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New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
- funnybusiness2 3y agoPlaying devil's advocate here: Given that there is not a shred of evidence that we have found so far that supports the idea of the existence of the Proto-Indo-European language, why are so many linguists (and researchers from other disciplines) continuing to invest in research with a firm belief/assumption that PIE ever existed? Is it because it would be a career ending move for a linguist to conduct research that assumes that PIE did not exist? We have seen this before in history where researchers are punished for researching topics that go against the leading voices in the field.
- funnybusiness2 3y agoMy question got downvoted. I wonder whose feathers I ruffled.
- jeltz 3y agoPeople who do not like pointless contrarianism like your comment.
- ashleney 3y agoWhat is your proposed theory? It is understandable to be sceptical considering the scandal that was proto-altaic, however there is evidence in form of successful reconstructions of PIE languages.
- funnybusiness2 3y agoThis brings up the topic of standard of evidence that's considered acceptable in various fields. Successful reconstruction of PIE languages is similar to mathematical derivations in theoretical physics. In physics, successful derivation of mathematical results would not be considered "evidence". Evidence is mostly limited to observed phenomenon. Linguistics as a field seems to accept reconstructions as evidence. Which is cool. But it is interesting to consider the implications of using the standard of evidence of physics as applied to Linguistics, because it would certainly weaken (not eliminate) the case for PIE. It may create space for inquiry into non-PIE-assumed theoretical work.
- angiosperm 3y agoThe existence of indo-european languages is itself ironclad evidence of the existence of a proto-indo-european language. The alternative would be that each of the populations speaking an indo-european language just made up identical vocabulary independently. Details of PIE are subject to revision based on new evidence. Its existence is not in question.
- funnybusiness2 3y agoI think what you are saying is that the existence of indo-european languages could only reasonably be explained by them having originated from a common ancestral language. I agree with you. The open question is whether this common ancestral language is the imagined / reconstructed extinct language called Proto-Indo-European that does not currently have any supporting physical evidence (cave paintings, stone carvings, Papyrus manuscripts, tablets, and whatnot) proving its existence, or is it one of the many surviving languages still spoken today? I don't think we know the answer to that question.
- angiosperm 3y agoPIE is, exactly, the name of that ancestral language. We are able to deduce many details of that language from a large amount of distributed evidence about extant languages and extinct written languages. A great many details have been elucidated from this evidence, more all the time. Sometimes new evidence leads to changes to the deduced model. It is hard to understand what you think is the difference between the ancestral language and PIE. PIE was almost certainly not a written language, so carvings or manuscripts can exist only in fantasies. We have enormous evidence of the existence of non-written languages.
- angiosperm 3y agoIt should be obvious that a non-written language from 8000 years ago would not be spoken today, just as much newer languages Latin and Sanskrit are long dead, as was Hebrew until artificially revived. Spoken Hebrew is evolving fast.
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- whatsup7123 3y agoThis is interesting. If PIE did not actually exist, what language would be the root instead? Because chronologically, there does need to be some root language that explains the patterns.
- jmclnx 3y agoSeems 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 3y agoI 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.
- mojuba 3y agoDNA analysis allows to follow migrations and with it the migrations of languages.
- Sharlin 3y agoExcept 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.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoIt helps to map migrations and thus spread of languages.
- bradrn 3y agoThere 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…)
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- guerrilla 3y agoI'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 3y agoRegarding „matriarchal character“, what Marija Gumbutienė 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 Gimbutienė and those societies. While doing exactly opposite to what those societies were doing.
- guerrilla 3y agoYes, 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 3y ago
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- bigbillheck 3y agoLanguage Log had a post on this https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=59908 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 https://twitter.com/ndyjroo/status/1684636445854875648 and, for traditionalists, was quoted in an article: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-indo-european-language-origins/ 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 3y agoHaven'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 3y agoThat'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.
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- Roark66 3y agoI 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 3y agoThat 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 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg7586
- idoubtit 3y agoWhat 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.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoWell 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.
- cco 3y agoIn 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?
- ninja-ninja 3y agoAs 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.”
- skrebbel 3y agoWhy did that surprise you, as an Armenian speaker?
- dghughes 3y ago>...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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis
- ninja-ninja 3y agoidk 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 3y agoIt'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.
- fsckboy 3y ago
- teleforce 3y agoFun 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language
- canjobear 3y agoHittite 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.
- angiosperm 3y agoFor anybody who has doubted that history can be a science, consider the issue firmly resolved.
- dmichulke 3y agoHow can you determine that a consonant was "laryngeal" (voiced?) from text?
- smitty1e 3y agoFor an interesting example using ancient Egyptian, see https://youtu.be/J-K5OjAkiEA https://youtu.be/J-K5OjAkiEA
- jfengel 3y agoLaryngeal 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.
- euroderf 3y agoIt might be interesting to see whether this affects current thinking about the plausibility of Indo-Uralic. (Probably not much, if it all.)
- abeppu 3y ago> “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.
- ekianjo 3y agoBecause people moved a lot less and much slower than now so DNA is a good proxy?
- whimsicalism 3y ago> 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 3y agoCan 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 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9145-4
- whimsicalism 3y agoSure - 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 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.
- joh234p2342343 3y ago[flagged]
- qersist3nce 3y agoThere 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-une-nouvelle-fake-news-de-bhl/ https://www.les-crises.fr/l-origine-nazie-du-nom-de-liran-un...
- DiscourseFan 3y agoI 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/File:Royal_family,_Cave_17,_Kizil_(family_detail,_retouched),_Hermitage_Museum.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages#/media/Fil...
- anon84873628 3y agoFor 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.
- tbdenney 3y ago+1 to this recommendation! I binged the entire 150+ episode series during various lockdown periods and found it fascinating. It's so well researched and despite covering some potentially very dry topics the host, Kevin Stroud, manages to weave in interesting facts that keep my attention engaged throughout. Link: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
- elevaet 3y agoThanks for the great recommendation! I can already tell I'm going to go through the whole series.
- nologic01 3y agoIts 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?
- ashleney 3y agoIt is very hard to predict how fast a language will evolve even for linguists. I'd like to recommend a video https://youtu.be/evJ_E7k1pvY https://youtu.be/evJ_E7k1pvY
- flownoon 3y agoNow do Afro-Asiatic!
- jackcosgrove 3y agoOne question I've always had about Indo-European languages is that they seem to have become less inflected over time. First off, is this true? There seems to be a loss of cases and genders as time goes by. If true, I'm sure there is some linguistic explanation as to why but I'm not aware of it. It would seem counterintuitive to me that a language would start out complex and simplify over time, but I'm sure simplicity is - for me as a native English speaker - defined as a non-gendered and mostly positional language.
- ashleney 3y agoLanguages that lose cases will replace them with adpositions which can then again develop into cases. I unfortunately can't think of any PIE languages but Hungarian has 18 cases while proto-uralic only had 6. PIE languages are currently in the process of losing cases and we can statistically expect some of them to start gaining cases again sometime in the next few millennias.
- ashleney 3y agoLanguages tend to lose grammatical features (english gender) but also gain them (english habitual tense). A common way you can see languages get complex is due to sound changes making grammar irregular (english past participles).