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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
by 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 agoA 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).