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Study may link DNA to Proto-IE spread | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4951 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 9 16 June 2015 at 3:22pm | IP Logged |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/science/dna-deciphers-root s-of-modern-europeans.html?_r=0
"Both studies indicate that today’s Europeans descend from three groups who moved into Europe at different stages of history.The first were hunter-gatherers who arrived some 45,000 years ago in Europe. Then came farmers who arrived from the Near East about 8,000 years ago." "Finally, a group of nomadic sheepherders from western Russia called the Yamnaya arrived about 4,500 years ago. The authors of the new studies also suggest that the Yamnaya language may have given rise to many of the languages spoken in Europe today." - - - - The bottom end of the article gets quite interesting. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 9 16 June 2015 at 4:55pm | IP Logged |
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Just a thought: the Yamnaya may also have introduced traces of Denisovan DNA to Europa.
As for the oldest history of the Indoeuropean languages in Europe it is worth noticing that Hittite in Asia Minor is attested from around 1700 AD, Mycenean Greek from around 1500 AC (Linear A on Crete was probably NOT written in the same kind language as linear B, which only came into use when Mycenian Greeks & co. invaded the island). Whether the Mycenanians got their language from the North or the East is an open question (and hotly debated). Having no attestations concerning older languages in Europe you could only make loose guesses, based on abrupt changes in the material cultures - and now apparently DNA has entered the game too. But if the DNA of the farmers mingled with the DNA of the remnants of hunter-gatherers from 7000-9000 years ago this is so long time before the first attested languages that it would be foolish to make guesses about the languages of the people in Europe at time time (except that Basque may be survivor from the time before the great mingle). Do the oldest European Indoeuropean languages resemble Hitite or Tocharian? Well, not too much. And the classical centum-satem areas can't solve the question, but it is worth noticing that the whole of Western Europe apparently are centum languages, while Eastern Europe is satem oriented - and having that division line suggests that satemization came after the population of Europe with centum-ists. But who knows, I'm not a specialist in Indoeuropean prehistory. But assume that hordes of nomades from the East invaded a Europe populated by sedentary farmers, each group speaking its own quite idiosyncratic languages (which must have been incomprehensible to the other group). We have actually seen things like that in historic times, for instance with the Huns and the Mongols. They left a trail of destruction, but mostly not their language. The Russians still speak a Slavic language, not Mongol, and the language of the Huns left so few traces that it hasn't even been possible to classify it. The Goths left a colony in the Crimea which kept its language until the 16. century or so, but Italy and Spain still speak descendants of Latin in spite of centuries of Gothic dominance. Likewise the German Orders in the Balitic states established a ruling class that spoke German, but the local people kept speaking their old languges (except a few like Old Prussian, that died out). And do people there speak German now? No. They speak the old languages OR Russian. So pure nomads are apparently not very effecient in implanting their own language in regions with a large sedentary population. The Romans succeeded in forcing or persuading large populations to adopt Latin and the Anglosaxons successfully killed off the Celtic language in most of Great Britain (and their English successors later repeated the feat in Ireland), so they must have done something differently from the Huns, Goths and Mongols. I have just read a Danish article about the so called Yamnaya - and Danish isn't irrelevant here because much of the genetical research has been done by professor Willerslev and his specialist team from Copenhagen - and this article shows a map where the word "Yamnaya" is shown in South Eastern Europe, but in Central and Northern Europe it is suggested that their raids lead to the socalled Corded Ware culture ("båndkeramik" in Danish), and at the same time it is suggested that the originally nomadic Yamnayas around the year 2000 BC became sedentary people. Their society was based on individual farms, and the old collective graves of the preceding cultue was abolished in favour of single graves. It has been popular among 'progressive' historians to claim that these changes were effectuated by the resident population by their own free will, but the genetic influx and the fact that culture of the invaders actually persisted don't favor flower power explanations, but more something like the brutal changes forced upon Great Britain and its Celtic inhabitants by the Anglosaxons. The only remaining proablem is now to find out whether the Yamnaya actually brought the Indoeuropean languages to Europe, but without any kind of physical evidence this is a fairly hypothetical suggestion. Edited by Iversen on 11 July 2015 at 11:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mork the Fiddle Senior Member United States Joined 3971 days ago 86 posts - 159 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 3 of 9 10 July 2015 at 7:42pm | IP Logged |
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Unfortunately the NY Times article is apparently no longer available.
There is a piece on the spread of languages and its relationship to DNA here, which is a comment on Dianekes' Blog. There is more about the Yamnaya influx in DaughterNumberThree Blog. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mork the Fiddle Senior Member United States Joined 3971 days ago 86 posts - 159 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 4 of 9 10 July 2015 at 7:47pm | IP Logged |
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And there is this article by Anatole A. Klyosov and Giancarlo T. Tomezzoli: DNA Genealogy and Linguistics. Ancient Europe.
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| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5230 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 5 of 9 10 July 2015 at 8:09pm | IP Logged |
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Speaking of, you can get your own DNA sequenced at the National Geographic Genographic project. It shows the migration of your maternal and paternal (for men only) lines out of Africa. Mine showed the paternal line make its way up to central Europe, and then into Northern Europe, just as we'd expect from a German lineage.
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| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5308 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 6 of 9 06 October 2015 at 6:45pm | IP Logged |
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There is something here that does not add up quite well:
If the last ivaders brought with them the IE languages, the time depth seems too shallow, and one should also expect more substrate elements in the European languages. If the farmers brought IE with them, then IE must have its origin in the Middle East, which speaks for a revision of what is thought about the IE homeland. Still the last hypothesis has support from the many Semitic borrowed elements in IE. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 9 09 October 2015 at 1:44pm | IP Logged |
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The immigration wawe from 8000 or so years ago consisted of farmers, possibly from ASia Minor, but they were almost certainly not speakers of Indoeuropean languages. I know that some linguists have tried to infer the origin of the Indoeuropeans from the kind of words you would find in the reconstructed Proto-Indoeuropean language, and the protagonists of an origin on the Russian steppes and those who prefer an origin in Asia Minor are still locked up in their respective trenches. But the new information from genetic sources quite unequivocally point to a group called the Yamnaya as the protagonists of the invasion at qround 5000 years ago, and these Yamnaya lived in an area several thousand km North of the Caucasus - and they were first and foremost herdsmen. This is reflected in the funeral costums: the farmers were collectivistic and built large tombs called 'jættestuer' in Danish (giants' rooms). In other places they built megalithic temples, whose alignments suggest an early interest in astronomy. The herders had a society structure based on families, and they buried their dead in family graves (and even later in single graves). Here in Scandinavia they apparently only settled down as serious farmers around 2000 BD - until then they burnt our forests down to get pastures. And they probably also let their cattle graze on the fields of the farmers, which might explain the lack of non-Indoeuropean elements in ProtoGermanic and its successors.
History isn't for the fainthearted. »Agerbrugere er mere kollektive og bor i landsbyer, mens de her er meget mere individualistiske og organiseret i kernefamilier. Man kan se skiftet i den begravelsesform, de introducerer. Familiegravhøjen kommer med dem.« Hvor agerbrugerne begraves i store jættestuer, der har krævet en kollektiv indsats, bliver landskabet nu fyldt af små gravhøje, som en familie selv kan bygge - i Jylland er der ifølge Kristiansen ca. 30.000 gravhøje. Yamnaya'erne er et hyrdefolk med kvæg, som har heste til at trække alle deres ejendele på prærievogne med de ældst kendte hjul. De brænder skovene af for at skabe græsningsarealer, indtil man omtrent 2.000 fvt. igen bliver bofast. Edited by Iversen on 09 October 2015 at 1:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Aquila123 Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mydeltapi.com Joined 5308 days ago 201 posts - 262 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: Finnish, Russian | Message 8 of 9 11 October 2015 at 8:46pm | IP Logged |
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Still you have a problem with the time depth. The first quite distinct IE languages are
known from about 2000 bc. Then there will be only 1000 years to develop their distinctness. Some of the problems can be solved by postulating an early breakup between Anatolian and the rest, but the problem is still not totally satisfactorily solved. Maybe there was a breakup into a limited area, and after a couple of thousand years people spread over Europe and parts of Asia from different parts of that restricted area. Then the people that began spreading throughout Europa were not any longer speaking Proto-indoeuropean but precursors for the various branches. Edited by Aquila123 on 11 October 2015 at 8:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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