Its quite difficult to fathom how these early linguistic branches have sounded around 8000 bc when they have changed so dramatically from 1000 bc to today. Is there any way (for a layman) to get a feel about this?
New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
111–120 of 157 posts
Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did that surprise you, as an Armenian speaker?
idk in school they really go ham on how exactly our language has elements from the "core" of the indo-european branch, not sure how well the steppe works with the narrative
It's irrelevant, as I point out below. Armenian is not an Anatolian language despite it existing in the Anatolian region.
The Anatolian languages are all extinct, and Armenian has its origins out of the Yamnaya migration out of the steppe just like the rest of living Indo-European languages.
Armenian is Armenian, not related to Hittite, Luwian, etc. of the Bronze age in any way except as extremely distant cousins.
Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
#113I 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,…
> But at some time between 50k and 20k years ago, all humans outside of Africa seemed to have died: Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Sapiens, all of them.
Hasn’t this been debunked by the discovery of Neanderthal and I think Denisovan DNA in contemporary human populations?
Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can you determine that a consonant was "laryngeal" (voiced?) from text?
The laryngeal consonants were guttural sounds produced in the back of the throat, like English h, German ch, Arabic `ayn or qaf, etc. We don't know exactly what the pronunciations were, but in other existing languages, laryngeal sounds like this tend to have an effect on the surrounding vowels. This happens because your tongue has to movie continuously between the sounds it produces, and so there's some blurring that…
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Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
#115I 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.
Razib Khan’s Substack has a lot of pieces about the complexities of out-of-Africa; here are a few that aren’t paywalled:
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/out-of-africas-midlife-crisis
Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This is very common. The Romans did not genocide and repopulate everywhere they conquered, for example. A lot of romance language speakers genetically contiguous with Celts and other such things. And going back further there is evidence of genetic continuity with pre-Indo-European European populations too.
The picture with the Indo-Europeans becomes a little clearer when you distinguish between Y-chromosomal and mitochondrial DNA. The genetic continuity with pre-Indo-Europeans is entirely on the mothers’ side; the Y-chromosome DNA of that population was entirely replaced with that of Indo-Europeans.
Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
#117Earlier 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…
Roots undergo semantic shifts in their meaning. So English "deer" is cognate to German "Tier" despite the fact that Tier means animal in German, but only one specific kind of animal in English. The German meaning is the original one for the root; in English it shifted to the more specific meaning. In German, "Rad" was originally a word that meant something like "rolling" and it generalized in meaning to encompass wha…
> Roots undergo semantic shifts in their meaning. So English "deer" is cognate to German "Tier" despite the fact that Tier means animal in German, but only one specific kind of animal in English. The German meaning is the original one for the root; in English it shifted to the more specific meaning.
And if you go back and read Old English and Middle English texts you can actually see this happen! From https://ahdictionary.com/word/search.html?q=deer
> In Middle English texts one finds a fish, an ant, or a fox called a der, the Middle English ancestor of our word deer. In its Old English form dēor, the word referred to any animal, including members of the deer family, and continued to do so in Middle English, although it also acquired the specific sense "a deer." By the end of the Middle English period, around 1500, the general sense had all but disappeared.
Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
#118Earlier 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…
> I agree with your general point but ironically you yourself now try to link language to genetics (skin color).
The link is very strong for the obvious reason that everyone learns to speak to their parents.
My point is that things happen to break the link, not that the link can break for no reason.
Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Ethopians also just don't really look very much like west African (Niger-Congo speakers, but it is nonsense to presume Ethopians area "hybrid" population while west African Niger-Congo speakers and west Asian Semitic speakers are are "basal".
Niger-Congo does not belong to the Afroasiatic language group. I mentioned Nigeria because of Hausa. Obviously I would no more assume that the Hausa are a basal Afroasiatic group than that any Ethiopian group is.
Re: New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages
#120I 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.
After 300k years ago people are called anatomically modern humans, not “final copy” humans. Evolution never stopped. And even if evolution did stop, consider that developing primitive technology, language, and culture (eg wearing of clothes, a notion of “fairness” or “justice” so conflicts can be resolved without killing people) into something that’d allow humans to be as environmentally adaptable as they are today could itself take a long time.
Humans didn’t “stay in Africa” and early Homo sapiens certainly didn’t wait until 10k years ago to spread across the planet. Going off memory here but pretty sure the current theory is early Homo sapiens started to spread out of Africa about ~70-60k years ago. 10k years ago is around when agriculture and “civilization” began.
Also other hominids, arguably a kind of human, like Neanderthals and homo erectus had left Africa well before 100k years ago - considering they were probably more adapted to their environment in many cases it’s not that far fetched to think their presence generally made it harder for early Homo sapiens to displace them or coexist with them, given they’d occupy similar ecological niches.