6 ms·

Tocharian Languages

137 points by fer 4y ago

danans 4y ago
There has long been an unproven hypothesis that an ancestor of Tocharian was spoken by the people of the Tarim Basin mummies [1]. The mummies appear to have a mixture of ancestry from West, South, and East Asia, but there is nothing beyond conjecture to link them to the Tocharian languages, which are only attested several thousand years later than the mummies were interred. Tocharian itself is an Indo European language, but despite its written remains being largely Buddhist translations from Sanskrit (another Indo European language) in a Brahmic script, it isn't particularly closely related to Sanskritic languages, nor to Western Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, Germanic, Slavic). It has a very different nominal case system than Indo-European languages of similar antiquity [2], and is thought to be an early offshoot from Proto Indo European, similar (and perhaps contemporary) to Hittite. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages#Nouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages#Nouns
- turndown 4y ago
  Last year the Tarim Basin mummies were sequenced and the findings go against the idea they were Tocharians[0]. Still, an absolutely fascinating topic and I recommend reading about Indo-European to anyone interested in linguistics(or programming languages) just because the ideas used and what can be gleaned from them are very interesting. 0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04052-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04052-7
  - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
    Tocharian is a language, we don't know who the "Tocharians" were as the linked paper explains in the abstract (and then somewhat ignores). Strictly speaking we don't even know if they were one ethnicity, the Tarim Basin has always been a melting pot and even during the time of the Tocharian manuscripts there were already Sogdians (Iranians), Han Chinese and others living and trading there. There also isn't really evidence that the mummies are directly linked to the later Tocharian speakers of the texts in the first place. They may be or may be not. It should be noted that research in this field is extremely politicized within China even by local standards. The finding isn't surprising in the sense that this is what the official narrative is, so they found what they were looking for. Uyghurs, who don't have a local origin, claim the mummies as their ancestors but the Chinese state strongly denies this. There may be something to that story as it's generally assumed they intermixed with the local population when they settled there. When you visit the museum in Urumqi you're greeted by a sign claiming the area had always been Chinese. If we assume a Western hypothesis, it's also possible that the mummy genes are "local" but the language isn't, if we were to assume the study findings are correct. There are dozens of other possibilities.
    - danans 4y ago
      > Tocharian is a language, we don't know who the "Tocharians" were as the linked paper explains in the abstract We do know that the Tocharians were a people [1], as they were identified as such by writings in Sanskrit, Greek, and Persian. But the Tocharian language is too late (400-1200CE) to make any connection to the Tarim mummies, which date to 1800BC. However, the Tocharian language has distinctive features that suggest that it branched at a very early date (3000BC [1]) from the other Indo European languages, which would put its "origin" date far earlier than its attestation date, and possibly (though not provably) associated with the Tarim mummies. The signals point both ways, and as you say, this was a diverse part of the world in ancient times, so it's impossible to know what language they spoke given current evidence. They could just as well have been multilingual. > It should be noted that research in this field is extremely politicized within China even by local standards. Yeah, this is very unfortunate, but common across Asia as countries form post-colonial national identities, but in doing so force complex questions about history and human migrations into the service of very simplistic nationalist identity narratives. You see this particularly in India, where the nationalists in power reject (without basis) the entire notion that the Indo-European languages originated in Central Asia (i.e. Yamnaya culture). This is of course not to excuse the biases of colonial scholarship, which had its own serious problems in how it characterized linguistic and archaeological discoveries, allowing them them to be pushed into service of colonial nationalist narratives. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites#/media/File:Indo-European_expansions.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites#/media/File:Indo-Euro...
      - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
        >Müller's identification became a minority position among scholars when it turned out that the people of Tokharistan (Bactria) spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language, which is quite distinct from the Tocharian languages. Nevertheless, "Tocharian" remained the standard term for the languages of the Tarim Basin manuscripts and for the people who produced them.[11][16] A few scholars argue that the Yuezhi were originally speakers of Tocharian who later adopted the Bactrian language. And so forth. Not that Wikipedia is a reliable source in the first place but your link mentions a couple of competing theories, showing that we don't know - since all of it is speculation and unproven. Languages can be shared by people of different ethnicities. Many Europeans wrote texts in Latin and Greek despite being neither. To be clear I completely agree with you regarding the language, which is well studied thanks to the many preserved texts. We just don't know much about the people, even the name that was given to them was retroactively made up.
- bradrn 4y ago
  > … it isn't particularly closely related to Sanskritic languages, nor to Western Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, Germanic, Slavic). This is actually an interesting and rather subtle point! The IE languages are usually divided into two groups: the *centum and *satem languages. Originally PIE had three different kinds of plosive phonemes, usually notated *k *ḱ *kʷ; centum descendants such as Latin and Germanic merged PIE *ḱ into *k while leaving *kʷ separate, whereas satem descendants such as Slavic and Indo–Iranian languages merged *kʷ into *k while leaving *ḱ separate. You may note that this seems very much like an east/west division, with centum languages in the west and satem languages in the east. It was thus proposed that PIE split early on into two languages, one of which underwent centumisation and the other satemisation. However, the discovery of Tocharian changed this situation: Tocharian was the easternmost of all early IE languages, yet was a centum language! Thus, the theory had to be abandoned. We now think that neither centum nor satem languages form particularly closely-related groups; rather, the various groups each independently underwent centumisation or satemisation, though probably with some influence from neighbouring languages too.
  - danans 4y ago
    > rather, the various groups each independently underwent centumisation or satemisation, Yeah, just as Romance languages themselves later converted /k/ to /s/ when it came before /e/ or /i/.
    - nirimda 4y ago
      That is not an independent undergoing of centumisation or satemisation. The terms specifically relate to the development of the three PIE velars. "Satemisation" is not simply a synonym for "velar palatalisation"; it means the the language is a PIE language that merged *k *kʷ but kept *ḱ distinct at some critical threshold. All Romance languages are centum languages on the other hand because they treat *k and *ḱ the same (palatalising both before front vowels without consideration of its origin) but *kʷ was distinct (even if nowadays the labialisation is often dropped, so that que is pronounced /ke/ - but it is clear that it was treated distinctly from *k which would have been palatalised in that context).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
AbrahamParangi 4y ago
One question that I am interested in (and one that probably doesn’t have a definitive answer) is why Europe retained a relatively high degree of diversity compared to China over the last 4000 years. Further reading for anyone also curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_East_Asians https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_East_Asia...
- colordrops 4y ago
  What's your definition of "diversity" here?
  - AbrahamParangi 4y ago
    Fairly equivalently, why is Europe comprised of 44 countries but China is one country? 4000 years ago China and Europe did not look so different from each other! They both contained a mix of early centralized kingdoms, pastoralists, nomads, etc. and they both had a great diversity of people living in the region. However their evolution is very different.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - bayesian_horse 4y ago
      I'd say this is more of an accident than the result of any root cause. Also you are already picking China as a single state, instead of the entire East or Southeast of Asia.
    - peterfirefly 4y ago
      A large part of Europe was a single "country", namely the Roman Empire. What is currently China is arguably China + Tibet + Xinjiang + parts of Mongolia + parts of Korea + parts of whatever Heilongjiang/Jilin/Manchuria should be called. China (including China proper) has occasionally broken up into multiple polities. One could also argue that the European Union kinda, sorta constitutes a single "country". One that would become an instant superpower if we who live there wanted it to be... But, on the whole, Europe tends to be more fragmented than China. I'd say the geography has a lot to do with it. China has a couple of big rivers that are well-suited for long-distance travel. Europe doesn't. Europe is also a peninsula of peninsulas, often with mountains (Pyrenees, Alps) going across where one peninsula is attached to the next.
mdturnerphys 4y ago
Victor Mair, who is heavily cited on the Wikipedia page, has a large number of posts about Tocharian on the Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=tocharian https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=tocharian
gumby 4y ago
I’m fascinated that pronunciation shifts and even stress can be reconstructed from written texts of an extinct language. How is that possible?
- gostsamo 4y ago
  Just a conjecture, but poems have rhythm rules and if two words are supposed to rhyme, you can guess where the stress should be. Not sure how it is done in reality though.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  Mostly from rhyme and rhythm structures. Also the Brahmic scripts seem to be entirely phonetic, so you'd notice significant changes anyway.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  we have checksums; older traditions protected against channel noise with poetic stuctures. (incidentally, the WP article claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmic_scripts#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmic_scripts#Characteristic... had an influence on japanese katakana/hiragana; I wonder how much influence they had —perhaps indirectly, via phonetics?— on the varied western shorthand systems, not to mention Shavian)
- talideon 4y ago
  The comparative method is how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method
haunter 4y ago
>Michaël Peyrot argues that several of the most striking typological peculiarities of Tocharian are rooted in a prolonged contact of Proto-Tocharian with an early stage of Proto-Samoyedic in South Siberia >Some modern Chinese words may ultimately derive from a Tocharian or related source, e.g. Old Chinese mjit (蜜; mì) "honey", from Proto-Tocharian ḿət(ə) Wouldn’t be surprised that cause honey in modern Uralic languages are also very similar. Méz in Hungarian, mesi in Estonian.
- bayesian_horse 4y ago
  Most important rule in linguistics: Follow the honey.
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    ... and to protect the identity of the bear that told you to follow the honey, (while preserving journalistic integrity about not fictionalising sources) never refer to it in print by its proper name, but use an obvious pseudonym, such as "honey-eater"
- mokenator 4y ago
  Also in Slavic languages mȇd.
  - throw_pm23 4y ago
    Also English "mead" for something closely related.
- peterfirefly 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderwort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderwort
  - paganel 4y ago
    Honey is different compared to oranges and tea (presented as examples in that wiki article) because, presumably, the old Chinese populations were also having access to honey and producing it and, as such, they should have had a name for it. On the other hand Europeans didn't have direct access to stuff like oranges and tea until the transport links happen starting with the 16th century.
KhoomeiK 4y ago
I love how historical linguistics, archaeogenetics, and anthropology posts make it to the front page of HN every once in a while. Is this interest all because of Sapiens? Or did Sapiens do well in the ~HN/Silicon Valley community because of some other underlying reason?
- travisgriggs 4y ago
  I clicked to verify my guess that Tocharian languages were indeed linguistic, and not some esoteric branch of computing languages that I might need to know about in some future l33t interview.
- culebron21 4y ago
  If you're curious to science and how things work, you're also curious about how things work in other sciences. And it's beneficial. Knowing linguistics, antropology or sociology (or about Khoomei singing, which is mentioned in your username) is helpful to stop thinking like "here's how I see X, so everyone should do Y in such and such a way".
- danans 4y ago
  > Or did Sapiens do well in the ~HN/Silicon Valley community because of some other underlying reason? The knowledge gained from the study of historical linguistics, and from there the structure of natural language itself, was foundational to the creation of formal language theory, and from there the creation of the programming languages that we use today, which would not exist if not for the creation of generative grammars. In that sense, there is a very direct link (down to specific people like Noam Chomsky who researched both natural language and computation) between natural linguistics and computer science.
college_physics 4y ago
Homo sapiens seems like a language creating factory. Two nearby valleys and they already mutually not intelligible. But is this a lost art? Is there any recent new language or have we moved to an era of language oligarchy?
- dmulligan 4y ago
  I grew up in Greater Manchester, a heavily-industrialised part of the UK, where locally the main industries were at one time coal mining and cotton milling. Members of my family worked in cotton mills, and the machines were so deafening that normal communication was impossible. Consequently, mill workers invented their own forms of communication, which mixed hand signals, exaggerated lip movement, and shouting, which was locally called "meemawing". This communication form was specific to each mill, and workers moving between mills would have to relearn the mill-specific dialect to be able to meemaw with their colleagues.
  - college_physics 4y ago
    This is fascinating (and depressing of course from a quality of worker life perspective). I can imagine that if it would be somehow integrated in a theatrical play it would make for a very moving / haunting experience.
- kibwen 4y ago
  In the past, languages arose because of a lack of communication between different populations. These days every large population can easily communicate with itself, which destroys this avenue for new language creation. However, new dialects of existing languages still arise, and will continue to arise, usually driven by young people seeking to create a distinct culture from their uncool elders. For example, see any Twitch-aware teen and try to decipher half of what they're saying; is "monkaS" in your vocabulary?
- culebron21 4y ago
  The example you give is so-called primary dialects -- those that stay in place for 1000 years or more, and become very different. These are dialects in Europe, except for areas like Poland, where many people were displaced in WW2. There are also so-called secondary dialects. They appear where area is colonized, people from different dialects mix together, and differences disappear. But then they start developing. This is what happens in Latin America. In Russia, primary dialects are in the Western part, but east of Nizhni Novgorod they end, because Russia got those territories only after year 1500. In LA, people mostly settled 2-3 centuries ago, and differences are already big. Brasilians already can tell origins of each other by accent and vocabulary (they were puzzled by my accent and asked which state I'm from). USSR moved a lot of people across the country quite recently, and yet differences between regions appear and are developing. To test if there's oligarchy, we should probably measure whether European Portuguese is converging with Brasilian because of media and the amount of cultural content Brasilians produce. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet they don't. I saw a public person speculate that small national languages will disappear soon. But that's just not true. First phase of language dissapearance is when natives switch to another one in some areas -- like court, school or science -- and feel normal discussing school or law matters in the "colonial" language. Then it may lose more areas of use, shrink to home usage, and then be lost, because kids want to use the more socially prestigious language, rather their mother tongue. But this only happens to languages of minorities smaller than 1M speakers in bigger countries.

137 points by fer 4y ago

There has long been an unproven hypothesis that an ancestor of Tocharian was spoken by the people of the Tarim Basin mummies [1]. The mummies appear to have a mixture of ancestry from West, South, and East Asia, but there is nothing beyond conjecture to link them to the Tocharian languages, which are only attested several thousand years later than the mummies were interred. Tocharian itself is an Indo European language, but despite its written remains being largely Buddhist translations from Sanskrit (another Indo European language) in a Brahmic script, it isn't particularly closely related to Sanskritic languages, nor to Western Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, Germanic, Slavic). It has a very different nominal case system than Indo-European languages of similar antiquity [2], and is thought to be an early offshoot from Proto Indo European, similar (and perhaps contemporary) to Hittite. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages#Nouns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages#Nouns

turndown 4y ago
Last year the Tarim Basin mummies were sequenced and the findings go against the idea they were Tocharians[0]. Still, an absolutely fascinating topic and I recommend reading about Indo-European to anyone interested in linguistics(or programming languages) just because the ideas used and what can be gleaned from them are very interesting. 0. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04052-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04052-7
- trompetenaccoun 4y ago
  Tocharian is a language, we don't know who the "Tocharians" were as the linked paper explains in the abstract (and then somewhat ignores). Strictly speaking we don't even know if they were one ethnicity, the Tarim Basin has always been a melting pot and even during the time of the Tocharian manuscripts there were already Sogdians (Iranians), Han Chinese and others living and trading there. There also isn't really evidence that the mummies are directly linked to the later Tocharian speakers of the texts in the first place. They may be or may be not. It should be noted that research in this field is extremely politicized within China even by local standards. The finding isn't surprising in the sense that this is what the official narrative is, so they found what they were looking for. Uyghurs, who don't have a local origin, claim the mummies as their ancestors but the Chinese state strongly denies this. There may be something to that story as it's generally assumed they intermixed with the local population when they settled there. When you visit the museum in Urumqi you're greeted by a sign claiming the area had always been Chinese. If we assume a Western hypothesis, it's also possible that the mummy genes are "local" but the language isn't, if we were to assume the study findings are correct. There are dozens of other possibilities.
  - danans 4y ago
    > Tocharian is a language, we don't know who the "Tocharians" were as the linked paper explains in the abstract We do know that the Tocharians were a people [1], as they were identified as such by writings in Sanskrit, Greek, and Persian. But the Tocharian language is too late (400-1200CE) to make any connection to the Tarim mummies, which date to 1800BC. However, the Tocharian language has distinctive features that suggest that it branched at a very early date (3000BC [1]) from the other Indo European languages, which would put its "origin" date far earlier than its attestation date, and possibly (though not provably) associated with the Tarim mummies. The signals point both ways, and as you say, this was a diverse part of the world in ancient times, so it's impossible to know what language they spoke given current evidence. They could just as well have been multilingual. > It should be noted that research in this field is extremely politicized within China even by local standards. Yeah, this is very unfortunate, but common across Asia as countries form post-colonial national identities, but in doing so force complex questions about history and human migrations into the service of very simplistic nationalist identity narratives. You see this particularly in India, where the nationalists in power reject (without basis) the entire notion that the Indo-European languages originated in Central Asia (i.e. Yamnaya culture). This is of course not to excuse the biases of colonial scholarship, which had its own serious problems in how it characterized linguistic and archaeological discoveries, allowing them them to be pushed into service of colonial nationalist narratives. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharians 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites#/media/File:Indo-European_expansions.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittites#/media/File:Indo-Euro...
    - trompetenaccoun 4y ago
      >Müller's identification became a minority position among scholars when it turned out that the people of Tokharistan (Bactria) spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language, which is quite distinct from the Tocharian languages. Nevertheless, "Tocharian" remained the standard term for the languages of the Tarim Basin manuscripts and for the people who produced them.[11][16] A few scholars argue that the Yuezhi were originally speakers of Tocharian who later adopted the Bactrian language. And so forth. Not that Wikipedia is a reliable source in the first place but your link mentions a couple of competing theories, showing that we don't know - since all of it is speculation and unproven. Languages can be shared by people of different ethnicities. Many Europeans wrote texts in Latin and Greek despite being neither. To be clear I completely agree with you regarding the language, which is well studied thanks to the many preserved texts. We just don't know much about the people, even the name that was given to them was retroactively made up.
bradrn 4y ago
> … it isn't particularly closely related to Sanskritic languages, nor to Western Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, Germanic, Slavic). This is actually an interesting and rather subtle point! The IE languages are usually divided into two groups: the *centum and *satem languages. Originally PIE had three different kinds of plosive phonemes, usually notated *k *ḱ *kʷ; centum descendants such as Latin and Germanic merged PIE *ḱ into *k while leaving *kʷ separate, whereas satem descendants such as Slavic and Indo–Iranian languages merged *kʷ into *k while leaving *ḱ separate. You may note that this seems very much like an east/west division, with centum languages in the west and satem languages in the east. It was thus proposed that PIE split early on into two languages, one of which underwent centumisation and the other satemisation. However, the discovery of Tocharian changed this situation: Tocharian was the easternmost of all early IE languages, yet was a centum language! Thus, the theory had to be abandoned. We now think that neither centum nor satem languages form particularly closely-related groups; rather, the various groups each independently underwent centumisation or satemisation, though probably with some influence from neighbouring languages too.
- danans 4y ago
  > rather, the various groups each independently underwent centumisation or satemisation, Yeah, just as Romance languages themselves later converted /k/ to /s/ when it came before /e/ or /i/.
  - nirimda 4y ago
    That is not an independent undergoing of centumisation or satemisation. The terms specifically relate to the development of the three PIE velars. "Satemisation" is not simply a synonym for "velar palatalisation"; it means the the language is a PIE language that merged *k *kʷ but kept *ḱ distinct at some critical threshold. All Romance languages are centum languages on the other hand because they treat *k and *ḱ the same (palatalising both before front vowels without consideration of its origin) but *kʷ was distinct (even if nowadays the labialisation is often dropped, so that que is pronounced /ke/ - but it is clear that it was treated distinctly from *k which would have been palatalised in that context).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

AbrahamParangi 4y ago

One question that I am interested in (and one that probably doesn’t have a definitive answer) is why Europe retained a relatively high degree of diversity compared to China over the last 4000 years. Further reading for anyone also curious: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_East_Asians https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_East_Asia...

colordrops 4y ago
What's your definition of "diversity" here?
- AbrahamParangi 4y ago
  Fairly equivalently, why is Europe comprised of 44 countries but China is one country? 4000 years ago China and Europe did not look so different from each other! They both contained a mix of early centralized kingdoms, pastoralists, nomads, etc. and they both had a great diversity of people living in the region. However their evolution is very different.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bayesian_horse 4y ago
    I'd say this is more of an accident than the result of any root cause. Also you are already picking China as a single state, instead of the entire East or Southeast of Asia.
  - peterfirefly 4y ago
    A large part of Europe was a single "country", namely the Roman Empire. What is currently China is arguably China + Tibet + Xinjiang + parts of Mongolia + parts of Korea + parts of whatever Heilongjiang/Jilin/Manchuria should be called. China (including China proper) has occasionally broken up into multiple polities. One could also argue that the European Union kinda, sorta constitutes a single "country". One that would become an instant superpower if we who live there wanted it to be... But, on the whole, Europe tends to be more fragmented than China. I'd say the geography has a lot to do with it. China has a couple of big rivers that are well-suited for long-distance travel. Europe doesn't. Europe is also a peninsula of peninsulas, often with mountains (Pyrenees, Alps) going across where one peninsula is attached to the next.

mdturnerphys 4y ago

Victor Mair, who is heavily cited on the Wikipedia page, has a large number of posts about Tocharian on the Language Log: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=tocharian https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/index.php?s=tocharian

gumby 4y ago

I’m fascinated that pronunciation shifts and even stress can be reconstructed from written texts of an extinct language. How is that possible?

gostsamo 4y ago
Just a conjecture, but poems have rhythm rules and if two words are supposed to rhyme, you can guess where the stress should be. Not sure how it is done in reality though.
bayesian_horse 4y ago
Mostly from rhyme and rhythm structures. Also the Brahmic scripts seem to be entirely phonetic, so you'd notice significant changes anyway.
082349872349872 4y ago
we have checksums; older traditions protected against channel noise with poetic stuctures. (incidentally, the WP article claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmic_scripts#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmic_scripts#Characteristic... had an influence on japanese katakana/hiragana; I wonder how much influence they had —perhaps indirectly, via phonetics?— on the varied western shorthand systems, not to mention Shavian)
talideon 4y ago
The comparative method is how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method

haunter 4y ago

>Michaël Peyrot argues that several of the most striking typological peculiarities of Tocharian are rooted in a prolonged contact of Proto-Tocharian with an early stage of Proto-Samoyedic in South Siberia >Some modern Chinese words may ultimately derive from a Tocharian or related source, e.g. Old Chinese mjit (蜜; mì) "honey", from Proto-Tocharian ḿət(ə) Wouldn’t be surprised that cause honey in modern Uralic languages are also very similar. Méz in Hungarian, mesi in Estonian.

bayesian_horse 4y ago
Most important rule in linguistics: Follow the honey.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  ... and to protect the identity of the bear that told you to follow the honey, (while preserving journalistic integrity about not fictionalising sources) never refer to it in print by its proper name, but use an obvious pseudonym, such as "honey-eater"
mokenator 4y ago
Also in Slavic languages mȇd.
- throw_pm23 4y ago
  Also English "mead" for something closely related.
peterfirefly 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderwort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderwort
- paganel 4y ago
  Honey is different compared to oranges and tea (presented as examples in that wiki article) because, presumably, the old Chinese populations were also having access to honey and producing it and, as such, they should have had a name for it. On the other hand Europeans didn't have direct access to stuff like oranges and tea until the transport links happen starting with the 16th century.

KhoomeiK 4y ago

I love how historical linguistics, archaeogenetics, and anthropology posts make it to the front page of HN every once in a while. Is this interest all because of Sapiens? Or did Sapiens do well in the ~HN/Silicon Valley community because of some other underlying reason?

travisgriggs 4y ago
I clicked to verify my guess that Tocharian languages were indeed linguistic, and not some esoteric branch of computing languages that I might need to know about in some future l33t interview.
culebron21 4y ago
If you're curious to science and how things work, you're also curious about how things work in other sciences. And it's beneficial. Knowing linguistics, antropology or sociology (or about Khoomei singing, which is mentioned in your username) is helpful to stop thinking like "here's how I see X, so everyone should do Y in such and such a way".
danans 4y ago
> Or did Sapiens do well in the ~HN/Silicon Valley community because of some other underlying reason? The knowledge gained from the study of historical linguistics, and from there the structure of natural language itself, was foundational to the creation of formal language theory, and from there the creation of the programming languages that we use today, which would not exist if not for the creation of generative grammars. In that sense, there is a very direct link (down to specific people like Noam Chomsky who researched both natural language and computation) between natural linguistics and computer science.

college_physics 4y ago

Homo sapiens seems like a language creating factory. Two nearby valleys and they already mutually not intelligible. But is this a lost art? Is there any recent new language or have we moved to an era of language oligarchy?

dmulligan 4y ago
I grew up in Greater Manchester, a heavily-industrialised part of the UK, where locally the main industries were at one time coal mining and cotton milling. Members of my family worked in cotton mills, and the machines were so deafening that normal communication was impossible. Consequently, mill workers invented their own forms of communication, which mixed hand signals, exaggerated lip movement, and shouting, which was locally called "meemawing". This communication form was specific to each mill, and workers moving between mills would have to relearn the mill-specific dialect to be able to meemaw with their colleagues.
- college_physics 4y ago
  This is fascinating (and depressing of course from a quality of worker life perspective). I can imagine that if it would be somehow integrated in a theatrical play it would make for a very moving / haunting experience.
kibwen 4y ago
In the past, languages arose because of a lack of communication between different populations. These days every large population can easily communicate with itself, which destroys this avenue for new language creation. However, new dialects of existing languages still arise, and will continue to arise, usually driven by young people seeking to create a distinct culture from their uncool elders. For example, see any Twitch-aware teen and try to decipher half of what they're saying; is "monkaS" in your vocabulary?
culebron21 4y ago
The example you give is so-called primary dialects -- those that stay in place for 1000 years or more, and become very different. These are dialects in Europe, except for areas like Poland, where many people were displaced in WW2. There are also so-called secondary dialects. They appear where area is colonized, people from different dialects mix together, and differences disappear. But then they start developing. This is what happens in Latin America. In Russia, primary dialects are in the Western part, but east of Nizhni Novgorod they end, because Russia got those territories only after year 1500. In LA, people mostly settled 2-3 centuries ago, and differences are already big. Brasilians already can tell origins of each other by accent and vocabulary (they were puzzled by my accent and asked which state I'm from). USSR moved a lot of people across the country quite recently, and yet differences between regions appear and are developing. To test if there's oligarchy, we should probably measure whether European Portuguese is converging with Brasilian because of media and the amount of cultural content Brasilians produce. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet they don't. I saw a public person speculate that small national languages will disappear soon. But that's just not true. First phase of language dissapearance is when natives switch to another one in some areas -- like court, school or science -- and feel normal discussing school or law matters in the "colonial" language. Then it may lose more areas of use, shrink to home usage, and then be lost, because kids want to use the more socially prestigious language, rather their mother tongue. But this only happens to languages of minorities smaller than 1M speakers in bigger countries.