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Origins of the Indo-European Language Fam | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| stelingo Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5833 days ago 722 posts - 1076 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Czech, Polish, Greek, Mandarin | Message 1 of 4 26 August 2012 at 8:02am | IP Logged |
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'Modern Indo-European languages - which include English - originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago, researchers say.'
Link to BBC online article here Link to the report here (You need to subscribe) Edited by stelingo on 26 August 2012 at 8:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 4 26 August 2012 at 6:34pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you for the link!
I haven't read the paper in question (I don't have access to Science), but this isn't the first paper where somebody has tried to do historical linguistics using algorithms from bioinformatics. There's a very predictable bit of academic politics that flares up every time somebody publishes one of these papers: * Science is an extremely prestigious journal. But like Nature (the only journal of similar stature), it's a little too anxious to publish groundbreaking papers, whether or not they're actually correct. The most famous example of this was the "water memory" paper in Nature. Typically, what happens is that these journals will publish a paper by a physicist claiming to "revolutionize" computer science, or by a biologist claiming to "revolutionize" linguistics. And the peer reviewers—whose job it is to keep incompetent BS out of the journal—don't seem to know very much about computer science or linguistics. * There's a field called "historical linguistics" which has spent the last 150-plus years painstakingly reconstructing dead languages, and which has had several spectacular confirmations. For example, somebody will make a radical prediction, and a newly discovered language will later confirm it. Historical linguists work word-by- word, carefully identifying loan words, verb paradigms, and other tricky wrinkles in the data. * Historical linguistics was a major inspiration for evolution and modern biology, dating back to the 1800s. Since this time, of course, biology has become a booming field of its own, and has written lots of powerful software for analyzing genetic history. * Every few years, some biologist will get the bright idea of throwing raw linguistic data into some bioinformatics software, and will submit the results to Science or another interdisciplinary journal of the sort. But the problem is that the biologists rarely (a) know anything about historical linguistics, (b) clean their data to remove known loan words, or (c) consult with anyone who has a clue before running off to announce their "revolutionary discovery". Now, if the historical linguists hadn't spent a century and a half building family trees for Indo-European by hand, debating every individual word, some of these papers by overenthusiastic biologists would be an excellent first draft of historical linguistics. But the work has been done before, and it has generally been done better. So, I would take these research results with a grain of salt until the historical linguists have a chance to look at this paper carefully and respond to these claims. They might be true! Or they might not. 11 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5568 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 3 of 4 26 August 2012 at 9:58pm | IP Logged |
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All individual studies need to be taken with a grain of salt. Very seldom in science is one study sufficient to revolutionize the way we think about something. Only when other researchers start coming to the same conclusion, when multiple independent lines of evidence converge on a single idea, and a real consensus forms in the research community, can we have a high degree of confidence that we have stumbled upon the truth or at least something that approximates the truth.
When it comes to historical linguistics, the available data is always going to be fuzzy, and extremely so when you're going back thousands of years. I'm always skeptical when people claim to have conclusive knowledge regarding the details of a proto-language that was never written down. It's good to think about these things and speculate, see which ideas make sense in light of the evidence we do have, but it's important to be humble and recognize that our educated guesses based on indirect observations don't constitute definite knowledge. I think it's entirely plausible that Proto-Indo-European was spoken in Anatolia. However, I don't think that you can conclusively disprove alternative hypotheses of its origin just using statistical analysis of PIE's daughter languages. There is some geographical information you can glean, for example the fact that PIE had words for certain kinds of trees and geographical features that survive into widely disparate modern languages, which gives us some idea what things must have been in PIE speakers' environment. But that only tells us that PIE was spoken somewhere in central Eurasia, which is a big place. And we're not even certain that it was a single language in a single location; PIE could easily have been a dialect continuum that spanned a wide geographical area and whose nomadic speakers were always on the move. If PIE is going to be tied to a specific region, then multiple researchers using multiple independent methods of inferring its location need to be consistently converging on the same conclusion, and that's just not happening. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 4 of 4 27 August 2012 at 11:30am | IP Logged |
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Like Emk I have only read the article in BBC (though I might be able to find science on some library in my hometown). But is surprises me than anybody are willing to make guesses that go 5000 or even 8000 years back in time - long before the first Sumerian and Egyptian writings appeared, and even longer before the hittites appeared. We know from for instance English that a language can change a lot in a short time, especially in troubled times (and the hittites who appeared in present day Turkey almost 4000 years ago were certainly capable of making times troubled for their surroundings!). On the other hand people who are left in peace and ignored and cut off from 'civilization' can keep their language stable for very long periods, witness Lituanian and Icelandic. This is a very different situation from the cladistic analysis of mankind where you could count on a roughly stable rate of mutations. In language history you must be prepared for large geographical and historical fluctuations in the 'mutation rate'.
Besides this analysis is based on some supposed core words (somewhat along the lines of thought of Greenberg), but in some languages most of the vocabulary apart from number, family members and pronouns comes from other languages. And again 'troubled times' is a likely reason. This makes the delimitation of the core vocabulary problematic, unlike our genes which don't constantly absorb things from the outside world. It wouldn't surprise me if the Indoeuropan languages all go back to ancestors in Asia minor, and from there the different branches could spread in all directions. But just as the Turks apparently came from Central Asia just a thousand years ago (the first inscriptions in a language from that group were found in the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia) those elusive Protoindoeuropeans could have followed the same path westwards some three thousand years before. I have not yet seen any clear evidence which once and for all places the original ancestor of the Indoeuropean languages in either Central Asia or Asia minor, only circumstantial evidence which can point in several directions. Edited by Iversen on 27 August 2012 at 6:21pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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