Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia,

[Kosmo]

Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages. The family includes English and most other European languages, as well as Persian, Hindi and many others. Despite the importance of the languages, specialists have long disagreed about their origin.

 

Linguists believe that the first speakers of the mother tongue, known as proto-Indo-European,were chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago and conquered Europe and Asia. A rival theory holds that, to the contrary, the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword. The new entrant to the debate is an evolutionary biologist, Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand. He and colleagues have taken the existing vocabulary and geographical range of 103 Indo-European languages and computationally walked them back in time and place to their statistically most likely origin.

 

The result is that

[docoflove1974]

Well, it's been done before, particularly with reference to the Basques and the American population from Asia--although that's admittedly using genetics.

 

I find it interesting that they're using traditional reconstruction tactics in a different way. But as the end of the article accurately points out, using simply lexical items, even core vocabulary, isn't as strong as including the evolution of the syntax and morphology.

[Virgil61]

 

 

I find it weird that a biologist uses linguistics and statistics to solve a history problem.

 

I think they (or at least geneticists) have been doing it for a couple of decades. Luigi Cavalli-Sforza is the main one I'm thinking of and he's been at it since the 80s I think. Genes, Peoples and Languages is one example. I'm wonder if docoflove can give an insight into how valuable (or not) this research has been.

[docoflove1974]

It's been interesting, and controversial on the linguistic side. It certainly has helped in the case of the Basques, proving that their linguistic uniqueness also corresponds to their genetic uniqueness. But with respect to the Americas, the controversy of their results (if I recall correctly, that there were only 3 waves of migration: Inuit, Na-Dene, and everyone else) doesn't entirely match up with what some linguistic researchers are continuously reconstructing. On the other hand, other studies have shown that the 'other' group of Americans has several linguistic similarities. I'm not sure of the research beyond that, but it is a controversial, and ever-evolving, area of linguistics.

 

At the same time, I've been reading this NYT article more, and I agree with some of the skepticism on the part of the linguists. I'd have to delve into the original article in Science more, but as I said in my earlier posts, there is a very strong risk of using only lexical items for reconstruction, because words can be borrowed--in particular, those for technology, which is what words for 'chariot' are. It's one thing to analyze terminology for family members, the basic body parts, numerals 1-10, native flora and fauna--this is commonly used in reconstruction. But equally important is basic sentence structure and morphology--what time of affixation is used on basic words, possessive constructions, and similar core elements of a language. That's what they are missing in this study of Proto-Indo-European, and until they do include it, it's not going to convince many historical Indo-Europeanists.

[DecimusCaesar]

I find the idea interesting, considering it fits into the hypothesis developed by the English Archaeologist Andrew Sherratt from a few years ago. He also proposed the controversial idea that Celtic language(s) were being spoken in Britain as far back as the Neolithic period around 6,000 years ago, before Indo-European langauges were said to have arrived in north-western Europe. That idea might be harder to accept.

 

As for Indo-European originating in Anatolia, it's a fascinating idea when you consider that the oldest written examples of an Indo-European language is Hittite, which is also from the very same area. It's believed that the Hittites originated in eastern Europe and migrated/invaded Anatolia, displacing or absorbing into the native Hattian culture. In light of the new discoveries perhaps the 'Hittite' language was developed by the native Hattians (who may have spoken an indo-European language) and the Hittites adopted their language instead of the other way round? Then again by the hayday of Hittites in the second millennium BC, the Indo-European langauges had developed and flourished long enough for the Hittite language to have been brought from eastern Europe.