On the Original Home of the Speakers of Indo-European

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Abstract
The articles "The Ancient Near East and the Indo-European Problem" and "The Migrations of Tribes Speaking the Indo-European Dialects" by the well-known linguists T. V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov were published in two numbers of the Journal of Ancient History. Though published separately, the articles are parts of the same work, the result of years of research by the two authors. This research is devoted to a historical problem, which the authors try to solve almost always by purely linguistic means, making insufficient use, in our opinion, of archaeological data. They write: "The main question associated with the problem of the actual existence of a common Indo-European proto-language in space and time is the question of chronology of the dispersion from which the historical Indo-European dialects originated and of the location of the territory of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European." We would agree with this formulation of the problem as the basic one. Moreover, it should be stressed that the reconstruction of a proto-language on a certain territory and in a certain period of time has enormous historical importance, because it allows us to reconstruct in general outline the history and the "proto-history" of a series of societies, and to do so with considerable reliability, going back far into the past: language change is a natural historical process and therefore historical linguistic data are objective, in contradistinction to written sources, which are always subjective and to some extent biased. But linguistic data become historical sources only when adequate methods of research and mathematical precision are applied to the interpretation of linguistic facts, and also only if these facts are constantly checked against the data of related disciplines.

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