Slashdot Mirror
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."
Agreed, as a linguist working with early Indo-European languages, I'm appalled to see this recent Anatolian study being credulously passed around by laymen who are completely unaware of the longstanding debates in the field. It's like Slashdot posting an article on string theory saying that the mystery of the universe is now solved, without even mentioning that this is an alternative theory that most physicists do not hold to.
I'd encourage everyone interested in the issue to read David W. Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel and Language (Princeton University Press). It represents the mainstream on the origin of the Indo-European language family and is written in a fairly friendly tone, accessible to anyone with some basic undergraduate knowledge of history and archaeology.
If you knew anything about this subject, you would be aware that from the Eastern European steppes, there is extensive evidence for population expansion in several directions in the middle of the first millennium BCE. And those various populations settled in other early homelands that then carried them further.
Linguistics is a big field. Chomsky's work (the popularity which is mainly limited to North America, by the way) has nothing to do with historical linguistics and archaeology.
It should be understood that any scientific report is to be regarded with suspicion - that is the scientific method. A new report is interesting, and the further it strays from widely held understanding, the more interesting it is. And the more doubt should be granted.
The Times graph clearly indicates at least one competing idea, and the Science report describes the current mainstream view as well as marking this very clearly as a minority view.
At least phantomfive had the courtesy to use the word "suggests", and then samzenpus spooged it all up with the definitive "found".
I would encourage anyone interested to actually read the fucking article.
Substrate toponymy makes it clear that the Indo-European languages are not native to that area. You seem to have some knowledge of the Indo-European family, so it's strange to me that you could overlook this.
Why? It seems perfectly plausible to me that different flood legends might trace back to different actual floods.
And the various efforts to pin down its origin seem to be pretty scientific
Except for the venerable old tradition of discovering that - surprise! - it arose in the researcher's own country.
I haven't seen the Science article, but you can read the abstract at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6097/957
They apparently built a phlyogenetic tree, which isn't too terribly different from mainstream views (which vary considerably to begin with). They also used what they call "phylogeographic" techniques, which apparently is something like what is done to trace the origin and dispersion of haplotypes.
Sounds like a good approach in principle, but from what the map at the NYT article implies about the origin and spread of the Indo-Iranian sub-family, is almost certainly wrong. AFAIK the only hint that any IE language was ever spoken west of Iran and south of the Black Sea is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_superstrate_in_Mitanni, which is thought to be an intrusion of IE words into upper-class terminology, not an actual language spoken in the area. (Though, as indicated by the Wikipedia article, there's an oddity in that the vocabulary seems to be more closely related to the Indic than to the geographically much nearer Iranian branch of Indo-Iranian.)
Of course, like FTL neutrinos and solar-driven variations in radioactive decay rates, if this "almost certainly wrong" analysis turns out to be correct, it will make things interesting for the field.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Except climate science... there is complete consensus there and the debate is over and closed forever, and even if a career, credentialed climate scientist like Dr. Timothy Ball or whomever disagrees, they're just denialists!
Even though I personally think that there is a real warming trend, I think it's disgusting how many people have made that a dogmatic if not wholly political ideology that doesn't even resemble the open, questioning spirit of real science. If you look at the leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit, they openly discuss and advocate subverting the peer review process to bar any theory which doesn't conform to their opinions on no other grounds than that disagreement and deliberately irrespective of a scientific reason that would normally bar publishing (methodological questions or whatever).
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit