Indo-Iranian languages

"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..."

"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."