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New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

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Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#71

Post by qersist3nce »

joh234p2342343 wrote: post #65

[flagged]

There is also a micro-aggression against Iranians by fringe communities of Europe/US and even our Arab/Turk neighbors! They somehow think that the name of Iran is "fake" or "manufactured" in 1930s! at the request of Hitler [1].

While we literally have attestations in government letters (in almost every century prior to 20th), local literature and population awareness of the continuity of the freaking name of the country but somehow they completely ignore it.

They also frequently use the word "Aryan" as a derogatory/fake term for Iranians and say "why you don't look like white Europeans if you claim to be Aryan".

[1]: https://www.les-crises.fr/l-origine-nazie-du-nom-de-liran-un...

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#72

Post by DiscourseFan »

joh234p2342343 wrote: post #65

[flagged]

I don't think the Aryan invasion theory was appropriate to justify colonization, but I'm also not sure this constitutes evidence against it. In any case, Sanskrit is far more archaic than Hittite, and even with the genetic evidence it doesn't make sense that Hittite would precede the Indo-aryan languages.

The Bhagavad Gita is quite clear about the cultures of the old Aryan peoples. They were nomadic, cowherding peoples, who were highly patriarchal, that valued prowess in battle and the ability to kill your enemies ruthlessly, even if they were members of your own family. They were probably white because Tocharian speakers in western China are depicted in cave painting as having blond hair and blue eyes[0], a group of people who completely split off the rest of the Indo-European tribal peoples well before they entered the subcontinent.

Is Nazi race science as a justification for brutal genocide and the destruction of labor organizing something I agree with? No, but the Nazis understood that anyone can spin a story to justify any political regime, and that whoever is in power is constantly inventing their own histories to justify their power. None of these things are very meaningful, in the end. Language, culture, and history is far more diverse than the question of Yamnaya genetics.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tocharian_languages#/media/Fil...

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#73

Post by username135 »

cco wrote: post #56
lkrubner wrote: post #41

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,…

> 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. This is fascinating and new to me, can you provide any articles or podcasts that discuss it?

Seconded

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#74

Post by biorach »

bigbillheck wrote: post #69
Archelaos wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You might be interested in 'The Horse, the Wheel, and Language': https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691148182/th...

Excellent book

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#75

Post by ch4s3 »

throwaway290 wrote: post #60
lkrubner wrote: post #41

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?

> How did they manage this all without wheels?

Walking, and at least for the people in North America probably canoes.

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#76

Post by biorach »

joh234p2342343 wrote: post #65

[flagged]

> For years, the Europeans 'scholars' have dogmatically asserted that 'Aryans' were European. That Indian culture, and thus all of its achievements were brought in by the 'mighty European white-skinned warriors' who 'by their grace' not only conquered them violently, but also 'graciously' brought everything valuable in Indian civilization, which of course was then 'corrupted' by the despicable dark-skinned natives.

That is not what Western science claims. You seem to be describing a garbled version of some junk pseudo history that the Nazis spouted decades ago but that is not at all representative of any reputable modern science

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#77

Post by smitty1e »

dmichulke wrote: post #70
canjobear wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can you determine that a consonant was "laryngeal" (voiced?) from text?

For an interesting example using ancient Egyptian, see https://youtu.be/J-K5OjAkiEA

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#78

Post by AlotOfReading »

whimsicalism wrote: post #66
abeppu wrote: post #61

> “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/…

> trade, war/political power, cultural exchange etc also move languages around 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.

Can you clarify a bit more about who did this learning? This statement is profoundly at odds with what I understand as an archaeologist. To give one example, Kohler's Sprachbund paper [1] gives a modern-ish proposal about linguistic convergence/diffusion that largely avoids demographic replacement. Are you talking about discontinuities, which is a related (but critically different) term that's often used in the literature?

[1] https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-012-9145-4

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#79

Post by rustymonday »

lkrubner wrote: post #41
Roark66 wrote: post #25

I find it fascinating modern humans are thought to have evolved 300k years ago, but we haven't got any idea what happened before last ice age. I find it hard to believe people would just "stay in Africa" prior to last ice age (120k years ago and before) when the moment climate allowed it (~10k years ago) they spread out all over the planet.

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,…

Aboriginal Australians migrated to Australia 65,000 years ago.

Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages

#80

Post by Sprocklem »

dmichulke wrote: post #70
canjobear wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How can you determine that a consonant was "laryngeal" (voiced?) from text?

See the video linked in the sister comment for (IIRC) an excellent discussion of historical reconstruction of sounds from writing systems, but I can add some clarification to the matter of laryngeal consonants: they are confusingly named for historical reasons but consitute three unknown consonants with a place of articulation towards the back of the vocal tract (near the larynx). In addition to this reconstruction, this specific case has the additional matter of finding consonants in a place where they are predicted from their influence on the nearby vowels in IE languages (and, incidentally, the expected vowels), but where there is otherwise no consonant attested in non-Anatolian IE languages.
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