[HN Gopher] New insights into the origin of the Indo-European la...
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New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
Author : Archelaos
Score : 188 points
Date : 2023-07-30 12:03 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mpg.de)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mpg.de)
| anon84873628 wrote:
| For the layperson I highly recommend The History of English
| Podcast. Although the focus is on English is starts from square
| one with the Proto Indo European people -- what we know about
| their culture/technology, the various migrations and branches,
| how the language was reconstructed, etc. The host is always
| careful to point out how these conclusions were drawn and where
| there are competing hypotheses or uncertainty. I love how the
| show weaves the evolution of language together with many aspects
| of history.
| [deleted]
| nologic01 wrote:
| Its quite difficult to fathom how these early linguistic branches
| have sounded around 8000 bc when they have changed so
| dramatically from 1000 bc to today. Is there any way (for a
| layman) to get a feel about this?
| smith34 wrote:
| [dead]
| abeppu wrote:
| > "Ancient DNA and language phylogenetics thus combine to suggest
| that the resolution to the 200-year-old Indo-European enigma lies
| in a hybrid of the farming and Steppe hypotheses"
|
| Can someone with a background in this area speak to why the DNA
| data is taken to be a strong signal about the origin of language
| families? Like, clearly when people move around they generally
| take their language with them, but trade, war/political power,
| cultural exchange etc also move languages around.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > trade, war/political power, cultural exchange etc also move
| languages around
|
| This was much less common in the pre-modern era. One of the
| largest learnings of the latter 20th century in this field is
| that when language and culture are moving, it typically means a
| previous population was displaced, not merely that the same
| people adopted a new culture.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Can you clarify a bit more about who did this learning? This
| statement is profoundly at odds with what I understand as an
| archaeologist. To give one example, Kohler's _Sprachbund_
| paper [1] gives a modern-ish proposal about linguistic
| convergence /diffusion that largely avoids demographic
| replacement. Are you talking about _discontinuities_ , which
| is a related (but critically different) term that's often
| used in the literature?
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9145-4
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Sure - and of course let me preface this by saying I am not
| an archaeologist, merely someone who is interested.
|
| My comment was perhaps overgeneralizing specifically from
| the early neolithic transition in Europe more broadly than
| I should have been. One example of the work I am discussing
| is the work of Cavalli-Sforza (ie
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.94.15.7719). My
| understanding of the history of academic work on this
| subject was the prior to the 1970s or 80s or so, it was
| largely thought the spread of agriculture did not imply
| genetic population replacement and subsequent genetic
| research has since proven that is false.
|
| I don't think the article you've linked actually disagrees
| with me. Excerpting briefly
|
| > Essentially, in the Pueblo Southwest, language became
| partially decoupled from genes and culture, probably
| because language is a stronger convention (Young 1966) than
| are the other two, and can therefore better withstand the
| blending forces discussed below. A second force for
| creating zones of cultural similarity, more applicable to
| the case of phylogenetically distinct groups considered
| here, is through mixture of groups via movement of people
| ("demic" diffusion) that also entrained sharing of culture.
| To the extent that this describes the Pueblo case, once
| again, such mixing could not to have been so extreme as to
| undermine the linguistic differences that still survive.
| Recent research (e.g., Kandler 2009) provides some guidance
| as to the factors determining which language will prevail
| when linguistically different groups come into contact. The
| relative sizes of the populations, their relative status,
| and the duration of the flow are all relevant. To the
| extent that emigrating populations were relatively low in
| status, small in number, and arriving sporadically, it is
| more likely that they would adopt, rather than displace,
| the language of any group they were entering. Of course
| cultural similarities among groups can also emerge without
| population movement by copying neighboring groups, a
| process that anthropologists once simply called diffusion
| (e.g., Sahlins 1960). In the terms used by Collard et al.
| (2006), both movement of people among groups and this
| horizontal cultural transmission among groups are blending
| processes, as opposed to the branching processes discussed
| in the previous paragraph.
|
| To me, this article seems to be attempting to explain the
| cultural similarity between (at least originally) disparate
| linguistic Pueblo groups (that largely, afaict from the
| article, share common genetics). In the paragraph above,
| you can see that the author is describing population
| migration and displacement as one of the key ways for
| cultural/linguistic transfer (especially when the
| populations moving are large) that 'can also' emerge
| without displacement, but I understand the article to be
| describing this as a minoritarian current - an _exception_
| to the broader pattern of pre-modern linguistic & cultural
| spread through displacement.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Yeah, the situation with the European neolithic
| transition is one where there's a substantial amount of
| population discontinuity and people are partial to
| replacement specifically, though there's still some
| debate as to the exact nature and timeline of that
| replacement. For example, I've excavated areas with
| centuries of coexistence between foragers and early
| sedentary farmers during the neolithic transition, which
| makes the more universally violent replacement theories
| look a bit suspect. This is very a feature particular to
| Europe and older theories (~70s-90s) though and not
| common to modern Asian, or Americanist archaeologists.
|
| As an aside, Cavalli-Sforza was a legendary figure, but a
| lot of this stuff has benefited from powerful new tools
| like eDNA and effective aDNA that he never had much of a
| chance to speak on.
|
| For Kohler's paper, I'd point to the summary as a better
| example of what I was trying to communicate:
| Evidently, though, powerful blending forces were also at
| work. These included local exogamy, which, on the borders
| of linguistic groups, led to blending, movement of
| traders among increasingly sedentary groups, movements
| forced on populations increasingly reliant on agriculture
| by changing climates, and movements forced on
| increasingly large and sedentary groups by anthropogenic
| depression of local resources. One of my goals in this
| article has been to add convergent evolution to this
| list. This would have been driven by adaptive
| considerations, possibly bootstrapped by additional
| blending processes such as indirectly biased cultural
| transmission across groups (Mesoudi and O'Brien 2008).
| Together, these blending forces created the Pueblo
| culture area and Sprachbund.
|
| The Pueblo cultural area isn't particularly unique in
| this respect. There's been a broad _complexification_ of
| transition theories in archaeology, where specific common
| explanations are subsumed by everything everywhere all at
| once. Population replacement in particular has gone from
| being the default explanation for every new
| archaeological horizon to being a much more localized,
| one-of-many explanation.
| blahedo wrote:
| As also pointed out in some other threads: it's less that it's
| dispositive evidence, and more that it corroborates. If you
| have what seems like a good linguistic theory backed by
| language phylogenetics or other linguistic-only evidence, and
| then you do some DNA work and it lines up, that tends to make
| the linguistic theory stronger, because it at least verifies
| that humans were moving in the patterns suggested by the
| language drift. But it's not a "strong signal" by itself,
| because there are many ways for languages to disperse other
| than within family groups.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Trade, war, and political power also move genetics around.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Because people moved a lot less and much slower than now so DNA
| is a good proxy?
| Roark66 wrote:
| I find it fascinating modern humans are thought to have evolved
| 300k years ago, but we haven't got any idea what happened before
| last ice age. I find it hard to believe people would just "stay
| in Africa" prior to last ice age (120k years ago and before) when
| the moment climate allowed it (~10k years ago) they spread out
| all over the planet.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| That narrative is changing. Scientists are starting to think
| the peopling of the americas happened a lot earlier than we
| previously to believed.
|
| https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586
| idoubtit wrote:
| What is funny is that there's been a consensus for many years
| in Europe that Hominids arrived in America at least 30,000
| years ago. There were several artefacts that made the
| hypothesis very plausible. But most North American scientist
| were vigorously opposed to it, until this recent proof that's
| harder to deny.
|
| By the way, this is unrelated to the GP post which was about
| hominids walking out of Africa, more than 1M years before
| entering America.
| cco wrote:
| In the early 2000's my anthropology courses at a large US
| university presented 13kya as basically certain and that
| maybe up to 27kya but that the evidence was pretty early.
|
| Perhaps there was more pushback in archeology?
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Well that's certainly one hell of a claim. It's one I feel
| like I should know about considering I've worked with
| European researchers on human presence in the arctic in the
| LGM, but I've never heard of this "consensus". Can you
| provide some more info?
|
| As an aside, the white sands footprints aren't "proof".
| They're interesting and highly suggestive, but significant
| concerns remain about the quality of the dating, let alone
| transbering crossings in the LGM without implicating things
| like the sketchy refugia hypothesis. It'll be a few years
| before all that shakes out and we have anything approaching
| consensus on the matter.
| lkrubner wrote:
| At this point the argument isn't that people stayed in Africa,
| but that everyone outside of Africa died. At this point the 3
| oldest fossils we have that look like homo sapiens are all from
| Morocco or the Levant or Greece, suggesting homo sapiens first
| evolved near the Mediterranean. But at some time between 50k
| and 20k years ago, all humans outside of Africa seemed to have
| died: Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Sapiens, all of them.
|
| Regarding the older finds of Sapiens, when we find DNA traces
| and compare them to modern DNA, we are not able to find any
| modern population that is descended from any of this Sapien
| DNA, outside of Africa, that is older than even 25k.
|
| It is well known that Sapiens arrived in Spain 40k years ago
| and that they demonstrated modern behavior: arts, music,
| advanced hunting tools, but DNA analysis suggests this group
| disappeared entirely, no trace of their DNA is found in
| existing European populations. The picture then is that 75k ago
| Eurasia was covered with humans, of at least 3 or 4 different
| species, and all of them died, and then Eurasia was repopulated
| by a burst of homo sapiens that radiated out from Africa.
|
| Of course, this picture would change if we ever found some old
| DNA, outside of Africa, that could also be matched to DNA in a
| surviving group of humans.
| cco wrote:
| > At this point the 3 oldest fossils we have that look like
| homo sapiens are all from Morocco or the Levant or Greece,
| suggesting homo sapiens first evolved near the Mediterranean.
|
| This is fascinating and new to me, can you provide any
| articles or podcasts that discuss it?
| username135 wrote:
| Seconded
| lkrubner wrote:
| I've been meaning to write this up in one place, and maybe
| this week would be a good time to do so.
|
| I thought the news from Morocco was now well known, see
| here:
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.22114
|
| Homo sapiens and some other form of human were living in
| the Levant 200,000 years ago:
|
| https://www.earth.com/news/new-type-of-prehistoric-human-
| fou...
|
| The reference to the skulls found on an island Greece, I'll
| need time to track that one down.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Are you saying it is less that homo sapiens out-competed the
| others than the ice age knocked out everyone?
|
| How does that comport with modern humans still having some
| admixture from them?
| CogitoCogito wrote:
| Modern humans having some admixture from them doesn't
| contradict the idea that the ice age was the bigger problem
| than direct competition.
| lkrubner wrote:
| My own guess would be the final years of the Ice Age saw
| too many changes in the northern hemisphere, erratic
| weather that wiped out everyone, but I have not seen that
| in an official source, except in discussions of
| Neanderthals.
|
| Modern Humans can be an admixture of several species if the
| ancestors to modern humans either migrated south to Africa
| or continued to survive in some place like Arabia, but
| perhaps we just haven't found the right fossil yet.
| Assuming Sapiens and Neanderthals mixed together in the
| Levant then they either survived in the Levant or they
| moved south into Africa and then later expanded out of
| Africa.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| > It is well known that Sapiens arrived in Spain 40k years
| ago and that they demonstrated modern behavior: arts, music,
| advanced hunting tools
|
| Anyone to whom this is complete news? How did they manage
| this all without wheels?
| lkrubner wrote:
| See here:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_European_modern_humans
|
| This population in Belgium and Spain seems to have died
| out:
|
| "Earlier EEMH (10 tested in total), on the other hand, did
| not seem to be ancestral to any present-day population, nor
| did they form any cohesive group in and of themselves, each
| representing either completely distinct genetic lineages,
| admixture between major lineages, or have highly divergent
| ancestry. Because of these, the study also concluded that,
| beginning roughly 37,000 years ago, EEMH descended from a
| single founder population and were reproductively isolated
| from the rest of the world. The study reported that an
| Aurignacian individual from Grottes de Goyet, Belgium, has
| more genetic affinities to the Magdalenian inhabitants of
| Cueva de El Miron, Spain, than to more or less
| contemporaneous Eastern European Gravettians.[15]"
|
| The population in Spain apparently had music, as this flute
| is dated to 40k years ago:
|
| https://www.quora.com/Did-Cro-Magnons-have-music
| [deleted]
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > How did they manage this all without wheels?
|
| Walking, and at least for the people in North America
| probably canoes.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| "Modern behavior", not getting places...
| rustymonday wrote:
| Aboriginal Australians migrated to Australia 65,000 years
| ago.
| NotSuspicious wrote:
| Yeah, OP's timeline is incredibly off. It has absolutely no
| bearing to reality.
| idoubtit wrote:
| As pointed by
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...
| it seems that modern humans went of out Africa in many waves at
| various eras. It's not surprising, the other Homo genus did the
| same.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| A big part of the challenge is that most of the areas that
| might have been inhabited before the last ice age are now
| underwater.
|
| Really hard for early artefacts to survive being under the
| ocean for 10k years.
|
| Nonetheless, I think its fair to say now that we can at least
| push back the timeline for early civilized settlements to at
| least the time of Gobekli Tepe (~10k years).
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| We know a bit more than that
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_first_human_settleme...
| ledgerdev wrote:
| You should check out Randal Carlson on Joe Rogan, and this is a
| very interesting video on the topic.
|
| https://youtu.be/3qXuAzzVOTQ
| xkjyeah wrote:
| The book Pathogenesis published this year has a hypothesis --
| diseases from the Neanderthals and other hominids who populated
| the regions outside Africa earlier wiped out the earlier waves
| of Sapiens.
|
| Until diseases spread back and forth enough that Sapiens had
| enough immunity to non-Sapien diseases, but not vice versa (due
| to lower population density or less diverse fauna outside
| Africa) which wiped out the non-Sapiens populations outside
| Africa.
| smith34 wrote:
| [dead]
| teleforce wrote:
| Fun facts, the oldest attestation of Indo-European language is
| now the long extinct language Hittite. The language is attested
| in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th
| centuries BCE.
|
| Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also
| around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1].
|
| [1]Hittite language:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language
| canjobear wrote:
| Hittite is also interesting because it provided one of the
| biggest validations of the methodology for reconstructing
| languages. Based on subtle patterns in vowels in other Indo-
| European languages, Saussure was able to figure out that there
| must have been three "laryngeal" consonants in Proto-Indo-
| European which were lost in all the attested languages. And lo
| and behold, when Hittite was deciphered, there were the
| laryngeal consonants right where the philologers had predicted
| them.
| dmichulke wrote:
| How can you determine that a consonant was "laryngeal"
| (voiced?) from text?
| jfengel wrote:
| Laryngeal refers to the place of articulation (where the
| air stream is constricted). They are pronounced way in the
| back of the throat, like the glottal stop. Even further
| back than things like Greek chi or German ch.
| smitty1e wrote:
| For an interesting example using ancient Egyptian, see
| https://youtu.be/J-K5OjAkiEA
| canjobear wrote:
| The laryngeal consonants were guttural sounds produced in
| the back of the throat, like English h, German ch, Arabic
| `ayn or qaf, etc. We don't know exactly what the
| pronunciations were, but in other existing languages,
| laryngeal sounds like this tend to have an effect on the
| surrounding vowels. This happens because your tongue has to
| movie continuously between the sounds it produces, and so
| there's some blurring that happens between adjacent sounds.
|
| In particular, laryngeal sounds tend to make vowels near
| them become more back, low, and round. So for example
| before a uvular q sound in Arabic, the sound /a/ which is
| usually something like English a in cat will become back
| and low, something more like au in caught. You can get a
| process like this, playing out over hundreds of years:
|
| 1. You start with a form like Hewis, where H is some
| laryngeal sound.
|
| 2. The laryngeal sound makes the following vowel low and
| back, yielding Hawis.
|
| 3. The laryngeal sound drops, leaving just awis.
|
| In fact this is how we get the Indo-European root for
| "sheep" (reflected in English ewe, Latin ovis, etc.). The
| Hittite form is hawis.
| daliusd wrote:
| Nice, sheep in Lithuanian is "avis"
| (https://lt.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/avis) what I assume
| sounds like "hawis"
| canjobear wrote:
| Yeah, Lithuanian is one of the most conservative Indo-
| European languages.
| mlinksva wrote:
| I did not know the term, but very intuitive https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_and_innovative_(l... linked
| near the top of
| https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Lithuanian_language
|
| I'd be curious to see some kind of (perhaps multi-
| dimensional?) characterization/ranking of all languages'
| conservatism and innovation, if anyone happens to have a
| pointer.
| Sprocklem wrote:
| See the video linked in the sister comment for (IIRC) an
| excellent discussion of historical reconstruction of sounds
| from writing systems, but I can add some clarification to
| the matter of laryngeal consonants: they are confusingly
| named for historical reasons but consitute three unknown
| consonants with a place of articulation towards the back of
| the vocal tract (near the larynx). In addition to this
| reconstruction, this specific case has the additional
| matter of finding consonants in a place where they are
| predicted from their influence on the nearby vowels in IE
| languages (and, incidentally, the expected vowels), but
| where there is otherwise no consonant attested in non-
| Anatolian IE languages.
| Mlller wrote:
| Thank you, that's it: one of the biggest validations of the
| methodology for reconstructing languages. - Little nitpicks,
| if you allow:
|
| - Saussure reconstructed only two of the three consonants now
| called "laryngeals" and called them "coefficients
| sonantiques". Saussure's two sounds would be h2 and h3 in
| modern notation. The Danish linguist Moller added the third
| (h1) and suggested that they were laryngeals.
|
| - In Hittite, not all of the laryngeals are preserved: the
| Hittite sound transcribed as "h" is certainly not a reflex of
| h1, which had no reflexes in Hittite, and it certainly is a
| reflex of h2. Whether it can also be a reflex of h3 is
| contested.
|
| (Edit: Your explanation below about the coloring by
| laryngeals is also correct in principle; just the specific
| example is problematic: because of Latin "ovis", Greek "ois"
| we know that the late PIE form was "Howis" with "o" not "a",
| either from "h3ewis" with "h3e" - "o" or from "h2owis". The
| Hittite word you quoted may be evidence for the latter:
| "h2owis" - Hittite "hawis" with uncontested "h2" - "h".)
| canjobear wrote:
| Thanks, I was pretty sure the details weren't 100% right.
|
| Another overlooked point is that it wasn't immediately
| obvious that the Hittite h was related to Saussure/Moller's
| laryngeals, because the theory wasn't fully accepted at the
| time, and not everyone understood it. Even after the h was
| identified in Hittite, it took a while for people to make
| the connection.
|
| Do you know what Saussure's initial evidence for h2 and h3
| was?
| Mlller wrote:
| Yes, you are right, and the whole story of the laryngeal
| theory is quite exciting. - Saussure's initial evidence
| was a set of Sanskrit forms; and his argumentation went
| like:
|
| - There is e.g. a root meaning 'carry' having the full
| grade "bkar" and a corresponding zero grade "bkr" (within
| the regular ablaut system of Sanskrit).
|
| - Then there is e.g. a root meaning 'clean' having the
| full grade "pavi" and a corresponding zero grade "pu".
|
| - So we have "bkar" : "pavi" = "bkr" : "pu" or, re-
| grouped, "bkar" : "bkr" = "pavi" : "pu".
|
| - We already know (since the times of the great Indian
| grammarians) that, in ablaut, "v" corresponds to "u"
| (samprasarana). All synchronic observations, by the way,
| about these different kinds of roots were already made by
| the Indian grammarians in the first millennium BC, too;
| and they called the roots a la "bkar" "anit" 'without i'
| and the roots a la "pavi" "set" 'with i'.
|
| - "bkar" : "bkr" is the regular ablaut pattern
| understandable as: 'the full grade has the short vowel
| ("a" in Sanskrit, "e" in PIE), the zero grade lacks it.'
|
| - Saussures brilliant and simple idea was to trace back
| "pavi" : "pu" to this very same basic pattern.
|
| - To make this work he assumed a sound in the
| 'clean'-root that became "i" between consonants but
| vanished with compensatory lengthening after sonantic
| "u". (Saussure denoted this sound here with the cover
| symbol "A" in small caps.) So the older, regular pattern
| can be reconstructed as (in more modern notation):
|
| - "bkar" : "bkr" = "pavH" : "puH", which yields:
|
| - "bkar" : "bkr" = "pavi" : "pu" as attested.
|
| This argumentation is fairly compelling IMHO because it
| complies with Occam's razor by assuming that a second
| complicated, seemingly irregular morphological pattern
| leads back to the simpler, regular pattern we have to
| assume anyways, and that this simpler pattern was
| complicated by sound change - which is the normal way of
| linguistic change.
|
| But it got even better.
|
| - Saussure then drew attention to the Sanskrit verb
| formations of the seventh and ninth class (again, already
| classified and extensively described by the Indian
| grammarians), which both had an infix, i.e. a
| morphological element inserted into the root (not
| prepended like a prefix or appended like a suffix):
|
| - 7th, e.g. "yunakti" 'yokes (up)' (the English word is a
| cognate), built like "yu*na*k-ti" with zero grade "yug"
| (and "g" - "k" before voiceless "t"), "na"-infix and
| personal ending "ti".
|
| - 9th, e.g. "punati" 'cleans' - our pavi/pu-root again.
| But now with a short "u"? And with an infix "na" instead
| of "na" as in "yunakti"? So ... "u" instead of "u" and
| "na" instead of "na" ... and both _is already explained_
| by the coefficient, because then we _have_ to
| reconstruct:
|
| - "pu*na*H-ti", because the na-infix had to be inserted
| before the last consonant of the root. And this formation
| "pu*na*H-ti" is, again, exactly the same pattern as:
|
| - "yu*na*k-ti", just with "H" : "k".
|
| So far this argument justifies to assume one
| "coefficient", in the case of the "pavi"-root denoted as
| "A" (in small caps) by Saussure and "h2" nowadays.
| Saussure assumed two - denoting the other as "O",
| nowadays "h3" - because he also already noticed the
| coloring effect you explained in your comment below: The
| compensatorily lengthened Sanskrit "a" sometimes
| corresponds to e.g. Greek and Latin "a", sometimes to
| Greek and Latin "o"; for the latter Saussure introduced
| the "O". His argumentation here is more difficult and
| partly outdated, because he wrote his memoire (published
| 1879) in a time when another major discovery was not yet
| fully taken into account: So far, Indo-Europeanists had
| assumed that Sanskrit "a" originated from Proto-Indo-
| European "a". When Saussure wrote his memoire, it had
| become clear that it was necessary to assume at least two
| diffent vowels here, which both became Indian "a".
| dghughes wrote:
| For anything languages, writing systems, abjads, scripts and so
| on I like https://omniglot.com/ it's a great site very
| detailed.
| euroderf wrote:
| It might be interesting to see whether this affects current
| thinking about the plausibility of Indo-Uralic. (Probably not
| much, if it all.)
| ninja-ninja wrote:
| As an Armenian speaker i was pretty surprised at this part
|
| > Recent ancient DNA data suggest that the Anatolian branch of
| Indo-European did not emerge from the Steppe, but from further
| south, in or near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent -- as
| the earliest source of the Indo-European family. Our language
| family tree topology, and our lineage split dates, point to other
| early branches that may also have spread directly from there, not
| through the Steppe."
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Worth pointing out that Armenian is not a descendent of the
| Anatolian branch (if you didn't know that already). The whole
| Anatolian tree of Indo-European (Hittite, Luwian, Lydian, etc.)
| is extinct; the languages there were displaced completely in
| the late Bronze age and early Iron Age.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Why did that surprise you, as an Armenian speaker?
| ninja-ninja wrote:
| idk in school they really go ham on how exactly our language
| has elements from the "core" of the indo-european branch, not
| sure how well the steppe works with the narrative
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| It's irrelevant, as I point out below. Armenian is not an
| Anatolian language despite it existing in the Anatolian
| region.
|
| The Anatolian languages are all extinct, and Armenian has
| its origins out of the Yamnaya migration out of the steppe
| just like the rest of living Indo-European languages.
|
| Armenian is Armenian, not related to Hittite, Luwian, etc.
| of the Bronze age in any way except as extremely distant
| cousins.
| dghughes wrote:
| >...may also have spread directly from there, not through the
| Steppe.
|
| My guess is they assumed it came through the steppe i.e. from
| the north, not their region the south/Caucasus.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis
| jmclnx wrote:
| Seems a third theory, the other 2 existing theories are in the
| article
|
| >Recent ancient DNA data suggest that the Anatolian branch of
| Indo-European did not emerge from the Steppe, but from further
| south, in or near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent
| briffid wrote:
| I don't get it. DNA is about people, Indo-European is about
| language. DNA tells nothing about what language those people
| spoke thousands of years ago.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| It helps to map migrations and thus spread of languages.
| bradrn wrote:
| There is a saying I've seen: 'genes don't speak languages'.
| Languages can easily spread between population groupings,
| and conversely a single population can move from one
| language to another -- and both processes happen with
| considerable regularity. (Consider what happened to Gaulish
| as Latin spread, or Hittite as Greek spread, or Ancient
| Egyptian as Arabic spread, or...)
| guerrilla wrote:
| Indeed, Renfew gives two models for how this is possible.
| One is called the wave model where trade and integration
| causes language propagation and the other is conquest
| where one group dominates over a neighbor who eventually
| adopts the dominion's language.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > or Ancient Egyptian as Arabic spread
|
| By that period in history, you'd usually call it Coptic,
| not (the much older) Ancient Egyptian.
| bradrn wrote:
| Yeah, I know. I presume more readers here would be
| familiar with the name 'Ancient Egyptian' than with
| 'Coptic'.
|
| (And really, as it evolved so dramatically over 3000
| years, 'Ancient Egyptian' can't easily be called a single
| language to start with. I tend to think of Coptic as
| simply the latest stage of Ancient Egyptian.)
| Archelaos wrote:
| The idea is that the historical migration patterns inferred
| from DNA match the branching of Indo-European languages of
| their new linguistic model, which therefore should be
| considered superior to earlier models.
| guerrilla wrote:
| You're very right to point this out. It's one of Colin
| Renfew's* main attacks on other hypotheses. As I mentioned in
| my other comment, it's not automatically given that people
| will form a consensus that this methodology is acceptable as
| variations of methodology have been the main source of
| controversy on this issue in the past.
|
| * originator of the Anatolian hypothesis
| johnmyleswhite wrote:
| People migrate -- they always bring their DNA with them and
| their language. No? The connections between these have been
| studied for a long time -- for example, this popular book was
| published 20 years ago:
| https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520228733/genes-peoples-
| and...
| Sharlin wrote:
| A nice counter-example is Finnish (and other Finno-Ugric
| languages) - back in the early 1900s it was argued that
| Finns as an ethnicity must have originated from the Urals
| because the language seemed to have its roots there.
| (Notably in the era's racial "science" this had clear
| racist implications.) But modern genetics have revealed
| that the origins of the people are quite separate from the
| origins of the language.
| euroderf wrote:
| Indeed this is so, but where does one find further
| information online (or not online) ? Such a case where
| language and genetics do not align is unusual in the
| world, but I have read that there are a few cases. Mostly
| associated with conquest and/or assimilation IIRC.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| This is very common. The Romans did not genocide and
| repopulate everywhere they conquered, for example. A lot
| of romance language speakers genetically contiguous with
| Celts and other such things.
|
| And going back further there is evidence of genetic
| continuity with pre-Indo-European European populations
| too.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Turks are commonly said to be Mediterranean people with a
| Central Asian language. No clue about how true this is
| genetically but anecdotally I think Turks look quite
| similar to Greeks and Italians, and not much to eg
| Turkmen.
| bradrn wrote:
| But, on the other hand, 'While in most populations genetic
| and linguistic relations match, mismatches occur regularly
| as a result of language shift':
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2122084119
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| People can change their language. Hungary and Turkey speak
| the languages of conquerors who have left very little
| genetic trace. (France is in a similar position!) Many
| Ethiopians speak a Semitic language (Amharic) for reasons
| unknown to us. Yiddish is a Germanic language spoken by a
| non-Germanic people. The Chinese of Thailand often cannot
| speak any Chinese (they speak Thai).
|
| I assume the argument here is that if you see a huge
| linguistic expansion and a huge demographic expansion
| occurring at the same time, you can reasonably conclude
| that they are the same phenomenon and the expanding
| language is spoken by the expanding people. But the
| language and the people are not in general the same; people
| may voluntarily adopt a foreign language without moving
| (compare India and English) and they may fail to bring
| their language with them when they move. They cannot avoid
| bringing their DNA with them, but it will die out when they
| do, which their language may not.
| retrac wrote:
| > I assume the argument here is that if you see a huge
| linguistic expansion and a huge demographic expansion
| occurring at the same time, you can reasonably conclude
| that they are the same phenomenon and the expanding
| language is spoken by the expanding people.
|
| That's a lot to assume, though. One possible
| counterexample is contemporary North America. The
| English-speaking population spread across the continent
| in a linked process, the same phenomenon, but the
| majority contribution genetically, is not from England.
| There are communities in North America where almost no
| one is of English ancestry, yet they are English-
| speaking.
|
| The same sort of social/demographic upheavals and changes
| that can create large language spread, are also the same
| kind that can create homogenization towards a single
| language despite people speaking many languages.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Your point is correct, but because this is HN, I'm going
| to be ridiculously pedantic and correct 2 statements in
| your example.
|
| > The Chinese of Thailand often cannot speak any Chinese
| (they speak Thai)
|
| That was because of forced assimilation in the 1930s-50s
| by their proto-Fascist dictator.
|
| > Yiddish is a Germanic language spoken by a non-Germanic
| people
|
| Because there was plenty of intermarriage and the
| community was in Central Europe since Roman times
| bradrn wrote:
| I think that _is_ their point. Languages often spread by
| processes unrelated to genetics.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| In the case of Thailand, the same political forces
| pressured the Chinese into intermarrying with the Thai,
| so genetics do come into play. But a clean victory was
| won over language; that didn't happen with genetics.
| canjobear wrote:
| These seem like explanations, not corrections?
| sdiq wrote:
| >Many Ethiopians speak a Semitic language (Amharic) for
| reasons unknown to us.
|
| Amharic isn't the only Semitic language spoken in
| Ethiopia. We have other Semitic languages spoken both in
| Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is just the Red Sea that divides
| these two countries from the other Semitic speaking
| countries. Yemen, across the sea has other Semitic
| languages other than Arabic. Also, just like Indo-
| European is a large grouping of languages, the Semitic
| languages are ordinarily grouped under Afro-Asiatic
| languages. Thus, besides some of the Semitic languages
| spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea, we also have two other
| subgroups of Afro-Asiatic namely, Cushitic and Omotic
| languages that are also spoken in Ethiopia. Amharic thus
| is well contextualised for Ethiopia.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| The fact remains that you would not expect to see black
| Africans speaking any Afroasiatic language without some
| kind of significant cultural shock. The reason those
| languages are in Ethiopia ( / Nigeria / etc. ) today is
| not that Ethiopia is populated by the descendants of an
| originally afroasiatic group. Something must have
| happened.
| mtts wrote:
| Nigeria is all the way on the other side of the African
| content while the Arabian peninsula is right across the
| very narrow Red Sea. So it would make less sense for
| Ethiopians to speak a language that's related to
| languages spoken thousands of kms away in West Africa
| than for them to speak a language that's related to the
| languages spoken on the other side of the Red Sea - which
| is exactly what they do.
|
| Edit: also, if you look at pictures of Ethiopians and
| Eritreans and of Yemenites you'll see they're way more
| similar in appearance than Ethiopians and, say,
| Nigerians.
| bangkoksbest wrote:
| Yeah, my wife is Ethiopian and she was shocked to see in
| TV news coverage how "Ethiopian" a lot of the Houthi
| rebels in Yemen looked, but this is actually not
| surprising once you know the histories of the Horn of
| Africa and Red Sea at a greater detail.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| The Semitic languages are Afroasiatic languages. I agree
| with your general point but ironically you yourself now
| try to link language to genetics (skin color).
|
| In the horn of Africa they've always spoken Semitic
| languages as far as we know, and actually it's possible
| the entire language family originated in Africa, not in
| West Asia as I guess you assume. This hasn't been proven
| one way or another, both theories exist.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Ethopians also just don't really look very much like west
| African (Niger-Congo speakers, but it is nonsense to
| presume Ethopians area "hybrid" population while west
| African Niger-Congo speakers and west Asian Semitic
| speakers are are "basal".
| mdp2021 wrote:
| The direct answer, you have been given: we suppose leads
| between migration and cultural propagation.
|
| It should also be noted marginally that haplogroups are, for
| similar reasons, a recent focus in history.
| mojuba wrote:
| DNA analysis allows to follow migrations and with it the
| migrations of languages.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Except that DNA and languages are only loosely coupled, and
| wrong conclusions have historically been drawn due to
| assumptions they're more tightly correlated than they
| actually are.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| Language Log had a post on this
| https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=59908 and their
| commentariat seems unimpressed. Linguist Andrew Garrett had some
| tweets about that:
| https://twitter.com/ndyjroo/status/1684636445854875648 and, for
| traditionalists, was quoted in an article:
| https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-indo-european...
|
| The paper hasn't made it to sci-hub yet (at least not the one I
| checked) but it seems like they're going to have a tough row to
| hoe.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Haven't read the articles or papers yet, but I am really
| skeptical of the kind of statistical inferences talked about in
| the article -- _" we were able to prove Romance from Latin
| using our model, so using the same model we got #..."_; it
| seems to me this kind of thing assumes they can project a model
| of language mutation built from data out of the iron age back
| to neolithic, which is... a really giant assumption.
|
| I'd say dynamics of human history are really full of all sorts
| of variance and instances of punctuated equilibrium.
|
| Still... it wouldn't surprise me to find surprises around the
| Anatolian languages and their age and origins. They do seem to
| fall outside the 'norm' of the mainstream of Indo-European
| languages and the age of their split from the origin of
| whatever variant of early Indo-European that Yamnaya spoke I
| suspect could be a lot further back then expected. And it
| wouldn't also surprise me to find back and forth flow for a
| period of time from Anatolia to/from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.
| tgv wrote:
| That's been my problem with this approach too. It's an
| arbitrary model, fitted onto very limited data that doesn't
| generalize, under the very assumption that they all derive
| from a common root. I'm totally willing to accept that the
| language and DNA models can be thought of as complementing
| each other, but any conclusion stronger than "perhaps
| (almost) all European languages have a common origin" remains
| speculative. And that's not a very interesting conclusion.
| canjobear wrote:
| The only substantive objection I see there is archeological-
| linguistic. Words related to chariot technology like "wheel"
| and "yoke" are cognate across IE languages, so the languages
| probably split after this technology was invented. But the
| invention seems to have happened later than 8000 BP.
| Archelaos wrote:
| Can we say something about how often a particular
| technological adaptation is accompanied by an adoption of the
| corresponding verbal expression? In other words: If the wheel
| has been adopted by a neighbouring community, is it not very
| likely that the word for it will be adopted in a
| linguistically similar version?
|
| As an aside: I looked for the origine of the English "wheel"
| and the German "Rad", and they seem to have been different IE
| roots: _kwe-kwlh1-o- /_rot-h2-o-[1], but the word is
| nevertheless often given as a example for a common IE
| origine. So what does scholars make so sure that the original
| Indo-Europeans already had the wheel? Could these words not
| have been derived somewhat later independently from IE roots
| of a somewhat different meaning, or when the area occupied by
| Indo-Europeans was still small via techno-lingustic transfer?
|
| [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indogermanische_Ursprache#c
| ite...
| canjobear wrote:
| Roots undergo semantic shifts in their meaning. So English
| "deer" is cognate to German "Tier" despite the fact that
| Tier means animal in German, but only one specific kind of
| animal in English. The German meaning is the original one
| for the root; in English it shifted to the more specific
| meaning.
|
| In German, "Rad" was originally a word that meant something
| like "rolling" and it generalized in meaning to encompass
| what was originally referred to using the cognate of
| English wheel, which then died out in German. It would have
| been something like *Wiel (Dutch still retains "wiel").
|
| The evidence for a shared root for wheel goes much much
| farther back than the split between English and German. The
| Proto-Indo-Euopean root was something like *kwekwlos, which
| gives Germanic *hwel (> English wheel), Greek kyklos/cycle,
| Sanskrit cakra, all according to regular sound changes. So
| it goes back all the way to the split between these
| languages.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Wow, I am an absolute layperson, only having listened to
| the History of English podcast before from where I get
| some minor context, but I find the whole of linguistics
| so interesting. Thank you for sharing these details!
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > Could these words not have been derived somewhat later
| independently
|
| That would require that the independent languages
| maintained the exact same derivational process of
| reduplication + zero-grade ablaut in the root. We know from
| the attested history of IE language that derivational
| processes last only for a while before they die out. That
| independent languages maintained that particular
| derivational process (which is inseparable from historical-
| phonological developments, too) for thousands and thousands
| of years, is extremely unlikely, which is just one of the
| many pieces of evidence against the Anatolian hypothesis.
| Archelaos wrote:
| But could not a horizontal process between already
| separated languages/dialects smoothed that out by
| adapting the incorporated term to its host language, so
| that the date of the general phonetic bifurcations of two
| languages and the history of a lot of their vocabulary
| might be very distinct?
|
| I am thinking of such cases as certain Anglicisms that
| were phonetically adapted when they were incorporated
| into German. For example the English term "password" is
| in the process to replace German "Kennwort", but its
| final consonant is adjusted to German "Wort" as
| "Passwort". So phonetically "Passwort" and "Wort" vs.
| "password" and "word" seem to share the very same
| derivational process, while their actual history of
| adaptation is quite distinct.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| As I said, the derivational process we find here is a
| very specific one involving reduplication and zero-grade
| ablaut of the root. If we look at the documented history
| of the Indo-European languages, both reduplication and
| ablaut had already become subject to erosion, or even
| total loss. It is just not realistic for those two things
| to have survived (and, in this particular derivational
| process, to survive in sync!) for thousands and thousands
| of years.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| You might be interested in 'The Horse, the Wheel, and
| Language': https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780
| 691148182/th...
| biorach wrote:
| Excellent book
| guerrilla wrote:
| I'm reading Colin Renfew's (outdated) book on the Anatolian
| hypothesis. From what I understood, Renfew had already conceded
| that he was wrong* and that Maria Gimbutas was right about Steppe
| hypothesis (but not the matriarchal character of the pre-Indo-
| European cultures.) So it surprises me to see that anyone would
| still be taking Anatolian hypothesis seriously. Did Renfew have
| follows that did not give it up when he did?
|
| Anyway, the thing about this new research is that it'll depend on
| whether people accept this methodology or not. It's not clear to
| me that people will form a consensus on that any time soon
| because historically methodology is a central part of _why_
| people disagree about this in the first place. In fact, as
| another commenter below mentions, this methodology assumes an
| identification of genes and language-speakers which has been
| explicitly and heavily criticized in this area before and I think
| the consensus is that that is invalid.
|
| * It doesn't surprise me. The positive arguments in this book are
| very weak.
| mantas wrote:
| Regarding ,,matriarchal character", what Marija Gumbutiene
| wrote and how postmodernist society nowadays is
| (mis)interpreting her writing is very different. It wasn't
| ,,matriarchal" as in ruled-by-women. Instead, those societies
| were glorifying maternity (and women) through and through.
|
| Which is funny when modern feminists try to glorify Gimbutiene
| and those societies. While doing exactly opposite to what those
| societies were doing.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Yes, I and Renfew know that but he still disagreed with her
| as do many other anthropoligists.
|
| I just read a book by a feminist, Karin Bojs, who concludes
| basically* what you just said but I don't think she'd
| appreciate your overheneralized jab at feminists.
|
| * Her thesis is that those societies valued women's work
| which included pottery and textiles in addition to maternity
| while the later IE societies were overtly patriarchical.
| Personally I don't think there's enough evidence for anyone's
| position on this and I'm fine not knowing for now.
| mantas wrote:
| My stab was more at people who ain't anthropologists and
| just take whatever they can fit into their fantasies.
|
| I'm not so sure about not valuing women work though. Home
| goods and arts (fairytales, singing etc) etc were valued
| for a loooong time. And virtually all IE cultures looove
| nice items. Heirloom traditions and alll that jazz. I'd
| argue only industrial revolution changed that. Although
| more war-oriented man-first cultures popped up all the
| time. It looks like ultimately they'd conquer Gimbutiene's
| Old Europe. But maternal tradition would survive to big
| extent. Raiding warriors ain't raising kids. And they have
| damn hard time controlling how women back home raise the
| next generation. It's on women to form and propagate the
| culture.
|
| Well, till recent era. When women are out there raiding the
| job market and men spend unbelievable amount of time with
| their offsprings. On the other hand, women have upper hand
| in public education system which is #1 by time spent with
| the next generation.
| mrangle wrote:
| The key to clickbait articles is not to provide one click
| access to methodology, if any at all.
| joh234p2342343 wrote:
| India twitter is laughing it rear-side off.
|
| For years, the Europeans 'scholars' have dogmatically asserted
| that 'Aryans' were European. That Indian culture, and thus all of
| its achievements were brought in by the 'mighty European white-
| skinned warriors' who 'by their grace' not only conquered them
| violently, but also 'graciously' brought everything valuable in
| Indian civilization, which of course was then 'corrupted' by the
| despicable dark-skinned natives.
|
| This is the driving theology (it's derived from xtianity) in
| Indology, and behind all the misappropriation of India culture
| that happens to this day (though they'll never admit it openly).
|
| This was then used to justify not only colonization, but also to
| simultaneously destroy India's culture by the proselytizers to
| nullify opposition (aka 'harvest'). The damage to consciousness
| is so great that indeed, it's routine in India's filthy politics
| to hear people asking 'Brahmins & Aryas' even today (code for
| 'Hindus') to either be genocided or be sent back to Volga (for
| ref. this has happened in 2022, 2023, by some of the West's
| chosen 'liberal' crowd). Unsurprisingly, the only solution
| 'Indologists' offer for India today is no less than genociding
| all 'evil Brahmins'.
|
| Of course, there was/is, like all 'xtian-white-supremacist'
| 'academic consensus' by the 'enlightened crowd', next to no
| archaeological evidence; the linguistic evidence was always
| flimsy at best; the genetic evidence has always remained nebulous
| (and doesn't really track language/culture in any case).
|
| Quite amusing today to see the homeland now moved to Iran,
| solidly back to Asia, though still at the extremities of
| historical Indo-Aryan memory (in Rg. Veda / Avesta).
|
| A bit pre-mature, but still, Yay!
|
| Now all those jack-asses in neo-Nazis (and those hateful
| genocide-mongering Indologists) who go around talking about
| 'Indo-European Aryan' peoples with all the implicit Nazi
| background theories can go pound sand about how all their '300'
| fantasies fell apart.
|
| Ofc. they still want to see India's native culture destroyed,
| much like the Xtians did to Europe's own native culture. We'll
| see how all this will fare in a few hundred years (signs are not
| good).
|
| Jaya Isis!
|
| (Isis is the goddess of knowledge.)
| biorach wrote:
| > For years, the Europeans 'scholars' have dogmatically
| asserted that 'Aryans' were European. That Indian culture, and
| thus all of its achievements were brought in by the 'mighty
| European white-skinned warriors' who 'by their grace' not only
| conquered them violently, but also 'graciously' brought
| everything valuable in Indian civilization, which of course was
| then 'corrupted' by the despicable dark-skinned natives.
|
| That is not what Western science claims. You seem to be
| describing a garbled version of some junk pseudo history that
| the Nazis spouted decades ago but that is not at all
| representative of any reputable modern science
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Despite your best attempts to skim-read and then cake a Hindu-
| nationalist veneer on it, what you're saying is not even close
| to what this article is saying, even if it were correct. No
| serious scholar argues for an origin of the the language tree
| in the subcontinent or Iran.
|
| Also nobody other than Nazis calls the Aryans "European";
|
| The origin of the Indo-European language family tree is from
| the Pontic-Caspian steppe region; what is today southeastern
| Ukraine and southern Russia, roughly from the Dniepro to the
| Volga. The "Aryans" (really multiple names and multiple
| peoples) were people who moved eastwards from there, carrying
| early Indo-Iranian languages with them. (Over a 1000+ year
| history, winding their way eastwards across central Asia, so
| I'm not sure how you could spin that as "European")
| qersist3nce wrote:
| There is also a micro-aggression against Iranians by fringe
| communities of Europe/US and even our Arab/Turk neighbors! They
| somehow think that the name of Iran is "fake" or "manufactured"
| in 1930s! at the request of Hitler [1].
|
| While we literally have attestations in government letters (in
| almost every century prior to 20th), local literature and
| population awareness of the continuity of the freaking name of
| the country but somehow they completely ignore it.
|
| They also frequently use the word "Aryan" as a derogatory/fake
| term for Iranians and say "why you don't look like white
| Europeans if you claim to be Aryan".
|
| [1]: https://www.les-crises.fr/l-origine-nazie-du-nom-de-liran-
| un...
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| I don't think the Aryan invasion theory was appropriate to
| justify colonization, but I'm also not sure this constitutes
| evidence against it. In any case, Sanskrit is far more archaic
| than Hittite, and even with the genetic evidence it doesn't
| make sense that Hittite would precede the Indo-aryan languages.
|
| The Bhagavad Gita is quite clear about the cultures of the old
| Aryan peoples. They were nomadic, cowherding peoples, who were
| highly patriarchal, that valued prowess in battle and the
| ability to kill your enemies ruthlessly, even if they were
| members of your own family. They were probably white because
| Tocharian speakers in western China are depicted in cave
| painting as having blond hair and blue eyes[0], a group of
| people who completely split off the rest of the Indo-European
| tribal peoples well before they entered the subcontinent.
|
| Is Nazi race science as a justification for brutal genocide and
| the destruction of labor organizing something I agree with? No,
| but the Nazis understood that anyone can spin a story to
| justify any political regime, and that whoever is in power is
| constantly inventing their own histories to justify their
| power. None of these things are very meaningful, in the end.
| Language, culture, and history is far more diverse than the
| question of Yamnaya genetics.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages#/media/Fil
| ...
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| > The Bhagavad Gita is quite clear about the cultures of the
| old Aryan peoples. They were nomadic, cowherding peoples, who
| were highly patriarchal, that valued prowess in battle and
| the ability to kill your enemies ruthlessly, even if they
| were members of your own family.
|
| Not this again. This is an old missionaries tale. There are
| descriptions of large cities and palaces in Mahabharata (of
| which Gita is part). Nomads don't construct palaces and large
| cities. Also, the Gita is about duty to preserve good not
| killing. (A few months ago I debunked a similar comment on
| this site lol)
|
| https://vedicfeed.com/places-mentioned-in-mahabharata/
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