early dates for Indo-Aryan don’t prove OIT. Early dates for Indo-Aryan are compatible with standard theories of IE development. The Anatolian homeland theory, which I subscribe to, pushes Indo-Aryan back to 4,600 YBP, which seems a stretch. Renfrew pushes Proto-Indo-Aryan all the way back to 5,000 YBP.

Red herrings. OIT proponents have all sorts of red herrings about the AMT. One of them is “there was no Aryan invasion.” But AMT proponents have abandoned the invasion theory a long time ago. Another is that there is no way that inferior horse-riding nomads of the steppes could have create the wonderfully complex language of Sanskrit, the Vedas, complex Indian culture, etc.

First of all, cultural complexity and linguistic complexity are not the same thing. Uncivilized peoples can speak very complex languages. Anyway, nomads did not bring fully-formed Sanskrit to India. Sanskrit, the Vedas, Hinduism, etc. were created in India by the confluence between Aryans and Dravidians.

This is a frankly racist argument anyway – that Central Asians were too stupid to create the great Indian culture – only wonderful Indians could do that. There is also a racist assumption that Sanskrit is better than other languages – or that it is the greatest language of all.

Physical anthropology. Skeletons look similar all over India for many thousands of years, so there is no evidence of an Aryan migration. Skeletons look similar all over Europe for thousands of years too. Continuity is typical in anthropology.

Northern Dravidian. There are isolated pockets of Dravidian speakers in the northern part of South Asia. These are obviously the remnants of a large area in northern South Asia that was entirely Dravidian speaking. Indo-Aryan speakers moved in, and there was mass language shift except for a few pockets here and there, the lingering pockets being just as we would expect in the case of mass language shift.

Horses. Horses have long been associated with IE societies, even in the Vedas. However, there were no horses in India at the time of the supposed migration out of India.

Impression of validity. Most of the arguments for the OIT are misleading, gratuitous, irrelevant or biased. They are pushed by kooks, nuts, chauvinists and fringe types. Mainstream academics usually don’t consider them worthy of a reply, contradiction or debunking, so the OIT arguments remain unanswered. This gives the impression that the theory carries some kind of weight. This is the case with a lot of fringe science, and OIT is very much fringe science.

Linguistic center of gravity. The linguistic center of gravity for IE is in Europe, specifically somewhere around the Balkans. Most branches are in Europe – Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Greek and various extinct branches. The Balkans seems to be the center of gravity for IE, clearly not where IE originated, but possibly a secondary spread inside of Europe. Central and South Asia appear to be ruled out.

Confusion of arguments. Typically, OIT arguments take the form of, “There was no Aryan migration into India.” That is, they argue against the AMT and not for the OIT. They waste all their breath on the AMT, attempting to disprove it, but then when evidence comes for migration out of India as required by the OIT, they are silent. OIT and AMT are separate arguments. You do not prove OIT by “disproving” AMT.

References

Mallory, JP. 1998. “A European Perspective on Indo-Europeans in Asia.” In: The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern and Central Asia. Ed. Mair. Washington DC: Institute for the Study of Man. 

Parpola, Asko. 1998. “Aryan Languages, Archaeological Cultures, and Sinkiang: Where Did Proto-Iranian Come into Being and How Did It Spread?”, in Mair, The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern and Central Asia. Washington, D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man.

Witzel, Michael. May 2001. Autochthonous Aryans? The Evidence from Old Indian and Iranian Texts. Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 7(3): 1-11.

Osama bin Laden on Top of the World

Repost from the old site. Dated but fascinating stuff.

Where is Osama bin Laden, and where has he been hiding ever since he fled Tora Bora in December 2001? There are many theories about where he hides. One theory is that he has been and is hiding in Pakistan.

I do not speak of the region encompassing North and South Waziristan, where bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri have long been rumored to be. Nor do we include Peshawar, which seems too busy to hide him, although he probably stayed there in January and February 2002, being carefully hidden by members of Pakistan’s major fundamentalist parties who now rule the area.

Nor do we even speak here of the Bajaur Tribal Agency or the adjacent Afghan provinces of Kunar and Nuristan, where this blog has long suspected that bin Laden may be, and where he has definitely been hiding off and on since then. For instance, Pakistani President Musharaff said in mid-September 2006 that Bin Laden is hiding somewhere in Bajaur, Kunar and Nuristan.

On September 28, 2006, Pakistani sources said that a new Ayman al-Zawahiri tape was circulating but had not yet been released. They said it had been recorded around the border between Bajaur and Kunar. On October 31, 2006, Pakistani intelligence said they think that they have Zawahiri “boxed in” in a 40-mile square area bordered by the Khalozai Valley in Bajaur and the village of Pashat in Kunar, and they hope to capture him in a few months.

There is also evidence that bin Laden is in that area. For instance, Osama reportedly attended a wedding of a daughter in or near Bari Kot in Kunar Province in 2002. In September 2003, according to a Newsweek article on September 8, bin Laden was said to be hiding north of the Pech River Valley in Kunar.

The source in the article was an interview with an Afghan whose daughter was married to an Algerian member of Bin Laden’s “praetorian guard”. The Algerian occasionally came down from his hideout to visit his wife.

Bajaur is thought to be Al Qaeda’s “winter hideout”. Zawahiri has surely been in Bajaur, first at Damadola, where he was nearly killed by an airstrike that missed him by mere hours, and in Chinagai, where a rumored Zawahiri visit resulted in a recent US-Pakistani strike that killed 80 madrassa students.

Afghans captured at a safe house in Bajaur in May 2005 reported that the house was regularly visited in February and March 2005 by a masked man with a large bodyguard contingent whom they suspected to be Zawahiri. I have been unable to pinpoint the town in Bajaur where the safe house was.

We are not talking about those areas in this post.

Instead, we are talking about a region in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province ranging from the Dir District north of Bajaur and adjacent to northern Kunar Province in Afghanistan, up into the Chitral District through Lowarai Pass along the Chitral Valley, past Drosh, and up to and beyond Chitral, the old hippie and trekker heaven across from Nuristan Province in Afghanistan.

From the Chitral Valley, we move east of Drosh and back into the Dir District to the Kumrat Valley in Dir Kohistan, part of a larger area called Kohistan. From Chitral, we move north up to Tirich Mir, a 25,000 ft. peak that soars to the skies. From there, we move west to Salim Shah, near the Dorah Pass on the border of Pakistan and the Afghan provinces of Nuristan and Badakhsan.

From that point, we move east along the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan first to Darkot, near 15,000 foot Darkot Pass, and then further east, out of the Chitral District and the NWFP into the Ghizar District in Kashmir, to an extremely remote town called Chillinji, near the Chillinji Pass, a 17,358 foot pass near where Afghanistan, Pakistan and China all come together.

Some places around here, especially north, northwest and west of Chillinji have just recently been explored by modern explorers, who were shocked to find almost no maps or trip reports available when they planned their trips.

From Chillinji, we move a ways east, out of the Hindu Kush and into the Karokoram Mountains, into the Gilgit District to just south of the Chinese border in the Hunza.

Along the way, we will check out some breathtaking photos of the region.

This blog has already reported on this possibility in a prior post, which focused somewhat on Chitral but also investigated reports that bin Laden was seen at an Al Qaeda training camp in the Minteke Pass region on the border of Pakistan and China in 2002. That post included spectacular photos of Chitral and many other photos of the Karokoram Mountains and the Hunza area, which encompasses the Mingteke region.

Lending possible credence to theory that Bin Laden is in the high mountains of the Hindu Kush, at least in the Summer, when most of the reports have placed him there, is a theory that the CIA is operating on the seasonal movements of Al Qaeda’s top leadership.

The theory is that the leadership moves between a number of safe houses at lower elevations in the winter (in areas that are pretty much snowed in) and then moves to caves at very high elevations in the Summer when the lower elevations they had been staying in become accessible.

If you think about it, the best place to hide in the region in the warmer months is as high up as possible. A recent ABC news investigative report video segment placed bin Laden between the Khyber Pass and Chitral along the Afghan-Pakistan border. That video also noted the seasonal movements described above (works only in Internet Explorer – shame on ABC!)

This very nice and easy-to-read map is a good guide to at least part of this post. The red circle is the approximate location of Damadola , where a US Predator tried to kill Ayman Al-Zawahiri (Al Qaeda’s Number 2 man) when he was visiting in-laws on January 13, 2006. (Zawahiri married a woman from the Damadola area in 2001.) The missile only missed the Al Qaeda leader by hours and killed Al Qaeda’s top explosive expert.

Abu Marwan Al-Suri, Al Qaeda’s money man, was killed on April 20, 2006 between Khar (not on the map), capital of Bajaur, and the Afghan border. That would also be in about the location of the red circle on the map.

Dargai on the map is where the Pakistani Taliban suicide bomber attacked a Pakistani base recently, killing 45 recruits, in a revenge attack for the US Predator attack on the Al Qaeda training camp/madrassa in Chinagai (not shown, but located by the bend in the road east of Mian Kalai on the map) on October 30, 2006, killing 80 madrassa students. That attack may also have been based on a rumored visit by Zawahiri.

Abu Faraj Al-Libbi, the so-called Number 3 man in Al Qaeda, was arrested in May 2005 in Mardan on the map. Dir, Drosh and Chitral on the map are discussed in this post. The town of Tal on the map is located in the Kumrat Valley, discussed in the post.

Bin Laden and Zawahiri are also often said to be hiding in the Afghan province of Nuristan around Kamdesh on the map. Bin Laden appeared at a wedding for a daughter in 2002 in Barikot on the map in the Afghan Province of Kunar in 2002.

Tirich Mir, Darkot and Chillinji Pass are off the map to the north and northeast.

We begin our journey in Dir, where Frontline (a US Public Broadcasting Service, or PBS, program) reported that Osama bin Laden was seen only three weeks before they visited on August 30, 2002 to make the special In Search of Bin Laden. During Frontline’s visit to Dir, they described it as totally hostile. Bin Laden had also been seen in Chitral just weeks prior to the Dir sighting. At the time, Zawahiri was thought to be operating out of Chitral.

Later, in March 2003, we have a report from the Iranian News Agency that an FBI team (actually CIA) was in Chitral in order to intercept a planned meeting between bin Laden and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of Hizb-Islami, an Afghan radical Islamist group, who had just thrown his hat in with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In truth, there were extensive searches in Chitral in February-March 2003 involving both CIA and Pakistani forces. The two-person CIA team (male and female) cruised the district in an SUV, but found nothing. Parties were reportedly coming across the border from Nuristan for the meeting.

Abu Khabaib, an Arab explosives master, has been spotted several times in the Chitral Mountains. He has worked with Sheik Ahmed Salim, an Al Qaeda operative who has given money and fighters to Lashakr-e-Jhangvi, a Pakistani extremist organization that is primarily dedicated to waging horrible terrorist attacks (often large-scale attacks) on Pakistan’s Shia population.

Al Qaeda released a videotape in September 2003 showing bin Laden and Zawahiri picking their way down a very steep and high-elevation forested mountain. The trees in the videotape are reportedly peculiar to the Chitral region.

The Chitral District has a population that is 65% Sunni, 35% Shia Muslim and a tiny percentage of non-Muslim Kalash, who practice a pre-Islamic native religion with overtones of animism.

This obscure blog feels that bin Laden is hiding between Dir and Chitral in the Chitral Valley, which would put him around Drosh on the map. A description of the Frontline crew’s visit to Drosh on September 1, 2002, with a nice photo, is here.

Moving on up the Chitral Valley past Drosh, we come to Chitral, where hippies migrated in the 1960′s and 1970′s for its legendary hashish. Even back then, it was very difficult to get in, as all entry to foreigners was banned, and you could only get in with an invite from a resident.

When Frontline traveled through the Lowarai Pass between Dir and Drosh, they looked in the guestbook and noted that only two Americans had been there since 9-11, a period of almost a year. The soldier manning the post joked and said that one of the two Americans was a spy.

Stomach-churning switchbacks on the road to Lowarai Pass. This terrible road is one of the best roads in this part of Pakistan. The Phalura people live here. Their language is related to the Kohistanis 40 miles to the west; the Phalura apparently moved to this area from Kohistan several centuries ago for unknown reasons. Bin Laden and Zawahiri were apparently in this area in July and August 2002. Are they there now?

The people around the pass speak a Dardic language with 8,600 speakers called Phalura, that is related to Shina (Shina is described at the end of the post). In some villages, the language appears to be dying in favor of the more widely spoken Khowar but in others it is still vibrant .

The people here are Sunnis. A linguist in Sweden, Hendrik Lilgendren, is working on a grammar of the language, a much-needed addition to our knowledge of these poorly documented languages of Northern Pakistan.

Chitral is now a trekking capital for intrepid visitors all over the world, but it is still a great place to hide. There are tourists in the summertime, but in the winter, Lowarai Pass, its window to the world, is generally snowed in. Air access to Chitral is meager at best, and the electricity and Internet go out all the time. In 2006, perhaps ominously, Pakistan closed the entire Chitral region to tourists due to “security reasons”.

The local governor has reportedly forbidden intelligence officers from searching the area and local politicians have been protesting, perhaps a bit too much, that bin Laden is nowhere in the area. Fundamentalist Islam is big even in Chitral, where the local Islamist party in summer 2006 protested women having their own stalls in the market.

In late August 2006, Al Qaeda authority Peter Bergen said US intelligence was starting to focus on Chitral as a possible hideout for bin Laden. This conclusion was based on an analysis of the trees in Al Qaeda videotapes and the length of time it seems to take to deliver Al Qaeda tapes after they have been made (about 3 weeks).

Another interview with Bergen for a CNN program called “In the Footsteps of Bin Laden” aired in September 2006 elaborates along the same lines, and says that Chitral is considered “inaccessible” and that US forces are banned from the area at any rate.

Note this recent article from September 2006, though, that notes that since January 2006, a special US bin Laden task force called Task Force 145 is now allowed to go into Pakistan without permission to hunt bin Laden.

Chitral, where as recently as August 2006, US intelligence felt that Osama bin Laden was hiding. A CIA team rented a home here to search for him until they were chased out in Spring 2006. Some think he was living a quiet, paranoid life here in a home with only a few other people. He would hardly ever go out, and his visitors would be very tightly regulated. He may have spent his day listening to radio, watching the news and surfing the net, since he is a news junkie.

A US intelligence official was quoted as saying that bin Laden was thought to be living not in a cave but in a house in Chitral, possibly with a family, and with a small bodyguard team of maybe only a couple of guards. Bergen felt that bin Laden spendt his days on the Internet, watching CNN and listening to BBC radio. He may access the net through a device called an HF modem that connects users to the net via radio waves.

Pakistani officials protest that Chitralis do not like bin Laden due to ethnic and religious differences, so it is unlikely that he is in the area. A tiny CIA (reports say it was FBI, but CIA here is always referred to as FBI, in order not to inflame Pakistani sensibilities) team rented a home in Chitral in Winter 2005 under the cover of being investors trying to bring business to the area.

By Spring 2006, local politicians found out about them, and were raising a fuss about them after their location was revealed by a local politician, but by that time, they were already gone.

There is another report, this one from June 17, 2005, from ABC’s Brian Ross. In this case, a group of Arabs came down from Nuristan to a small market town in the Chitral District and loaded up on large quantities of supplies, including wheat and flour. Then they headed back to Afghanistan. I do not know what town in Chitral they came to. It seems probable that this group was connected to the Al Qaeda leadership.

People in Chitral mostly speak Khowar, a Dardic language with 240,000 speakers that is distantly related to Hindu and Persian and more closely to Punjabi, Kashmiri and Sindhi. You can see the tremendous differences between it and Pashto, Hindi, and even Nuristani in this lexical chart. Note the occasional cognate though, such as “eye”.

About 15-20 % of speakers are literate in the language. Nevertheless, Khowar, I am happy to say, is being well-developed as a literary language.

Adding weight to the theory that bin Laden may be or may have been in Chitral is a recent report from ABC News that more foreigners have been seen lately in the Waziristan and Bajaur Agencies of FATA, and in the Dir and Chitral Districts of NWFP. In all of these areas (including Chitral), the Taliban have been openly recruiting for jihad in Afghanistan.

The heightened presence of foreigners and open recruiting is apparently due to recent peace deals between the Pakistani government and jihadis in North and South Waziristan that essentially handed over power there to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Moving north of Chitral, this article from around the same time, late August 2006, says bin Laden was thought to be hiding north of Chitral, around the towering Tirich Mir Mountain, a soaring peak that rises to 25,289 feet. No source was given, but Western intelligence agencies are usually the sources of these tidbits.

Tirich Mir Mountain, where in August 2006, US intelligence sources suspected Osama bin Laden may be hiding.

A nice webpage on this mountain, with some spectacular pictures, is here.

The Chitral River near Tirch Mir, north of Chitral. This river cuts a wide swath through the canyons here. Good luck getting across it.

You were wondering how you get across the Chitral River in this area? Like this. As you can see, motor vehicles cannot cross here and typically pack animals cannot either.

There are plenty of caves around there too, sympathetic tribesmen, a ban on US forces operating in the area, and few to no roads. Another great place to hide.

Goats on the road near Tirich Mir, north of Chitral. Is that a paved road? Amazing.

On a map, Tirich Mir can be seen in the far northwest corner of Pakistan, north of Chitral and south and west of the border with Afghanistan.

Kuragh Ridge, near Tirich Mir north of Chitral. An intelligence report in August 2006 placed Osama bin Laden here.

A road in the Yarkuhn Valley, about 1/2 way between Tirich Mir and Darkot. This is the best road in the area!

The area circled shows the location of various areas discussed in this post, including Chitral, Tirich Mir, Drosh, Dir, Salim Shah, Dorah Pass, Garam Chasma, the Kuragh Ridge and the Kumrat Valley.

Moving east, a report by ABC’s Brian Ross from May 24, 2006 (6 months ago) said that Pakistani officials had received reports that Al Qaeda’s top leadership was in the Kumrat Valley of Dir Kohistan, 40 miles inside Pakistan. They had reportedly moved there from Chitral.

Kohistan, where the Al Qaeda leadership was thought to have moved to from Chitral in summer 2006. The trees and terrain here do resemble that seen on a videotape of bin Laden and Zawahiri in 2003, I must admit. This photo also looks very much like Nuristan Province in Afghanistan, where the leadership has also long been rumored to be hiding. It also reminds me of Idaho in the US Northwest.

The Pakistanis felt that the bin Laden’s entourage had recently moved down from the high peaks near the Afghan-Pakistan border to Kohistan.

Stunning Kohistan. This photo looks like the Caucasus Mountains on Russia’s southern border. What a great place to hide! Why not hang a Welcome Al Qaeda sign?

The Kumrat Valley is identified on the map above by the town of Tal, which is located in the valley.

A nice web page on Kohistan is here . Kohistan (population 2 million ) is one of the most isolated and deprived areas in Pakistan, and the illiteracy rate ranges from 94-98%!

A dwelling, or series of dwellings, on a terraced field in Kohistan. Crops do not grow well in this region at all, with poor weather and rocky soils being major factors.

There are 5 doctors per million population in Kohistan – or 1 doctor for every 200,000 people.

Harsh winters in stunning Kohistan add to the isolation of this region.

The people in the Kumrat Valley speak a language called Kalami, which has 40,000 speakers. In this area, the Thal dialect of Kalami is spoken. This dialect has around 90% similarity with most of the other Kalami dialects. Most men also speak Pashto.

This link has an excellent description of the people and language of this region (pdf). Since the creation of an alphabet in 1995, Kalami is now a written language with an Indo-Arabic script similar to Urdu. Three books have now been published in Kalami by the Kalam Cultural Society. Links to two of those books are here and here. Some stunning photos of the Kalam area can be seen here.

The Kalamis are similar in many ways to the Kohistanis of Afghanistan. They are all strict Hanafite Sunni Muslims.

As you can see, the natives here in Kohistan are not particularly friendly. “Who are you looking for? Osama who? Never seen him.” Afghan Nuristanis often have similar hostile expressions towards visitors.

As with the Kohistanis in Afghanistan, almost all men are armed at all times in order to defend themselves against their numerous enemies, since most of them are engaged in continuous feuds with other Kalamis, usually revolving around women and honor.

A Pakistani official recently stated that Kohistan is the most lawless area of all Pakistan, and Dir Kohistan was the most lawless part of Kohistan. Feuds kill about one person every two weeks in the Tal Region.

The strict Sunni Muslims here in are all armed, all the time, and ready to fight. That and they don’t like strangers, especially nosy infidels. For bin Laden, Kohistan is paradise.

Kohistani women are treated terribly in Kohistan, as they are in Afghanistan. Kohistani women are treated even worse than Pashtun women, which is pretty bad!

This region is extremely inaccessible. There are only two roads in the entirety of Pakistani Kohistan, and those are pretty bad.

A typical “road” in Kohistan. Inaccessible by any motor vehicles; you need to access places like this either on foot or by donkey. Nuristan in Afghanistan has similar terrain and a similar “road” system. The first road in Nuristan was reportedly built in 1979.

Most travel here is on foot or by mule on narrow rocky trails.

Bridges are often narrow hanging bridges over raging, torrential rivers tearing through soaring canyons. The bridges are so narrow and rickety that often pack animals will refuse to cross them, rendering much of the area inaccessible even by mule!

That is called a bridge in Kohistan – a log over a raging torrent of a river plunging down a skyscraper canyon. If you hide here, no motorized vehicle can get to you. Search teams must come by mule or on foot and you will be warned far in advance.

These same conditions regarding roads and bridges also apply to Nuristan, and similarly limit access to that Afghan province and make it an excellent place to hide.

That’s barely even a trail. This is what passes for a road here in Kohistan. An enemy army here is confined to mules or boots. This is the terrain US forces have to deal with in Kunar and Nuristan in Afghanistan. Have fun!

As you can see, this is an excellent place to hide! US forces are not allowed here and Pakistani forces cannot access most of the region via motorized vehicles.

A typical hanging bridge in Kohistan. Nuristan in Afghanistan has many similar bridges that often look remarkably like this one.

Pakistani troops would be limited to pack animals, and in many cases, they would just have to abandon the animals and go on foot.

Often, pack animals simply refuse to cross these Kohistan foot bridges over raging alpine rivers. Surely, anything with four wheels is useless here. The bridges and scenery in Afghanistan’s Nuristan are quite similar.

The people here are notoriously hard to govern, and early observers reported that this area was inhabited by “ anarchists” who opposed all outside authority. The terrain here is spectacular, with plunging canyons, soaring peaks, raging rivers, lush meadows and deep evergreen forests.

Lush forests and soaring peaks in this photo of Kohistan look like the Sierra Nevada near my home. The forests here are still intact, unlike those in much of the region.

The forests here are vast and the deforestation level is still low, unlike Nuristan and Kunar.

Spectacular scenery in Kohistan as a smaller tributary meets a larger river amidst soaring, impenetrable forests. This could be Alaska, Western Canada (British Colombia) or Norway.

There is also a very healthy wildlife population in Kohistan, including rare animals. Large carnivores, often rare elsewhere in the region, are abundant. Brown and Black Bears, leopards and snow leopards and wolves roam the wild forests.

Kohistan is a paradise for wildlife, even rare predatory mammals that are barely holding their own elsewhere. Can you imagine Al Qaeda’s most wanted hiding here? This photo looks like the Rocky Mountains in Canada.

What few roads and trails existed prior to 1992 have now been wiped out after terrible floods raged through Kohistan in that year, destroying roads, trails, bridges and structures.

There are a few roads in Kohistan, if you can call that a road! This is transportation at its finest in this region.

Most of the area has still not yet been rebuilt.

Floods raged through these canyons in Kohistan 14 years ago, devastating an already deprived area and isolating it even further.

The people grow a few crops here, but only 4% of the land is cultivated and most crops do not grow well.

Rain in Kohistan, with snow on the ground. The climate here is extremely wet, with lots of snow in winters and plenty of rain the rest of the year.

They also increasingly engage in forestry and especially the gathering of medicinal herbs for sale, of which there are around 70 types growing here.

The gorgeous forests of Kohistan. By examining the trees in an Al Qaeda video from 2003, the CIA thinks it is pinning down where bin Laden is located. This photo could be of the Black Forest in Germany, the US’ Washington state and Canada’s province of British Colombia in the Pacific Northwest, Chile’s Patagonia, or Russia’s endless Siberian forests.

For the most part, residents subsist on animal husbandry. They obtain milk, meat, cheese, wool and hides from these animals.

Residents in Kohistan graze animals on the gorgeous alpine meadows here. This looks like the Alps.

In recent years, quite a bit of tourism has come to the Kalam area, but I don’t know how they are getting around unless they are trekkers.

Moving even further to the north and off the map above, in this fascinating Christian Science Monitor article by Scott Baldouf on August 9, 2002, Al Qaeda Massing For New Fight, Ayman Zawahiri was said to be holding sway at a new base constructed by Al Qaeda in the town of Shah Silim (map).

A village near Garam Chasma, which is close to Shah Salim, where Al Qaeda reportedly had a large base in 2002. Look at those craggy, forbidding peaks.

This obscure report notes that in August 2002, echoing Baldouf’s article, bin Laden and Zawahiri traveled to Dir and Shah Salim to solidify their alliance with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, head of the Hezb-i-Islami. It also lists in fascinating detail all of bin Laden’s known movements and activities from November 2001 to August 2004.

The road along the Lutko River from Chitral to the Dorah Pass is actually accessible by jeep. This is near Shah Salim.

Shah Salim is located about 30 miles northwest of Chitral on the Afghan-Pakistan border near where Pakistan meets the Afghan provinces of Badakhshan and Nuristan.

Spectacular footage and forbidding terrain near Garam Chasma, close to the Shah Salim Al Qaeda base. The people here are speak a language called Yidga.

On a map, it is located between the town of Darband and 14,940 foot Dorah Pass, only a few miles from the Afghan border. This pass played an important role in the war, as this was an important supply route form Pakistan to Afghanistan that the Soviets were never able to shut off.

The Afghan side of Dorah Pass, the famous route used by the mujaheddin in the Soviet War. The people in this area used to be mostly Munjis, but most of the Munjis left to Pakistan with the war. It’s not known if they have returned or not yet.

This is an extremely wild, remote and inaccessible region. There are hardly any roads and much of the access is by foot or horse. In 2001, the area was experiencing a terrible humanitarian crisis. Most of the people here speak Yidga (6,145 speakers) and are Ismaili Shia Muslims. Yidga is a Pamir language. The Pamir languages are Indo-Iranian languages related to Persian and Pashto, but fairly distantly.

Across the border in Afghanistan, people speak another Pamir language called Munji that is somewhat closely related to Yidga (about as close as English and Dutch). Most Munjis fled Afghanistan and settled in Pakistan during the Soviet War.

A fascinating Australian Medical Journal article in 2002 reported on the experience of a doctor, Robert Simpson, working with MSF (Doctors Without Borders) in the region in 1999, albeit 60 miles north of Salim Shah in the Badakhshan town of Baharak (map here). This article gives you an idea of what things are probably like in Salim Shah.

The living conditions in this region are simply appalling. This is a region where there are no roads, no communications, no water, no power, and basically, no government, along with a population engaged in constant warring and feuding.

On Dr. Simpson’s trip to the Wakhan Corridor, his Afghan guides decided to go fishing – with explosives!

Results of fishing with explosives in the Wakhan Corridor.

50% of the children in Badakhshan are malnourished and many women die in childbirth.

A variety of terrible diseases regularly ravage large sectors of the population, and cures or even treatments are typically nonexistent. Three people were stoned to death while he was there. For Afghanistan as a whole, infant and maternal mortality figures are amongst the worst on Earth (Afghanistan’s maternal mortality rate is exceeded only by Sierra Leone) and life expectancy is a mere 45 years.

In Baharak, all of those figures are worse, if you can imagine that. The linked article includes disgusting photos of Afghans afflicted with the bizarre and terrible illnesses that ravage this region.

Moving further along the Wakhan Corridor, an area even poorer and more devastated than the rest of Badakhshan, if you can believe that, we note that on August 17, 2006 bin Laden and Zawahiri were reportedly in the Pakistani town of Darkot, on the border between Pakistan and the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan.

Another precarious bridge, this time near Darkot and the Wakhan Corridor. People are using yaks to cross this bridge.

The article suggested that the leadership had just moved out of Chitral to the Wakhan Corridor.

Crossing Darkot Pass on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Remind you of Tora Bora and Al Qaeda’s escape through similar snowfields and peaks? Yes, it does.

Darkot Pass, another view, where the Al Qaeda leadership was reportedly hiding out in August 2006.

On a map, Darkot is north of Mir Wali and slightly northwest of the 21,407 ft. Daspar Mountain. It is located on the edge of the Wakhan Corridor on the Afghan border.

Trekkers riding yaks near Darkot. The preferred way to travel here is by yak! The Al Qaeda leadership was said to be here in summer 2006.

The entire Wakhan Corridor is at least 9000 feet high and the climate is very harsh. There is only 1 clinic in the entire corridor and it is 20 days’ donkey ride away from the furthest villages in the corridor. There is absolutely no infrastructure whatsoever here.

A very large percentage of the population is using opium here, possibly because it is about the only “medicine” available.

Dr. Simpson in an opium field in Badakhshan.

The vast majority of the population also appears to be depressed. None of the children are immunized against anything.

On Simpson’s visit, he reported that in one village, the last foreigner had passed through 20 years ago. In another, an entire village of 300 had been devastated by a klebsiella bacterial infection, probably spread by poor sanitation. At one point, there were hardly any villagers strong enough to even fetch water for the rest. The outbreak could easily have killed the whole village.

Dr. Simpson traveling along the Wakhan Corridor. The health and general living conditions here are truly horrible. This photo looks like the Andes.

A similar report, this one from a month earlier, noted that Pakistani authorities had, on July 19, 2006, ordered the entire part of Pakistan bordering the Wakhan Corridor evacuated due to reports that bin Laden and Zawahiri were in the area of the Chillinji (or Chilinji) Pass.

A raging, muddy, torrential, flooding river near Darkot. The wild, nearly unknown lands near Chillinji look similar. This entire area was evacuated in summer 2006 after reports that bin Laden and Zawahiri were hiding somewhere here. I would expect to see an Abominable Snowman in a place like this. This photo actually looks like Patagonia in Chile.

The town of Chillinji is about 34 miles west of Darkot. It is across the border of the Chitral District, beyond the tail of the Hindu Kush, into an obscure range called the Hindu Raj, and into the Ghizar District of Kashmir at the headwaters of the Ishkuman River.

A village near Darkot, one of the highest villages in the area. The terrain around Chillinji is very similar. The first modern expedition to Chillinji only explored this area in the 1990′s.

This 17,549 ft. pass is the 5th highest pass in the Hindu Kush. A report places the Al Qaeda leadership in Chillinji about 1 month before they were seen in Darkot.

The Darkot Glacier, viewed from the West. Take your breath away.

Chillinji is 30 miles east of Darkot and also borders the Wakhan Corridor.

Herding yaks near Darkot in terrain reminiscent of Tibet. Was the Al Qaeda leadership here in summer 2006?

The area has two advantages for Al Qaeda – US forces are not permitted there, and the proximity to China means that bombing by US air power is probably not an option due to the fact that a diplomatic row may ensue over US planes bombing targets so close to Chinese territory.

A precarious bridge over a raging, muddy torrent bashing away at an apparent glacier near Darkot. Tell me how a modern army travels through this terrain?

There were 100′s of tourists in the area at the time, mostly trekkers, and all were reportedly evacuated. The report was confirmed by Western intelligence in Islamabad.

The linked report above goes on to speculate about a Chinese connection to Al Qaeda, either governmental, or (more likely) via East Turkestan separatists, who are long known to be allied with Al Qaeda through attending courses at Al Qaeda’s training camps under the Taliban’s rule.

We seem to have come full circle here. Soon after the US invasion of Afghanistan, US Special Forces were hunting bin Laden in the very same Wakhan Corridor. At the time, the theory was that the top AQ leadership was hiding in caves in the corridor in a cave complex that was supposedly built by the Russians.

This complex very high in the mountains was supposedly so high-tech that it was heated. Special Forces were using thermal sensors in the winter to look for a possible heated shelter in this area. Nothing ever turned up, and no one has ever conclusively shown that this supposed base even exists.

Close to Darkot. The peaks in the background look like the Himalayas. You see Osama anywhere around here? Neither do I.

I was unable to find pictures of the Chilinji area that were not copyrighted, and we typically don’t run copyrighted photos on this blog.

Those interested in some truly spectacular photos of the Chillinji/Darkot Pass area are urged to check out the site of photographer Steve Razzetti. Once inside, click on the slide show marked Hindu Kush. Most of the photos are of the area around Chillinji and Darkot. The Chilinji area looks quite a bit like the Darkot photos in this post.

Near Darkot, the soaring peaks bring to mind the Matterhorn in the Alps or Everest in the Himalayas.

Our final stop along this voyage will be a place called Murkushi ( map), a town located 4 1/2 miles south of the Chinese border where China, Pakistan and Afghanistan all come together.

A breathtaking photo of the area near Murkushi, with a typical barely passable bridge and cascading gorge. This area is impassible by motor vehicles and often even pack animals because they are afraid of these bridges. Hence, the only access is by foot.

Murkushi is located south of Kilik Pass and west of Mintaka Pass. Both passes are at 15,449 feet.

The incredible view of Kilik Pass. Kilik Pass is only about 5 miles north of the supposed Al Qaeda training camp at Murkushi.

Mintaka Pass, about 5 miles east of Murkushi, the site of a reported Al Qaeda training camp. Photo is from the Pakistani side. The pass is about 15,500 feet.

The stunning view, looking from Kilik Pass southeast to Mintaka Pass on the Chinese-Pakistani border. This area is so close to China that it is de facto controlled by the Chinese. Furthermore, the proximity to China means that US jets cannot bomb here for fear of setting off a world crisis with the Chinese.

According to the Baldouf article, by August 2002, Al Qaeda had set up a large base here.

A great and hard to find photo of the area right around Murkushi. Al Qaeda supposedly had a large base here in Summer 2002.

Afghan spies, pretending to be Islamists, reportedly penetrated the Murkushi and Shah Salim bases in 2002. The Murkushi area, though in Pakistani territory, is reportedly under de facto Chinese control.

Afghan intelligence concluded that the Murkushi base may be being controlled by the Chinese government, a theory the Machiavellian implications of which are presently boggling my mind. I will leave it to the reader to toss that idea around!

The people residing in Darkot, Chillinji and Murkushi are generally Wakhis, an Ismaili Shia Tajik people numbering 50,000 worldwide.

Wakhi women and girls near Darkot. Note the colorful dresses of these Ismaili Shia women. Women here are not under the restrictions of purdah one finds as one goes west towards Chitral.

Wakhi is spoken in Pakistan (9,100 speakers), China (6,000 speakers), Tajikistan (7,000 speakers) and Afghanistan (9,600 speakers). In Afghanistan, it is spoken in the Wakhan Corridor, described above.

Wakhi is related to Iranian and Tajik, but fairly distantly. It is even rather diverse within its Pamir subgroup, as this lexicon shows. Wakhi is now a written language, and 60% of Pakistani speakers can read and write it. There is also a radio program in Wakhi in Pakistan. Most male Wakhis in Pakistan can also speak Urdu.

In other places, especially Afghanistan and Tajikistan (especially), Wakhi appears to be losing ground in favor of Pashto or Tajik. In Pakistan, Wakhis refer to themselves as Tajiks. Tajik nationalists claim that Wakhi is a dialect of Tajik, but a quick look at the lexicon above shows how ludicrous that claim is.

There are also some speakers of Burushaski , an obscure language isolate (not related to any known languages) here, especially in the Hunza around Murkushi. I have studied Burushaski extensively (in particular, the work of John Bengston) and I now feel it is related to Sino-Tibetan, Basque, Ket and the North Caucasian languages like Chechen in a super-family called Dene-Caucasian), although that is a highly controversial theory.

The Bengston book I read back in the 1990′s mostly dealt with Yenisien (the Ket family), some Caucasian languages and Basque, and I felt it was quite convincing.

Khowar and Shina are also spoken in the Yasin and Ishkoman Valleys near Darkot and Chillinji.

River crossing near Darkot. This party had a jeep but they had to abandon it miles back because it was no longer possible to travel by jeep. They switched to donkeys, which they are using to ford this wide, wild river. A mechanized army is useless here; an excellent place to hide.

Shina is a widely-spoken language in northern Pakistan, spoken by 330,000 speakers.

An interesting fact is that in Chillinji, Darkot and Murkushi, the purdah system, whereby women are kept out of sight in public, pretty much vanishes, and girls and women walk freely about and anyone can look at them, whereas in most of Chitral, even in the Ismaili areas, the purdah system prevails.

Wakhi girls near Darkot. Not only do they walk around freely, but you can actually look at them and even take their photos! Gasp! Note the bright outfits and the neat jewelry hanging from them. The girl on the right has very noticeable Asian features.

You may note the focus on languages in this post. I have a Master’s Degree in Linguistics. One of my areas of interest is a controversial one – language death. The decline and extinction of so many of the world’s languages is a complex subject that goes beyond the scope of this post. But those interested may wish to check out this neat paper on language diversity, decline and death in Pakistan (pdf).

It also has a nice list of the 70 languages spoken there, with number of speakers, locations, and in some cases, notes about language shift (a process of language death whereby speakers quit speaking their native language in favor of another, usually more widely spoken language).

The Out of India Model for Indo-European

Related to “There was no Aryan Invasion” folks, mostly Hindu nationalists and Indian nationalists.

Out of India Model. Unfortunately, the Wikipedia page makes it seem somewhat plausible. It’s not. Not plausible, that is. It’s nonsense. Indo-European speakers did not come out of India. India is not the homeland of the Indo-Europeans. The true homeland is in far southern Russia north of the Caucasus, or, even better, in Anatolia.

This is what really happened: an Indo-Aryan migration. Read through that piece and it becomes quite clear that this is what really happened. Part of the problem is with the word invasion. There was no invasion. They just moved in.

Michael Witzel, a Sanskritist, has been in the forefront of attacking the Out of India model. Here is a good page savaging most of their arguments. He takes apart one of their leader proponents, N. Kazanas of Greece, a guy who is little more than a dilettante. It takes a little while to get through this stuff as it’s a bit heavy going, but I was able to do it. Once you do it, the Out of India Theory lies in ruins.

One of the OOI arguments is that Indo-Aryan peoples have no memory of a migration. But who does anyway? Most IE peoples do not remember their obvious migrations either. Romans said they came from Troy. This is a lie. Gypsies say they came from Egypt. Fiction.

Here is an argument against an Indo-Aryan incursion:

we have an archaeologically attested culture of many centuries if not millennia with undoubted literacy but without any traces of religious texts, legal codes, scientific works and even simple secular fables (except most laconic legends on indecipherable seals), and, in quick succession, even as the older culture declines, an intrusive illiterate people with no archaeological attestation at all who yet produce within a few centuries (according to the AIT) all the literature that was missing from the previous culture.

This is a unique situation that makes little sense.

However, this very thing happened in Greece. First, a Minoan cult, a Helladic civilization, but no literary texts, then, in a few centuries, then, within a few centuries, an explosion of literature, poetry, religion, philosophy, the Homeric texts, etc. Further, it does not produce “all the literature that was missing from the previous civilization. It produces new literature at a very rapid pace – see the Yayoi invasion of Japan from Korea and the rapid replacement of the Jomon culture for something similar.

Another argument is that archeologically, the record of civilization in India is continuous – that is, there is no obvious disruption dating from an Aryan invasion. However, as a general rule, culture, archeologically, is continuous in all parts of the world. Culture is continuous in Europe too, and we know full well that Indo-Europeans took over and supplanted earlier groups. Is there a record of this takeover culturally? Well no, but it happened.

However, keep in mind that horses and chariots showed up with the Indo-Aryans and were not found in India previously. OOI folks say silly things like, “Egyptians had chariots too” (Point being?). Anyway, horses and chariots did not develop in India. They came down from the steppes with the I-A speakers.

Surely if OOI is true than Sanskrit would be the most ancient IE language. It’s not at all. It only goes back 3,500 years too. The Anatolian branch may well date back 8,000 years.

If OOI is true than borrowings from other Indian languages such as Dravidian and Munda would be found in all branches of IE, no? But of course they are only found in Indic, which we would expect if Indic speakers migrated into India and not out of it.

Going back to pre-Indo-Aryan times, paleontologists find differences between bones even between Mohenjo Daro and Harappa. Also, there are no I-A bones found here. Of course not. Aryans will not show up for 1000′s of years.

Yes, Harappans built wheels, but they built no spoke-wheeled chariot. This came only with the Aryans. OOI folks have no explanation for this.

Indeed, Aryan chariots are built from woods from the Punjab plain, not wood from say the steppes. But this is not a valid OOI argument. Invaders always use whatever is available. Aryan immigrants brought chariot technology with them from the steppes. To make chariots in their new homeland, they used local wood. This is surprising?

Does Speaking Indic As a Native Language Help You Learn English?

Commenters are discussing this question. Mr. India first said that Indians speak English well because they speak an Indo-European language natively. First of all, it’s dubious whether most Indians speak an Indic language natively. Many speak Dravidian and Asiatic languages natively.

Wade: I doubt that the fact that both are Indo-European really matters a lot. I doubt learning Russian would be easy just because I speak English. The European countries don’t have a “native” English tradition implanted by colonialism like India does.Cyrus: Trust me when I say it does, Wade. It is more than just remembering words, but a way of thinking. For you to learn Russia would be simpler than if you tried to learn Chinese. Like wise, you could pick up Persian far easier than Turkish. I’ve seen that happen over and over again.

The problem is that the obvious cognates are few and far between. I know Indo-European studies pretty well, and I have been through a lot of the IE etymological dictionary (Pokorny). Indic is one of the most screwed up branches as far as cognates with English are concerned. Sure there are lots of cognates, but they look little or nothing like their English cognate words! Iranic is similar – there are almost no obvious cognates left that I’m aware of. The cognates are there, but they are badly mangled.

Slavic is bad too, but I think maybe not quite as bad as Indo-Iranian. Baltic is bad, maybe the same as Slavic or closer.

The closest to English are obviously Germanic and Italic, which obviously has lots of words in which cognates line up quite well with English words, though in many cases the only English word cognate anymore is a dead one from Old English or Middle English.

For some reason, Celtic is actually ok as far as English cognates, but a lot of them are pretty removed from the English word, and it’s a stretch to see how the Celtic looks like the English word. But it’s probably second after Italic – Germanic.

Greek is ok due to all the borrowings, but there’s not a lot there either, plus the alphabet is different, so that seems to ruin everything.

Albanian and Armenian are disasters. There’s virtually nothing left, and the few cognates typically look almost nothing like the English word.

I have known many speakers of Dravidian languages and many speakers of Indian Indic languages. The Dravidian speakers’ English is no better or worse than the Indic speakers’ English.

Speaking Indic as a native language seems to be little or no benefit in learning English as opposed to speaking Dravidian as a native language.

More On The Hardest Languages To Learn – Indo-European Languages

Note: Bizarrely enough, the PC headcases have accused this post, a Linguistics post of all things, of racism. See here for my position statement on racism.

Caution: This post is very long! It runs to 88 pages on the Web.

We did a post on this earlier, but it looks like we only scratched the surface. There are many of webpages on this topic, and one could read about the subject for a long time, but after a while, things start getting repetitive.

This post is very good. There are more in various places on the Web.

For starters, before we do our own analysis, let’s look at what some other people came up with. This post is very good. They did a survey, and the post describes the results of the survey.

According to the survey, the nine hardest languages to learn overall were Mandarin, Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Arabic, Hindi, Icelandic, German and Swedish.

The eight hardest languages to speak (or to pronounce correctly, specifically) were French, Mandarin, Polish, Korean, Hungarian, Arabic, Basque and Hindi.

The nine hardest languages to write were Arabic, Mandarin, Polish, French, Serbo-Croatian, Japanese, Russian, Basque and English.

How does that survey line up with the facts? Surveys are just opinions of L2 learners, and carry variant validity. For starters, let’s throw Swedish off the list altogether, as it actually seems to be a pretty easy language to learn. It’s interesting that some people find it hard, but the weight of the evidence suggests that more folks find it easy than difficult.

Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese and Russian of course use different alphabets and this is why they were rated as hard to write.

Method. A literature survey, combined with interviews of various L2 language learners was conducted. In addition, 100 years of surveys on the question by language instructors was reviewed. The US military’s School of Languages in Monterey’s ratings system for difficulty of learning various languages was analyzed.

Results were collated in an impressionistic manner along a majority rules line in order to form final opinions. For example, a minority said that Portuguese or Spanish were very hard to learn, but the consensus view was that they were quite easy. In this case, the minority opinion was rejected and the consensus view was adopted. The work received a tremendous amount of criticism after publication, and many changes were made to the text.

Clearly, such a project will necessarily be more impressionistic than scientific. Scientific tests of the relative difficulty of learning different languages will have to await the development of algorithms specifically designed to measure such things. And even then, surely there will be legions of “We can’t prove anything” naysayers, as this is the heyday of the “We can’t prove anything” School of Physics Envy in Linguistics.

One common criticism was that, “In Linguistics, the standard view is that there is no such thing as an easy or difficult language to learn. All languages are equally difficult or easy to learn.” Unless we are talking about children learning an L1 (and even then that’s a dubious assertion) this statement was rejected as simply untrue and exemplar of the sort of soft science (“We can’t prove anything about anything”) mushiness that has overtaken Linguistics in recent years.

Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics have long been nearly ruined by soft science mushiness, and in recent years, soft science “We can’t prove anything” muddleheadedness has overtaken Historical Linguistics in a horrible way. Bizarrely enough, this epidemic of Physics Envy has been clouded, as one might suspect, in claims of rigorous application of the scientific method.

But hard sciences prove things all the time. Whenever a field claims that almost nothing in the field is provable, you’re heading in the realms of Politically Correct soft science Humanities brain mush.

Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was judged according to how hard it would be for a non-English speaker to learn the language. Speaking, reading and writing were all considered.

Ratings. Languages were rated 1-5, easiest to hardest. 1 = easiest, 2 = moderately easy to average, 3 = average to moderately difficult, 4 = very to extremely difficult, 5 = most difficult of all.

Time needed. Time needed to learn the language “reasonably well”: Level 1 languages = 3 months-1 year. Level 2 languages = 6 months-1 year. Level 3 languages = 1-2 years. Level 4 languages = 2 years. Level 5 languages = 3-4 years, but some may take longer.

Conclusion. The soft science, Politically Correct mush-speak from the swamps of Sociolinguistics currently in vogue, “All languages are equally difficult or easy for any adult to learn,” was rejected. The results of this study indicate that languages to indeed differ dramatically in how difficult they are for L2 learners.

Indo-European

Indo-Aryan

Indian languages like Kashmiri, Hindi and especially Sanskrit are  quite hard, and Sanskrit is legendary for its extreme complexity. Sanskrit grammar is very complicated. There are 8 cases. Sinhala is also difficult.

The Hindi script is quite opaque to Westerners, some of whom say that Chinese script is easier. You speak one way if you are talking to a man or a woman, and you also need to take into account whether you as speaker are male or female. In addition, Hindi has many long words.

Sanskrit is legendary for its difficulty. It has script that goes on for long sequences in which many small individual words may be buried. You have to take apart the sequences to find the small words. However, the words are further masked by tone sandhi running everything together. Once you tease the sandhi apart, you have to deal with hundreds of compound characters in the script. Once you do those two things, you are left with eight cases, nine declensions, dual number and other fun things.

Hindi is rated 3, moderately difficult.

Kashmiri and Sinhala are rated 4, extremely difficult.

Sanskrit is rated 5, the most difficult of all.

Iranian

Persian is easier to learn than its reputation, as some say this is a difficult language to learn. In truth, it’s difficulty is only average. On the plus side, Persian has a very simple grammar. It has no grammatical gender, no case, no articles and adjectives never change form. It is a quite easy language to learn at the entry level, but it is much harder to learn at the advanced level, say Sufi poetry, due to difficulty in untangling subtleties of meaning.

Persian only gets a 3 rating as average to moderately difficult.

Romance

French is pretty easy to learn at a simple level, but it’s not easy to get to an advanced level. For instance, the language is full of idioms, many more than your average language, and it’s often hard to figure them out. French has a grammar that is neither simple nor difficult; that, combined with a syntax is pretty straightforward and a Latin alphabet make it pretty easy to learn for most Westerners.

One problem is pronunciation. There are many nasal vowels, similar to Portuguese. The eu, u and all of the nasal vowels can be Hell for the learner. There is also a strange uvular r. The orthography is also difficult, since there are many sounds that are written but no longer pronounced, as in English. Also similar to English, orthography does not line up with pronunciation. For instance, there are 13 different ways to spell the o sound: o, ot, ots, os, ocs, au, aux, aud, auds, eau, eaux, ho and ö.

In addition, spoken French and written French can be quite different. Spoken French uses words such as fouture and on which you might never see in written French.

The English language, having no Language Committee, at least has an excuse for the frequently irrational nature of its spelling.

The French have no excuse, since they have a committee that is set up in part to keep the language as orthographically irrational as possible. One of their passions is refusing to change the spelling of words even as pronunciation changes, which is the opposite of what occurs in any sane spelling reform. So French is, like English, frozen in time.

Furthermore, to make matters worse, the French are almost as prickly about writing properly as they are about speaking properly, and you know how they are about foreigners mangling their language.

A good case can be made that French is harder to learn than English. Verbs change much more, and it has grammatical gender.

French is one of the toughest languages to learn in the Romance family. A good case can be made that French is harder to learn than Italian in that French children do not learn to write French properly until age 12-13, six years after Italian children.

This is due to the illogical nature of French spelling discussed above such that the spelling of many French words must be memorized as opposed to applying a general sound-symbol correspondence rule. In addition, French uses both acute and grave accents – `´.

French gets a 3 rating for average to moderately difficult.

Italian is said to be easy to learn, especially if you speak a Romance language or English, but learning to order a pizza and really mastering it are two different things. Foreigners usually do not learn Italian at anywhere near a native level.

For instance, Italian has three types of tenses, simple tenses, compound tenses, and indefinite tenses. There are also various moods that combine to take tense forms – four subjunctive moods, two conditional moods, two gerund moods, two infinite moods, two participle moods and one imperative mood.

There are eight tenses in the indicative mood – recent past, remote pluperfect, recent pluperfect, preterite (remote past), imperfect, present, future, future perfect. There are four tenses in the subjunctive mood – present, imperfect, preterite and pluperfect. There are two tenses in the conditional mood – present and preterite.

There is only one tense in the imperative mood – present. Gerund, participle and infinite moods all take only present and perfect tenses. Altogether, using these mood-tense combinations, any Italian verb can decline in up to 21 different ways.

Italian has many irregular verbs. There are many combinations just to make articles and preposition,s and there are 600 irregular verbs with all sorts of different irregularities. Nevertheless, it is a Romance language, and Romance has gotten rid of most of its irregularity. The Slavic languages are much more irregular than Romance.

Counterintuitively, some Italian words are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. There are many different ways to say the – il, i, lo, gli , l’ (masculine); la, le, l’ (feminine). Few Italians even write Italian 100% correctly. A problem with Italian is that meaning is inferred via intonation. If you mess up the intonation of your utterance, you’re screwed and will not be understood. However, there is no case in Italian, as in all of Romance.

Italian is still easier to learn than French, for evidence see the research that shows Italian children learning to write Italian properly by age 6, 6-7 years ahead of French children. This is because Italian orthography is quite sensible and coherent, with good sound-symbol correspondence.

Italian gets a 2 rating, moderately easy to average.

Surprisingly enough, Romanian is said to be one of the harder Romance languages to speak or write properly. Even Romanians often get it wrong. One strange thing about Romanian is that the articles are attached to the noun as suffixes. In all the rest of Romance, articles are free words that precede the noun. English: telephone and the telephone; Romanian: telefon and telefonul. Romanian is harder to learn than Spanish or Italian, and possibly harder than French. It has considerable Slavic influence.

Romanian gets a 3 rating as average to moderately hard to learn.

Spanish is often said to be one of the easiest languages to learn, though this is somewhat controversial. Personally, I’ve been learning it off and on since age six and I still have problems, though Spanish speakers say my Spanish is good, but Hispanophones, unlike the French, are generous about these things.

It’s quite logical, though the verbs do decline a lot with tense and number, and there are many irregular verbs, similar to French. Compare English declensions to Spanish declensions of the verb to read.

English

I read
He reads

Spanish

Yo leo
Tu lees
El lee
Nos leemos
Vos leéis
Ellos leen
leí
leeré
leería
leyese
leyésemos
leyéseis
¿leísteis?
leyéremos
leeréis
pudísteis haber leído
hubiéremos ó hubiésemos leído

Nevertheless, Romance grammar is much more regular than, say, Polish, as Romance has junked most of the irregularity. Spanish has the good grace to lack case, spelling is a piece of cake, and words are spoken just as they are written. Nevertheless, Hispanophones say that few foreigners end up speaking like natives.

Rated 1 as easiest of all.

Portuguese, like Spanish, is also very easy to learn, though Portuguese pronunciation is harder due to the unusual vowels such as nasal diphthongs and the strange palatal lateral ʎ, which many English speakers will mistake for an l.

Portuguese gets a 1 rating, easiest of all.

Hellenic

Greek is a difficult language to learn, and it’s rated the second hardest language to learn by language professors. It’s easy to learn to speak simply, but it’s quite hard to get it down like a native. It’s the rare second language learner who attains native competence. Greek grammar is dead simple, but there are problems with writing Greek. Like English, the spelling doesn’t seem to make sense, and you have to memorize many words. Further, there is the unusual alphabet.

Greek gets a 4 rating, extremely difficult to learn.

Classic Greek is worse, with a distinction between aspirated and unaspirated consonants, a pitch accent system and a truly convoluted system of noun and verb inflection.

Classic Greek gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Germanic

People often say that English is easy to learn, but that is deceptive. For one thing, English has anywhere from 500,000-1 million words (said to be twice as much as any other language – but there are claims that Dutch and Arabic each have 4 million words), the number increases by the day; furthermore, most people don’t understand more than 50,000. Yet they only use 5,000 at most.

Actually, the average American or Brit uses a mere 2,500 words. As we might expect, our cultivated Continentals in Europe, such as Spaniards and French, probably have twice the regular vocabulary of English speakers and far more colloquial expressions.

In addition, verbal phrases or phrasal verbs are a nightmare. In many cases, phrasal verbs can have more than 10 different antagonistic meanings.

Get down and party down – to have fun and party, yet get down on the floor – to lie prone and remain there. Are you down? – are you ready to do something. Pat down – to frisk. Take down – to tackle. Cook down – to reduce the liquid content in a cooked item. Run down - to run over something, to review a list or to attack someone verbally for a long time. Play down – to de-emphasize. Write down – to write on a sheet of paper, but write up – to write in any form, usually a long piece.

Drink up and drink down mean roughly the same thing, as do slip up and slip down. Light up – to torch. Mess up, slip up – to fail.  Cook up – to prepare a meal. Vacuum up – to vacuum. Wash up – to wash. Brush up – to go over a previously learned skill. Bone up – to study hard. Play up – to dramatize. Read up – to read intensively as in studying. Stay up – to not go to bed. Come up – to approach closely, to occur suddenly or to overflow. Patch up – to put together a broken thing or relationship.

Make up – to make amends, to apply cosmetics to one’s face or to invent a story. Burn up – burn completely or to be made very angry, burn down – reduce s.t. to ashes, like a structure. Turn up – to increase volume or to appear suddenly somewhere. Run up – to tally a big bill or approach s.t. quickly. Dry up – to dessicate. Take up - to develop a new skill, to bring something to a higher elevation, to cook something at a high heat to where it is assimilated. Blow up – to explode.

Dress up – to dress oneself in formal attire. Shake up – to upset a paradigm, to upset emotionally. Hit up - to visit someone casually or to ask for a favor or gift, usually small amounts of money. Wake up – to awaken. Stir up – stir rapidly, upset a calm surrounding or scene or upset a paradigm. Cheer up – to elevate one’s mood. Talk up – to try to convince someone of something by discussing it dramatically and intensively.

Chat up – to talk casually with a goal in mind, usually seduction or at least flirtation. Hang up – to place on a hanger or a wall, to end a phone call. Trip up – to stumble mentally over s.t. confusing. Mop up – mop a floor or finish off the remains of an enemy army or finalize a military operation. Clean up – to make an area thoroughly tidy. Pick up – to grasp an object and lift it higher, to seduce someone sexually or to acquire a new skill, usually rapidly.

Put up – to hang, to tolerate, often grudgingly, or to put forward a new image. Tear up – to shred. Ring up – to telephone someone. Cut up – to shred or to make jokes, often of a slapstick variety. Meet up – to meet someone or a group for a get meeting or date of some sort. Start up – to initialize an engine or a program, to open a new business to go back to something that had been terminated previously, often a fight; a recrudescence. Crank up - elevate the volume.

Rev up – to turn the RPM’s higher on a stationary engine. Shoot up – to inject, usually illegal drugs, or to fire many projectiles into a place with a gun. Drum up – to charge someone with wrongdoing, usually criminal, usually by a state actor, usually for false reasons.

Kiss up – to mend a relationship after a fight. Wait up – to ask other parties to wait for someone who is coming in a hurry. Whip up – to cook a meal quickly or for winds to blow wildly. Touch up – to apply the final aspects of a work nearly finished.

Suck up – to ingratiate oneself, often in an obsequious fashion. Stop up – to block the flow of liquids with some object(s). Suit up – to get dressed in a uniform, often for athletics. Pass up - to miss an opportunity, often a good one. Pop up – for s.t. to appear suddenly, often out of nowhere.

Own up – to confess to one’s sins under pressure and reluctantly. Live up – to enjoy life. Lighten up – to reduce the downcast or hostile seriousness of the mood of a person or setting. Knock up – to impregnate. Beat up – to defeat someone thoroughly in a violent physical fight.

Listen up – imperative – to order someone to pay attention, often with threats of aggression if they don’t comply. Man up – to elevate oneself to manly behaviors when one is slacking and behaving in an unmanly fashion. Lock up – to lock securely, often locking various locks, or to imprison, or for an object or computer program to be frozen or jammed and unable to function. Mix up – to confuse, or to disarrange contents in a scattered fashion so that it does not resemble the original.

Measure up – in a competition, for an entity to match the competition. Mark up – to raise the price of s.t. Move up – to elevate the status of a person or entity in competition with other entities- to move up in the world. Hook up – to have a casual sexual encounter or to meet casually for a social encounter, often in a public place; also to connect together a mechanical devise or plug something in.

Hurry up - imperative, usually an order to quit delaying and join the general group or another person in some activity, often when they are leaving to go to another place. Face up – to quit avoiding your problems and meet them head on. End up – to arrive at some destination after a long winding, often convoluted journey either in space or in time. Clear up – for a storm to dissipate, for a rash to go away, for a confusing matter to become understandable.

Close up – to close, also to end business hours for a public business. Cheer up – to change from a downcast mood to a more positive one. Curl up – to rest in a curled body position, either alone or with another being. Crack up – to laugh, often heartily. Back up – to go in reverse, often in a vehicle, or to go back over something previously dealt with that was poorly understood in order to understand it better. Bruise up – to receive multiple bruises, often serious ones.

Break up – to break into various pieces, or to end a relationship, either personal or between entitles, also to split a large entity, like a large company or a state. Build up – to build intensively in an area, such as a town or city, from a previously less well-developed state. Buy up – to buy all or most all of something. Catch up – to reach a person or group that one had lagged behind earlier, or to take care of things, often hobbies, that had been put off by lack of time.

Do up – apply makeup to someone, often elaborately. Dream up – to imagine a creative notion, often an elaborate one. Drive up – to drive towards something, and then stop, or to raise the price of something by buying it intensively. Feel up – to grope someone sexually. Get up – to awaken or rise from a prone position. Give up – to surrender, in war or a contest, or to stop doing something trying or unpleasant that is yielding poor results, or to die, as in give up the ghost.

Grow up – to attain an age or maturity or to act like a mature person, often imperative. Hold up – to delay, to ask someone ahead of you to wait, often imperative. Keep up – to maintain on a par with the competition without falling behind. Lay up – to be sidelined due to illness or injury for a time. Let up – to ease off of someone or something, for a storm to dissipate, to stop attacking someone or s.t.

Pay up – to pay, usually a debt, often imperative to demand payment of a debt, to pay all of what one owes so you don’t owe anymore. Rise up – for an oppressed group to arouse and fight back against their oppressors. Run up – to spend a lot of money, often foolishly. Show up – to appear somewhere, often unexpectedly. Shut up – to silence, often imperative, fighting words. Sit up – to sit upright.

Speak up – to begin speaking after listening for a while, often imperative, a request for a silent person to say what they wish to say. Take up – to cohabit with someone – She has taken up with him. Think up – to conjure up a plan, often an elaborate or creative one. Throw up - to vomit. Bid up – to raise the price of something, usually at an auction, by calling out higher and higher bids. Be up – to be in a waking state after having slept. “I’ve been up for three hours.”

There are figures of speech and idioms everywhere (some estimate that up to 20% of casual English speech is idiomatic), and it seems impossible to learn them all. In fact, few second language learners get all the idioms down pat.

The spelling is insane and hardly follows any rules at all. The English spelling system in some ways is frozen at about 1500 or so. The pronunciation has changed but the spelling has not. Careful studies have shown that English-speaking children take longer to read than children speaking other languages (Finnish, Greek and various Romance and other Germanic languages) due to the difficulty of the spelling system. Romance languages were easier to read than Germanic ones.

This may be why English speakers are more likely to be diagnosed dyslexic than speakers of other languages. The dyslexia still exists if you speak a language with good sound-symbol correspondence, but it’s covered up so much by the ease of the orthography that it seems invisible and the person can often function well. But for a dyslexic, trying to read English is like walking into a minefield.

The rules governing the use of the indefinite, definite and zero article are opaque and possibly don’t even exist. There are synonyms for almost every word in a sentence, and the various shades of meaning can be difficult to discern. In addition, quite a few words have many different meanings. There are strange situations like read and read, which are pronounced differently and mean two different things.

However, English verbs generally have few forms in their normal paradigm of regular verbs. In this arrangement, there are only five forms of the verb in general use with the overwhelming majority of verbs:

present except 3rd singular steal
3rd person singular  steals
progressive  stealing
past  stole
perfect  stolen

Even a language like Spanish has many more basic forms than that.

There are quite a few dialects – over 100 have been recorded in London alone. Letters can make many different sounds, a consequence of the insane spelling system. English prepositions are notoriously hard, and few second language learners get them down right because they seem to obey no discernible rules.

While English seems simple at first – past tense is easy, little or no case, no grammatical gender, little mood, etc. – that can be quite deceptive. In European countries like Croatia, it’s hard to find a person who speaks English with even close to native speaker competence.

The problem with English is that it’s a mess! There are languages with very easy grammatical rules like Indonesian and languages with very hard grammatical rules like Arabic. English is one of those languages that is a total mess. There are rules, but there are exceptions everywhere and exceptions to the exceptions. Grammatically, it’s disaster area. It’s hard to know where to start.

However, it is often said that English has no grammatical rules. Even native speakers make this comment because that is how English seems due to its highly irregular nature. Most English native speakers, even highly educated ones, can’t name one English grammatical rule. Just to show you that English does have rules though, I will list some of them.

*Indicates an ungrammatical form.

Adjectives appear before the noun in noun phrases. Small dogs barked. *Dogs small barked.

Adjectives are numerically invariant – the small dog, the small dogs, The dog is small. The dogs are small.

Intensifiers appear before both attributive and predicative adjectives. The very small dog barked. *The small very dog barked. The dog was very small. *The dog was small very.

Attributive adjectives can have complements. The dog was scared. The dog was scared of cats. But predicative adjectives cannot. The scared dog barked. *The scared of cats dog barked.

Articles, quantifiers, etc. appear before the adjective (and any
intensifier) in a noun phrase. The very small dog barked. *Very the small dog barked. *Very small the dog barked. Every very small dog barked. *Very every small dog barked. *Very small every dog barked.

Relative clauses appear after the noun in a noun phrase. The dog that barked. *The that barked dog.

The progressive verb form is the bare form with the suffix -ing, even for the most irregular verbs in the language – being, having, doing; *wasing, *aring, *aming.

The infinitive verb form is to followed by the bare form, even for the most irregular verbs in the language – to be, to have, to do; *to was, *to are, *to am.

The imperative verb form is the bare form, even for the most irregular verb in the language. Be! Have! Do! *Was! *Are! *Am!

All 1st person present, 2nd person present, and plural present verb forms are equivalent to the bare form, except for to be.

All past tense verb forms of a given verb are the same regardless of person and number, except for to be.

Question inversion is optional. You are leaving? Are you leaving? But when inversion does occur in a wh-question, a wh-phrase is required to be fronted. You’re seeing what? What are you seeing? *Are you seeing what?

Wh-fronting is required to affect an entire noun phrase, not just the wh-word. You are going to which Italian restaurant? Which Italian restaurant are you going to? *Which are you going to Italian restaurant? *Which Italian are you going to restaurant? *Which restaurant are you going to Italian?

Wh-fronting only happens once, never more. What are you buying from which store? Which store are you buying what from? *What which store are you buying from? *Which store what are you buying from?

The choice of auxiliary verb in compound past sentences does not depend on the choice of main verb. I have eaten. I have arrived. *I am eaten. *I am arrived. cf. French. J’ai mangé. Je suis arrivé.

English can be seen as an inverted pyramid in terms of ease of learning. The basics are easy, but it gets a lot more difficult as you progress in your learning.

Nevertheless, for a variety of reasons, English only gets a 2 rating as moderately easy to average, mostly because it is relatively easy to speak it well enough to be more or less understandable most of the time.

German’s status is controversial. It’s long been considered hard to learn, but many learn it fairly easily. Pronunciation is straightforward, but there are some problems with the müde, the Ach, and the two ch sounds in Geschichte.

Although the first one is really an sch instead of a ch, English speakers lack an sch, so they will just see that as a ch. Further, there are specific rules about when to use the ss (or sz as Germans say) or hard s. The r in German is quite strange, and of common languages, only French has a similar r.

There are six different forms of the depending on the noun case – der , die, das, den, dem and des – but 16 different slots to put the six forms in, and the gender system is irrational. In a more basic sense and similar to Danish, there are three basic forms of the: der, die and das. Each one goes with a particular noun, and it’s not very clear what the rules are.

One problem with German syntax is that the verb, verbs or parts of verbs doesn’t occur until the end of the sentence.

German also has Schachtelsätze, box clauses, which are like clauses piled into other clauses. The syntax is very rigid but at least very regular. In addition, subclauses use SOV word order . German case is also quite regular. The case exceptions can be almost counted on one hand.

An example of German case (and case in general) is here: The leader of the group gives the boy a dog. In German, the sentence is case marked with the four different German cases: Der Führer (nominative) der Gruppe (genitive) gibt dem Jungen (dative) einen Hund (accusative).

There are three genders, masculine, feminine and neutral. Yet female – (das Weib) is neutral, and petticoat is masculine! Any given noun inflects into the four cases and the three genders. Furthermore, the genders change between masculine and feminine in the same noun for no logical reason.

Phonology also changes strangely as the number of the noun changes – Haus – house is singular – Haeuser – houses, is plural with umlaut. But to change the noun to a diminutive, you add -chen – Haueschen, which is singular, yet has the umlaut of the plural.

German also has a vast vocabulary, the fourth largest in the world. This is either positive or negative depending on your viewpoint. Language learners often complain about learning languages with huge vocabularies, but as a native English speaker, I’m happy to speak a language with a million words. There’s a word for just about everything you want to say about anything, and then some!

On the plus side, word formation is quite regular. Pollution is Umweltverschmutzung. It consists, logically, of two words, Umwelt and Verschmutzung, which mean environment and dirtying. In English, you have three words, environment, dirtying and pollution, the third one, the combination of the first two, has no relation to its semantic roots in the first two words.

Nevertheless, this has its problems, since it’s not simple to figure out how the words are stuck together into bigger words, and meanings of morphemes can take years to figure out.

Learning German can be seen as a pyramid. It is very difficult to grasp the basics, but once you do that, it gets increasingly easy as the language follows relatively simple rules and many words are created from other words via compound words, prefixes and suffixes.

On the plus side, German is not very inflected, and the inflection that it does take is more regular than many other languages. Furthermore, German orthography is phonetic, and there are no silent letters.

German gets a 3 rating, average to moderately difficult.

Icelandic is very hard to learn, much harder than Norwegian, German or Swedish. Part of the problem is pronunciation. The grammar is harder than German grammar, and there are almost no Latin-based words in it. The vocabulary is quite archaic.

There are four cases – nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative – as in German, and there are many exceptions to the case rules, or “quirky case,” as it is called. Verbs are modified for tense, person and number, as in many other IE languages (this is almost gone from English).

Icelandic also modifies verbs for voice – active, passive and medial. Furthermore, there are four different kinds of verbs – strong, weak, reduplicating and irregular, with several conjugation categories in each division. Many verbs just have to be memorized.

Icelandic gets a 5 rating, hardest of all to learn.

Faroese is said to be even harder to learn than Icelandic, with some very strange vowels not found in other North Germanic languages.

Faroese gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Norwegian and Swedish are both easy to learn, and Norwegian is sometimes touted as the easiest language on Earth to learn. This is confusing because Danish is described below as a more difficult language to learn, and critics say that Danish and Norwegian are the same, so they should have equal difficulty. But only one Norwegian writing system is almost the same as Danish the Danish writing system.

Danish pronunciation is quite a bit different from Norwegian, and this is where the problems come in.

Nevertheless, Norwegian dialects can be a problem. Foreigners get off the plane having learned a bit of Norwegian and are immediately struck by the strangeness of the multiplicity of dialects, which for the most part are easy for Norwegians to understand, but can be hard for foreigners. There is also the problematic en and et alternation, as discussed with Danish.

Swedish does have the disadvantage of having hundreds of irregular verbs. Swedish also has some difficult phonemes, especially vowels. since Swedish has nine vowels, not including diphthongs. Pronunciation of the ö and å (and sometimes ä, which has different sounds) can be difficult . Words can take either an -en or an -ett ending, and there don’t seem to be any rules about which one to use. The same word can have a number of different meanings.

Swedish can be compared to a tube in terms of ease of learning. The basics are harder to learn than in English, but instead of getting more difficult as one progresses as in English, the difficulty of Swedish stays more or less the same from basics to the most complicated.

But learning to speak Swedish is easy enough compared to other languages. Where Swedish gets difficult is learning how to write it, since the spelling seems illogical, like in English.

Swedish and Norwegian get 1 ratings, very easy to learn.

Danish is a harder language to learn than one might think. It’s not that hard to read or even write, but it’s quite hard to speak. However, like English, Danish has a non-phonetic orthography, so this can be problematic.

For one, there are a huge number of dialects. Denmark is a group of cool to cold islands (depending on the season) with a freezing cold ocean in between them. People generally stayed on their islands and didn’t move around much. Each island has its own dialect, and the dialects can be quite baffling for second language learners. There are eight major dialects, and countless minor ones subsumed under them.

In addition, there are d words where the d is silent and other d words where it is pronounced, and though the rules are straightforward, it’s often hard for foreigners. The d in hund is silent, for instance.

There are three strange vowels that are not in English, represented by the letters æ, ø and å. Two of them (one each) are also present in Swedish and Icelandic, but most foreigners have problems with them.

One advantage of all of the Scandinavian languages is that their basic vocabulary is fairly limited. This is in contrast to Chinese, where you have to learn a lot of vocabulary just to converse at a basic level.

As with Maltese and Gaelic, there is little correlation between how a Danish word is written and how it is pronounced. Pronunciation of Danish is difficult. Speech is very fast and comes out in a continuous stream that elides entire words. Vowels in the middle and at the end of words are seldom expressed.

There are nine vowel characters, and each one can be pronounced in five or six different ways. There is also a strange phonetic element called a stød, which is a very short pause slightly before the vowel(s) in a word. This element is very hard for foreigners to get right. Just about any word has at least four meanings, and can serve as noun, verb, adjective or adverb.

Suggesting that Danish may be harder to learn than Swedish or Norwegian, it’s said that Danish children speak later than Swedish or Norwegian children. One study comparing Danish children to Croatian tots found that the Croat children had learned over twice as many words by 15 months as the Danes. According to the study:

The University of Southern Denmark study shows that at 15 months, the average Danish toddler has mastered just 80 words, whereas a Croatian tot of the same age has a vocabulary of up to 200 terms.

[...] According to the study, the primary reason Danish children lag behind in language comprehension is because single words are difficult to extract from Danish’s slurring together of words in sentences. Danish is also one of the languages with the most vowel sounds, which leads to a ‘mushier’ pronunciation of words in everyday conversation.

Danish gets a 3 rating, average to moderately hard to learn.

Dutch is harder to learn than English due to the large number of rules used in both speaking and writing. The Dutch say that few foreigners learn to speak Dutch well. Part of the problem is that some words have no meaning at all in isolation (meaning is only derived via a phrase or sentence). Word order is somewhat difficult, as foreigners often seem to get the relatively lax Dutch rules about word order wrong in long sentences.

Dutch gets a 3 rating, average to moderately hard to learn.

Celtic

Any Gaelic language is tough. Irish students take Irish for 13 years, and some take French for five years. These students typically know French better than Irish. There are inflections for the inflections of the inflections, a convoluted aspiration system, and no words for yes or no. The system of initial consonant mutation is quite baffling.

Welsh and Scottish Gaelic are also very hard to learn, some say harder than Irish, although Welsh has no case compared to Irish’s two cases. And the Welsh has a mere five irregular verbs. Gaelic languages are harder to learn than German or Russian. Both Scots Gaelic and Irish Gaelic are written with non-phonetic spelling that is even more convoluted and irrational than English.

Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Irish get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Armenian

An  obscure branch of Indo-European, Armenian, is very hard to learn. Armenian is a difficult language in terms of grammar and phonetics, not to mention the very odd alphabet.

Rated 5, hardest of all.

Albanian

Albanian is another obscure branch of Indo-European. Similarly to Gaelic, Albanian is even harder to learn than either German or Russian. Albanian may be even harder to learn than Polish.

Rated 5, hardest of all.

Slavic

Czech and Slovak are notoriously hard to learn; in fact, all Slavic languages are. Language professors rate the Slavic languages the third hardest to learn on Earth. Czech is in the Guinness Book of World Records as the hardest language to learn.

It’s sometimes said that even Czechs never learn to speak their language correctly, and there is actually some truth to that. They spend nine years in school studying Czech grammar, but some rules are learned only at university. Immigrants never seem to learn Czech well.

Czech is full of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions. It is said that there are more exceptions than there are rules.

Czech has seven cases in singular and seven more cases in plural for nouns, for a total of 59 different “modes” of declension. There are also words that swing back and forth between “modes.” Adjectives and pronouns also have seven cases in the singular and plural. There are lots of exceptions, too.

There are six genders, three in the singular and three in the plural.  Verbs also decline. When you put all that together, each noun can decline in 59 different ways. Further, these 59 different types of nouns each have 14 different forms depending on case.

The verbs have both perfective and imperfective and have 45 different conjugation patterns.

Truth is that almost every word in the language is subject to declension.

One of the problems with Czech is that not only nouns but also verbs take gender, but they only do so in the past tense. In addition, Czech has a complicated aspect system that is often quite irregular and simply must be memorized to be learned. This conjugation is fairly regular:

viděl continuous past – he saw
uviděl punctual – once he suddenly saw
vídával repetitive – he used to see (somebody/something) repeatedly

Others are less regular:

jedl continuous – he ate
snědl, ujedl, pojedl, dojedl – he ate it all up
ujedl has the slightly different meaning of he ate a bit of it
pojedl has the slightly different meaning of he finished eating
jídával repetitive – he used to eat repeatedly

As with other Slavic languages like Russian, it has the added problem of fairly loose word order. In addition, there are significant differences between casual and formal speech.

Slovak is said to be even harder than Czech, but that’s a tough call. These two languages are the only ones with seven cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, locative, dative, instrumental and vocative). There is also a hard and soft i which is hard to figure out.

The suffixes on nouns and verbs change all the time in strange ways. It’s also full of words that don’t seem to have vowels. There are some difficult consonants such as š, č, ť, ž, ľ, ď, dz, dž, ĺ and ŕ.

Some say that Slovak is even harder than Polish, but, it’s probably a toss-up between Czech/Slovak and Polish.

Czech and Slovak both get 5 ratings, hardest of all.

Polish is similar to Czech and Slovak in having words that seem to have no vowels, but in Polish at least there are invisible vowels. That’s not so obviously the case with Czech. Nevertheless, try these sentences: Strč prst skrz krk or Mlž pln skvrn zlvh. Or these: Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie. Wyindywidualizowaliśmy się z rozentuzjazmowanego tłumu.

I and y, s and z, je and ě alternate at the ends of some words, but the rules governing when to do this, if they exist, don’t seem sensible. The letters ř and ť are very hard to pronounce, and the ř exists in no other language. There are nasal vowels as in Portuguese. The ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, sz, cz, dz, dź, dż sounds are hard for foreigners to make. There are sounds that it is even hard for native speakers to make, as they require a lot tongue movements.

Polish written to spoken pronunciation makes little sense, as in English – h and ch are one sound, and ó, u and ł are one sound. Polish orthography, while being regular, is very complex.

Further, native speakers speak so fast it’s hard for non-natives to understand them. Due to the consonant-ridden nature of Polish, it is harder to pronounce than most Asian languages. Listening comprehension is made difficult by all of the sh and ch like sounds. Furthermore, since few foreigners learn Polish, Poles are not used to hearing their language mangled by second-language learners. Therefore, foreigners’ Polish will seldom be understood.

Polish grammar is much more difficult than Russian grammar.

Polish has seven cases, and case declension is very irregular, unlike German. It also has seven genders, five in the singular and two in the plural. The genders of nouns cause the adjectives modifying them to inflect differently.

Noun
matka   mother (female gender)
ojciec  father (male gender)
dziecko child (neuter gender)

Modifying Adjective
brzydki - ugly

Singular
brzydka matka    ugly mother
brzydki ojciec  ugly father
brzydkie dziecko ugly child

Plural
brzydkie matki   ugly mothers
brzydcy ojcowie  ugly fathers
brzydkie dzieci  ugly children

Gender even effects verbs.

I ate (female speaker) – Ja zjadłam
I ate (male speaker) – Ja zjadłem
I killed – zabiłem/zabiłam
We killed – zabiliśmy/zabiłyśmy
They killed – zabili/zabiły

There are two different forms of the verb kill depending on whether the 1st person singular and plural and 2nd person plural killers are males or females.

kupować - to buy

Singular  Simple Past         Imperfect
I (f.)    kupiłam             kupowałam
I (m.)    kupiłem             kupowałem
you (f.)  kupiłaś             kupowałaś
you (m.)  kupiłeś             kupowałeś
he        kupił               kupował
she       kupiła              kupowała
it        kupiło              kupowało

we (f.)   kupiłyśmy           kupowałyśmy
we (m.)   kupiliśmy           kupowaliśmy
you (f.)  kupiłyście          kupowałyścieyou
you (m.)  kupiliście          kupowaliście
they (f.) kupiły              kupowały
they (m.) kupili              kupowali

The verb above forms an incredible 28 different forms in the perfect and imperfect past tense alone.

In addition, there is an animate-inanimate distinction in gender. Look at some words:

hat – kapelusz
computer – komputer
dog – pies
student – uczen

All are masculine gender, but computer and hat are inanimate and student and dog are animate, so they inflect differently.

I see a new hat – Widze nowy kapelusz
I see a new student – Widze nowego ucznia .

Notice how the now- form changed.

For instance, English has one word for the genitive case of the 1st person singular – my. In Polish, depending on the context, you can have the following 11 forms, and actually there are even more than 11:

mój
moje
moja
moją
mojego
mojemu
mojej
moim
moi
moich
moimi

English has one word for the number 2 – two. Polish has 21 words for two (however, only 5-6 of them are in common use):

dwa
dwaj
dwie
dwoje
dwóch
dwom
dwóm
dwu
dwoma
dwiema
dwojga
dwojgu
dwójką
dwójkę
dwójki
dwójce
dwójko
dwojgiem
dwójkach
dwójek
dwója
dwójkami

Polish, like Hungarian and Finnish, can also have very long word. For instance, pięćsetdwadzieściajedenmiliardówdwieścieczterdzieścisiedemmiloionów-trzystaosiemdzisiątpięćtysięcyczterystadziewięćdziesięciopięcioletni is a word in Polish (There is no dash in the word – I was just dividing the line).

A single noun can change in many ways and take many different forms. Compare przyjaciel – friend

                          singular       plural
who is my friend          przyjaciel    przyjaciele
who is not my friend      przyjaciela  przyjaciół
friend who I give s.t. to przyjacielowi  przyjaciołom
friend who I see          przyjaciela  przyjaciół
friend who I go with      z przyajcielem z przyjaciółmi
friend who I dream of     o przyjacielu  o przyjaciołach
Oh my friend!             Przyajcielu!   Przyjaciele!

There are 12 different forms of the noun friend above.

Polish has perfective and imperfective verbs, but that is the least of the problem. The problem is that each verb is in effect a separate verb altogether, instead of just being conjugated differently. The verb to see has two completely different verbs in Polish: widziec and zobaczyc . Widziałem – I saw (repeatedly in the past, like I saw the sun come up every morning). Zobaczyłem – I saw (only once; I saw the sun come up yesterday).

This is not a tense difference – the very verbs themselves are different! So for every verb in the language, you effectively have to learn two different verbs.

In addition, the future perfect and future imperfect often conjugate completely differently, though the past forms usually conjugate in the same way – note the -em endings above. There is no present perfect as in English, since in Polish the action must be completed, and you can’t be doing something at this precise moment and at the same time have just finished doing it. 95% of verbs have these maddening dual forms, but for 5% of verbs that lack a perfective version, you only have one form.

Plurals change based on number. In English, the plural of telephone is telephones, whether you have two or 1000 of them. In Polish, you use different words depending on how many phones you have: two, three or four telefony, but five telefonów. Sometimes, this radically changes the word, as in hands: four ręce, but five rąk.

It’s often said that one of the advantages of Polish is that there are only three tenses, but this is not really case, as there are at least eight tenses:

Indicative – grac – to play.
Present – gram – I play
Past – gralem – I played
Conditional – gralbym – I would play
Future – będę grać – I will play
Continuous future – będę grał – I will be playing
Perfective future – bogram – Implies you will finish the action – I will have played
Perfective conditional – pogralbym – I would have played

There is also an aspectual distinction made when referring to the past. Different forms are used based on whether or not the action has been completed.

In addition, like Serbo-Croatian, Polish can use multiple negation in a sentence. You can use up to five negatives in a perfectly grammatical sentence: Nikt nikomu nigdy nic nie powiedzia – Nobody ever said anything to anyone.

Whereas in English we use one word for go no matter what mode of transportation we are using to get from one place to another, in Polish, you use different verbs if you are going by foot, by car, by plane, by boat or by other means of transportation.

Like Russian, there are multiple different ways to say the same thing in Polish. In English, you can say Ann has a cat, but you can’t mix the words up and mean the same thing. In Polish you can say Ann has a cat five different ways:

Ania ma kota
Kota ma Ania
Ma Ania kota
Kota Ania ma
Ma kota Ania.

The first one is the most common, but the other five can certainly be used.

A major problem with Polish grammar is that it is not regular at all. There are probably more exceptions than there are rules. Even more importantly, what rules there are so complex and numerous that it is hard to figure them all out.

It is said English-speaking children reach full adult competency in the language (reading, writing, speaking, spelling) at age 12. Polish children do not reach this milestone until age 16. Even adult Poles make a lot of mistakes in speaking and writing Polish properly. However, most Poles are quite proud of their difficult language (though a few hate it), and even take pride in its difficult nature.

On the positive side, in Polish, the stress is fixed, there are no short or long vowels or vowel harmony, there are no tones and it uses a Latin alphabet.

Polish gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

It’s controversial whether Bulgarian is an easy or hard language to learn, but the truth is it probably has average difficulty. Though it is close to Russian, there are Russians who have been living there for 20 years and still can’t understand it well. It has few cases compared to the rest of Slavic – only three, but no Western Slavic language is easy to learn.

Mood is very complicated. There are different ways to say the same idea depending on how you know of the event. If you know about it historically, you mark the sentence with a particular mood. If you doubt the event, you mark with another mood.

If you know it historically but doubt it, you use yet another mood. And there are more than that. These forms are rare in world languages. One is Yamana, a Patagonian language that has only one speaker left. Bulgarian is probably the easiest Slavic language to learn.

Bulgarian gets a 3 rating, average to moderately hard to learn.

Slovenian is also a very hard language to learn, probably on a par with Serbo-Croatian. It has three number distinctions, singular, dual and plural. It’s the only European language that has retained the dual. In addition, there are six cases. There are 18 different declensions of the word son, but five of them are identical, so there are really only 13 different forms.

   Singular Dual       Plural 

1. Sin      Sina       Sini
2. Sina     Sinov      Sinov
3. Sinu     Sinovoma   Sinovom
4. Sina     Sinova     Sinove
5. O sinu   O sinovoma O sinovih
6. S sinom  Z sinovoma Z sini

There are seven different ways that nouns decline depending on gender, but there are exceptions to all of the gender rules.

Slovenian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all to learn.

Serbo-Croatian, similar to Czech, has seven cases in the singular and seven in the plural, plus there are several different declensions. There 15 different types of declensions: seven tenses, three genders, three moods and two aspects. Whereas English has one word for the number 2 – two, Serbo-Croatian has 17 words.

Case abbreviations below:
N = NAV – nominative, accusative, vocative
G = Genitive
D = Dative
L =Locative
I = Instrumental

Masculine inanimate gender
N dva
G dvaju
D L I dvama

Feminine gender
N dve
G dveju
D L I dvema

Mixed gender
N dvoje
G dvoga
D L I dvoma

Masculine animate gender
N dvojica
G dvojice
D L dvojici
I dvojicom

“Twosome”
N dvojka
G dvojke
D L dvojci
I dvojkom

The grammar is incredibly complex. There are imperfective and perfective verbs, but when you try to figure out how to build one from the other, it seems irregular. This is the hardest part of Serbo-Croatian grammar, and foreigners not familiar with other Slavic tongues usually never get it right.

As in English, there are many different ways to say the same thing. Pronouns are so rarely used that some learners are surprised that they exist, since pronimalization is marked on the verb as person and number. Word order is almost free or at least seems arbitrary, similar to Russian.

Serbo-Croatian, like Lithuanian, has pitch accent – low-rising, low-falling, short-rising and short-falling. It’s not the same as tone, but it’s similar. In addition to the pitch accent differentiating words, you also have an accented syllable somewhere in the word, which as in English, is unmarked.

And when the word conjugates or declines, the pitch accent jumps around in the word to another syllable and even changes its type in unpredictable ways. It’s almost impossible for foreigners to get this pitch-accent right.

However, Serbo-Croatian does benefit from a phonetic orthography. The “hard” ch sound is written č, while the “soft” ch sound is written ć.

Serbo-Croatian is probably not quite as hard as Polish, but it’s harder than Russian.

Serbo-Croatian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

People are divided on the difficulty of Russian, but language teachers say it’s one of the hardest to learn. Even after a couple of years of study, some learners find it hard to speak even a simple sentence correctly.

It has seven cases, but the grammar is fairly easy for a Slavic language. The problem comes with the variability in pronunciation. The adjectives and endings can be difficult. In addition, Russian has gender and lots of declinations. The adjectives change form if the nouns they describe have different endings. Adjectives also take case somehow. Verbs have different forms depending on the pronouns that precede them.

Word order is pretty free. For instance, you can say I love you by saying I love you, You love I, Love you I, I you love, Love I you and You I love.

Pronunciation is strange, with one vowel that is between an ü and i. Many consonants are quite strange, and every consonant has a palatalized counterpart, which will be difficult to speakers whose languages lack phonemic palatalized consonants. Stress is quite difficult in Russian since it seems arbitrary and does not appear to follow obvious rules: дóма – at home, but домá – buildings. One problem is that accent, generally not written out, changes the way the vowel is pronounced.

Like German, Russian builds morphemes into larger words. Again like German, this is worse than it sounds since the rules are not so obvious.  In addition, there is the strange Cyrillic alphabet, which is nevertheless easier than Arabic or Chinese. Russian also uses prepositions to combine with verbs to form the nightmare of phrasal verbs, but whereas English puts the preposition after the verb, Russian puts it in front of the verb.

On the plus side, while Russian grammar has what seems like an avalanche of rules, those rules have few exceptions.

Russian gets a 4 rating, very hard to learn.

Baltic

Lithuanian, an archaic Indo-European Baltic tongue, is extremely difficult to learn. There are many dialects, which is interesting for such a small country, and the grammar is very difficult, with many rules. There is grammatical gender for nouns, and in addition, even numerals have gender in all cases. The language is heavily inflectional such that you can almost speak without using prepositions.

A single verb has 13 participial forms, and that is just using masculine gender for the participles. You can also add feminine forms to that verb. There are five classes of verbs and five modes of declension for nouns. However, Lithuanian tense is quite regular. You only need to remember infinitive, 3rd person present and 3rd person past, and after that, all of the conjugations are regular.

There are two genders, but telling them apart is easier than in German where you often have to memorize which noun takes which gender. Lithuanian is similar to Spanish in that the ending will often give you a hint about which gender the noun takes.

Here is an example of the sort of convolutions you have to go through to attach the adjective good to a noun.

geras – good

Masculine                   Feminine

Singular    Plural      Singular   Plural
Nominative    geras         geri          gera          geros
Genitive           gero          gerų         geros        gerų
Dative               geram      geriems   gerai        geroms
Accusative       gerą         gerus        gerą         geras
Instrumental  geru         gerais       gera          geromis
Locative           gerame    geruose   geroje       gerose

Furthermore, while it does not have lexical tone per se, it does have pitch accent – there are three different pitches, which sound like tones but are not tones. It’s almost impossible for foreigners to get the accent right, and the accents tend to move around a lot across words during declension/conjugation such that the rules are opaque if they exist at all. Often you need a dictionary to figure out where the accent should be on a word. Lithuanian pronunciation is also difficult.

Try these words and phrases: šalna, šąla šiandien, ačiū už skanią vakarienę, pasikiškiakopūsteliaudamasis , ūkis, malūnas, čežėti šiauduose.

Or this paragraph: Labas, kaip šiandien sekasi? Aš esu iš Lietuvos, kur gyvenu visą savo gyvenimą. Lietuvių kalba yra sunkiausia iš visų pasaulyje. Ačiū už dėmesį .

Lithuanian is an archaic IE language that has preserved a lot of forms that the others have lost.

In spite of all of that, picking up the basics of Lithuanian may be easier than it seems, and while foreigners usually never get the pitch-accent down, the actual rules are fairly sensible. All in all, Lithuanian may not be as difficult as it appears at first. Also, Lithuanian is very phonetic, words are pronounced how they are spelled.

Learning Lithuanian is similar to learning Latin. If you’ve been able to learn Latin, Lithuanian should not be too hard. Some languages that are similar to English, like Norwegian and Dutch, can be learned to a certain extent simply by learning words and ignoring grammar. I know Spanish and have been able to learn a fair amount of Portuguese, French and Italian without learning a bit of grammar in any of them.

Lithuanian won’t work that way because due to case, base words change form all the time, so it will seem like you are always running into new words, when it fact it’s the same base word declining in various case forms. There’s no shortcut with Latin and Lithuanian. You need to learn the case grammar first, or little of it will make sense.

Lithuanian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

Latvian is another Baltic language that is somewhat similar to Lithuanian. It’s also hard to learn. Try this: Sveiki, esmu no Latvijas, un mūsu valoda ir skanīga, skaista un ar ļoti sarežģītu gramatisko sistēmu. Latvian and Lithuanian are definitely harder to learn than Russian. They both have aspects like in Russian but have more cases than Russian, plus a lot more irregular verbs.

Some say that the Baltic languages are even harder to learn than the hardest Slavic languages like Polish, Czech and Serbo-Croatian, but I’m not sure if that’s true, especially for Polish.

Latvian gets a 5 rating, hardest of all.

References

Seymour, Philip H. K., Aro, Mikko, Erskine, Jane M. and the COST Action A8 Network. 2003. Foundation Literacy Acquisition in European Orthographies. British Journal of Psychology 94:143–174. 

New Article About the Peopling of India

A new article has come out in Nature Magazine dealing with the Peopling of India, a subject I have dealt with quite a bit on this site. The Indian nationals who hate the Aryan Invasion concept have been jumping up and down for joy over this article. I’m not sure where these people are coming from, but generally, it’s a silly, anti-scientific and reactionary place.

Their argument is usually that the Aryan Invasion could not have taken place since our Hindu texts say that it never happened. Well, there is not much to say to such a powerful scientific argument like that!

Those who oppose the Aryan Invasion theory are generally Far Rightwing Hindu nationalists or Hindutvas. They also tend to be associated with the higher castes, especially the Brahmins. One argument is an Indian nationalist one. This crazy line says that there was no Aryan invasion – instead this was a lie made up by the evil British colonialists to “divide the people of India.” As Hindutva fascism claims (falsely) to be a national unification project, as all such projects do, they rail against the “outsiders who divide our people.”

Problem with this argument is that the Indians themselves and the Hindus in particular had done a mighty fine job dividing up the Indian people themselves into many thousands of insane, cruel, backwards and anti-human caste structures.

Another crazy Indian nationalist argument is that there was no caste until the evil Brits came. Or there was caste before then, but it was nothing. The evil Brits came and made caste so much worse. This argument is favored with high castes, typically Brahmins. It’s dubious. Caste was probably much worse before the British came.

The British, civilized folks that they were, hated the animalistic, bestial, primitive caste system and tried to eliminate as part of the necessary mission of civilizing the Indians. This article notes that caste is as old as India, and that the British did not hoist it upon the unwilling heads of the innocent and pure Indians.

Another crazy Indian nationalist line is that there was no race structure in India. Race was invented in India by those evil Brits again. The Brits divided the peaceable, loving, brotherly and Kumbayaa-singing Indian people into two races, a northern race that appeared European or Aryan and a southern race that they called Dravidian.

There does seem to be something to the concept of a somewhat bimodal race structure in India. The people of the South are darker and have a different physical type than the Northern Indics, who look more Iranian or even European. Some say that the Dravidians are the remains of a Mediterranean Caucasian Race that moved into India 13-17,000 years ago. That seems reasonable to me.

This article turns that on its head and argues that all Indians are a mixture between North Indians and South Indians. The South Indians are more Asiatic types and the North Indians are a more European type, yet all of the Indian people are thoroughly mixed between the two. This also seems reasonable.

Articles about the piece, especially from the reactionary Brahmin-controlled Indian media, are crowing about “the death of the Aryan invasion theory.” But the Nature piece proclaims no such thing.

The Nature article claims that the South Indians came to India 70,000 YBP. The only remaining pure members of the South Indian group are the Negritos of the Andaman Islands. This part is reasonable enough. The piece also claims that the North Indians (or Aryans) came to India 45,000 YBP. This much is a real shocker, and I do not know what to make of this.

45,000 YBP, there were no real Caucasoid types anywhere. Further, skulls from even north India dated at 24,000 YBP look like Aborigines. So these North Indians must have looked like Aborigines at first. In fact, all Indians looked something like Aborigines until 8,000 YBP when they started transitioning to Caucasian types.

Anyway, there was an Aryan invasion. Or at least, a group of Indo-Aryans moved down from Kazakhstan into Iran, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, the Caucasus, Pakistan and North India about 3,500 YBP. They all speak related languages that we can provably trace back to the Russian steppes. We can follow their movements archeologically as they moved down from Kazakhstan into North India.

Now whether or not these folks were “invaders” is open to question. Perhaps they were “migrants.” Maybe they were “undocumented workers.” Maybe they were going on an extended vacation down South. I haven’t the faintest idea. But there was clearly a movement of Indo-European speaking Indo-Aryan folks down from Kazakhstan into Central and South Asia 3,500 YBP. That’s a fact of history, and no sane person questions that. Nor does this paper call that into question.

Another argument that Indian nationalists are making is that Indians are a unique race, a separate race, not part of any other race. If you look at the data, that’s an interesting argument, but skull and genetic data (see Cavalli-Sforza for instance) show that Indians are a member of the Caucasian race, though they are one of the most divergent members of that group.

One interesting finding is that Gujaratis seem to form their own separate minor race in India and differentiate from all the others. I can’t explain that, but it may have something to do with stories about Scythians moving into that area 1,200 YBP.

One of the more sensible dissections of the article is here by Razib of GNXP Science Blogs. Razib is sounding a lot more sensible since he got his better writing gig at Science Blogs.