LINGUISTICS: Early Date for the Birth of Indo-European Languages

Science Magazine ^ | 2003-11-28 | Michael Balter

[Lessismore]

Ever since British jurist Sir William Jones noted in 1786 that there are marked similarities between diverse languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Celtic, linguists have assumed that most of the languages of Europe and the Indian subcontinent derive from a single ancient tongue. But researchers have fiercely debated just when and where this mother tongue was first spoken.

Now a bold new study asserts that the common root of the 144 so-called Indo-European languages, which also include English and all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, is very ancient indeed. In this week's issue of Nature, evolutionary biologist Russell Gray and his graduate student Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand combine state-of-the-art computational methods from evolutionary biology with an older technique for dating languages, called glottochronology. Their results suggest that a proto-Indo-European tongue was spoken more than 8000 years ago by Neolithic farmers in Anatolia, in central Turkey; these farmers then spread it far and wide as they migrated from their homeland.

"It is almost too good to be true," says Margalit Finkelberg, a classicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel who has long favored this so-called Anatolian hypothesis. But many linguists prefer a competing theory, which traces Indo-European languages to Kurgan horsemen in southern Russia about 6000 years ago. Some of these researchers challenge the new methodology as well as its conclusions. "I cannot possibly accept [their] results," says linguist Craig Melchert of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who adds that the paper "simply reconfirms the unreliability of any glottochronological model, no matter what improvements are made."

Glottochronology uses the percentage of "cognates"--words with shared roots--to determine how long ago different languages diverged. For example, the Sanskrit and Latin words for "fire," agnis and ignis, show clear evidence of a common origin. But the technique has long been out of favor, in part because of its flawed assumption that words change form steadily over time. Gray and Atkinson revived the method with powerful statistical techniques now used by biologists to determine the evolutionary trees of living organisms, such as Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood analysis, and a trick called "rate smoothing" that allows the rate of word change to vary (Science, 14 December 2001, p. 2310). The team members applied their method to a database previously compiled by Yale University linguist Isidore Dyen, comprising 2449 cognate sets from 87 Indo-European languages. They added Hittite, an extinct Anatolian language, and Tocharian A and B, once spoken in western China.

No matter how they varied parameters such as the rate of word change or the length of branches on parts of the tree, the answer came out pretty much the same: Indo- European languages initially diverged between 7800 and 9800 years ago, with the best guess being around 8700 years. "Try as we might, we just couldn't get [younger] dates," says Gray. Moreover, the analysis showed ancient Hittite to be closest to the root of the language tree, providing a slam dunk for the Anatolian hypothesis.

"The conclusions coincide in all essentials with those at which the adherents of the Anatolian theory ... have arrived on independent grounds," says Finkelberg. Others praise the ambitious new technique. "Computational methodologies of this kind can only be helpful for historical linguistics," says linguist April McMahon of the University of Sheffield, U.K.

Yet some researchers question the basic assumptions of the study. "The characteristics of languages and biomolecular sequences evolve in very different ways," says Tandy Warnow, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin. Gray and Atkinson "used techniques that are not appropriate for their data." Linguist Don Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia notes that the study relied entirely on the Dyen database, which tracks word changes but not grammar or construction changes. "[This is] the least reliable type of data" for building language trees, Ringe says.

As arguments over both method and results continue, Gray and Atkinson raise a possible compromise solution regarding the timing. They identified a rapid divergence about 6500 years ago that gave rise to the Romance, Celtic, and Balto-Slavic language families--very close to the time of the postulated Kurgan expansion. The Kurgan and Anatolian hypotheses, they write, "need not be mutually exclusive."

[Styria]

I sat in a little bit of a course on Proto-Indo-European. That professor said that Hittite is a sister language of that one, not one of its daughters, with the common ancestor Proto-Indo-Hittite.

[LiteKeeper]

What language would that have been?

Whatever language God chose to converse with Adam. Perhaps what came to be known as Hebrew, but there is no way to know.

Perhaps your concern is to the historicity of this claim. There is no reason to believe that this did not happen, except, of course, to deny the historicity of the Book of Genesis. You are certainly welcome to do so, but no less an authority than Jesus attested to the historicity, not only of Genesis, but of Adam himself.

[blam]

"john mcwhortten "the power of bable" (2002)"

I have that book. I started it but didn't find it very intresting. Maybe I'll try again.

[blam]

"Here ya go guys."

Thanks, I knew someone was smart enough to figure out how to post it.

[Scenic Sounds]

You probably knew this already.

LOL. Oh, of course I did . . .

NOT!! ;-)

[muawiyah]

I used to think the "old stories" in the Bible came strictly out of the experience of the ancient Hebrews or other peoples of the Near Middle East. No doubt those folks left their tracks all over the place.

More recently I discovered that the Saami (Laplanders), who had little contact with anyone outside their own circles of reindeer chasers until about 1000 years ago, left cliff and cave drawings which can be "dated" back before the existence of Hebrews or any of the Semitic languages.

Some folks think these guys were in place fishing out of the Arctic Ocean as long as 10,000 years ago (although none of their drawings date that old), and possibly were there during the last big glaciation.

The ancient cliff drawings are representations of various "stories". There are some "husband selecting" stories that are much more in line the tale of Lot and his daughters than just about anything else you can think of.

It's pretty easy to find these things on the internet if anyone has an interest.

If "Adam" is Biblically clocked as preceeding "Lot" and we can postulate that the Biblical chronologies are spiritually correct, it is possible the "flood" being discussed occurred at the end of the last Ice Age (14000 years ago) and not at the time of the flooding of the Black Sea basin (a mere 7500 years ago).

The story of Adam being driven out of Eden (and barred from that place by an angel bearing a flaming sword) would also preceed the desertification of the Sahara, and the last previous desertification would be some time during the last glaciation.

Thor Hyerdahl and other ethnologists proposed that the stories of "Bifrost Giants" current in ancient Norwegian tales probably arose during the last Ice Age, thereby demonstrating that a rollicking good story has a long shelf-life!

[SunkenCiv]

S.M. Stirling from Santa Fe, NM -- A recent edition of "British Archaeology" noted that the ideological prejudice against the idea of population movements among British archaeologists had gotten to the point where some postgraduate student would soon come up with a paper 'proving' that the first humans in Britain weren't immigrants at all, but purely indigenous, symbolically transformed reindeer. [Amazon reader review]

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Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins by Colin Renfrew

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[SunkenCiv]

From 2003.

Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on, off, or alter the "Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list --
Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
The GGG Digest -- Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)

[Ptarmigan]

I kind of that ear for language. I can the difference between language. Anatolia is present day Turkey. I know Turkish is not an Indo-European language.

[Henchman]

8700 years ago coincides with the exact date the Tower of Babble being destroyed by advancing Republican forces. Indeed, "linguists prefer a competing theory, which traces Indo-European languages to Kurgan horsemen in southern Russia about 6000 years ago." Kurgan is closely related to Klingon.

[PoorMuttly]

Muttly family tradition states that it was started by a talking dog who sold pistacio nuts from a flying carpet...but I digress.....

Ain't science great?!

Actually, me love this stuff...very exciting to be living in this time. Postulate ON, ye humans. (we get a kick out of it)

[RightWhale]

try the Garden

Afghanistan? Possible.

[bannie]

nah, that'll kill the tongue. You just obtain a plug. Then fill it in with a bar and call it a piercing.

:p

:D

[SunkenCiv]

a couple of graphics posted somewhere on FR by FReeper Cronos, each one set to width of 600 (try opening each one in new window if that bugs you):

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[eugenrau]

I made some personal searches regarding IE-languages.Some of my preliminary results are:
1.The sumero-tamil language is the main contributor to the forming of IE-languages.It was the most IE-type language of his time.It is containing many basic components later found in IE-languages.
2.The second contributor is proto-akkadian.The sumerian and akkadian areas and languges overlapt.
3.As one must notice,the sanskrite and akkadian-like word roots are the main componets found in IE-languages and the proofs are overhelming.
4.I am suspecting:
-An very early austric infussion in Iberia.
-An early infusion of proto-sumerian in Danube area.
-The very place of final shping of IE-languages was in Mediterranean area.This could not been possible without the contact with afro-semitic and proto-iberian languages.
-The kurgans possible introduced only proto-slavic languages to Europe and not IE-languages proper.
5.The place of origin of latines/letoones is close to Lycia.They entered Europe very early and in Danubian area diverged in some 3 branches.
I am waiting your feed-bac to my notices. ing. Rau Eugen,Romania eugen_rau@hotmail.com

[SunkenCiv]

[SunkenCiv]

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[IrishBrigade]

‘There is no reason to believe that this did not happen, except, of course, to deny the historicity of the Book of Genesis’

since Genesis delivers up two differing accounts of the Creation, skepticism is certainly on the table concerning its historicity...