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."
Where was the first post, 'tho?
that's guilty of ruining my college experience because of the foreign language requirement.(Since that's where it really started.)
Ahh, the second-most important language family on the planet, after the C/C++/C#/Java family.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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
The native annals of several Phoencian/Scythian nations (e.g., the United Kingdom) describes the invention of language occurring along the southern shores of the Black Sea.
-=/\- Jizzbug -/\=-
But it could be aliens.
Bizarre, because the now dominiant language of Turkey, Turkish, isn't Indo-European. So it spread everywhere, but was pushed out of it's own back yard.
Noah came to a landing on a mountain in Turkey; then the languages spread out from there. So the 8k years is slightly off.
...from the frequent 'discovery' of Atlantis. Finding the birthplace of the IE languages has gone out of style.
On the basis of dialect geography I would put it in the Balkans or lower Danube. There's a curious fact about languages, namely that there's a bigger pile-up of dialects in the homeland than on the frontiers. E.g., compare the variety of Midland dialects in the UK vs. the (relative) homogeneity in the USA, Canada, or Oz.
So given what we know about the locations of the various IE languages, and what we know about migrations, Danube/Balkans makes a lot of sense. Illyrian, Thracian, Greek, Macedonian, Albanian, Dacian, Paionian, all right there. Two families of Italic languages thought to be intrusive from that region, whether across the water or around by land. Armenian thought to have migrated from that region. Anatolian languages easily placed by short migration across the Bosporus, Celtic by a migration up the Danube.
The big problem is Indo-Iranian, but it's a big problem for *any* homeland hypothesis: it stretched from Iran and India, around the eastern side of the Caspian Sea, and across the steppes to eastern Europe. These people were mobile. But easier to explain, IMO, by anchoring everything where we have the known pile-up of dialects and let Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, and Celtic be the expansive frontiers. Fits what we know about how languages spread perfectly.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But the folk memory of the flooding of the ending of the ice age recorded in Indo-European languages is very dramatic. It is sudden. It is by an angry God displeased by the sinfulness of mankind, and only one person was spared. It is the story of First Avatar of Vishnu in Hindu scriptures. Lord Vishnu takes the avatar of a fish and saves one man, Manu, from the impending global flood that kills all. The well known Noah's story is common to Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Mesapotamian flood legend is similar too.
The conjecture is that, during the ice age, the Mediterranean sea was lower, and the straits of Bhosporus was actually an isthmus connecting Asia Minor with Europe. As the sea levels rose, the Med over-topped the isthmus and flooded into the Black Sea, which was a fresh water lake at that time. The southern and the eastern shores of the lake had gradual slope and was populated by agricultural settlements. As the lake level started rising relentlessly the few who took to the boats survived. Those who could not bear to leave their beloved agricultural fields and homes were left stranded and were drowned. The folk memory of the survivors morphed into the Noah's and other flood legends.
I wonder how the flood and the rising of the sea levels is remembered in the northern branches of the Indo-European family.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
when I see the fossil record.
This still seems to hold to the archaic view that Europeans migrated from the middle east to Europe were as it's now believed the earlier migration was from the north. That would also support the Eurasian origin of those languages. It also explains pesky issues like similar words in Russian dialects which the up from Turkey route fails to explain. Much like the migrations themselves the languages more than likely had multiple sources. It's a little like looking for Adam and Eve when we interbred with multiple branches of the family tree. Modern humans are hybrids as are our languages.
The great thing about the "birthplace of the Indoeuropean languages" is that there are so many of them.
For quite some wile we see these studies which depict turkey as the ancient cradle of everything. The Turkish state sponsors this kind of research.
The idea is to depict Turkey as a European power which it is not anymore, thanks to the Holy League at the Gates of Vienna and humilating defeats as 9/11 1687.
If those scientists could prove that Finno-Ugric languages don't have extra-terrestrial origin I would be glad.
Je me souviens.
...Until we get a time machine to check ourselves. Interesting, yes. But I am still for the Steppes theory. Pacifism would be nice, but it is not likely, judging by the high amount of warrior-hero myths found in IE cultures.
Disclaimer: I have only a casual understanding of the science I am presenting. Someone with a real understanding may want to comment. The authors are using the statistical methods used to analyze DNA in phylogeny to study the "tree of life". In biology, these statistical methods are founded on a very plausible scientific model which offered a variety of consistency checks. Nevertheless, the uncritical use of these methods lead to a lot of mistakes. My understanding is that the limitations of these methods are now more or less understood in phylogeny. However, the application of the same methods to a much more complex problem of language evolution cannot be straight forward. Two obvious things make the situation in biology simpler. First, once two species separate, their gene pools no longer interact. Thus, if two animals share the same gene, it is reasonably safe to say that they also share a common ancestor. Second, there are redundant codes in DNA. That is, there are cases where changing a DNA base pair doesn't change the protein that is being encoded. Variations in these redundant codes are thought to be more or less benign, i.e. they do not significantly influence the survival of the individuals involved. Furthermore, it is plausible that these variations accumulate at a more or less constant rate throughout the genome. Thus, there are lot's of opportunities for consistency checks. My understanding is that these checks frequently turned up problems.
The graph may be pretty, but when it comes to science, any undergrad student could have done the same, and easily better. I've been studying languages for almost my whole life, and the timeline at the bottom of the graph is so off, that they should have just left it away - according to them, old dialects like Breton are younger than French (which of course isn't, French replaced those dialects), and the oldest modern language is English, whereas Polish and other Slavic languages appeared much later (... rright.) It's actually the opposite. Old, early examples of Polish, Russian, Italian, from between the 9th and 12th century are still intelligible, modern French really appeared in the 16th century and is maybe the European language which has had the fewest changes since then (compared to German and English, the difference is striking)...
/. already? There always used to be many bad articles posted, but now it jsut seems that everything is getting past the filters now, no matter how much it goes against the most basic knowledge!!!.
Are there no other slashdotters in linguistics? Or is everybody giving up on
"This quest for the origins of the Indo-Europeans has all the fascination of an electric light in the open air on a summer night: it tends to attract every species of scholar or would-be savant who can take pen to hand. ... It is no easy task to get one's bearings in a problem where most of the proposed solutions show a remarkable ability to be dismembered and securely entombed in one generation only to rise again to haunt later scholars. One does not ask 'where is the Indo-European homeland?' but rather 'where do they put it _now_?'"
According to the biblical account, a united humanity of the generations following the Great Flood, speaking a single language and migrating from the east, came to the land of Shinar, where they resolved to build a city with a tower "with its top in the heavens...lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the Earth". God came down to see what they did and said: "They are one people and have one language, and nothing will be withholden from them which they purpose to do." So God said, "Come, let us go down and confound their speech." And so God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their languages, and they left off building the city, which was called Babel "because God there confounded the language of all the Earth" (Genesis 11:5–8).
This isn't new, even in the slightest.
Further, those that hold that PIE was in the Pontic Steppes, (David W. Anthony, et. al) believe that Anatolian has some involvement with PIE, as a direct or indirect parent, anyhow.
Go read his book, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, if you are interested in this subject matter.
There have been two competing ideas on PIE for some time: Anatolia, and the Caspian sea steppes. Both could be correct.
Fugue for Aaron Swartz
that old Irish is older than old English, something I like to remind people of obviously http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/08/24/science/0824-origins.html?ref=science
Enough said.
According to that map, despite arising in modern-day Baltic, Central and Eastern Europe the Balto-Slavic group hasn't really moved anywhere. Looks like Russia, Ukraine, Georgia and Armenia are still using sign language of some sort... What's the deal there?
Now there's a name I haven't heard in a long, long time. I actually tried to learn Snobol once with a failure so complete it's only matched by the utterness of my failure to learn Lisp
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
If the Altaic family of languages no longer exists then where is Korean? Sometimes Koreans get a look about their noses that is rather Turkish and my wife can tell Koreans at a glance by the grace with which they walk - I don't see it myself but she has demonstrated her ability to me time and time again so I have to believe her. The Altaic origins of Korean always fit nicely with my preconceptions and I find myself uncomfortable with the idea of two isolates (Japanese and Korean) living side by side with no connection to each other and no related languages anywhere else.
I said - don't look Ethel!..., but it was too late..., she'd already looked.
Indo-European? I suggest you guys read Atlan.
Languages don't always follow population groups. Even if the Koreans have similar genetic background to the Turkic peoples, it doesn't mean the languages are related.
While the birthplace of the indo-european language may have been Anatolia, it certainly was not Turkey. Turkey only came into existence in 1923.
If you are talking about the geographic region, that would be Anatolia.
Indo-European languages were NOT born there.
Proto-Indo-European was born there (perhaps).
The location of the PIE urheimat has been a bone of contention for over 200 years. The Anatolia hypothesis is rejected by most. The study presented here was done by non-linguists, and there is no evidence that supports their method, let alone their results. There isn't a constant geographical spread velocity of languages that would allow this simplistic kind of calculation. If you're interested in what linguists think of this study (not much), read the discussions on Languagelog and Languagehat from ten days ago, when this was news.
I won't believe any of it until I see the birth certificate.
Nothing whatsoever to do with the article at hand. In fact it looks like it was inadvertently posted on the wrong thread.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Clearly they came from Indoeuropea.
Who cares? Bunch of old bald-headed white guys way back in time. The real source of EVERTHING is Africa! Yo.
IIRC he hasnt abandoned it, so much as modified it slightly. Originally he postulated a relatively early PIE in Anatolia, spread wide by migrating farmers. There is a lot of evidence that points this way, but the criticism of course was that words associated with later technology (wheeled chariots) are very widespread through IE languages, yet could not have arisen that early. The critics postulate a significantly later date for PIE as a result.
However the counter-counter argument is that the Anatolian group which split first lacks those cognates. So what Renfrew has done is really to change his vocabulary, not his theory. He now refers to what he first called PIE as 'pre-proto-indo-european' or PPIE instead, and postulates that PPIE split first into proto-anatolian and PIE, before the wheel, and then the PIE branch splits into more families later on, after the wheel. This is more a change of definition than of substance - if you define Anatolian as a branch of IE (which most do,) then the older date for PIE is required. If you define Anatolian instead as a sister language to PIE, then PIE gets a later date, but the older date goes to PPIE, the common ancestor to both.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.