On a well-known "not-so-palaeo-language"

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

This has to do with two competing hypotheses regarding the geographic origin of Indo-European languages.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

Language tree rooted in Turkey.
Evolutionary ideas give farmers credit for Indo-European tongues.
27 November 2003 – Nature ScienceUpdate

JOHN WHITFIELD

Languages, like genomes, encode information.
© Corbis

A family tree of Indo-European languages suggests they began to spread and split about 9,000 years ago. The finding hints that farmers in what is now Turkey drove the language boom - and not later Siberian horsemen, as some linguists reckon.

Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand use the rate at which words change to gauge the age of the tree's roots - just as biologists estimate a species' age from the rate of gene mutations. The differences between words, or DNA sequences, are a measure of how closely languages, or species, are related.

Gray and Atkinson analysed 87 languages from Irish to Afghan. Rather than compare entire dictionaries, they used a list of 200 words that are found in all cultures, such as 'I', 'hunt' and 'sky'. Words are better understood than grammar as a guide to language history; the same sentence structure can arise independently in different tongues.

© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003

For the full text, CLICK HERE

And, for those of you who would rather learn about this story in French , LE MONDE also carries a fairly lengthy piece.

[Mikey Brass]

All,

This has to do with two competing hypotheses regarding the geographic origin of Indo-European languages.

But as words as the surface of a language, this study seems to me to be superficial rather than methdologically substantive ?

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

Here is Nicholas Wade review of the study referred to in my earlier post.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

A Biological Dig for the Roots of Language

By NICHOLAS WADE

New York Times - Published: March 16, 2004

Once upon a time, there were very few human languages and perhaps only one, and if so, all of the 6,000 or so languages spoken round the world today must be descended from it.

If that family tree of human language could be reconstructed and its branching points dated, a wonderful new window would be opened onto the human past.

Yet in the view of many historical linguists, the chances of drawing up such a tree are virtually nil and those who suppose otherwise are chasing a tiresome delusion.

Languages change so fast, the linguists point out, that their genealogies can be traced back only a few thousand years at best before the signal dissolves completely into noise: witness how hard Chaucer is to read just 600 years later.

But the linguists' problem has recently attracted a new group of researchers who are more hopeful of success. They are biologists who have developed sophisticated mathematical tools for drawing up family trees of genes and species. Because the same problems crop up in both gene trees and language trees, the biologists are confident that their tools will work with languages, too.

The biologists' latest foray onto the linguists' turf is a reconstruction of the Indo-European family of languages by Dr. Russell D. Gray, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

For the full text, CLICK HERE.

[rlass]

It's rather a pity that the Anatolian story is surfacing again; for some reason this particular narrative seems to be in favour primarily with non-linguists.

I'd just like to note that the consensus among IE specialists is that there is no substance to the Anatolian origins scenario; the evidence from loanwords and their forms most strongly suggests not necessarily a steppe origin (you can be anti-Anatolian without believing the Kurgan hypothesis), but an origin probably around the Black Sea or thereabouts, and movement north and east (the strongest evidence is the spread of 'horse' words and some others into Siberian, Caucasian and Semitic languages, and the form these words take, suggesting for instance that a lot of the innovations that define Indo-Iranian moved first north and then east, and Anatolia is one of the late arrivals).

Among most linguists by the way the idea that there is a 'lexical attrition clock' has been discredited for decades; virtually no serious scholars of linguistic prehistory use the techniques of 'glottochronology' any more, as it turns out that rates of lexical change are strongly culturally primed and not at all constant.

Just a reminder from within linguistics that what one might call the 'Renfrew School' is generally not well thought of within the profession.