This is the same map that Ryan & Pittman have in their book Noah's Flood
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.
This is the same map that Ryan & Pittman have in their book Noah's Flood
Perhaps someday no one will be familiar with extinct terms such as: Marxist, Socialist, Liberal, Democrat.
Well, If the Ark is ever found on Mount Arafat, I have an explanation.
During the Ice Age, the Mediterranean was isolated from the world's oceans ( I have a map that shows it in three different sections) and it partially dried out, after a point, the water level stabilized at a much reduced level and stayed that way for thousands of years.
Then the 'plug' at Gilbralter broke and the Mediterranean began to flood creating many refugees...and the same would occur in the Mediterranean as each of the three seperations were breached. Refugees were streaming everywhere with stories about flooding and everyone was convinced that the whole world was flooding.
Noah heard these stories and not knowing how much time he had to build the Ark, built it up on the heights of Mt. Ararat. The plug at the Black Sea broke, convincing everyone that Noah had been warned by God. If the Ark is ever found, it will be found on Mt. Arafat where Noah built it.
It is probably no accident that the Sumerians started to build zigguruts to emulate mountains-the thing that may have saved their ancestors from the flood and thus a holy place? It was remembered of course cause the rivers contonued to overflow so it was a constant reminder ofthe big one?
Does BP mean before Before 11/30/2003? If so the greeks found out how to talk good a little after they opened a whole bunch of restaurants in chicago.
LOL, I suggest you look at a map of the Black Sea. The Tigris and Euphrates flows out of Iraq into the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf was completely dry during the Ice Age.
"Around the survivors a perimeter create."
Proof that Yoda spoke Indo-European! Amazing that it spread to the Degoba system.
Are these related to Basque?
The majority linguistic opinion on Basque is indeed that it is sui generis, but some, such as Merritt Ruhlen in his book The Origin of Language, posit a relationship between Basque and languages as disparate as Georgian (Kartvelian), Ket (an obscure, nearly extinct language belonging to a "Yeniseian" language group, because its speakers live along the Yenisei river in Central Siberia), Navajo, and Chinese! (Cool, hunh?)
By the way, Ruhlen was a student of the late Joseph H. Greenberg, IMHO one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century, if not of all time, who posited a larger "super-family" of language families consisting of Indo-European, Finno-Ugric (Uralic), Altaic, and other more obscure languages, in his book "Indo-European and its Closest Relatives" published by Stanford a few years ago. Greenberg actually wasn't the first to propose a genetic link between Indo-European and Finno-Ugric, and the similarities between the Finno-Ugric (Uralic) and Altaic (E.g., TURKISH) language families are so prominent that they were noticed back in the 19th Century and led linguists to posit a "Ural-Altaic" group of languages.
Roy Andrew Miller, an international authority on the Japanese language, has argued for the relationship of Japanese to the Altaic family for about four decades now. And while scholarly opinion is not unanimous on this point either, there is even stronger evidence for the relationship of Korean to the Altaic family, and I believe that hypothesis is the majority opinion among ethnic Korean linguists studying the Korean language and its origins. Finally, the genetic relationship between Japanese and Korean, while still not established to everyone's satisfaction, is today generally accepted among comparative linguists.
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