What did Proto-Indo-European actually sound like — and can linguistics alone prove where it originated? In this third session, Dr. Koenraad Elst and his interlocutor move into the deep technical machinery of comparative linguistics, exploring phonological reconstruction and what it reveals about the language family’s ancient history.
The conversation addresses the branching sequence of early IE languages — Hittite and Tocharian splitting first — and what their features tell us about the parent tongue. A fascinating thread runs through the discussion: Sanskrit itself changed from Proto-Indo-European, with forms like jagama traceable to earlier reconstructed roots, complicating simplistic “Out of India” readings that treat Sanskrit as the terminus rather than a development. The Proto-Bhagavad Gita thread, river-name retention in North America, and the relationship between linguistic and genetic evidence are all examined with scholarly precision.
The session resists easy conclusions, modelling instead how serious IE linguistics operates: through probabilistic reconstruction, cross-language comparison, and awareness of where ideology has distorted otherwise valid data.
About the speakers:
Dr. Koenraad Elst is a Belgian Indologist with Master’s degrees in Indology, Sinology, and Philosophy, followed by original fieldwork at BHU and a doctorate on Hindu nationalism. He is known as an oriental philologist and historian, as well as an independent researcher. One of the few Westerners actively defending Hinduism, he is known for his blunt and objective views, with a dissertation (prepared without any funding) on the ideological development of Hindu revivalism in India. He earned his Master’s degrees in Chinese Studies, Indo-Iranian Studies, and Philosophy at KU Leuven. He completed one year of postgraduate research in Indian philosophy at Banaras Hindu University and was accepted for a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies. He completed a doctorate in 1998 in Asian Studies.
Dr. Ramakrishnan Sitaraman is a microbiologist by training, with research interests in microbial pathogenesis, gene regulation, and science education. He received his doctoral degree from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (U.S.A.) and conducted post-doctoral research at the National Institutes of Health (U.S.A.) and Vanderbilt University (U.S.A.). Currently, he is a faculty member in the Department of Biotechnology at the TERI School of Advanced Studies, New Delhi, India.
