61–70 of 157 posts
Can someone with a background in this area speak to why the DNA data is taken to be a strong signal about the origin of language families? Like, clearly when people move around they generally take their language with them, but trade, war/political power, cultural exchange etc also move languages around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At this point the argument isn't that people stayed in Africa, but that everyone outside of Africa died. At this point the 3 oldest fossils we have that look like homo sapiens are all from Morocco or the Levant or Greece, suggesting homo sapiens first evolved near the Mediterranean. But at some time between 50k and 20k years ago, all humans outside of Africa seemed to have died: Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Sapiens,…
> It is well known that Sapiens arrived in Spain 40k years ago and that they demonstrated modern behavior: arts, music, advanced hunting tools Anyone to whom this is complete news? How did they manage this all without wheels?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A nice counter-example is Finnish (and other Finno-Ugric languages) – back in the early 1900s it was argued that Finns as an ethnicity must have originated from the Urals because the language seemed to have its roots there. (Notably in the era's racial "science" this had clear racist implications.) But modern genetics have revealed that the origins of the people are quite separate from the origins of the language.
Indeed this is so, but where does one find further information online (or not online) ? Such a case where language and genetics do not align is unusual in the world, but I have read that there are a few cases. Mostly associated with conquest and/or assimilation IIRC.
> “Ancient DNA and language phylogenetics thus combine to suggest that the resolution to the 200-year-old Indo-European enigma lies in a hybrid of the farming and Steppe hypotheses” Can someone with a background in this area speak to why the DNA data is taken to be a strong signal about the origin of language families? Like, clearly when people move around they generally take their language with them, but trade, war/…
> “Ancient DNA and language phylogenetics thus combine to suggest that the resolution to the 200-year-old Indo-European enigma lies in a hybrid of the farming and Steppe hypotheses” Can someone with a background in this area speak to why the DNA data is taken to be a strong signal about the origin of language families? Like, clearly when people move around they generally take their language with them, but trade, war/…
This was much less common in the pre-modern era. One of the largest learnings of the latter 20th century in this field is that when language and culture are moving, it typically means a previous population was displaced, not merely that the same people adopted a new culture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact remains that you would not expect to see black Africans speaking any Afroasiatic language without some kind of significant cultural shock. The reason those languages are in Ethiopia ( / Nigeria / etc. ) today is not that Ethiopia is populated by the descendants of an originally afroasiatic group. Something must have happened.
The Semitic languages are Afroasiatic languages. I agree with your general point but ironically you yourself now try to link language to genetics (skin color). In the horn of Africa they've always spoken Semitic languages as far as we know, and actually it's possible the entire language family originated in Africa, not in West Asia as I guess you assume. This hasn't been proven one way or another, both theories exist…
> “Ancient DNA and language phylogenetics thus combine to suggest that the resolution to the 200-year-old Indo-European enigma lies in a hybrid of the farming and Steppe hypotheses” Can someone with a background in this area speak to why the DNA data is taken to be a strong signal about the origin of language families? Like, clearly when people move around they generally take their language with them, but trade, war/…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only substantive objection I see there is archeological-linguistic. Words related to chariot technology like “wheel” and “yoke” are cognate across IE languages, so the languages probably split after this technology was invented. But the invention seems to have happened later than 8000 BP.
Can we say something about how often a particular technological adaptation is accompanied by an adoption of the corresponding verbal expression? In other words: If the wheel has been adopted by a neighbouring community, is it not very likely that the word for it will be adopted in a linguistically similar version? As an aside: I looked for the origine of the English "wheel" and the German "Rad", and they seem to have…
Fun facts, the oldest attestation of Indo-European language is now the long extinct language Hittite. The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE. Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1]. [1]Hittite language: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hittite_language
Hittite is also interesting because it provided one of the biggest validations of the methodology for reconstructing languages. Based on subtle patterns in vowels in other Indo-European languages, Saussure was able to figure out that there must have been three “laryngeal” consonants in Proto-Indo-European which were lost in all the attested languages. And lo and behold, when Hittite was deciphered, there were the lar…