Birthplace of Indoeuropean Languages Found 195
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."
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Re:I think "found" should be in quotes (Score:5, 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.
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Re:Flood legends in Indo-European scriptures. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? It seems perfectly plausible to me that different flood legends might trace back to different actual floods.
Re:Nice change... (Score:5, 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 [sciencemag.org]
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 [wikipedia.org], 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.
Re:I think "found" should be in quotes (Score:4, Insightful)
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).