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 am multilingual.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Ahh, the second-most important language family on the planet, after the C/C++/C#/Java family.

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

[CRCulver]

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.

Re:I think "found" should be in quotes

[Black Parrot]

"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.