Posted on 11/26/2003 5:35:02 PM PST by a_Turk
PARIS (AFP) - The vast group of languages that dominates Europe and much of Central and South Asia originated around 8,000 years ago among farmers in what is now Anatolia, Turkey.
So say a pair of New Zealand academics who have remarkably retraced the family tree of so-called Indo-European languages -- a linguistic classification that covers scores of tongues ranging from Faroese to Hindi by way of English, French, German, Gujarati, Nepalese and Russian.
Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, psychologists at the University of Auckland, built their language tree on the same principles as the theory of genetic evolution.
According to this idea, words, like genes, survive according to their fitness.
Imported words take root in a language in response to evolutionary pressures or if they answer a need, and words can also fall out of use, rather like "silent" DNA that appears to be a relic in the genome and serves no known purpose.
The languages that are spoken and written today are the result of historical layering, of addition and deletion, that can be carefully scraped away to trace their previous sources, Gray and Atkinson suggest in the British weekly scientific journal Nature.
The similarity is phylogeny -- the reconstruction of the evolutionary history of organisms.
In theory, an evolutionary biologist one can work all the way back to LUCA: the "last universal common ancestor," presumed to be a bacterium, which evolved into all life as we know it today.
Using a parallel method, Gray and Atkinson turned back the clock on 87 languages, using sophisticated software to trace the path taken by 2,449 "cognates" -- fundamental words in each language that are presumed to derive from a common ancestor.
Their study produces an estimated age-range for the very first Indo-European language of between 7,800 and 9,800 years ago, among rural communities who lived in modern-day Anatolia and for whom there is already an impressive array of archaeological evidence.
Successful pioneers in agriculture, these people migrated westwards and eastwards and the languages evolved accordingly, becoming the tongues that today are so diverse that they would seem to share no common link.
"The pattern and timing of expansion... is consistent with the Anatolian farming theory," Gray and Atkinson suggest.
"Radiocarbon analysis of the earliest Neolithic sites across Europe suggests that agriculture arrived in Greece at some time during the ninth millennium BP (before the present day) and had received as far as Scotland by 5,500 BP."
About 6,000 years ago, the western branch of linguistic migration began to fork into smaller branches, according to their calculations.
The branches progressively became the Celtic languages (2,900 years ago), Romance languages (1,700 years ago) and, 1,750 years ago, the Germanic languages of northern Europe, including rudimentary English.
As for the eastern branch, the biggest fork occurred about 4,600 years ago.
It split into two groups, one of which became the languages of Central Asia today while the other eventually evolved into the major languages of the latter-day sub-continent.
The rival to the Anatolian theory is the notion that roving tribes of Kurgan horsemen expanded into Europe and the Middle East from the steppes of Asia around 6,000 years ago, sowing the linguistic seed for what would become all Indo-European languages today.
Another interesting thing about Sanskrit is the ability to form non-linear sentences. Because the each word has a case imbedded in it, the words of a sentence can theoretically be placed in any order and the sentence still makes sense. The Sanskrit alpahabet is also fascinating as the letters are grouped by how the mouth is formed when pronouncing them. pa pha ba bha ma is the 'labial' group, for example.
That is my understanding, too. It is remarkable that these two languages have survived, as both peoples have been often dominated by other countries. There once was another Baltic language called Prussian, but it is extinct -- I suppose the people who spoke that language either became Poles or Germans.
Wonder how far away this place is from Babel??
I'm not a linguist, but I believe that it shares this characteristic with all older IE languages. In general, they evolved stylistic conventions that became set as rules. For instance in most Western European EI languages the convention was verb-second in declarative sentences, with the element one wished to stress first. This lead to subject-verb order as the norm in the descendents of these languages. (In interogative sentences it was verb first. Did you get that?) As English lost its inflections, it came to depend on word order to convey meaning. It shares this trait with Chinese. In spoken English we also depend on stress and tone to convey meaning.
Are these related to Basque?
I am not a linguist, but I think not. I think Basque is sui generis or whatever the Basque phrase for one-of-a-kind is.
no, but I am series.
Me two.
Doesn't the Bible story of Noah say that everyone on Earth was killed, aside from Noah's family?
I'm pretty sure it does. The Gilgamesh and the Atrahasis ( 500 years older than Gilgamesh) flood stories do too. But, we also know that men were writing these stories, not god.
The Nostratic macrofamily of languages was discovered by linguists. It appears that Indo-European, Semitic, Dravidian, Egyptian, Sumerian, and other language families have a common origin.
Archaeology is now providing us with evidence of a mass dispersal of peoples from the flooded Black Sea around 5600 BC which could explain the origins of Nostratic.
Here are a few quotations from NOAH'S FLOOD, THE NEW SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERIES ABOUT THE EVENT THAT CHANGED HISTORY, by William Ryan and Walter Pitman. N.Y., Simon and Schuster, 1998.
Page 188: "The ocean bursting through Bosporus in 5600 B.C. so violently cleaved Europe from Anatolia that it would have been several years before anyone dared make passage across."
Page 189 Map "Inferred human migrations west and northwest into Europe in the wake of the Black Sea flood"
The map shows five migrations.
1. Danilo-Hvar from Bosporus, around Greece, and north into Serbia
2. Hamangians from Rumanian coast southwards into Bulgaria and Thrace
3. Vincas along Danube through Belgrade and up to Budapest. Origin of famous Vinca culture with primitive writing.
4. Linear Pottery Farmers (LBK) through Moldavia across central Europe to Paris
5. Proto-Indoeuropeans up the Dnieper River into Russia
"It seemed clear to Vasic that the Vinca had built on the deserted ruins of an older culture. Makers of lovely wattle and daub houses and fine incised pottery, the Vinca appeared abruptly on the plains of Bulgaria within a century and a half after the flood, settling also on river terraces of the southern Hungarian plain and in mountain valleys as far south as the Vardar River in Macedonia. They constructed well-planned permanent villages on leveled ground with parallel rows of houses separated by streets."
Page 190: (Vinca) "They plastered their floors with white clay. But instead of constructing their walls of mud-brick, they built them from split timber planks or hewn posts interwoven with twigs and covered with a thick layer of mud plaster. Archaeologists have uncovered shrines decorated by bucrania, attached to a wall beam as in the shrines of Anatolia.
"Vasic saw no continuity between the Vinca culture and the underlying strata of their predecessors but rather thought the Vinca were outsiders who settled on a previously abandoned site. Their art and pottery were so exceptional and in such contrast to the prior occupants that Vasic mistakenly identified this 'as a center of Aegean civilization in the second millennium B.C.'" It was actually over 3,000 years older than he thought.
"LBK culture....their longhouse building style, never before seen in Europe, these huge timber-framed houses, up to 150 feet in length, were organized into villages founded exclusively on the fertile loess soil blown across Eurasia during the sky-darkening sandstorms of the last Ice Age. THESE DWELLINGS WERE THE LARGEST FREESTANDING BUILDINGS IN THE WORLD FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS (emphasis added)"
Page 191: "A very striking feature of the LBK is the homogeneity in pottery design, stone tools, village plan, house shape, burial practices, and economy over the vast territory into which these people appeared, suggesting that their dispersal was almost instantaneous. Experts specializing in pottery from Belgium can readily recognize shards from Moldavia as if they had been crafted nearby in France. The domesticated plants and animals show practically no variation from village to village across a span of a thousand miles or more. But there is a dramatic cultural gap between the preexisting sparse hunter-gatherer population and the LBK homesteaders." This is another blow to the theory of Renfrew and Cavalli-Sforza that Indo-European languages spread with neolithic farmers from Turkey. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong direction.
Danilo-Hvar "They crafted a now-famous pot decorated with a sailing ship, depicting masts and rigging dated at about 4000 BC." They imported obsidian from Italy.
Page 194 Map "Inferred human migrations northeast into Asia and southeast into the Levant, Egypt, and Mesopotamia" Going clockwise, the following migrations are shown:
1. Proto-Indoeuropeans up the Dnieper into Russia
2. Proto-Indo-Europeans up the Don into Russia and eastwards to the Urals and south of the Urals and from there to Kazakhstan and western China
3. Ubaids from Georgia eastwards and then southwards to Sumer in Iraq
4. "Semites" from southeastern Black Sea to Halaf and Abu Hureyra in Iraq and Syria. This one is doubtful.
5. From just east of Istanbul we have a migration which branches into
....a. migration to Hacilar, in western Turkey
...b. migration of "Predynastic Egyptians" to Çatal Hüyük and Mersin in Turkey, along the Mediterranean coast past Jericho into Egypt.
It might be more accurate to call the second branch "Proto-Afroasiatic Speakers" . Hacilar and Çatal Hüyük might come from a different branch originating farther west than the Afroasiatic branch.
"The craftsmen who reoccupied Hacilar after its desertion created sophisticated painted pottery, more technologically advanced in style and fabrication than any contemporary pottery found elsewhere in the entire Near East."
Page 196: Caption "The elaborately decorated pottery that appeared in Syria and Mesopotamia in the centuries bracketing the Black Sea flood." "Others have assigned a northern or Anatolian origin to the [beautiful colored pottery of] Halaf."
"As Moore has pointed out, there was a sizable influx of farming peoples along the coast of Lebanon and in its valleys in the mid sixth millennium B.C. Were these refugees from the flood?
"Egypt had experienced a rapid cultural and economic change during the same period, at the time of the flood. A new flint industry was introduced, epitomized by two-sided flaked tools, which was much more in common with the industry of Çatal Hüyük, Hacilar, and Jericho than with the preceding African designs. In addition, the art of pottery making appeared for the first time in the Nile Valley. Domesticated cereals and animals with direct genetic affinity to Asia were also suddenly adopted, along with the first systematic practice of planting and harvesting in fields watered from the Nile." The similarity of the Egyptian language with the Semitic languages of southwest origin also indicates a common origin.
Page 197: Advanced farmers with a culture similar to the Halafian of Iraq settled along the Rioni River between the Black and Caspian Seas right after the flood.
"Carbon 14 dating places the settling of the Transcaucasus contemporaneously with the beginning of the LBK dispersal, the defense and fall of Hacilar, the arrival of newcomers in the Levant--particularly in the valleys and along the coast of Lebanon and at Tell Ard Tlaili in Palestine--the introduction of Asian domesticates in Egypt, and the flooding of the Black Sea." We are probably dealing with the related Kartvelian, Sumerian, and Elamo-Dravidian language families, which form a cluster within ...[Message truncated]
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