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Birthplace of Indoeuropean Languages Found

Posted by samzenpus on from the start-of-it-all dept.

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."

26 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. I am multilingual. by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  2. I think "found" should be in quotes by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

    1. Re:I think "found" should be in quotes by CRCulver · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:I think "found" should be in quotes by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Rubbish to Ukraine being the homeland of PIE. All you have to do is look at a map. Which one is closer to historical trade routes and the path of human migration?

      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.

      Of course, the majority view in linguistics being something silly is nothing new. While nearly every other psychology-related field is long past over-reacting to behaviorism's decline, we're stuck in the Chomsky era.

      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.

    3. Re:I think "found" should be in quotes by 0-9a-zA-Z_.+!*'()123 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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."

    4. Re:I think "found" should be in quotes by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Interesting

      "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."

      The "minority view" was posed by Colin Renfew, and rejected by *everyone* who knew anything about the topic. It just doesn't fit anything we know about the topic. IIRC, even he has abandoned it.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    5. Re:I think "found" should be in quotes by b4dc0d3r · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    6. Re:I think "found" should be in quotes by ElectricTurtle · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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).

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      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
    7. Re:I think "found" should be in quotes by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
  3. Superficially Bizarre by wonkavader · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Superficially Bizarre by CRCulver · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Turkish is a Turkic language. The Turkic languages do not have demonstrable common ancestry with the Indo-European language.

      The idea of an "Altaic" language family has fallen out of fashion, especially since the 1990s when some major Altaic linguists announced they no longer believed in their own theory. It's essentially limited to a handful of Russians now, whose methods are viewed as at best optimistic and at worst as outright crackpottery.

      Mainstream linguistics now prefers to view the Tungusic, Turkic and Mongolic families are isolates, the similarities between them due to longstanding contact. Even during the heyday of the Altaic theory, the idea that Korean and Japonic were part of such a family was a minority view.

    2. Re:Superficially Bizarre by Black+Parrot · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

      Happens a lot. The Romans spread Latin all around the Mediterranean and western Europe, erasing a lot of other languages in the process. English and Spanish have almost erased the hundreds of languages formerly spoken in the Americas. You can probably think of more examples.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    3. Re:Superficially Bizarre by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Superficially Bizarre by r1348 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Latin was never pushed out of Italy, it rather split in many regional neo-Latin (or Romance) languages according to the political turmoils that followed the end of the Roman Empire, with various degrees of influence from the languages of the invading forces (mostly Germanic and Slavic), to later gradually reunite, from the Renaissance onwards, into one single language. Italy reunited as a political entity only in 1860, so more than 1500 years after the fall of the Roman Empire, so by that time the divergence between the various regional languages was often beyond the limit of mutual comprehension. It was the birth of a new Italian literature, active repression of local languages during the Fascism, and ultimately the television that brought about what is now known as Italian.
      However in many regions the dialects remain the most spoken language, even thought standard Italian is well understood everywhere.
      My maternal grandparents automatically switch to Venetian while talking, while my paternal grandparents are native Friulan speakers.

  4. Nice change... by Black+Parrot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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
    1. Re:Nice change... by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Insightful

      On the basis of dialect geography I would put it in the Balkans or lower Danube.

      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.

    2. Re:Nice change... by Black+Parrot · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
    3. Re:Nice change... by Black+Parrot · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  5. Flood legends in Indo-European scriptures. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 3, Interesting
    When the last ice age ended and the sea levels rose, it was a gradual process that happened over decades. So it was just seen as a natural thing in most communities. For example the Tamil language is spoken in peninsular India. It has literature mentioning towns (South Madurai, Kaviri Poom Pattinam) that were taken by sea, river (Pah-truli) taken by the sea etc. They believe the first grammar book in Tamil composed by Sage Agastiyar has been swallowed by the sea and the present grammar book was composed by his student Thol Kappiar. Nothing dramatic, simple narration. The sea used to be over there, now it is over here.

    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
    1. Re:Flood legends in Indo-European scriptures. by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The Hindu and the mesapotamian flood legends are older than the Old Testament. They must all have a common ancestor.

      Why? It seems perfectly plausible to me that different flood legends might trace back to different actual floods.

    2. Re:Flood legends in Indo-European scriptures. by craton_crusher · · Score: 3, Interesting

      In fact, the Turkey hypothesis for the language origin is not inconsistent with the Ukrainian one, if the two populations on either side of the sea were cut off from each other as a result of the flood. Thus, it may be that the real "birthplace" of the Indo-european languages is now underwater.

      This theory is well supported by the geologic record, as detailed in "Noah's Flood" by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. Also here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

  6. Now ... by 32771 · · Score: 3, Funny

    If those scientists could prove that Finno-Ugric languages don't have extra-terrestrial origin I would be glad.

    --
    Je me souviens.
    1. Re:Now ... by dkleinsc · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's really not that complicated, and doesn't require space aliens: There was a culture speaking Finno-Ugric languages that started in the Volga River valley and got as far as Finland to the north, Turkey to the south, and much of Russia in between. However, they were dominated in many places by Indo-European speakers, which is why the Indo-European Slavic and Baltic languages split the Finno-Ugric speaking area into smaller pieces. However, one of the reasons Russian and Ukrainian sound different from, say, German, is that they would have picked up some words and concepts from the Finno-Ugric speakers who were in the area (official term for this is "language substrate").

      And yes, they're structured completely differently from Indo-European languages, which is why they're part of a different language family. Expecting any similarity at all makes about as much sense as expecting similarities between English and Chinese (other than words specifically borrowed from the other language).

      --
      I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
    2. Re:Now ... by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

  7. Re:So it's Turkey by Hognoxious · · Score: 3, Funny

    Turks hate Arabs because they think they're not Arabs - they think they're better than the Arabs.

    Arabs hate the Turks because they think they're not Arabs and, though they'd never admit it, the Arabs think the Turks are better than them.

    They both hate the Iranians.

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  8. Pretty pretty BS graph by ixvo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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)...

    Are there no other slashdotters in linguistics? Or is everybody giving up on /. 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!!!.