Likewise for the interminable discussion on the Sarasvati, although I — Sarasvati River

"Now, it would be ludicrous to claim that the IAs left the common Indo-Iranian habitat, as per the AIT, moved into Saptasindhu and turning the Haraχvaiti name into Sarasvati gave it to a river there to remember their past while they proceeded to generate the root sṛ and its derivatives to accord with other IE languages Occam’s razor, which here is conveniently ignored by AIT adherents, commands the opposite: that the Iranians moved away, lost the root sṛ and the name Sarasvati in its devolved form Haraxvaiti was given to a river in their new habitat"

"Many [Rigvedic] verses celebrate the might of the ancient river Sarasvati, nah priyà priyàsu ‘dearest of all our dear ones’. The word priyá... has the sense of ‘one’s own, that one is used to, or attached to’."

"As for Burrow‘s thesis that some place names reflect the names of geographical features to the west, and thus preserve an ancestral home, they once again rather rely on an assumption of Arya migrations than prove it. [...] His cited equivalence of Sanskrit Saraswati and Avestan Haraxvaiti is a case in point. Burrow accepts that it is the latter term that is borrowed, undergoing the usual change of s- > h in the process, but suggests that Saraswati was a proto-Indoaryan term, originally applied to the present Haraxvaiti when the proto-Indoaryans still lived in northeastern Iran, then it was brought into India at the time of the migrations, while its original bearer had its name modified by the speakers of Avestan who assumed control of the areas vacated by proto-Indoaryans. It would be just as plausible to assume that Saraswati was a Sanskrit term indigenous to India and was later imported by the speakers of Avestan into Iran. The fact that the Zend Avesta is aware of areas outside the Iranian plateau while the Rigveda is ignorant of anything west of the Indus basin would certainly support such an assertion."

"Traditional Indian belief recognizes in this well-marked bed the course of the sacred Sarasvati, once carrying its abundant waters down to the ocean and since antiquity ‘lost’ in desert sands [The Ghaggar was] still known as the Sarsuti (the Hindi derivative of Sarasvati) [which] passes the sacred sites of Kurukshetra near Thanesar, a place of Hindu pilgrimage"

"This dry bed is indeed the holy river ‘Sarasvati’ ; once upon a time, this was a genuine solitary river which reached the ocean without any tributaries on its long way through the desert"

"The waters of the Sarasvati [are] continuous with the dry bed of a great river [Hakra], which, as local legends assert, once flowed through the desert to the sea."