"It is still a hazardous task to connect the archaeological evidence… in the Central Asian steppe with the appearance of Iranian (Aryan) and Indic (Indo-Aryan) tribes in Iran, Afghanistan and India”.... [Indo-Iranian is archaeologically an] Indo-European branch which all the homeland theories we have reviewed so far have failed to explain."

"I was not a little surprised to find that out of ten words in Du Perron’s Zind Dictionary, six or seven were pure Sanskrit."

"It remains quite clear, however, that Indic and Iranian developed from different Indo-European dialects, whose period of common development was not long enough to effect total fusion."

"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 greatest diversity in the mountain region from central Asia to northern India (i.e. Bactria- Sogdiana and parts just south)."

"Prior to the Turkic expansion, at the beginning of the Iron Age, Iranian spread from somewhere in the vicinity of Bactria, Sogdiana, and the eastern steppe to cover most or all of western central Asia and the entire steppe, much of the Near East at least to eastern Anatolia, and, at least intermittently, the Danube plain, where Slavic vocabulary and ethnonyms attest to a major Iranianization at about the fifth century AD, and where there is good archaeological evidence of a Scythian presence in the mid-first millennium BC..."

"A keystone in the traditional short chronology for Indo‐European, for instance, is the perception that Avestan and Vedic are ‘so close’ that the divergence between them ‘must’ be but a matter of a few centuries. Sims‐Williams (1998: 126), for example, offers selected sentences that “may be transposed from the one language into the other merely by observing the appropriate phonological rules.” Much the same, though, can be said of selected phrases in Italian and Spanish, for instance: see Heggarty and Renfrew (2014: 545). Change and divergence have been minimal in no end of word pairs, such as Italian [liŋgwa] vs. Spanish [lɛŋgwa] tongue (from Latin [liŋgʷa]), [mɔndo]~[mundo] world, [θjelo]~[t͡ʃelo] sky, etc. Indeed, other cases show no real divergence at all: [kanto]~[kanto] I sing, [salta]~[salta] s/he jumps, and so on. Here too, simply applying phonological rules can straightforwardly transpose one language to the other, but that hardly proves a time‐depth of divergence of just a few centuries, as traditionally envisaged between Avestan and Vedic. For the net diver- gence between Italian and Spanish to arise, out of Latin, took the same two millennia that in French saw much more radical change."

"I was not a little surprised to find that out of ten words in Du Perron’s Zind Dictionary, six or seven were pure Sanskrit."

"To begin with, is Persian a language of equal rank with the Indian, derived from a common ancestor, or is it merely an Indian dialect? Seven centuries of linguistic development, scriptless and therefore very rapid, lie between the Old Vedic of the Indian texts and the Behistun Inscription of Darius. It is almost as great a gap as that between the Latin of Tacitus and the French of the Strassburg Oath of 842."

"The Mughals were Chaghta'i Turks and we know that, unlike them, the other Turkic rulers outside of Iran, such as the Ottomans in Turkey and the Uzbeks in Central Asia, were not so enthusiastic about Persian. Indeed, in India also, Persian did not appear to hold such dominance at the courts of the early Mughals."