Birthplace of Indoeuropean Languages Found

phantomfive writes "Language geeks might be interested in a recent study that suggests Turkey as the birthplace of the Indo-European language family. The Indo-European family is the largest, and includes languages as diverse as English, Russian, and Hindi. The New York Times made a pretty graph showing the spread."

Comments

I think "found" should be in quotes

[Chrisq]

As the article acknowledges "The majority view in historical linguistics is that the homeland of Indo-European is located in the Pontic steppes (present day Ukraine)" ... and "The minority view links the origins of Indo-European with the spread of farming from Anatolia 8,000 to 9,500 years ago. The minority view is decisively supported by the present analysis in this week's Science."

While being very plausible I think it is to early to say found for certain yet - this is a theory that sounds plausible and nothing more

Re:I think "found" should be in quotes

[0-9a-zA-Z_. !*'()123]

It says on the nice graph:

"A competing hypothesis places the point of origin in the steppes of modern-day Ukraine and Russia, north of the Black Sea."

Re:I think "found" should be in quotes

[TapeCutter]

Dr. Timothy Ball or whomever disagrees, they're just denialists!

Ball is not a denier, he's a shill, he's not just wrong, he's paid to lie.
Meat from the link:
- "Dr. Ball was a former professor of geography at the University of Winnipeg between 1988 to 1996. The University of Winnipeg never had a climatology department.".
- Statement of Defence by the Calgary Herald [in Ball vs Johnson] - “The Plantiff (Dr. Ball) is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist.”

So he's not a trained climatologist but can point to Tasmania on a map, and the people who publish his propaganda claim under oath that he is a FF shill. At least the Herald had the decency to be honest about cash for comment (when under the threat of legal punishment), after all, cash for comment has been a pillar of the MSM's business model since day one.

Influential people deny AGW for the same reasons influential people denied, pea-soup fog, acid rain and the health effects of smoking and astbestos. It's an existential threat to their economic and political power. The problem with denying reality is that sooner or later it is forced upon you. Coal fired generators are replaced every 30-40 years, but what would the entire coal industry be worth in 10yrs time if every time a generator was scheduled to be replaced, it was replaced with something that didn't burn coal? The economy would not collapse, the coal industry would, people would simply shift their investments to the clean energy market and leave the Luddites in the coal industry where they belong, in the past. The coal industry are fighting a hearts and minds campaign against climate science, they are fighting for their corporate lives and reality is starting to overwhelm them, it would be a mistake to expect them to be intellectually reasonable and reinvest their riches.

Re:Superficially Bizarre

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm assuming you're not joking.

English pushed out the native Celtic languages on the British Isles. At one stage, French almost eradicated English. English survived but took critical damage from French. Nobody knows what languages were spoken in England before the Indo-Europeans (Celts) arrived.

Spanish is a descendant of Latin and pushed out whatever languages were spoken in Castilia before. Spain, of course, has several other living languages, most notably Basque, which almost certainly predates the Indo-European languages (Latin et co.).

Latin of course pushed out many other Italic (Indo-European) languages, but also Etruscan.

As another example, Finnish (Uralic) pushed out Sami (also Uralic) in Finland. Nobody knows what was spoken in Finland before the Sami arrived.

Finland was inhabited before the Ice Age, but whatever language was spoken was pushed out by the ice sheet.

Re:Now ...

[CRCulver]

Turkey to the south

No Finno-Ugrian language spread as far as Turkey.

However, one of the reasons Russian and Ukrainian sound different from, say, German

The vast, vast number of differences between those languages and German date from the developments that Proto-Slavonic and Early Common Slavonic underwent on one hand, and Proto-Germanic on the other. The Slavic language family encountered the Finno-Ugrian languages rather late (after 800 CE), and by that date their peculiarities had been in place for centuries. There are a handful of features of Russian that can be attributed to contact with a Finno-Ugrian substrate, but it's hardly those that set Russian apart from German.

Re:Nice change...

[Black Parrot]

I just googled "substrate toponymy" and this post was the third result. The rest of the results made little sense. Can you explain what you mean there?

It means place names (rivers, mountains, etc.) left over from an earlier language in the area (substrate). E.g., in the USA very many place names are of Native American or Spanish origin rather than English, hinting strongly that people who spoke a different language lived here before the English speakers came along.