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The very first thing to remember is try not to make any mistake while writing. The PIQ form goes to the interviewing officer (who can also be the rank of Major General. He will definitely get offended with the mistake).Better to study and write all information in a notebook and copy word-to-word in PIQ, so that there is no mistake.If there is a mistake (unfortunately) then cut it with a single horizontal line. (Don't try to make abstract art out of it).A certain level of knowledge/vocabulary is required to fill PIQ properly.what is the meaning of the word “approximate”? (Approximate population of the place)place of ‘permanent residence’ and ‘current residence’what is “next of kin”?What is the difference between income & salary?What is fluctuating income?Then there is a section for academic record (marks in 10th, 12th, graduation, post graduation) with the mention of subjects.But the space provided is very small.(This is also a test of how much you know about Indian education system.)Two languages policy (southern states: English and local language)Three languages policy (states like Maharashtra has three language policy: English, Hindi and local language)For science students there is PCMB (12th). Some might have I.T. Instead of Biology.CBSE schools are till 12th. But in state boards it's 10th and then junior college.What is the difference between diploma and degree?What is the difference between hobby and interest?If the hobby is like cooking/reading books then it has to be specified.Cooking: Indian, Chinese, non-veg, local/traditional, fast food/street food etcBooks: fiction, non-fiction, autobiography, military literature etc.What is the difference between co-curricular and extra curricular activities?This is only the half part (50%).The other half part is understanding PIQ and what questions will be asked?If your marks go on decreasing then why it happened?If you failed or had ATKT then why?Some might take gap in studies. Some might change the field from science to arts or commerce. Why?If you were not doing part time job during college years then how did you manage? Did your parents give you pocket money?Note: During such question do three thing:-Tell the truthDon't give foolish excuses. Accept your faults.Don't feel nervous or come under pressure.[Try to balance the situation by giving proper answers to GK questions.]For hobby part:Questions mostly asked are about:measurements (length of cricket pitch, diameter of basketball ring, Altitude of the place above sea level for trekking/hiking)Terminology in that field. (what is power play in cricket? What is checkmate in chess? What is a super food)Recent/Famous Controversies. (banning of books, bodyline controversy in cricket)Questions on places (where you stay) are asked. (Here mostly there is an important history behind it.)Mumbai (first Bombay and now Mumbai based on goddess Mumba devi)Kolkata (First Calcutta, Job Charnok founder)Geography and problems related to home state/city.For Repeaters:Previous attempts. What happened in last SSB?Edited: someone has asked how to specify all the information in a short given space.If you consider this as problem then you should find the solution for it.The problem appears in information for academic section where it is specified mention all the subjects taken.What can be the solution?Can all subjects be mentioned in abbreviated form? (Offically English can be abbreviated to Eng. but it can't be En.)If someone mentions the word “Abbreviation” then officer might test his knowledge by asking What is the difference between Abbreviations & Acronyms?Instead of writing English, Hindi, Marathi , one can cut it short to 3 Lang. Policy.Officer can ask What is this 3 Lang Policy?One can also have a creative/presence of mind?If one just turn their marksheets, there you will find subjects and their respective sub. Codes.The officer might ask this? He might ask what is the code for Hindi? He might confuse you by saying are you sure?

The centum-satem split is one of those features of the development of Indo-European that has been so core for so long that it has almost entered the sphere of ‘pop knowledge’ of IE – well, to the extent that any knowledge of IE can be described as popular..!But as your question suggests, Dimitra, it is something that linguists nowadays have a bit of a different view about. As always, consensus is difficult to arrive at.First, let’s give a little background on what this is actually about. Next, I will talk about the historical view. Finally, I will share some thoughts on where the modern dialogue has got to – but bear in mind I have been out of the academic / linguistic world for twelve years now, so my knowledge and views may well be somewhat out of date.Background: Reconstructing Indo-European Stop SeriesWhen I was still a student, flying back to Canada for one of my holidays to see my parents, I got chatting to the woman I was sitting next to and she asked me about what I was studying. She asked me to explain what I meant when I mentioned historical linguistics and regular sound change, so I pulled out my boarding card and started scribbling some correspondences for her:Italian otto : Spanish ocho : French huitIt cotto / cotta : Sp [cocido] : Fr cuit / cuiteIt notte : Sp noche : Fr nuitYou can see right away that there is a pattern here:It -tt- : Sp -ch- : Fr -t-It is slightly obscured of course by the fact that French has lost its final vowels and deleted its final -t (in pronunciation) if the original final vowel had been -o (but not if the original had been -a), and that Spanish has replaced the expected form **cocho with the more regular (from the perspective of Spanish) form cocido.You can then see the resolution to this if you add in the Latin forms – respectively octo, coctum (/coctam), noctem – and right away we can see how regular sound change works. The things I pointed out above that ‘obscure’ this are also hallmarks of standard historical linguistic analysis: interfering regular sound changes (in the case of French), and analogical remodelling of regular sound changes (in the case of cocido).I then wanted to add in a few more languages to this mix. It was all going well enough to add in English and Greek, but adding in Sanskrit suddenly threw things off a little:(It otto : Sp ocho : Fr huit) > Lat octo : English eight : Greek okto : Sanskrit aštha(It cotto : Fr cuite) > Lat coctum (past participle), coquo (verb) : English [cooked, cook – a Latin borrowing] : Gr peptos (participle), petto (verb) : Skr pakta, pacati(It notte : Sp noche : Fr nuit) > Lat noctem : Eng night : Gr nukta : Skr naktaYou can see that at first glance it looks like there is still a pattern, but it is difficult to work it out. ‘Night’ suggests that this is the pattern:Lat -ct- : Gr -kt- : Eng -ght- : Skr -kt-On the other hand, ‘eight’ suggests that the pattern is actually:Lat -ct- : Gr -kt- : Eng -ght- : Skr -šth- (this is meant to be a retroflex voiceless sibilant next to an aspirated retroflex voiceless stop; apologies, I’ve never really worked out how to do diacritics properly on this iPad).And then ‘cooked’ (or ‘ripened’) gives us yet a different pattern:Lat -ct- : Gr -pt- : Skr -kt-I think I sort of realised partway through explaining this to her that I’d worked myself into a tricky part of IE, so hastily tried to work my way back to cleaner examples so that she got the point, and mopped my brow…This is the point where we should really pause to take our hats off to the nineteenth century historical linguists who really broke the back of IE sound correspondences. Their sheer knowledge of words and forms across all of the languages was remarkable in itself; that they then managed to find the patterns and the intersections of patterns is nothing short of jaw-dropping intellectual virtuosity. Yes, many of their conclusions have been refined or discarded since, but far more of what they discovered has simply been accepted.Charlatans like me have simply learned what they taught us, and that is what enables me to look at this set and see some complications that are obscuring the patterns – that the consonant cluster has led to delabialisation in Latin; that ‘cook’ has an assimilation in Latin, and that the Greek verbal stem actually has a hidden suffix ‘ye’ that is not present in the participle; that there is a process of both retroflexion and aspiration at play on Sanskrit – which, once accounted for, make the underlying patterns obvious. They had to work it all out in the first place, a much harder job.Their conclusions – once we account for all of these sorts of obscuring factors, all of which my linguist forebears discovered and catalogued – was that, if you just looked at the evidence from Latin, Greek, and Germanic, you would reconstruct the following stops for Indo-European:Labial series: *p *b *bhDental series: *t *d *dhVelar series: *k *g *ghLabiovelar series: *kw *gw *ghwLet’s set aside, for the moment, the question of the number of articulations in each series and their nature (conventionally thought of as three: plain voiceless, plain voiced, and ‘voiced aspirate’ or ‘breathy voiced’); the important thing is the four series.On the other hand, if you reconstructed on the basis of Indic, Iranian, Slavic, and Baltic, you would end up with a different set of series (for the moment I will stick with the same three articulations, although this is not necessarily what you would get if you strictly limited yourself to these languages):Labials: *p *b *bhDentals: *t *d *dhVelars: *k *g *ghThat is it for stops. However, you also end up with a series which are realised as either sibilants or affricates in most of the languages. They are conventionally thought of as ‘palatalised stops’, or affricates; we can represent them for the moment as:Palatals: *c *j *jhOur justification for thinking of these as affricates at this point comes only from the fact that, in Sanskrit, the descendant of *j was an affricate, the Sanskrit /j/ phoneme (pronounced like an ordinary English ‘j’, for the most part, not like a German ‘j’). The descendants of *c and *jh in every language – including Sanskrit – is a sibilant / fricative / approximant with no stopping at all (in Sanskrit, those descendants are /ś/ ‘sh’ and /h/), as is the descendant of *j in the languages other than Sanskrit. If we believe that the whole series developed in a similar way, and we note that while linguistically it is very common for affricates to become sibilants or fricatives but the reverse is very rare indeed, then we can conclude that there was a stage where the whole series was affricates.Okay. So we now have four series in the ‘Western’ group, and four series in the ‘Eastern’ group. Must be easy to fit them together, right?No. Sadly, they do not play nicely together.The first two groups – the labials and the dentals – match each other very well between the ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ groups. But the latter two do not:Western labiovelars always correspond to Eastern velarsEastern palatals always match Western velarsHowever the reverse of these two statements is not true: sometimes, Western velars and Eastern velars match each otherThere is no identifiable ‘interference pattern’ from some other sound change that would explain away this discrepancy (of the sort that explains ‘cook’ above)To resolve this, we actually need to reconstruct three series for the parent. Added to the two that matched up cleanly, this gives us an Indo-European with five stop series in total:Labials: *p *b *bhDentals: *t *d *dhVelar Series One: *k1 *g1 *gh1Velar Series Two: *k2 *g2 *gh2Velar Series Three: *k3 *g3 *gh3Note that, at this point, my notation is basically algebraic. I know that I need these three ‘velar’ series. I define them in terms of the sound correspondences. But it is very difficult to know what these sounds actually were. To some extent, that is also true of the first two series, and it is also true of the three reconstructed articulations within that series. I was trained by Oxford’s trio of Comparative Philologists – Anna Morpurgo-Davies, John Penney, and Philomen Probert – who always encouraged an extremely cautious and sceptical approach to everything, forcing us to look in detail at evidence and argument, and avoiding the narcissism of blindly believing that some blind intellectualising we are excited to have come up with – or, worse, the naivety of believing that a notational shorthand we find convenient – is ‘how it actually was’.Nevertheless, by convention, these three velar series are usually referred to and often notated as follows:Front Velars / Palatals / Palatalised Velars: *k’ *g’ *g’hBack Velars / Plain Velars / Velars / Gutturals: *k *g *ghLabiovelars: *kw *gw *gwh (usually the ‘w’ in these is notated superscript)(When we consider again the danger of believing our notational convention is what the sounds actually were, we should remember that, in addition to all of these, Indo-European also allowed sequences of palatal + w, meaning that there was actually a four-way contrast between *k’, *k, *kw, and *k’+w. If the sounds in Ie were actually what we notate them to be, is such a set of contrasts plausible – is it even possible??)Centum Languages and Satem LanguagesSo the nineteenth century linguists got us to a position where IE was reconstructed with five stop series – labial, dental, front velar, back velar, and labiovelar – but they also noticed that none of the attested languages preserved five distinct series. Whichever daughter language you looked at, you could only get a maximum of four different series.Not only that, but the grouping was pretty clear, and geographically marked: Western IE languages – Greek, Latin, Celtic, Germanic – merged the front and back velars into a single series, but retained the labiovelar series separately (it was often lost secondarily as these languages developed, of course). Eastern IE languages – Indo-Iranian, and Balto-Slavic – instead merged the labiovelars and plain velars.The Eastern group then did another major thing: in all of them, the front velars (which were left out of the merger that the other two series had) then went on to palatalise and become sibilants (or affricates in that one cases, or other sorts of fricatives / spirants).Note that, formulated in these terms, both sets of languages have innovated. The innovations are easy to see on the Eastern side, particularly if you believe that the ‘labiovelar’ series actually was pronounced the way that ‘qu’ is in English today: in this case the Eastern languages have innovated both by delabialising the labiovelars, and by assibilating the palatial series. However, the fact that the Western group actively merged the front and back velars was seen as no less of an innovation.In historical linguistics, the retention of archaic features is interesting, but has no classificatory value. Just holding on to something that already exists is an easy thing to do, and the fact that several languages manage to do that cannot be noteworthy. On the other hand, shared innovations are particularly exciting: they suggest a sort of dialectal grouping, indicating that the languages in question were particularly close or even form a single sub-branch. So we can define the Indo-Iranian branch, for instance, on this basis simply by looking at all of the things that Indic (Indo-Aryan – basically Vedic Sanskrit for our purposes) and Iranian (Avestan – particularly Gathic – and Old Persian) have in common that are not simple retentions from Indo-European, and therefore must be shared innovations. It is more likely that different languages would coincidentally not change something at all than that they would both coincidentally change the same feature, and even more coincidentally change that feature in the same way.The fact that nineteenth century linguists saw innovations on both sides led them to conclude that the IE universe had had a ‘great schism’ between West and East. The two group must have separated from each other quite early, so that they could share their respective great innovations in the stop systems before going on to internally diverge. We know that Greek, for instance, is quite different from Italic or Celtic, so the fact that they all shared their stop system reduction in the exact same way means they must have separated very early from the Eastern group, so that Greek could go on to become distinct from Italic and Celtic before it got attested. And similarly for Sanskrit diverging from Balto-Slavic, and then from Iranian, after sharing the great stop innovations with them.The two groups were named ‘Centum’ for the Western group, and ‘Satem’ for the Eastern group, after the word for ‘hundred’ in Latin and Iranian respectively. These words were chosen as they exemplify the assibilation of *k’ in the Eastern group, one of that group’s defining characteristics.The Centum-Satem Split hypothesis supercharged the process of the reconstruction of Indo-European beyond just its phonology. If you found something in common between different centum languages, it could possibly be a shared innovation amongst that group when they were in the period between the schism and the divergence of the different centum languages; similarly if you found something in common amongst satem languages. On the other hand, if you found something in common between a centum language on the one hand and a satem language on the other, you could confidently and credibly believe that it was a retained archaism from IE itself.Now, as it turns out, there are quite a lot of similarities between Greek – a centum language – and Sanskrit – a satem one. Both were also, in the nineteenth century, the oldest attested IE languages, and were very richly attested for their age.Inevitably, then, much of the received wisdom on non-phonology aspects of IE ultimately goes back to these nineteenth century linguists extrapolating from the Greco-Indic consensus to IE itself. Much of what we think we know about IE morphology, for instance, and more or less everything we think we know about syntax (which is not all that much at all, to be honest) is basically a straight lift-and-drop from Sanskrit and Greek.I have talked about the foundations those linguists laid in phonology, and how that is the basic stock of knowledge that I have assimilated in my little brain. But phonological evidence is quite copious, and it is easy to see when accommodations need to be made to account for a wide range of evidence across the suite of IE languages. On the other hand, just as many of the foundations and basic assumptions I make about IE morphology, syntax, vocabulary, etc comes from the same nineteenth century processes and probably over-values the evidence and argument made from the consensus of Greek and Sanskrit. Most of these are so reflexive for me now that it is extremely difficult for me to even identify them, any more than I can pinpoint, say, the muscles involved in brushing my teeth or walking through London.Challenges to the Traditional ViewTo recap: the traditional view from the nineteenth century Indo-Europeanists was that the IE world separated into a Western group and an Eastern group, and that each of those two groups remained distinct units after this separation for a period of time long enough for both groups to develop distinct shared innovations amongst themselves, before eventually further diverging into the different IE branches we know and love today.At the start of the twentieth century, new discoveries began to shatter this view.Those new discoveries were ultimately down to archaeologists, and ‘codebreakers’, who between them added immensely to the store of knowledge about IE languages by adding two whole new unrelated IE language families to the mix, hitherto unknown because they were long extinct: Anatolian, and Tocharian.Anatolian, of which the best known language is Hittite, was the branch of IE once spoken in Asia Minor. After the decline of the Hittite Empire, Anatolia came under the influence of the Greeks on the one side and the Persians on the other; by the Hellenistic period, Anatolian was extinct, and the region spoke mostly Greek until the coming of the Turks changed the culture again. Geographically, in terms of IE branches, Anatolian was contiguous with Greek to the West, and to the East with Armenian and Iranian. It was not initially that implausible, then, that Anatolian turned out to fit the centum pattern; while it was much more eastern than the other centum languages, it was after all contiguous with Greek, so it could be considered just as the southeasternmost outpost of the Western centum family.Tocharian, on the other hand, was a different kettle of fish altogether. The records for the Tocharian family are found very far to the East: the language was spoken in the Tarim Basin, which is the habitable bits that cut through the Taklamakan Desert. That’s the desert that is just north of Tibet. In China.Tocharian is also a centum language.That’s right. A supposedly ‘Western Indo-European’ language turned up – in China. China. The place that is not just East, but is the very definition of Far East.Okay, this bit of China – the Xinjiang province, now home to many Turkic people like the Uyghurs – is admittedly China’s westernmost province; fair enough. It borders Central Asia (Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan), although it is separated from them by mountain ranges like the Pamirs. In the era before the great nomadic migrations which brought the Turkic family to this area, these bits on the other side of the mountain would have been speakers of Iranian languages (Scythians, Sarmatians, etc), although the isolation of the Tocharian-speaking bits makes it difficult to say that Tocharian was contiguous with Indo-Iranian in anything other than the colours-on-a-map sense.So these are head-scratchers for the Western Centum vs Eastern Satem idea. At this point, maybe not insurmountable though – we have already made our excuse for Anatolian, and now we can just start to assume that, at some point after the Western group had their centum period together, one intrepid band of adventurers decided to head east and held onto their centum linguistic tradition even as they braved their way across steppe, mountain, and desert – tarrying in Eastern IE lands only long enough to become Buddhists, but not long enough for their beautiful Western IE language to become sullied with satanic satemic influences – and not resting until they arrived in China. Along the way, they dramatically expanded the IE case system and did all sorts of other things to the language, but they stayed true Western Centum IE in their heart of hearts. A touching story, and not entirely bereft of prima facie plausibility.But let’s go back to Hittite. Its attestation is old – same pedigree as that previously shared by only Greek, Vedic, and Avestan. However, as knowledge of the language grew, an uncomfortable fact soon became clear: its verbal system was not compatible at all with the Greco-Aryan consensus. The only way to make sense of the similarity betweeen Greek and Indo-Iranian but the difference from these of Hittite was to posit that Anatolian split away from the rest of IE while the verbal system was something very different. After that split, Anatolian developed that early IE verbal system in one way, while Greek and Sanskrit developed it another way.As you will have seen, though, this brings us neatly to a logical contradiction. The traditional view is that the centum-satem split happened very early, and that following the split, the centum group evolved together for a period without the satem group. Anatolian is a centum language, so it must have taken part in this period of centum unity. However, Greek and Vedic Sanskrit have nearly identical verbal systems, and Anatolian had to have split off from IE before this verbal system developed.The traditional centum-satem hypothesis requires that Sanskrit have split from Western IE while Greek and Anatolian were still the same language. The evidence from the verbal system, however, requires that Anatolian have split from IE while Greek and Sanskrit were still the same language.Both of these views cannot simultaneously be true.If we trust the evidence from the verb, and indeed from other very archaic features of Anatolian which sit in contrast to features shared between Greek and Sanskrit, we have no choice but to abandon the traditional view of the centum-satem split.Current Approaches to Squaring the CircleIf you want to resolve this paradox, there are a few alleyways you can wander down:You can challenge the idea that the centum-satem observations are shared innovations rather than obvious, common, or coincidental changesYou can challenge the conventional starting point for the stop seriesYou can challenge the model of quasi-Linnaean taxonomic branching and ‘speciation’ of languages, whereby common innovations happen only in a period before languages separate from each other and once they are separate they must go their own way with no further mutual influenceModern approaches use all three of these, to different degrees.The general consensus view that is developing is that the satem languages may well have shared some common innovations, and can therefore be logically seen as a group from that perspective, but that there is nothing really that qualifies to unite the centum languages as a group other than that they are not in the satem group. In other words, even if some people still think of ‘satemisation’ as an innovation shared by certain languages, there is no such thing as ‘centumisation’ at all.How might this work? Well, recall that when we first talked about the three velar series, I gave them algebraic names only, and I cautioned against letting the conventional descriptions become assumptions for what the sounds ‘actually were’. Well, if you start by assuming that you had a ‘palatalised velar’ series and a ‘plain velar’ series, then ‘centumisation’ becomes an active change of moving the palatals back, so that they fall together with the velars. If you believe this, you really need to hold something like the traditional view.But what if, instead, the ‘front velars’ were actually just originally normal velars, and the ‘back velars’ were originally, say, uvular? Then, we would have a very different story: in this version, there is a general process whereby the uvular series moves forward in all of the branches of IE. In the satem languages, this forward movement causes a chain shift, forcing the original velars to also move forward and become the palatalised affricates / sibilants etc. The ‘centum languages’ are just the ones in which the chain shift never happened, and so the moving forward of uvulars just meant that they fell together with the original velars.This ‘uvular theory’ has the neat effect of defining centum languages by the absence of a change, which means they are grouped only by a shared retention, which methodologically as discussed above means we do not need to think of them as forming a distinct group. This means we do not need to assume that Hittite and Tocharian broke away only after the ‘satemisation’ split had begun; we just say that the tendency to shift forward was there and still productive over the whole period, only producing the satem chain shift after Hittite had broken away.Maybe you find that convincing. You do need to believe that a ‘tendency’ for uvulars to move forward can last for a rather long period though without actually finishing anywhere to be independently motivated everywhere. It is easier to see how this might work if IE was a standardised written language, which of course it was not.Other approaches challenge whether there were actually three series of velars in the first place. They point out that the front and back velars are almost in complementary distribution, so you can almost use ‘interfering sound change’ rules to predict which you should end up with in satem languages if you assume that in origin they were a single series, reducing us to two original velar series (velars and labiovelars) only. Detractors point out that the nineteenth century linguists went down this route and never managed to make it work – you do need three.Another approach is based on challenging the tree-and-branch structure. Basically, on the traditional method, you assume that a language splits into different branches, which then in turn split from each other, and then further split and subdivide, and so on. This has something going for it: it is clear, for instance, that Hindi, Punjabi, and Bengali are closely related to one another; that Irish, (Scots) Gaelic, and Manx are also closely related to one another; and that the tree-and-branch model describes the relationship of these modern Indo-European languages very well. This model that you would represent visually on a map with different colours filling in different territories, with your end product looking something like a mosaic, just the way a political map might look.But we know from looking at modern dialect continua that this is not necessarily the way speech varieties relate to each other. Have a look at the isogloss maps for dialects of Gascon on French Wikipedia here: Isoglosse — Wikipédia. This suggest that, rather than colouring in a map, we should instead start to think about languages as sort of ‘Venn Diagrams’ with overlapping features that relate certain languages on some criteria, but others on different ones.For instance, sticking with Romance, there are long debates around classification. One method, akin to the tree-and-branch model, starts by making a primary division between Western Romance and Eastern Romance. The key distinguishing feature between the two is that Western Romance has lenition of intervocalic stops, while Eastern Romance does not. French and Spanish belong to the Western side, while Italian and Romanian to the Eastern.But this view has problems. For starters, there are an awful lot of things that French and Italian share to the exclusion of Spanish. Setting aside the numerous vocabulary items – manger / mangiare vs comer; parler / parlare vs hablar; etc – they share very similar verbal auxiliary systems which Spanish does not. So both French and Italian form their perfects with a distinction between transitive verbs which use ‘have’ as their auxiliary, and intransitive ones which use ‘be’ as their auxiliary. Spanish only uses ‘have’. On the other hand, there are a number of things which Spanish and Italian share in which French is different – you could say that their contrast of a preterite with a present perfect is just a shared retention and so not significant, and that vowel breaking of stressed mid vowels is coincidental, but the development of ‘stand’ in the sense of ‘be (at the moment)’ (in, eg, come stai? vs como estás?) is harder to explain.I find this Venn-diagram approach – the idea that a particular feature originates somewhere and spreads out in waves from that point, with many different waves for many different features, all overlapping with one another in a fluid way, rather than the rigidity of the mosaic / coloured-in map approach – very compelling.On this theory, note that there are even possibilities for features to spread in a wave well after ‘speciation’ has already taken place. I find the Great Vowel Shift very intriguing – mainly because it impacted not just English, but also German and Dutch, in similar though slightly different ways. This makes sense if we think of the change as spreading from a source and washing over the Germanic world in the early modern period; on the other view we must think of these as completely independent phenomena that coincidentally happened at the same time. Even more evocative is the encroachment of compound perfects over preterites, which is spreading between French and German, even though they are in completely different IE families.This gives a much more reasonable view of IE features. We can now see satemisation as such a feature, that impacts Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic, probably in a period when those languages’ speakers were all around the north and east of the Black Sea, but has a lesser impact on Armenian and Albanian (which I have hitherto avoided adding into the discussion). On the other hand, the elaboration of IE’s verbal suffixes to create paradigms with dimensions for mood, voice, and tense is a feature whose centre of gravity is around Greek and Indo-Iranian, but diffuses out towards Italic as well. All of these languages were contiguous, even if in places before their resting places at the start of the recorded period, so such a view is reasonable to take.We no longer have to worry about when Tocharian or Anatolian broke off; we just note that satemisation did not spread as far as them. Tocharian has no more connection with ‘fellow centum language’ Celtic than that both are at the edges of the IE world and distant from the centre of gravity of satemisation; their similarity in this regard is no more striking than the surprising way that people from Norfolk and people from Cornwall sound so much more like each other than either do to the Londoners and Home Counties English people in between (at least in the way they say ‘combine harvester’. And the fact that they both know and care what combine harvesters are.).As you can tell, I have a lot of sympathy for this view. To really clinch it, you do need to also accept one of the arguments that shows that ‘centumisation’ is not a thing, that there is no shared innovation between the various centum languages which would lead to thinking of them as a more logical group; I think the ‘fronting of the uvulars’ theory is at least basically plausible.I also wonder how impressive a set of innovations satemisation actually is. Palatalising velars is something that happens very frequently – separately to the satemising palatalisation, Indic has had another round later in its development, and Slavic has had several. But not just them: English and Frisian did as well. So did most of Romance. In many of these cases the process was conditioned by being next to a front vowel; not so, though, for French, which palatalised even in front of /a/ (so chanter < cantare). Indeed, French looks in many ways like it is a satem language.So where does this leave us? We can see that the traditional view of a ‘centum-satem split’ is untenable; there is little that can convince us that these groupings are the first branchings of the IE family tree as used to be believed. Rather, satemisation is at most a set of relatively minor phonological changes that spread regionally within the IE continuum, while other arguably more significant changes in the language, particularly in its verbal morphology, were spreading in a different region of the IE sphere. Certain languages, like Indic, took part in both; some, like Baltic or Greek, in one but not the other; and others, like Armenian or Italic, may have experienced some aspects of them but were further from the centre of the wave. Anatolian broke off and isolated itself early enough to experience neither.What does this tell us about our reconstructed IE? Unfortunately, it probably tells us that a lot of our reconstructive foundations and impulses are based on a misunderstanding of the relationship of certain languages, and in particular of Greek and Vedic to each other. The remedy for this is difficult to see, as traditionally educated linguists like me find it difficult to the point of impossibility of recognising our own instinctive biases, even when we are consciously aware of them.What I would love to see done is a first-principles reconstruction, just as the nineteenth century linguists did, of IE that takes no account whatsoever of either Greek, Indic, or Avestan. I think once we see this done in a rigorous way we will come closer to understanding just what the relationship of Greek and Indic actually is: the further such a reconstruction from current reconstructions of IE, the more closely we will be able to conclude that Greek and Indic are in fact an innovative sub-branch rather than faithful witnesses of IE.But I doubt I will live to see that done.

I studied for two months in Manipal before joining PESIT, CS so I'm partly qualified to answer this.Take CSE in any of the 3 colleges. Branch more important than the college name in this case.To summarise, Both colleges are absolutely equally pathetic in academics (and so is any eng. college in India). Both have great, excellent students in CS. Both have a great fun crowd.Both have good placements for CS but PESIT scores in placements by a little extra and that's a very big reason to join PESIT. If you are getting CS at both, chose PESIT, and move out of the hostel after year one. Otherwise just take CS at whichever place you are getting it. Don't believe horrible hearsay stories about Manipal. Those aren't true.Manipal Pros:1. Excellent, non-interfering hostel culture.I had my NOC signed by the sweeper because he was the only person I saw in two months of my stay. I had a hard time trying to find out who the warden was after I realised my mistake !! At PESIT, the warden interferes every hour incessantly.2. Great Clubs.Manipal had adventure clubs, music clubs, quiz clubs and so many others. PESIT had these, but to a limited extent.3. Everyone is an outsider.Not just your college but the whole city is practically formed of students from outside.PESIT pros:1. PLACEMENT !!!This reason is enough to trump everything in favour of PESIT. If you are joining BE, CS in either college. Remember this thumb rule. You will learn nothing in classes. All learning happens from your fellow students. YOU JOIN ENGINEERING FOR ONE AND ONLY ONE REASON. PLACEMENT. Here, PESIT scores over Manipal simply because it is in Bangalore. Companies have easier access and are more inclined to oblige and just test the waters if the college asks a favor.2. Bangalore !!Bangalore has its adavntages. Movies, other colleges, all advantages of a big city. I joined GRE classes at Jayanagar. Language classes, the arts, anything you maybe interested in, its better in Bangalore.Can't emphasize less on excellent localites Kannada students (80% of the total class strength) who are great at studies but still very very humble and friendly. Plus you have home ground advantage if you join a company in the city.(which you probably will).This doesn't count if you stay in the hostel. PESIT hostel has great vegetarian food but apart from that it's possibly the worst hostel in terms of stupid rules. You cannot stay in another guy's room after 10 pm !! Can't stay outside campus after 7pm. How the hell is the learning and collaboration supposed to happen. Warden and management is equally pathetic in enforcing these rules.