The Indo-European thread

[Astarho]

Indo-European linguistics is a hobby of mine, so I thought I would open it up to discussion.

Indo-European is the largest and most widely spoken language family in the world, spoken by half the planet. Because of that, it is the most widely documented. The family is made up of Germanic, Italic, Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Celtic, the extinct Tocharian and Anatolian branches as well as several independent languages Greek, Armenian, Albanian, and the extinct branches, Illyrian, Thracian and Phrygian (I tend to group the last six under the title Balkan due to geographic proximity)

Despite all the research and documentation, there are still several controversies in IE linguistics, one of which being where the homeland was.

In my view, it was on the steppes north of the Black Sea, for several reasons:
1. One it is roughly central to the distribution of the languages.
2. The steppe cultures were nomadic and extremely mobile, which would allow for the rapid expansions from India and Turkestan in the east to Western Europe.
3. Evidence of substrate languages can rule out most of Western Europe, India, Anatolia and Armenia.
3a. The grammatical restructuring of the fringe languages (Celtic, Anatolian, Tocharian) could be attributed to interference from substrate languages, as opposed to the conservatism of the Baltic and Slavic languages.
4. Seeming evidence of very early IE loans in Uralic, would indicate the languages were in close proximity early in their development.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

1. Makes sense to me

Back when I was a graduate student in linguistics some friends from the Indo-European made up a song, sung to Home on the Range, called Home in the Urheimat.

I wish I could remember it, but the refrain began:

Ur-ur-ur-heimat
The philologers ask
"Vot is dot?"...

There are a lot of interesting archaeological finds in the steppes north of the Black Sea. Isn't that where all those "Scythian" remains were found?

[Astarho]

2. LOL

Linguists are a creative lot. :)

As for the Kurgan mounds, yeah they've found a lot up there. Some were definately Scythian, but others date back some 5000 years, predating the Scythians (but would fit the IE timescale).

Also they've found evidence of an Indic substrate, aka Pontic Aryan
http://indoeuro.bizland.com/archive/article17.html

[idgiehkt]

8. interesting link

thanks :)

[nickinSTL]

3. It's a fascinating topic

one of my favorites.

I don't necessarily have a favorite for the IE homeland. I've heard a number of theories, and ignoring the outlandish ones, the Black Sea are and Anatolia seem the primary suspects.

[Astarho]

4. Anatolia never seemed to fit for me

Mainly because the Hattic speakers there and the fact that most IE languages in the area, (Anatolian, and Armenian) seem to differ drastically from the proto-language.

[Odin2005]

6. The Anatolian Hypothesis seems to have been nothing more then a passing fad.

It seems to be loosing it's popularity back to the "traditional" Kurgan Hypothesis.

[ZombieNixon]

5. That's what I think

You should read the intro to the American Herirtage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, if you haven't already. It covers the topic pretty well in depth in an easy to understand manner and it's absolutely fascinating.

[Odin2005]

7. Germanic also had a strong amount of substrate influence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_substrate_hypothesis