Anatolian Roots Seen for Indo-Europe Language TreeIndo-European languages, which include Greek, Latin, English and Sanskrit among many others, originated thousands of years ago but their roots have been hotly debated by experts. One theory is that nomadic Kurgan horsemen from the steppes of Asia started the spread of Indo-European languages about 6,000 years ago during their conquest of Europe and the Near East. But other experts believe it started in Anatolia, now in Turkey, and expanded with the spread of agriculture... David Searls of the Bioinformatics Division of GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals said Gray and Atkinson calibrated and cross-validated branchings of the language tree against known historical events.
Reuters
Nov 26 2003 2:40PM
Ratthing version
Huh, I believe both of these. The language came from the east to Turkey and then was spread across Europe by the farmers who were displaced by the Black Sea flood in 5700BC.
There is a lot of undiluted Greek in our daily spoken language and not just English but understood by any street urchin in Europe. There is a term for phrases that are converted by sound from the original language to another using words that sound alike more or less but have entirely different meanings. The source language could be Arabic, French, Russian, or any other language we have run into in our worldquests. I don't have an example at hand outside of secret society cant, but some of our catch phrases are of that type. Others are quick words that are considered improper by English teachers, but which are universal and very ancient. One of the latter terms is the phrase word 'okay'. Look in the dictionary and you will find an example of extremely unschooled definitions. Read Euclid, and Lo!, there it is. Another is 'the hoi polloi', which is Greek of course, but which is incorrect since 'hoi' is 'the', so we are saying 'the the'.