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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."

14 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.

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    (-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.

  3. 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 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
    2. 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
  4. 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.

  5. 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
  6. 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.

  7. 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.