It may (or may not) be worth observing that if your tree gives the Anatolian fork at the root - an almost universally accepted idea - then the method described in the paragraph you quoted would, ISTM, tend to stick the geographical origin in Anatolia.
Frankly, I find the "wave" model much more compelling than the "tree" model. Languages are never 'atomic' in the way that a tree applies. You can't trace all the modern English dialects/sociolects back to some ideal "One True English". There were dialects in England before the colonial expansion, dialects of Middle English before Modern English arose, dialects of Anglo Saxon, dialects (and distinct languages) in the West Germanic family that gave birth to Anglo Saxon.
No reason to suppose that the Proto-Indo-European language was any different. Linguistic innovations can spread across dialects, and thus "infect" various descendent languages. But not every innovation has the same spread. IMO languages are more like the tangled fork-and-merge of some river deltas than the clean trees that are so popular for reconstructions.
Did anyone read the book yet? It seems to me to be a huge exercise in intellectual masturbation
It's a matter of supply and demand: There are thousands of books that are huge exercises in anti-intellectual masturbation, so they're not newsworthy..
Because, regardless of what the Slashdot community may think, theology is enjoying a renaissance in the past 20 years or so. Philosophy of Religion is enjoying an influx of young, intelligent people who are producing new and interesting works and God isn't going anywhere any time soon.
Lots of young people use crack and "bath salts" too, but for some reason the author didn't make a pilgrimage to a famous pusher to ask about the nature of reality.
The Noah flood story probably has basis in a real event, but was first written down not in a Semitic language at all, but Sumerian:
Why assume that a myth has a basis in fact?
You could just as easily say that the story started when a kid saw a bird on a piece of driftwood in a pond. Such speculations are utterly beyond the realm of evidence.
Thor was a Norse carpenter who didn't have enough sense to come in out of the rain. Adam was a Babylonian gardener who got fired for picking his boss's fruit without permission. Cthulhu was an octopus.
That would explain why they speak English in all the films
I was amused (or annoyed) to see the bobot in Prometheus studying the IE languages in preparation for meeting the aliens who created us. But that was about 30th down on the ridiculosity list.
The Hindu and the mesapotamian flood legends are older than the Old Testament
Yes, the Noah story is certainly derived from an older Mesopotamian tradition. It may have come from Sumerian rather than Semitic tradition, contrary to what I posted earlier.
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.
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.
That particular story comes from Semitic-speaking cultures, and was introduced into the IE-speaking cultures by contact (for the early Greek story), or by religious conversion (for everyone else).
I know. I always thought Turkish was considered an Altaic language, rather than Indo-European. Is Turkish a language common to both language families then? If so, that would be very interesting, as the Altaic languages include Japanese and Korean which I thought had no relation at all to Indo-European languages at all.
Turkish is intrusive in Anatolia, during the historical era.
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.
"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.
...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.
the 'failure' of the linux desktop is basically applications
In the big picture, yes. But for the present discussion, the failure is that Miguel took GNOME in a direction that no one wants to go, and now he's trying to deflect the rotten tomatoes.
De Icaza is a rat fink, period. He long ago used up any capital he had in the FOSS community with his dalliances with Microsoft. Frankly, if there was never another/. article involving anything that piece of crap had to say, we would still have about three dozen too many articles out there involving his weasily mutterings.
His "lets make it like Windows!" attitude turned me off years ago. Now he sounds like a has-been, trying to get into the spotlight and blaming everyone else for his failures.
A sugar molecule is as far from an amoeba as a piece of quartz frim a supercomputer. Insisting that living things came from nonliving matter by random processes is absurd. Anyone who thinks that is being far more dogmatic than the creationists they stubbornly ridicule.
Where to start...
Amino acids are found in deep space, not exactly a prime spot for the development of life.
We know that living things came from nonliving matter (and energy), because the universe was once in a state where living matter could not exist, yet now living matter is rife in at least one place.
The universe and its processes are not entirely random. If they were, this sugar would not exist either.
It's the very opposite of "dogmatic" to base your views on evidence.
Yours might have been an OK troll the first day the internet existed, but now it's as far from "nice troll" as a sugar molecule is from an amoeba.
It seems to me there is enough accumulated oddity to follow up with some space based measurements in order to get a better signal to noise ration and eliminate some possible systematic error sources.
Already done. No statistically significant deviations from exponential delay detected.
I think the problem is that the link is not yet established. What we have is a link between count rates in a detector observing a sample of some isotope and time of year, which no one disputes (we reasonably assume they are not making up their data). The argument is whether you can make the inductive leap to the claim that radioactive decay rates depend on the amount of solar radiation. As shown in some of those papers above, other experiments don't (like the test with the MESSENGER probe) show the effect you would expect if solar radiation were the cause.
That comment also points out that this "second study" includes one of the authors of the first study, so it's not really an independent confirmation.
And the first plot at that link (the original study) doesn't - IMO - actually look very supportive: the average period is about right, but the phase isn't very stable. Sometimes the peaks line up almost perfectly, but other times the measured peaks are almost at the zero of the astronomical curve. (The next plot is pretty impressive, though.)
Smart money - IMO - is that this, like the FTL neutrino thingy, will turn out to be in the equipment rather than in the phenomenon being studied.
Yeah, well, it's not like I intended for people to take the post seriously. As someone else has pointed out, dead people don't actually become angels in Christian theology, despite the popular notion.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks.
It may (or may not) be worth observing that if your tree gives the Anatolian fork at the root - an almost universally accepted idea - then the method described in the paragraph you quoted would, ISTM, tend to stick the geographical origin in Anatolia.
Frankly, I find the "wave" model much more compelling than the "tree" model. Languages are never 'atomic' in the way that a tree applies. You can't trace all the modern English dialects/sociolects back to some ideal "One True English". There were dialects in England before the colonial expansion, dialects of Middle English before Modern English arose, dialects of Anglo Saxon, dialects (and distinct languages) in the West Germanic family that gave birth to Anglo Saxon.
No reason to suppose that the Proto-Indo-European language was any different. Linguistic innovations can spread across dialects, and thus "infect" various descendent languages. But not every innovation has the same spread. IMO languages are more like the tangled fork-and-merge of some river deltas than the clean trees that are so popular for reconstructions.
Did anyone read the book yet? It seems to me to be a huge exercise in intellectual masturbation
It's a matter of supply and demand: There are thousands of books that are huge exercises in anti-intellectual masturbation, so they're not newsworthy..
Interesting, so you think young philosophers of religion should be equated to young bath salt abusers?
The analogy was to pushers rather than to users. But either way the answer is yes, in terms of being experts on the nature of reality.
Because, regardless of what the Slashdot community may think, theology is enjoying a renaissance in the past 20 years or so. Philosophy of Religion is enjoying an influx of young, intelligent people who are producing new and interesting works and God isn't going anywhere any time soon.
Lots of young people use crack and "bath salts" too, but for some reason the author didn't make a pilgrimage to a famous pusher to ask about the nature of reality.
why you would consult a theologian regarding questions about reality?
The Noah flood story probably has basis in a real event, but was first written down not in a Semitic language at all, but Sumerian:
Why assume that a myth has a basis in fact?
You could just as easily say that the story started when a kid saw a bird on a piece of driftwood in a pond. Such speculations are utterly beyond the realm of evidence.
Thor was a Norse carpenter who didn't have enough sense to come in out of the rain. Adam was a Babylonian gardener who got fired for picking his boss's fruit without permission. Cthulhu was an octopus.
AFAIK the only hint that any IE language was ever spoken west of Iran and south of the Black Sea
Uhm... I forgot that little Hittite thingy. Should have said "any Indo-Iranian language".
Yes, but can you say "substrate toponymy" five times real fast?
I can't say it *once* real fast.
But it could be aliens.
That would explain why they speak English in all the films
I was amused (or annoyed) to see the bobot in Prometheus studying the IE languages in preparation for meeting the aliens who created us. But that was about 30th down on the ridiculosity list.
The Hindu and the mesapotamian flood legends are older than the Old Testament
Yes, the Noah story is certainly derived from an older Mesopotamian tradition. It may have come from Sumerian rather than Semitic tradition, contrary to what I posted earlier.
They must all have a common ancestor.
Possibly, but not necessarily.
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.
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.
That particular story comes from Semitic-speaking cultures, and was introduced into the IE-speaking cultures by contact (for the early Greek story), or by religious conversion (for everyone else).
Substrate toponymy makes it clear that the Indo-European languages are not native to that area.
Is there anyplace where that isn't true?
I know. I always thought Turkish was considered an Altaic language, rather than Indo-European. Is Turkish a language common to both language families then? If so, that would be very interesting, as the Altaic languages include Japanese and Korean which I thought had no relation at all to Indo-European languages at all.
Turkish is intrusive in Anatolia, during the historical era.
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.
Where was the first post, 'tho?
I think it came out of someone's ...
"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.
...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.
the 'failure' of the linux desktop is basically applications
In the big picture, yes. But for the present discussion, the failure is that Miguel took GNOME in a direction that no one wants to go, and now he's trying to deflect the rotten tomatoes.
De Icaza is a rat fink, period. He long ago used up any capital he had in the FOSS community with his dalliances with Microsoft. Frankly, if there was never another /. article involving anything that piece of crap had to say, we would still have about three dozen too many articles out there involving his weasily mutterings.
His "lets make it like Windows!" attitude turned me off years ago. Now he sounds like a has-been, trying to get into the spotlight and blaming everyone else for his failures.
A sugar molecule is as far from an amoeba as a piece of quartz frim a supercomputer. Insisting that living things came from nonliving matter by random processes is absurd. Anyone who thinks that is being far more dogmatic than the creationists they stubbornly ridicule.
Where to start...
Amino acids are found in deep space, not exactly a prime spot for the development of life.
We know that living things came from nonliving matter (and energy), because the universe was once in a state where living matter could not exist, yet now living matter is rife in at least one place.
The universe and its processes are not entirely random. If they were, this sugar would not exist either.
It's the very opposite of "dogmatic" to base your views on evidence.
Yours might have been an OK troll the first day the internet existed, but now it's as far from "nice troll" as a sugar molecule is from an amoeba.
Where are people getting all this money to throw away at things like this?
Look at how many Hollywood movies, TV shows, games, fashion accessories, etc. that you or me think are a total waste. But obviously not everyone does.
It seems to me there is enough accumulated oddity to follow up with some space based measurements in order to get a better signal to noise ration and eliminate some possible systematic error sources.
Already done. No statistically significant deviations from exponential delay detected.
I think the problem is that the link is not yet established. What we have is a link between count rates in a detector observing a sample of some isotope and time of year, which no one disputes (we reasonably assume they are not making up their data). The argument is whether you can make the inductive leap to the claim that radioactive decay rates depend on the amount of solar radiation. As shown in some of those papers above, other experiments don't (like the test with the MESSENGER probe) show the effect you would expect if solar radiation were the cause.
Apparently there are some other papers that cast doubt on the basic finding. See the comment by "AK" at http://wavewatching.net/2012/09/01/from-the-annals-of-the-impossible-experimental-physics-edition/
That comment also points out that this "second study" includes one of the authors of the first study, so it's not really an independent confirmation.
And the first plot at that link (the original study) doesn't - IMO - actually look very supportive: the average period is about right, but the phase isn't very stable. Sometimes the peaks line up almost perfectly, but other times the measured peaks are almost at the zero of the astronomical curve. (The next plot is pretty impressive, though.)
Smart money - IMO - is that this, like the FTL neutrino thingy, will turn out to be in the equipment rather than in the phenomenon being studied.
Yeah, well, it's not like I intended for people to take the post seriously. As someone else has pointed out, dead people don't actually become angels in Christian theology, despite the popular notion.