Scientists trace evolution of Indo-European languages to Hittites

[whirlygigspin]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1093887,00.html

Tim Radford, science editor
Thursday November 27, 2003
The Guardian


"At last the answer in black and white, or beltz and zuri if you happen to be Basque, or noir and blanc, if you are French. You owe the words to Hittite-speaking farmers from Anatolia, who invented agriculture and spread their words as they sowed their seed, 9,500 years ago."

-snip-

For decades the focus has been on a tribe of nomad herders called the Kurgans from central Asia, who domesticated the horse 6,000 years ago and invaded Europe.

Others have argued that the Indo-European family of languages must have spread with barley and lentils - the first agriculturalists in the Fertile Crescent would have exported not just their techniques, but also the words that went with them.

Charles Darwin noted in 1871 that language seemed to have evolved in much the same way as animals and plants had. Dr Gray used the evolutionary approach three years ago to track the spread of languages from Asia eastwards across the Pacific.

This time he chose 2,449 words from 87 languages, including English, Lithuanian, Gujarati, Romany, Walloon, Breton, Hindi and Pennsylvania Dutch and began a series of comparisons to build up a pattern of descent..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1093887,00.html

[11cents]

Em - the writer shouldn't have used Basque as an example

... since it's not an Indo-European language, as any Basque will be happy to tell you. It's a language isolate -- not known to be related to any other language in the world.

[Cleita]

1. Interesting, but I always thought Basque was a

non-Indo-European language.

[Nazgul35]

2. Basque is not pure...

as any language that has come in contact with others...there has been some cross-generation of words...

[whirlygigspin]

3. basque stood out

in my mind too, but I don't get the pennsylvania dutch thing either,
strange mix.

[Astarho]

7. Grammatically, Basque retains

its non-Indo-European character (ergative, agglutinative), eventhough its vocabulary has borrowed extensivly from Iberian, Celtic, Latin and the modern languages.

[Astarho]

4. Here we go again

One famous Indo-Europeanist once said the question about the Indo-European homeland isn't "Where is it?" but "Where are they putting it now?"

This article sounds like it was influenced by the theories of Colin Renfrew, who is quite contriversial in many circles.

There was the Indo-Hittite theory (That they descended from a common ancestor, rather then Anatolian being a branch of the IE family), but it never caught on. Most of the evidence indicates Anatolian is simply a very archaic branch of the family. There are many flaws in the Anatolian homeland theory:

• The Hattic substrate language.

• the major differences between Hittite (and the Anatolian languages in general) from reconstructed Indo-European.

• The Indo-Uralic theory, would indicate a homeland north of the Black Sea.

• Neighboring languages show no relation to Hittite (Kaskian, Hurrian, Semitic, Sumerian)

• Armenian, and it's close relation to Greek, but lacking any close relation to Anatolian.

• Greek and Indo-Iranian share many isogloses not found in Anatolian, despite being on opposite sides of the Anatolians.

And there's many more, but this is all I can think of now.

[Cleita]

6. I always though Colin Renfrew was missing the

forest for the trees on this.

[Astarho]

8. Especially since the reconstructed vocab

seems to indicate nomadic pastorialists rather than agriculturalists.

[Rabrrrrrr]

10. I think someone here knows a hell of a lot more about linguistics

than I do!

But then, I don't know very much about it.

Thanks for the posts - fascinating read! I am very interested in how languages evolved, but never studied beyond a very occasional and lackadaisical exploration.

post more, if you'd like! You have one interested person here, anyway.

[Lexingtonian]

14. very true

I'm no linguist but have been pretty interested in historical linguistics for a few years.

This article has been discussed over on the Usenet group sci.lang, where a good number of linguists and other specialists hang out. And none of them agrees with this. Renfrew's name came up.

I like a mixed theory where the last common ancestors of all Indoeuropeans lived in the Black Sea depression, and when the ocean breakthrough in the Bosporus happened (6700 BC) the group/tribe/nation split into several tribes inhabiting the more hospitable shores. Those on the northern and western shores generally remained in a lot of language contact , but all three or four major groups differentiated culturally. That seems adequate to me to explain most of the very many, and often convoluted, phenomena, including the reconstructed loan words in PIE from Semitic and Uralic languages.

Basque is indeed an isolate of sorts- but Tartessian inscriptions suggest a language similar to Basque being spoken on the southern shores of the Iberian Peninsula for a long time, and the pre-IE substrate in German looks in some respects similar to Basque. Some scholars seem to think Basque could be distantly related to the Afro-Asiatic language family.

About Lithuanian, the hydronyms (river and lake names) seem to show that Baltic language family speakers inhabited present day Russia at least as far east as Moscow and pretty far south (to the latitude of Kharkov, iirc). The Slavic language family's center of origin seems to be near the Pripet Marshes.

[bleedingheart]

5. this is cool

however I would like to know more info. I am Lithuanian and have been fascinated about how the language is so unusual and it lasted even though the country was surrounded by slavic speaking peoples...

[whirlygigspin]

9. from what I got in the article

it seemed the link was being made through fire and water,

"look, look! I can make fire!" run off and show everyone how!

[Astarho]

12. little info on Lithuanian

Lithuanian is a Baltic language Like Latvian and Old Prussian and bunch of other extinct languages. The Baltic languages are closely related to Slavic and probably Germanic.

Lithuanian is alos one of the most conservative Indo-European languages, retaining nearly all of the IE case system, and many of the old sounds. In some respects it is more conservative than Sanskrit.

As for survival, hydronomy and history indicates that the Baltic languages were once much more widespread (Lithuania was once the largest nation in Europe).

Feel free to PM me for more.

[madrchsod]

11. oh my goodness

the boys and girls at "stormfront" will be posting like mad about this. they have long discussions over the problem of aryian/indo-european peoples.it`s interesting how they try to work around the irianian,indian problem..

[whirlygigspin]

13. oh my, those are some scary people

how did you find them?

[Astarho]

15. kick