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."
Superficially Bizarre (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.
Re:I think "found" should be in quotes (Score:0, Interesting)
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? Which one had a bigger impact on history (hint: not the Ukraine)?
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.
Timeline is off (Score:2, Interesting)
Noah came to a landing on a mountain in Turkey; then the languages spread out from there. So the 8k years is slightly off.
Nice change... (Score:5, 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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I think "found" should be in quotes (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.
Re:Superficially Bizarre (Score:5, 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.
Flood legends in Indo-European scriptures. (Score:4, Interesting)
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. It is the story of First Avatar of Vishnu in Hindu scriptures. Lord Vishnu takes the avatar of a fish and saves one man, Manu, from the impending global flood that kills all. The well known Noah's story is common to Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Mesapotamian flood legend is similar too.
The conjecture is that, during the ice age, the Mediterranean sea was lower, and the straits of Bhosporus was actually an isthmus connecting Asia Minor with Europe. As the sea levels rose, the Med over-topped the isthmus and flooded into the Black Sea, which was a fresh water lake at that time. The southern and the eastern shores of the lake had gradual slope and was populated by agricultural settlements. As the lake level started rising relentlessly the few who took to the boats survived. Those who could not bear to leave their beloved agricultural fields and homes were left stranded and were drowned. The folk memory of the survivors morphed into the Noah's and other flood legends.
I wonder how the flood and the rising of the sea levels is remembered in the northern branches of the Indo-European family.
Re:Flood legends in Indo-European scriptures. (Score:3, Interesting)
This theory is well supported by the geologic record, as detailed in "Noah's Flood" by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. Also here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis [wikipedia.org]
Re:Now ... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's really not that complicated, and doesn't require space aliens: There was a culture speaking Finno-Ugric languages that started in the Volga River valley and got as far as Finland to the north, Turkey to the south, and much of Russia in between. However, they were dominated in many places by Indo-European speakers, which is why the Indo-European Slavic and Baltic languages split the Finno-Ugric speaking area into smaller pieces. However, one of the reasons Russian and Ukrainian sound different from, say, German, is that they would have picked up some words and concepts from the Finno-Ugric speakers who were in the area (official term for this is "language substrate").
And yes, they're structured completely differently from Indo-European languages, which is why they're part of a different language family. Expecting any similarity at all makes about as much sense as expecting similarities between English and Chinese (other than words specifically borrowed from the other language).
Re:Superficially Bizarre (Score:5, 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.
Pretty pretty BS graph (Score:3, Interesting)
Are there no other slashdotters in linguistics? Or is everybody giving up on