A Turkish origin for Indo-European languages

Nature.com ^ | 8-23-2012 | Alyssa Joyce

[Renfield]

Languages as diverse as English, Russian and Hindi can trace their roots back more than 8,000 years to Anatolia — now in modern-day Turkey. That's the conclusion of a study1 that assessed 103 ancient and contemporary languages using a technique normally used to study the evolution and spread of disease. The researchers hope that their findings can settle a long-running debate about the origins of the Indo-European language group...

[Jack Hydrazine]

Yes, I understand it says “mountainssssssss of Ararat” and not Mount Ararat itself. The mountains of Ararat don’t extend that far out to Iraq or Iran. From documentaries that I have watched in the past about Noah’s ark there are towns near Mt. Ararat and the mountains of Ararat that indicate that Noah did land close by.

What the linguists are saying about the Turkic origins of the Indo-European languages indirectly supports that story from the Torah (aka the Bible).

[katana]

That is an interesting connection since Mt. Ararat is on the eastern edge of the Anatolian Peninsula bordering modern day Turkey, Iran, and Armenia (not Iraq). One of those things that make you go "hmmmmm". The conventional wisdom has been that the Indo-European language group originated in the Indus River Valley in India.

And the other posters are correct that the Turkish language is a very late import from the Central Asian steppes with Semitic elements picked up from the Arabic Quran. The language was even (clumsily - Turkish needed a few vowels) written in Arabic script until Atatürk's reforms in the 1920's.

[Oztrich Boy]

Kurdistan

[Oztrich Boy]

Not Mt Ararat. The mountains of Ararat/Urartu. Which when it got written down was only the deep purple core region around Lake Van near the modern Turkish/Iraq/Iranian border

[Sherman Logan]

The conventional wisdom has been that the Indo-European language group originated in the Indus River Valley in India.

Nope.

The conventional wisdom for some time now has been that it originated somewhere in Eastern Europe, perhaps in what is now the Ukraine or Kazakhstan. With the tribes spreading out from there east, west and south, reaching India as part of the Aryan invasion.

There is a noisy group of Indian nationalists who claim that the Aryans and their languages originated in India and went north and west from there, but they have remarkably little evidence to support their position, which AFAIK is held by no linguists or historians outside India.

[katana]

Was not aware of that but I will take your word for it. Interesting subject.

[Sherman Logan]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_India_theory

The oddest part of this “controversy” is that the Indians involved seem to take it as a national insult to theorize that the Aryans invaded and conquered India. While Europeans are not at all offended by theories that the Aryans (or their western relatives) invaded and conquered Europe.

[Little Bill]

If you consider that Tamil dialects are still spoken in Pakistan and Afghanistan, assumed to the language of the Happarians. It can also be assumed that Indo-European was introduced from the out side.

[paudio]

No. They predated the Muslims many thousand years. After all, even though now they own it, nobody claim Muslim built Constantinople.

[Wuli]

“What the linguists are saying about the Turkic origins of the Indo-European languages indirectly supports that story from the Torah (aka the Bible).”

for a study, and comments on a study about languages, referring to Anatolia (the place) in reference to orgins of Indo-European languages, it seems strange that any learned person would refer to them as either the “Turkish” (a modern nation) or the “Turkic” orgins, as the language “Turkish” is not native to Anatolia, but came from central Asia, around what is not Turkmekistan, which is wherefrom the “Turks’ that took over Anatolia came from

“Turkish” the language came along after the original “Indo-Europeans” migrated, radiating out from Anatolia

so, we can talk about the “Anatolian” origins of the Indo-European languages, without confusing the place, in history, with the modern day occupants of the area

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks Renfield. Of course, this is loopy on its face -- there's no way to trace geographical origin of a language without a vintage archive, and the oldest known writing (cave paintings) can't be read, for obvious reasons (no "paper trail", bilingual inscriptions, etc). In her Plato Prehistorian: 10,000 to 5000 B.C. Myth, Religion, Archaeology, Mary Settegast reproduces a table which shows four runic character sets; a is Upper Paleolithic (found among the cave paintings), b is Indus Valley script, c is Greek (western branch), and d is the Scandinavian runic alphabet. Story of Human Language, Course No. 1600 Taught by John McWhorter, Manhattan Institute, Ph.D., Stanford University To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[BIGLOOK]

Having been a linguistics student at the post grad levels, the most enlightening thing I learned was that 'Linguistics is the most unscientific of the sciences and the most inhuman of the humanities'. I'll add a corollary; it's also the most political.

Languages developed and changed from trade, migrations and war. Having been around a bit, there are different dialects in lesser developed countries about a two hour bus ride apart. In ancient days that was most likely a two hour trek apart.

We'll be counting the theories as archaeologists uncover something new (which really isn't) and linguists are brought in to divine some meaning and there'll be as many theories as all the days. That ought to give our successors a lot to dicuss in the future.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks BIGLOOK, and well said.

Here’s one from the FRchives that has many of those cool language tree diagrams and whatnot:

Unearthed Aryan cities rewrite history
The Australian | 04 Oct 2010 | The Sunday Times
Posted on 10/04/2010 12:15:28 AM PDT by Palter
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/chat/2601056/posts

[Verginius Rufus]

The Turkish language spread into Anatolia after the Seljuk Turk victory over the Byzantine Empire in 1071 at the battle of Manzikert. It's related to the other Turkic languages (mostly spoken east of the Caspian Sea) and more distantly to Mongolian. It has no connection with the Indo-European languages (apart from the possible borrowing of individual words from one language to another). There was an Indo-European language spoken in Chinese Turkestan in the Middle Ages, actually two related languages, called Tocharian A and Tocharian B, which are apparently closer to the European branches of Indo-European than they are to the Indo-Iranian branches...now extinct but known from some texts that were discovered.

There is a Turkish language called Gagauz spoken by 150,000 to 200,000 people in the Balkans, Moldova, and Ukraine. The speakers are Christians (mostly Orthodox, some Protestants) and supposedly do not differ in their DNA from neighboring speakers of other languages (Romanian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian--all Indo-European languages). Maybe they settled there before the period when that region was part of the Ottoman Empire.

[buwaya]

Because this stuff is in Turkey, the Turks call it Turkish, and many people tend to bend over backwards to refer to things in a country according to the way the countries’ current leaders want them to. Applies especially to third world countries. Some people bend over backwards doing this.

The Turks want us to go along with their calling Greek Orthodox things Turkish because calling them Greek would prick their ethnic chauvinist conceits.

It wasn’t this way in the past. Things were Greek, Mesopotamian or Anatolian in their proper context.

[P.O.E.]

Thanks for the link to the earlier thread. It was a veritable grove, I mean, trove of information.

[ZULU]

Turkish is a relative newcomer to Anatolia. Before the Turks arrived, there were Lydians, Lycians, Hittites, Luwians, etc and they spoke languages within the Indoeuropean subgroup called Anatolic Languages. Not closely related to modern Turkish at all.

[Theoria]

I like this reference:

[The_Reader_David]

As young people would say, “no, duh!” And in between the times you point to and the Turkish conquest, most folks in Asia Minor spoke Greek, another Indo-European Language.

Why folks feel like posting things which are actually amplifications of the point I made as if they were correcting me, I really don’t know. As I pointed out, the title is stupid in the context of an article on linguistics and based on nothing other than kowtowing to the conceit of Ataturk and his political heirs that anything on the territory of the present Republic of Turkey is “Turkish”.

[ZULU]

Kalle hemera