7 ms·

Can someone smarter than me explain how it's even possible to use DNA to identify the origin of a language, given that e.g. if this were tried with a language l

Can someone smarter than me explain how it's even possible to use DNA to identify the origin of a language, given that e.g. if this were tried with a language like German (or maybe any Western European language) the puzzle would look very confusing and is not DNA based.

sampton 2y ago
Writings on artifacts and burial practices associated with DNA fragments found at the burial sites.
- DC-3 2y ago
  This study is about prehistoric Steppe peoples, there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time.
  - teleforce 2y ago
    > there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time That's a very negative presumptions. How about the oldest attestation of Indo-European language or the long extinct language Hittite who once lived in Bronze age Anatolian Steppe? 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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language
    - fvvybfbfbyg 2y ago
      So? What about the Hittites? There is a slight gap between 1700 BC and 4500 BC.
      - philwelch 2y ago
        Prior to the discovery of the Hittite language, linguists had compared the various Indo-European languages they knew of and did much of the work of reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language based on comparative linguistics. This work was highly conjectural, but it provided something akin to a falsifiable theory that could be tested by the discovery of another written Indo-European language. Such a language was Hittite, and the Hittite language fits the model of Indo-European languages that had been constructed prior to its discovery.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - canjobear 2y ago
      The Proto-Indo-European language is usually dated to something like 6000 years ago, well before any writing.
    - kragen 2y ago
      That is about 2500 years after the period we're discussing, and in a region conventionally considered to be on a different continent. It isn't a mere presumption that the Kurgan culture didn't have writing; archaeologists have been looking for it diligently for more than a century and have found extensive collections of well-preserved grave goods, but no writing. Writing was invented about 1000 years later in Sumeria, probably in Egypt, and possibly in South America, but not in the Lower Volga homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. (The North American and Chinese inventions of writing seem to have been independent, but were another 2000 years later still.) The Hittites adopted the Sumerian form of writing; they did not bring a writing system with them from the Volga. Neither did other Indo-European groups have writing, which is why Hittite is, as you say, the oldest attested Indo-European language.
      - adrian_b 2y ago
        The Hittite documents, besides recording several Indo-European languages from the same (Anatolian) branch of the Indo-European language family, also record some fragments from an Indic language, making that the older attestation from another Indo-European branch than that of the Hittites. (The next attested Indo-European branch is Mycenaean Greek). That Indic language was the language of some group of people who at some point in time, perhaps after a war victory, had become the main members of the elites who ruled Mitanni, a Southern neighbor of the Hittites, located mostly in present Syria, where most inhabitants were speaking Hurrian, a non-Indo-European language. Those Indic-speaking people were renowned as expert horse trainers, so the quotes from their language were encountered in Hittite documents about horse training. Most known data is consistent with an older migration towards South Asia of the people speaking Indic languages, who had gone both towards East, reaching India, and towards West, reaching as far as Syria, where they entered in contact with the Hittites and other related populations, who had migrated towards South at an even earlier date and through a different path, reaching present Turkey. The Indic migration has been followed much later by a migration on the same path of people speaking the closely related Iranian languages, who have reached the present territories of Iran, Afghanistan, Tadjikistan, forming the ancient Persian empires, after various conquests. The people whom we now name Hittites used another name for themselves, and they called Hittites a non-Indo-European population, who were the former inhabitants of the territory ruled by what we call Hittites.
macleginn 2y ago
The story with the Indo-Europeans is basically as follows: 1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European languages using comparative phonetics we can try and reconstruct the words of the proto-IE language, both their approximate sounds and approximate meanings. This gives us some information about the society. E.g., the PIE language very likely had a word for wheel, which puts the common PIE community in the period after the wheel was invented. Other words can help us guess what landscape the PIE people lived in, and it has been generally assumed for almost a century now that it strongly resembles Southeastern Europe, essentially the Ukrainian steppe. Two alternative hypotheses (modern-day Turkey and the area to the north, in modern-day Poland/Ukraine) had different drawbacks. We can also look at the locations of the earliest historically attested IE groups (Europe, Middle East, Punjab, Anatolia) and try and guess where they all may have had come from, given the time frame. 2. By looking at the descriptions of the earliest IE societies (first of all the society of Rig-Veda), we can try and guess what way of life these people had. We can then look at all the archaeological cultures in the roughly appropriate area from the roughly appropriate time frame and see which of those have features of interest (in the IE case, warrior-like culture with social stratification, etc.). 3. We know that IE migrated a lot and provided a lot of genetic material to modern populations in Europe and some other regions. Since quite recently, by looking at palaeo-DNA data from the remains of the people who belonged to these cultures, we can try and check who of them made the biggest contribution to contemporary populations. All these sources of data are rather imprecise, but if you combine them all together and see a clear pattern, this looks rather convincing.
- FlyingSnake 2y ago
  > the society of Rig-Veda I fail to understand how the Rigvedic society can be connected to this DNA research. Rigveda never mentions anything beyond the Punjab/Swat/Haryana region in any of the hymns. The flora and fauna mentioned in it is also exclusive to this region. Lastly there is no mention of an ancient homeland both in Rigveda and Avesta.
  - flir 2y ago
    I believe there's some stuff around burial practices that parallels some steppe practices. Something about horses and mound construction, I think? Here we go: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers-of-the-steppes https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.
danans 2y ago
It's not about the origin of a single language. It's about the origin of a population whose widely dispersed descendants often speak a language whose primary features descend from the language spoken by the original population (albeit changed via thousands of years of drift and borrowing from other languages). That doesn't mean that a) all features of the descendant language come from the origin language or b) all speakers of the descendant language have ancestry from the original population.

sampton 2y ago

Writings on artifacts and burial practices associated with DNA fragments found at the burial sites.

DC-3 2y ago
This study is about prehistoric Steppe peoples, there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time.
- teleforce 2y ago
  > there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time That's a very negative presumptions. How about the oldest attestation of Indo-European language or the long extinct language Hittite who once lived in Bronze age Anatolian Steppe? 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.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language
  - fvvybfbfbyg 2y ago
    So? What about the Hittites? There is a slight gap between 1700 BC and 4500 BC.
    - philwelch 2y ago
      Prior to the discovery of the Hittite language, linguists had compared the various Indo-European languages they knew of and did much of the work of reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language based on comparative linguistics. This work was highly conjectural, but it provided something akin to a falsifiable theory that could be tested by the discovery of another written Indo-European language. Such a language was Hittite, and the Hittite language fits the model of Indo-European languages that had been constructed prior to its discovery.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
  - canjobear 2y ago
    The Proto-Indo-European language is usually dated to something like 6000 years ago, well before any writing.
  - kragen 2y ago
    That is about 2500 years after the period we're discussing, and in a region conventionally considered to be on a different continent. It isn't a mere presumption that the Kurgan culture didn't have writing; archaeologists have been looking for it diligently for more than a century and have found extensive collections of well-preserved grave goods, but no writing. Writing was invented about 1000 years later in Sumeria, probably in Egypt, and possibly in South America, but not in the Lower Volga homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. (The North American and Chinese inventions of writing seem to have been independent, but were another 2000 years later still.) The Hittites adopted the Sumerian form of writing; they did not bring a writing system with them from the Volga. Neither did other Indo-European groups have writing, which is why Hittite is, as you say, the oldest attested Indo-European language.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      The Hittite documents, besides recording several Indo-European languages from the same (Anatolian) branch of the Indo-European language family, also record some fragments from an Indic language, making that the older attestation from another Indo-European branch than that of the Hittites. (The next attested Indo-European branch is Mycenaean Greek). That Indic language was the language of some group of people who at some point in time, perhaps after a war victory, had become the main members of the elites who ruled Mitanni, a Southern neighbor of the Hittites, located mostly in present Syria, where most inhabitants were speaking Hurrian, a non-Indo-European language. Those Indic-speaking people were renowned as expert horse trainers, so the quotes from their language were encountered in Hittite documents about horse training. Most known data is consistent with an older migration towards South Asia of the people speaking Indic languages, who had gone both towards East, reaching India, and towards West, reaching as far as Syria, where they entered in contact with the Hittites and other related populations, who had migrated towards South at an even earlier date and through a different path, reaching present Turkey. The Indic migration has been followed much later by a migration on the same path of people speaking the closely related Iranian languages, who have reached the present territories of Iran, Afghanistan, Tadjikistan, forming the ancient Persian empires, after various conquests. The people whom we now name Hittites used another name for themselves, and they called Hittites a non-Indo-European population, who were the former inhabitants of the territory ruled by what we call Hittites.

macleginn 2y ago

The story with the Indo-Europeans is basically as follows: 1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European languages using comparative phonetics we can try and reconstruct the words of the proto-IE language, both their approximate sounds and approximate meanings. This gives us some information about the society. E.g., the PIE language very likely had a word for wheel, which puts the common PIE community in the period after the wheel was invented. Other words can help us guess what landscape the PIE people lived in, and it has been generally assumed for almost a century now that it strongly resembles Southeastern Europe, essentially the Ukrainian steppe. Two alternative hypotheses (modern-day Turkey and the area to the north, in modern-day Poland/Ukraine) had different drawbacks. We can also look at the locations of the earliest historically attested IE groups (Europe, Middle East, Punjab, Anatolia) and try and guess where they all may have had come from, given the time frame. 2. By looking at the descriptions of the earliest IE societies (first of all the society of Rig-Veda), we can try and guess what way of life these people had. We can then look at all the archaeological cultures in the roughly appropriate area from the roughly appropriate time frame and see which of those have features of interest (in the IE case, warrior-like culture with social stratification, etc.). 3. We know that IE migrated a lot and provided a lot of genetic material to modern populations in Europe and some other regions. Since quite recently, by looking at palaeo-DNA data from the remains of the people who belonged to these cultures, we can try and check who of them made the biggest contribution to contemporary populations. All these sources of data are rather imprecise, but if you combine them all together and see a clear pattern, this looks rather convincing.

FlyingSnake 2y ago
> the society of Rig-Veda I fail to understand how the Rigvedic society can be connected to this DNA research. Rigveda never mentions anything beyond the Punjab/Swat/Haryana region in any of the hymns. The flora and fauna mentioned in it is also exclusive to this region. Lastly there is no mention of an ancient homeland both in Rigveda and Avesta.
- flir 2y ago
  I believe there's some stuff around burial practices that parallels some steppe practices. Something about horses and mound construction, I think? Here we go: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers-of-the-steppes https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.

danans 2y ago

It's not about the origin of a single language. It's about the origin of a population whose widely dispersed descendants often speak a language whose primary features descend from the language spoken by the original population (albeit changed via thousands of years of drift and borrowing from other languages). That doesn't mean that a) all features of the descendant language come from the origin language or b) all speakers of the descendant language have ancestry from the original population.