5 ms·

Agriculture gave rise to one of world’s most mysterious language families

50 points by infodocket 5y ago

sharmin123 5y ago
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canjobear 5y ago
I’ve never heard the term Transeurasian languages before, but it seems to be a rebranding of the Altaic languages[0]. The hypothesis that these form a real language family is viewed with extreme suspicion by modern historical linguists because the sound correspondences are not very convincing. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages
- retrac 5y ago
  Right. It's a tantalizing hypothesis. My gut feeling is that it is likely at least a few of the identified language families (particularly Turkish and Mongolic and Korean) are related. But this simply has never been demonstrated by anyone adequately to make a scientific claim. A hunch at best. There just isn't enough data. There probably will never be. As soon as you add even slight fuzziness in what constitutes a valid match, given you're dealing with thousands of words in hundreds of forms... and you're matching all of them against each other, the search space explodes and you start finding matches. Dozens. Hundreds even. A great article by programmer, amateur linguist and imaginary world creator Mark Rosenfelder goes into this in some detail: http://zompist.com/chance.htm http://zompist.com/chance.htm "How likely are chance resemblances between languages?" (Quite likely!)
  - georgecmu 5y ago
    I think this review [1] put it best: It goes without saying that an etymological dictionary of a non-existing language family is a paradoxon, to say the least. One possible way out of this is of course the conclusion that the family is after all real and that the existence of a work like this is the best proof of this fact. On the other hand, a quite different conclusion would be that there could after all be such a thing as a full scale 3-volume lexical reconstruction of a proto-language, which indeed never existed. The full scale 3-volume lexical reconstruction of a proto-language, which indeed never existed can be downloaded here.[2]. [1] https://www.academia.edu/1629982/Review_of_Sergei_Starostin_Anna_Dybo_and_Oleg_Mudrak_eds._Etymological_Dictionary_of_the_Altaic_Languages_2003_ https://www.academia.edu/1629982/Review_of_Sergei_Starostin_... [2] http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/40_Language/Starostinetymological_dictionary_of_altaic_languages.pdf http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/40_Language/Starostin...
    - ummonk 5y ago
      It’s not hard to create a fake protolanguage by focusing on borrowed terms and accidental cognates.
- culi 5y ago
  This is all mentioned in the first three paragraphs of the article btw. Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin I think the debate around it points to an interesting issue in the quest of trying to taxonomize languages. It's a similar problem faced by bacteria and fungi taxonomists. These organisms are extremely prone to horizontal gene transfer (some even use functional horizontal gene transfer as an adaptation strategy to adapt to new environments). Languages can borrow a lot from each other and trying to untangle them is always gonna take a ton of guesswork. But it's also what makes the field so interesting. It forced this type of linguistic work to be very interdisciplinary
  - mrbukkake 5y ago
    Absolutely. These debates are as old as linguistics, there was a lot of controversy in the 19th century between supporters of the tree and wave theories. It's an active area of debate now too with a lot of cross pollination between biology and linguistics. A good recent summary of the issues is Jacques and List 2019 which is available here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/CONTENT/content https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/C... The authors' application to historical linguistics of the concept of incomplete lineage sorting from population genetics I think is particularly cool
    - canjobear 5y ago
      Cool paper!
    - culi 5y ago
      Ah thank you for this. Trees and waves both seem like really useful metaphors to talk about this and undoubtedly a clearer analysis would utilize both forms of analysis in different situations
  - nanis 5y ago
    > Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin From Wikipedia: +> The original hypothesis unified only the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic groups As a Turk who has occasionally looked at stuff and occasionally tried to learn Japanese, this limited version made more sense to me. OTOH, back in the 20th century in Turkey, we had a Japanese Economics faculty member who learned Turkish very quickly and I have a Turkish friend who teaches Japanese to Turks and they both talked up the similarities, but the common origin stuff seemed to me a little too far. Searching just now, I ran into this post[1]. Leaving aside all the arguments, I am going to note that: (A) Ben dün mektubu yazdım. (B) Ben mektubu dün yazdım. (C) Mektubu ben dün yazdım. Leaving aside the permutations of emphasis introduced by dropping "I" ("ben"), those three sentences convey different meanings in Turkish and each is appropriate depending on the intended meaning the speaker wants to convey. (A) to emphasize what one did the day before, (B) to emphasize that one wrote "the letter" the day before, and (C) to emphasize that the speaker is the person who wrote the letter and did the the day before. [1]: https://community.wanikani.com/t/similarities-between-japanese-and-turkish/39583 https://community.wanikani.com/t/similarities-between-japane...
selimthegrim 5y ago
A Sprachbund (extensive borrowing) is not remotely the same as being from a common root. Interesting about millet though, I think theories about the origin of the Dravidian language family depend on words for different kinds of millet too.
- wbl 5y ago
  No, but they can be hard to tell apart!
  - imoverclocked 5y ago
    Somewhat tangentially, when you say, “no, but …” and you are actually agreeing, what is that called? I expand this in my mind to, “no, they are not the same, but …” while I would expect “yes, but …” to be the actual form of agreement.
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      I think German has a particle (doch) to alleviate this
      - karatinversion 5y ago
        Early Modern English used “nay” to reply to positive questions, and “no” to negative questions, too. And I think in French you answer a negative question positively with “si” rather than “oui”.
- ummonk 5y ago
  Yes, and the existence of regular sound changes does not prove anything, since the borrowings could have happened in antiquity.
eterevsky 5y ago
> “It’s convincing,” says Peter Bellwood, an archaeologist at ... Why are they asking an archeologist to comment on a linguistic theory?
- cyber_kinetist 5y ago
  Because those fields are incredibly interlinked, and people from archaeology/anthropology often study other fields in conjunction as well?
  - eterevsky 5y ago
    Those fields are not very related. We don't even know for sure what culture spoke Proto-Indo-European language.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ummonk 5y ago
> They focused on what Robbeets calls “culture-free” vocabulary, including words for basic items such as “field,” “pig,” and “house.” Words for such material goods often jump languages. These aren’t the terms one should be focusing on if one is actually seriously trying to prove the existence of a language family. There is nothing in this research to suggest a change to the consensus view that the Altaic languages don’t constitute a language family.
peter303 5y ago
Strangest borrowing claim I heard was that Germanic strong verbs (hence English) came from Semitic language verb forms. Columbia linguist McWhorter claims this his Story of English book.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
senorsmile 5y ago
There are a few threads in r/linguistics about this. Basically, there's no new evidence here proving Altaic (what she now wants to call transeurasian).

50 points by infodocket 5y ago

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canjobear 5y ago

I’ve never heard the term Transeurasian languages before, but it seems to be a rebranding of the Altaic languages[0]. The hypothesis that these form a real language family is viewed with extreme suspicion by modern historical linguists because the sound correspondences are not very convincing. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages

retrac 5y ago
Right. It's a tantalizing hypothesis. My gut feeling is that it is likely at least a few of the identified language families (particularly Turkish and Mongolic and Korean) are related. But this simply has never been demonstrated by anyone adequately to make a scientific claim. A hunch at best. There just isn't enough data. There probably will never be. As soon as you add even slight fuzziness in what constitutes a valid match, given you're dealing with thousands of words in hundreds of forms... and you're matching all of them against each other, the search space explodes and you start finding matches. Dozens. Hundreds even. A great article by programmer, amateur linguist and imaginary world creator Mark Rosenfelder goes into this in some detail: http://zompist.com/chance.htm http://zompist.com/chance.htm "How likely are chance resemblances between languages?" (Quite likely!)
- georgecmu 5y ago
  I think this review [1] put it best: It goes without saying that an etymological dictionary of a non-existing language family is a paradoxon, to say the least. One possible way out of this is of course the conclusion that the family is after all real and that the existence of a work like this is the best proof of this fact. On the other hand, a quite different conclusion would be that there could after all be such a thing as a full scale 3-volume lexical reconstruction of a proto-language, which indeed never existed. The full scale 3-volume lexical reconstruction of a proto-language, which indeed never existed can be downloaded here.[2]. [1] https://www.academia.edu/1629982/Review_of_Sergei_Starostin_Anna_Dybo_and_Oleg_Mudrak_eds._Etymological_Dictionary_of_the_Altaic_Languages_2003_ https://www.academia.edu/1629982/Review_of_Sergei_Starostin_... [2] http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/40_Language/Starostinetymological_dictionary_of_altaic_languages.pdf http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/40_Language/Starostin...
  - ummonk 5y ago
    It’s not hard to create a fake protolanguage by focusing on borrowed terms and accidental cognates.
culi 5y ago
This is all mentioned in the first three paragraphs of the article btw. Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin I think the debate around it points to an interesting issue in the quest of trying to taxonomize languages. It's a similar problem faced by bacteria and fungi taxonomists. These organisms are extremely prone to horizontal gene transfer (some even use functional horizontal gene transfer as an adaptation strategy to adapt to new environments). Languages can borrow a lot from each other and trying to untangle them is always gonna take a ton of guesswork. But it's also what makes the field so interesting. It forced this type of linguistic work to be very interdisciplinary
- mrbukkake 5y ago
  Absolutely. These debates are as old as linguistics, there was a lot of controversy in the 19th century between supporters of the tree and wave theories. It's an active area of debate now too with a lot of cross pollination between biology and linguistics. A good recent summary of the issues is Jacques and List 2019 which is available here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/CONTENT/content https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/C... The authors' application to historical linguistics of the concept of incomplete lineage sorting from population genetics I think is particularly cool
  - canjobear 5y ago
    Cool paper!
  - culi 5y ago
    Ah thank you for this. Trees and waves both seem like really useful metaphors to talk about this and undoubtedly a clearer analysis would utilize both forms of analysis in different situations
- nanis 5y ago
  > Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin From Wikipedia: +> The original hypothesis unified only the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic groups As a Turk who has occasionally looked at stuff and occasionally tried to learn Japanese, this limited version made more sense to me. OTOH, back in the 20th century in Turkey, we had a Japanese Economics faculty member who learned Turkish very quickly and I have a Turkish friend who teaches Japanese to Turks and they both talked up the similarities, but the common origin stuff seemed to me a little too far. Searching just now, I ran into this post[1]. Leaving aside all the arguments, I am going to note that: (A) Ben dün mektubu yazdım. (B) Ben mektubu dün yazdım. (C) Mektubu ben dün yazdım. Leaving aside the permutations of emphasis introduced by dropping "I" ("ben"), those three sentences convey different meanings in Turkish and each is appropriate depending on the intended meaning the speaker wants to convey. (A) to emphasize what one did the day before, (B) to emphasize that one wrote "the letter" the day before, and (C) to emphasize that the speaker is the person who wrote the letter and did the the day before. [1]: https://community.wanikani.com/t/similarities-between-japanese-and-turkish/39583 https://community.wanikani.com/t/similarities-between-japane...

selimthegrim 5y ago

A Sprachbund (extensive borrowing) is not remotely the same as being from a common root. Interesting about millet though, I think theories about the origin of the Dravidian language family depend on words for different kinds of millet too.

wbl 5y ago
No, but they can be hard to tell apart!
- imoverclocked 5y ago
  Somewhat tangentially, when you say, “no, but …” and you are actually agreeing, what is that called? I expand this in my mind to, “no, they are not the same, but …” while I would expect “yes, but …” to be the actual form of agreement.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    I think German has a particle (doch) to alleviate this
    - karatinversion 5y ago
      Early Modern English used “nay” to reply to positive questions, and “no” to negative questions, too. And I think in French you answer a negative question positively with “si” rather than “oui”.
ummonk 5y ago
Yes, and the existence of regular sound changes does not prove anything, since the borrowings could have happened in antiquity.

eterevsky 5y ago

> “It’s convincing,” says Peter Bellwood, an archaeologist at ... Why are they asking an archeologist to comment on a linguistic theory?

cyber_kinetist 5y ago
Because those fields are incredibly interlinked, and people from archaeology/anthropology often study other fields in conjunction as well?
- eterevsky 5y ago
  Those fields are not very related. We don't even know for sure what culture spoke Proto-Indo-European language.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ummonk 5y ago

> They focused on what Robbeets calls “culture-free” vocabulary, including words for basic items such as “field,” “pig,” and “house.” Words for such material goods often jump languages. These aren’t the terms one should be focusing on if one is actually seriously trying to prove the existence of a language family. There is nothing in this research to suggest a change to the consensus view that the Altaic languages don’t constitute a language family.

peter303 5y ago

Strangest borrowing claim I heard was that Germanic strong verbs (hence English) came from Semitic language verb forms. Columbia linguist McWhorter claims this his Story of English book.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

senorsmile 5y ago

There are a few threads in r/linguistics about this. Basically, there's no new evidence here proving Altaic (what she now wants to call transeurasian).