English language 'originated in Turkey'(bbc.com)
bbc.com
English language 'originated in Turkey'
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19368988
6 comments
Ridiculous title if I understand it correctly. They are saying all European languages originated there, not just English.
All Indo-European languages. Not all European languages are Indo-European, for example Hungarian is not.
And some non-European languages are Indo-European, like Hindi or Persian.
And some non-European languages are Indo-European, like Hindi or Persian.
One might add that the Turkic language family isn't Indo-European. They seem to have originated in Central Asia.
> Ridiculous title if I understand it correctly.
It's on the BBC. Based in the country that gave English to the world. For an audience of mainly English/British readers. 'Ridiculous' could be seen as a slight exaggeration, no?
It's on the BBC. Based in the country that gave English to the world. For an audience of mainly English/British readers. 'Ridiculous' could be seen as a slight exaggeration, no?
Seems a reasonable title to me. If it was a person saying he had Turkish ancestry, you wouldn't say it was a ridiculous title because "many people have Turkish ancestors, not just him".
Obviously other languages originated there, because English is related to other languages!
Obviously other languages originated there, because English is related to other languages!
>Seems a reasonable title to me
To you it might, but to any linguist this is as ridiculous of a title as saying "English people originated in Africa". You will imediatelly think "wait, but the actual ethnogenesis happened nowhere close to Africa, so why would one say 'English people'? it's not useful to reference it".
It's the same with this title. It's as useful as saying that Farsi originated in Turkey. Or any language descended from PIE, for that matter.
Not even the separation into IE families like Germanic, Balto-Slavic, etc. happened at that time. Not even Anatolian had separated from IE. Yet the title references the ''English'' language.
>Obviously other languages originated there
No, the thing is, they didn't. Nor did English.
What originated there is an ancestor of a group of languages.
To you it might, but to any linguist this is as ridiculous of a title as saying "English people originated in Africa". You will imediatelly think "wait, but the actual ethnogenesis happened nowhere close to Africa, so why would one say 'English people'? it's not useful to reference it".
It's the same with this title. It's as useful as saying that Farsi originated in Turkey. Or any language descended from PIE, for that matter.
Not even the separation into IE families like Germanic, Balto-Slavic, etc. happened at that time. Not even Anatolian had separated from IE. Yet the title references the ''English'' language.
>Obviously other languages originated there
No, the thing is, they didn't. Nor did English.
What originated there is an ancestor of a group of languages.
A better title for Hacker News would be the BBC subtitle "Modern Indo-European languages like English originated in Turkey 9,000 years ago". That includes the language family name (though of course the super-family of Indo-European and its cousins originated elsewhere).
I'm sure their mathematical models are very beautiful, but the facts just don't support this theory at all. The "wheel" argument against this theory is just too damning, and their counterargument is weak: that nearly 4000 years after the language family split up, words for wheel, axle, and yoke managed to spread to nearly all daughter languages as loan words. But the problem is that these supposed loan words words reflect the same sound changes as all of the basic, inherited vocabulary. Thus the wheel vocab must be inherited from the same point in time as words like thou/tu/du.
Not to mention that the material culture found at the Ukraine sites is a much better match for what we know about early Indo-European culture.
Not to mention that the material culture found at the Ukraine sites is a much better match for what we know about early Indo-European culture.
Black Sea deluge is one theory for the initial dispersal of Indo-European speakers. Although wikipedia I don't think mentions this directly, the idea is that forced relocation caused the spread of the language. The timeline is approximately in line with what other theories suggest as well. And yes, Ukraine would have been the center. Or more correctly, what is now at the bottom of the Black Sea south of Ukraine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis
I find it somewhat surprising that these studies focus so much on vocabulary. Syntax seems to be much more stable over time.
All languages have so many "loan words" (do they ever give them back?) and borrowing words happens so quickly that I find it impossible to model this over millennia. Surely, we're dealing with a more general graph here, not with a simple tree.
All languages have so many "loan words" (do they ever give them back?) and borrowing words happens so quickly that I find it impossible to model this over millennia. Surely, we're dealing with a more general graph here, not with a simple tree.
walk is actually a bad example for words that don't change as it changed quite a lot in meaning.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/walk#Etymology
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/walk#Etymology
like 'turkey' did existed 9000 years ago.But editors need to sell articles.let's not fall for these cheap stunts.
What do you want them to say? Anatolia? The headline has some problems, but I wouldn't have called that one of them.
It is actually "the Anatolian hypothesis". The thing with Turkey is that it has its own language which is not related to this, so the title can be confused for "English comes from Turkish"
To my knowledge, Anatolia is not a strictly historical region. So one can also say that Turkish is the majority language in Anatolia. Now you have the problem with people not knowing what Anatolia is, on top of the possible confusion between the Turkish language and the region that belongs to the Republic of Turkey today (Anatolia).
The title doesn't reference the Turkish language. If English, or the family of languages it belongs to, didn't originate near the British Isles, why would one readily assume that the Turkish language (or its family) originated in, and always belonged to, the region that is today known as Turkey?
The title doesn't reference the Turkish language. If English, or the family of languages it belongs to, didn't originate near the British Isles, why would one readily assume that the Turkish language (or its family) originated in, and always belonged to, the region that is today known as Turkey?
> Anatolia is not a strictly historical region
Of course it is, also known as asia minor since the ancient times:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolia
And the relevant linguistic hypothesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis
Of course it is, also known as asia minor since the ancient times:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolia
And the relevant linguistic hypothesis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis
> Of course it is,
"Not strictly historical" by which I mean; not only used as a historical region. So if it is still used to refer to the modern region in some cases (?), then it can be misleading in the same way that one uses "Turkey" to refer to that region; it can be misunderstood to refer to this modern region, while in fact one is talking about a time where that place had nothing to do with modern Turkey. (whew!)
> And the relevant linguistic hypothesis:
Who cares what linguists call it? This is presumably meant for a more general audience, an audience that probably knows where Turkey lies but may not have heard of Anatolia. Anatolia is only slightly smaller than modern Turkey, and is subsumed by it. I don't think it is misleading.
"Not strictly historical" by which I mean; not only used as a historical region. So if it is still used to refer to the modern region in some cases (?), then it can be misleading in the same way that one uses "Turkey" to refer to that region; it can be misunderstood to refer to this modern region, while in fact one is talking about a time where that place had nothing to do with modern Turkey. (whew!)
> And the relevant linguistic hypothesis:
Who cares what linguists call it? This is presumably meant for a more general audience, an audience that probably knows where Turkey lies but may not have heard of Anatolia. Anatolia is only slightly smaller than modern Turkey, and is subsumed by it. I don't think it is misleading.
[deleted]
http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/259yt8/indoeuro...
"This is essentially the conclusion of biologists who treated the spread of language like the spread of disease. They specifically only modeled slow expansion through cultural diffusion, meaning they completely ignored things like languages spread through conquest. They literally ignored the Roman empire in the evolution of Indo European. So if you look at the actual timeline their simulation puts forth, it has things like Iceland being populated by settlers from the Faroe Islands, who took fifty years to cross the sea there. They also did much of this on the basis of cognates, and so by their model Russian splits off of the slavic languages first and Polish is closely related to Ukrainian, because Russian has a bunch of Greek words that make it seem superficially different.
Overall, it's not good science."
The poster also recommends a video that breaks this apart in greater detail, though it's over an hour long:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ