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Tracing the Origins of Indo-European Lang | ||
Tags: Indo-European Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Durben Diglot Groupie Portugal Joined 6620 days ago 42 posts - 45 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German | Message 1 of 3 04 September 2012 at 10:16am | IP Logged |
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Tracing the Origins of Indo-European Languages
A new study suggests that the sprawling Indo-European family of languages originated in Anatolia, or modern-day Turkey. 
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| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5784 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 2 of 3 04 September 2012 at 1:16pm | IP Logged |
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This topic has already been discussed and I think there were some excellent points
made on that other thread. The article you reference provides a tree to look at and I was struck by the Germanic and Romance branches of the tree (the only branches were I have some [small] knowledge). Let's take English, for example. Popular knowledge has English as most closely related to Frisian, I'm not in any position to judge as I've never studied any Frisian nor looked into it in too much detail. I am, however, fairly sure that English is supposed to be more closely related to Dutch than to German and what little Dutch I have learned confirmed this for me as it definitely felt even closer than German does. In contrast the tree created by this study has English as an outlier among the West Germanic languages, meaning that German and Dutch are equally close to English. For reasons like that I'm not sure how much trust I have in this tree! I remember these computer generated trees from Uni (I studied Genetics) and though that was 12 years ago now and my memory very, very hazy, I seem to remember that it was far from an exact science and often generated initial results that were later changed. For now I have more confidence in the historical linguists. Edited by Random review on 04 September 2012 at 4:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Antimanner Pentaglot Newbie Denmark Joined 5348 days ago 12 posts - 16 votes Speaks: Danish*, Latin, Sanskrit, English, Ancient Greek Studies: French, Russian, Lithuanian | Message 3 of 3 22 September 2012 at 10:52am | IP Logged |
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You should read this long and highly technical article. It sums up why cladistics doesn't work in this context.
http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/linguistic-geogra phy/quentin-atkinsons-nonsensical-maps-of-indo-european-expa nsion Edited by Antimanner on 22 September 2012 at 10:53am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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