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: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.