6 ms·

English language 'originated in Turkey'

37 points by schrofer 12y ago

Houshalter 12y ago
Ridiculous title if I understand it correctly. They are saying all European languages originated there, not just English.
- aristidb 12y ago
  All Indo-European languages. Not all European languages are Indo-European, for example Hungarian is not. And some non-European languages are Indo-European, like Hindi or Persian.
  - Dewie 12y ago
    One might add that the Turkic language family isn't Indo-European. They seem to have originated in Central Asia.
- phaemon 12y ago
  Seems a reasonable title to me. If it was a person saying he had Turkish ancestry, you wouldn't say it was a ridiculous title because "many people have Turkish ancestors, not just him". Obviously other languages originated there, because English is related to other languages!
  - tty 12y ago
    >Seems a reasonable title to me To you it might, but to any linguist this is as ridiculous of a title as saying "English people originated in Africa". You will imediatelly think "wait, but the actual ethnogenesis happened nowhere close to Africa, so why would one say 'English people'? it's not useful to reference it". It's the same with this title. It's as useful as saying that Farsi originated in Turkey. Or any language descended from PIE, for that matter. Not even the separation into IE families like Germanic, Balto-Slavic, etc. happened at that time. Not even Anatolian had separated from IE. Yet the title references the ''English'' language. >Obviously other languages originated there No, the thing is, they didn't. Nor did English. What originated there is an ancestor of a group of languages.
  - vorg 12y ago
    A better title for Hacker News would be the BBC subtitle "Modern Indo-European languages like English originated in Turkey 9,000 years ago". That includes the language family name (though of course the super-family of Indo-European and its cousins originated elsewhere).
- louthy 12y ago
  > Ridiculous title if I understand it correctly. It's on the BBC. Based in the country that gave English to the world. For an audience of mainly English/British readers. 'Ridiculous' could be seen as a slight exaggeration, no?
camus2 12y ago
like 'turkey' did existed 9000 years ago.But editors need to sell articles.let's not fall for these cheap stunts.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  What do you want them to say? Anatolia? The headline has some problems, but I wouldn't have called that one of them.
  - return0 12y ago
    It is actually "the Anatolian hypothesis". The thing with Turkey is that it has its own language which is not related to this, so the title can be confused for "English comes from Turkish"
    - Dewie 12y ago
      To my knowledge, Anatolia is not a strictly historical region. So one can also say that Turkish is the majority language in Anatolia. Now you have the problem with people not knowing what Anatolia is, on top of the possible confusion between the Turkish language and the region that belongs to the Republic of Turkey today (Anatolia). The title doesn't reference the Turkish language. If English, or the family of languages it belongs to, didn't originate near the British Isles, why would one readily assume that the Turkish language (or its family) originated in, and always belonged to, the region that is today known as Turkey?
      - return0 12y ago
        > Anatolia is not a strictly historical region Of course it is, also known as asia minor since the ancient times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolia And the relevant linguistic hypothesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis
        12y ago
legulere 12y ago
walk is actually a bad example for words that don't change as it changed quite a lot in meaning. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/walk#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/walk#Etymology
cw0 12y ago
I'm sure their mathematical models are very beautiful, but the facts just don't support this theory at all. The "wheel" argument against this theory is just too damning, and their counterargument is weak: that nearly 4000 years after the language family split up, words for wheel, axle, and yoke managed to spread to nearly all daughter languages as loan words. But the problem is that these supposed loan words words reflect the same sound changes as all of the basic, inherited vocabulary. Thus the wheel vocab must be inherited from the same point in time as words like thou/tu/du. Not to mention that the material culture found at the Ukraine sites is a much better match for what we know about early Indo-European culture.
- jqm 12y ago
  Black Sea deluge is one theory for the initial dispersal of Indo-European speakers. Although wikipedia I don't think mentions this directly, the idea is that forced relocation caused the spread of the language. The timeline is approximately in line with what other theories suggest as well. And yes, Ukraine would have been the center. Or more correctly, what is now at the bottom of the Black Sea south of Ukraine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
hetman 12y ago
There's a great comment about this on reddit (I'll quote the relevant part below): http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/259yt8/indoeuropean_languages_originated_in_turkey/chf4z77 http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/259yt8/indoeuro... "This is essentially the conclusion of biologists who treated the spread of language like the spread of disease. They specifically only modeled slow expansion through cultural diffusion, meaning they completely ignored things like languages spread through conquest. They literally ignored the Roman empire in the evolution of Indo European. So if you look at the actual timeline their simulation puts forth, it has things like Iceland being populated by settlers from the Faroe Islands, who took fifty years to cross the sea there. They also did much of this on the basis of cognates, and so by their model Russian splits off of the slavic languages first and Polish is closely related to Ukrainian, because Russian has a bunch of Greek words that make it seem superficially different. Overall, it's not good science." The poster also recommends a video that breaks this apart in greater detail, though it's over an hour long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ
fauigerzigerk 12y ago
I find it somewhat surprising that these studies focus so much on vocabulary. Syntax seems to be much more stable over time. All languages have so many "loan words" (do they ever give them back?) and borrowing words happens so quickly that I find it impossible to model this over millennia. Surely, we're dealing with a more general graph here, not with a simple tree.

37 points by schrofer 12y ago

Ridiculous title if I understand it correctly. They are saying all European languages originated there, not just English.

aristidb 12y ago
All Indo-European languages. Not all European languages are Indo-European, for example Hungarian is not. And some non-European languages are Indo-European, like Hindi or Persian.
- Dewie 12y ago
  One might add that the Turkic language family isn't Indo-European. They seem to have originated in Central Asia.
phaemon 12y ago
Seems a reasonable title to me. If it was a person saying he had Turkish ancestry, you wouldn't say it was a ridiculous title because "many people have Turkish ancestors, not just him". Obviously other languages originated there, because English is related to other languages!
- tty 12y ago
  >Seems a reasonable title to me To you it might, but to any linguist this is as ridiculous of a title as saying "English people originated in Africa". You will imediatelly think "wait, but the actual ethnogenesis happened nowhere close to Africa, so why would one say 'English people'? it's not useful to reference it". It's the same with this title. It's as useful as saying that Farsi originated in Turkey. Or any language descended from PIE, for that matter. Not even the separation into IE families like Germanic, Balto-Slavic, etc. happened at that time. Not even Anatolian had separated from IE. Yet the title references the ''English'' language. >Obviously other languages originated there No, the thing is, they didn't. Nor did English. What originated there is an ancestor of a group of languages.
- vorg 12y ago
  A better title for Hacker News would be the BBC subtitle "Modern Indo-European languages like English originated in Turkey 9,000 years ago". That includes the language family name (though of course the super-family of Indo-European and its cousins originated elsewhere).
louthy 12y ago
> Ridiculous title if I understand it correctly. It's on the BBC. Based in the country that gave English to the world. For an audience of mainly English/British readers. 'Ridiculous' could be seen as a slight exaggeration, no?

camus2 12y ago

like 'turkey' did existed 9000 years ago.But editors need to sell articles.let's not fall for these cheap stunts.

thaumasiotes 12y ago
What do you want them to say? Anatolia? The headline has some problems, but I wouldn't have called that one of them.
- return0 12y ago
  It is actually "the Anatolian hypothesis". The thing with Turkey is that it has its own language which is not related to this, so the title can be confused for "English comes from Turkish"
  - Dewie 12y ago
    To my knowledge, Anatolia is not a strictly historical region. So one can also say that Turkish is the majority language in Anatolia. Now you have the problem with people not knowing what Anatolia is, on top of the possible confusion between the Turkish language and the region that belongs to the Republic of Turkey today (Anatolia). The title doesn't reference the Turkish language. If English, or the family of languages it belongs to, didn't originate near the British Isles, why would one readily assume that the Turkish language (or its family) originated in, and always belonged to, the region that is today known as Turkey?
    - return0 12y ago
      > Anatolia is not a strictly historical region Of course it is, also known as asia minor since the ancient times: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolia And the relevant linguistic hypothesis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis
      - 12y ago

legulere 12y ago

walk is actually a bad example for words that don't change as it changed quite a lot in meaning. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/walk#Etymology http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/walk#Etymology

cw0 12y ago

I'm sure their mathematical models are very beautiful, but the facts just don't support this theory at all. The "wheel" argument against this theory is just too damning, and their counterargument is weak: that nearly 4000 years after the language family split up, words for wheel, axle, and yoke managed to spread to nearly all daughter languages as loan words. But the problem is that these supposed loan words words reflect the same sound changes as all of the basic, inherited vocabulary. Thus the wheel vocab must be inherited from the same point in time as words like thou/tu/du. Not to mention that the material culture found at the Ukraine sites is a much better match for what we know about early Indo-European culture.

jqm 12y ago
Black Sea deluge is one theory for the initial dispersal of Indo-European speakers. Although wikipedia I don't think mentions this directly, the idea is that forced relocation caused the spread of the language. The timeline is approximately in line with what other theories suggest as well. And yes, Ukraine would have been the center. Or more correctly, what is now at the bottom of the Black Sea south of Ukraine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

hetman 12y ago

There's a great comment about this on reddit (I'll quote the relevant part below): http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/259yt8/indoeuropean_languages_originated_in_turkey/chf4z77 http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/259yt8/indoeuro... "This is essentially the conclusion of biologists who treated the spread of language like the spread of disease. They specifically only modeled slow expansion through cultural diffusion, meaning they completely ignored things like languages spread through conquest. They literally ignored the Roman empire in the evolution of Indo European. So if you look at the actual timeline their simulation puts forth, it has things like Iceland being populated by settlers from the Faroe Islands, who took fifty years to cross the sea there. They also did much of this on the basis of cognates, and so by their model Russian splits off of the slavic languages first and Polish is closely related to Ukrainian, because Russian has a bunch of Greek words that make it seem superficially different. Overall, it's not good science." The poster also recommends a video that breaks this apart in greater detail, though it's over an hour long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ

fauigerzigerk 12y ago

I find it somewhat surprising that these studies focus so much on vocabulary. Syntax seems to be much more stable over time. All languages have so many "loan words" (do they ever give them back?) and borrowing words happens so quickly that I find it impossible to model this over millennia. Surely, we're dealing with a more general graph here, not with a simple tree.