“Approximately every two millennia, then, there has occurred a spread of a language family from a locus in the eastern part of the central Eurasian spread zone to cover the steppe and central Asia, extending partially or intermittently to the Danube plain, Anatolia, and northern Mesopotamia. The loci of the historically attested spreads are near the edge of the spread zone rather than in the centre of it: the piedmont to the south (Bactria-Sogdiana) for Iranian, the north of Mongolia for Turkic and Mongolian. The trajectories of language spread run east to west along the steppe and through the desert to the Near East as shown .... To take clear and historically well-attested examples, the locus, trajectories, and range of IE must have been much like those of Iranian or Turkic. ... The placement of the locus specifically in the vicinity of Bactria-Sogdiana is justified in .... A homeland reconstructed as locus, trajectory and range removes the dilemma: a locus in the vicinity of Bactria-Sogdiana implies a spread beginning at the frontier of ancient Near Eastern civilization and a range throughout the steppe and central Asia, following the east-to-west trajectory, with occasional or periodic spreads into the Danube plain and Anatolia.”
“These principles make it possible to pinpoint the locus in space more or less accurately even for a language family as old as IE. Here it will be shown that the locus accounting for the distribution o...”
Johanna Nichols
“No migrations are required to derive the attested IE distribution from a reconstructed homeland consisting of a locus in western central Asia and a range over the steppe and desert. Sometime in the fo...”
Johanna Nichols
“The Iranian family, which was next to sweep across the steppe and deserts, finds its region of greatest diversity in the central Asian mountains, and its ancestral Indo-Iranian family finds its own gr...”
Johanna Nichols
“Several kinds of evidence for the PIE locus have been presented here. Ancient loanwords point to a locus along the desert trajectory, not particularly close to Mesopotamia and probably far out in the ...”
Johanna Nichols
“A consequence of the reconstruction offered here is that the attested distribution of IE then turns out to be no singularity but just one regular episode in a standing pattern of spreads.”
Johanna Nichols