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Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

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Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#91

Post by Tor3 »

adolph wrote: post #70
teleforce wrote: post #9

Related HN posts [1], [2]. Fun facts, the most common words of Indo-European Family are surprisingly very similar across Sanskrit (S) English (E) German (G) [3]. Pitara (S) Father (E) Vater (G) Matara (S) Mother (E) Mutter (G) Bhratara (S) Brother (E) Bruder (G) Duhitar (S) Daughter (E) Tochter (G) [1] New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages (147 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369…

Could you explain in non-specialist language how similarities between these modern languages now has anything to do with their relationship from some earliest common ancestor? How is that explanation better than convergent evolution or overfitting hallucinations? When I look at the difference between modern and “old English” they seem to have changed quite a bit [0]. When I read an etymological explanation [1], it so…

English is a bit special in that it's a relatively modern mix of Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon) and what the invading Normans spoke (a Romance language), plus some more. So when you compare words it's maybe better to look at the origins of the modern English words. "Ignite", for example, is from Latin "Ignitus", via the Normans. It's fine to include English when comparing words from different IE languages, but perhaps not as the only "Western" example. Wikipedia has a much broader list which is more interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary But it's not as good as I would wish. English is included as the only modern western European language. No German, no Swedish, no Icelandic, no Dutch etc.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#92

Post by Tor3 »

empath75 wrote: post #19
teleforce wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The oldest attestation of Indo-European language is now the long extinct language Hittite who used to live in Bronze Age Anatolian Steppe. 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. > On a tangent, with the advent of AI and the final decades of our species,…

I believe the article is saying that the Hittite branch split off early from the rest of the tree, and the Yamnaya are the ones that spread it around the world -- the Hittite branch ended up being a dead end.

The main point of the article was that the Hittite spoke an IE language (evidence from their cuneiform writing), but their DNA doesn't have any Yamnaya ancestry. So, two conflicting points. What the article describes is that they have found an ancient population which they call "the Caucasus Lower Volga people", and their DNA is present in the Yamnaya AND the Hittites, as I understand it. So the hypothesis is that these people spoke an early proto-IE language, and some of them migrated to where the Hittites originated, and others moved west and intermixed with a small region in what is today the southern part of Ukraine, and in a few villages of a few thousand people a whole new economy was developed and this is what eventually spread out as the "steppe migration", bringing proto-IE with them.

So, the base of the article is that they found a population which appears to be ancestral to both the Yamnaya and the Hittites, and that the latter split off before that population became the Yamnaya by migrating elsewhere and merge with people there. What's missing is definite proof that the "Caucasus Lower Volga" people actually spoke proto-proto-IE, but if they didn't then things look even more complex. If they did it would match the current linguistic and DNA evidence pretty well.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#93

Post by geraneum »

teleforce wrote: post #9

Related HN posts [1], [2]. Fun facts, the most common words of Indo-European Family are surprisingly very similar across Sanskrit (S) English (E) German (G) [3]. Pitara (S) Father (E) Vater (G) Matara (S) Mother (E) Mutter (G) Bhratara (S) Brother (E) Bruder (G) Duhitar (S) Daughter (E) Tochter (G) [1] New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages (147 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=369…

In (today’s) Persian they go something like this:

Pedar, Madar, Baradar, Dokhtar

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#94

Post by gbuk2013 »

adastra22 wrote: post #49
gbuk2013 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that part - I speak both English and Russian and the latter is more concise and nuanced due to the more complex grammar. It’s just interesting that the apparent trend is from complexity to simplification, like what I observed with English as grammar is not taught so much here in England anymore. It could well be (and likely is) an illusion stemming from my shallow knowledge of the subject of linguistics.

There is a relevancy bias here. From the perspective of a highly literate society we see fewer grammar rules as simpler. But is it, really? It is substituting one complexity for another. English has fewer noun cases, but a multitude of prepositional phrases that are really hard to keep straight. The grammar of language tends swing back and forth on these factors, perhaps some guided by literacy and the rest a random…

That makes sense and “simpler” is probably not the right word to have used, as that is too positive. :)

To fall back on the reliable technology principle: it depends on your use case.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#95

Post by gbuk2013 »

trhway wrote: post #48
Hemospectrum wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complexity of natural human languages comes in different forms, but as a general rule, whenever you see something that's built into another language and "missing" from your own, you can express it by using more words. For example, PIE had a lot of noun cases that aren't in English, but you don't need the instrumental case to precisely express its purpose. You can say something like "by means of a forklift." Some…

>built into another language and "missing" from your own, you can express it by using more words. ... "by means of a forklift." and that "more words" combination may be more precise, expressive and much simpler to handle in communication in some contexts (not necessary in all though) than say something like with -es being "juschij" and the likes (my past comment on that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244902 )…

This is an interesting and somewhat orthogonal conversation (and sadly not what HN comments are designed for).

The 3 examples you give in each case are not the same though - they have a different colour to them and would be “wrong” to use depending on the context. This is precisely the sort of nuance that I mentioned in one of the other comments and like you say it’s great for poetry but also for encoding additional context in fewer words. Incidentally, I recall my dad pointing this out as another similarity to Sanskrit.

As an example: I once spent some time trying to explain to my wife the difference between «какая-то фигня» and «фигня какая-то». Same words quite different meaning. :)

Taking it further, this difference can be used as a lens to see the fundamental difference between Western and Eastern philosophy and way of thinking but that’s a whole separate rabbit hole. (This is much more my subject of interest rather than linguistics.)

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#96

Post by rsynnott »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #87

has anyone else encountered the Hindu nationalist perspective when discussing this? I've struggled to suggest this is a scientific reality when talking to some otherwise smart people about this and I suspect this is in part to their vulnerability to Hindu nationalist talking points which I assume tend to big up local ancestry instead of an ancestry that connects a lot of different peoples and religions together. Just…

The intersection of nationalism and archaeology can get _really_ weird, and depending on how deep in they are, well, you're probably not going to convince them. If nothing else, it's likely _emotionally_ important to them in a way that it probably isn't for you, the contrived nationalistic narrative being part of, essentially, a belief system.

For a particularly extreme example of this, see Great Zimbabwe, a ruined city in what is now Zimbabwe. When the country was Northern Rhodesia (a white minority ultra-nationalist breakaway state, somewhat like apartheid South Africa but moreso), any serious discussion of the nature of the site was essentially _illegal_ there, because its existence challenged the official narrative (the government insisted that it could not have been built by black people).

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#97

Post by nkrisc »

gbuk2013 wrote: post #39
Hemospectrum wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The complexity of natural human languages comes in different forms, but as a general rule, whenever you see something that's built into another language and "missing" from your own, you can express it by using more words. For example, PIE had a lot of noun cases that aren't in English, but you don't need the instrumental case to precisely express its purpose. You can say something like "by means of a forklift." Some…

I get that part - I speak both English and Russian and the latter is more concise and nuanced due to the more complex grammar. It’s just interesting that the apparent trend is from complexity to simplification, like what I observed with English as grammar is not taught so much here in England anymore. It could well be (and likely is) an illusion stemming from my shallow knowledge of the subject of linguistics.

When I was learning Spanish in Central America, I met people there leaning English. As we would help each other learn, they always commented how lucky I was to be learning Spanish because all the tenses and general regularity made it easy to learn, but they thought English was so difficult to learn because of the seeming lack of rules and regularity.

In some regards English is simpler, but in other ways it is more complex in order to compensate for what’s lost in simplification elsewhere. English is simplified morphologically, but word order does a lot of heavy lifting instead, and it’s often apparent when speaking to someone who hasn’t yet mastered the language.

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#98

Post by inkyoto »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #67
raddles wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are likely referring to Lysenkoism. This was the USSR's alternative to natural selection, partially because they believed natural selection was not compatible with Marxism. (There were other justifications, but this is the one relevant to the parent comment) "Some Marxists, however, perceived a fissure between Marxism and Darwinism. Specifically, the issue is that while the "struggle for survival" in Marxism app…

Yeah Lysenkoism is what I was referring to about flat out denying genetics. But a softer version of genetics denialism has been a running theme historically. Marxists are committed to a sort of historical determinism that requires social conditions to be more important than biology in a way that's not scientifically defensible. That's why they were the first to research classical conditioning, why they continue to su…

Lysenko was widely discredited and ridiculed in the late 1960's following the demise of his main proteges (Stalin and later Khrushchev).

The widespread damage Lysenko had brought about upon the Soviet genetics was widely acknowledged and openly discussed in the Soviet Union at the time. What on Earth is this bloviation all about?

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#99

Post by janandonly »

philwelch wrote: post #80
richardfontana wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dyaus-pitar and Jupiter, Zeus-pater This one is slightly more interesting than a mere cognate as it is believed that the Proto-Indo-European speakers worshipped a sky god with the reconstructed name *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr ("sky-father") which is the ancestor of these (also Tyr and the like on the Germanic side). See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us "*Dyēus is considered by scholars the most securely reconstructed…

What I find interesting is that the primary Turkic/Mongolic deity, Tengri, is also a sky father. There’s no shared genetic or linguistic ancestry there, just two different steppe nomad populations independently deifying the daylight sky the same way.

There is a connection. Not DNA, but via trade with the Saka/Scythians, who where descendants of PIE speakers

Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family

#100

Post by ho2423o4j2334 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #87

has anyone else encountered the Hindu nationalist perspective when discussing this? I've struggled to suggest this is a scientific reality when talking to some otherwise smart people about this and I suspect this is in part to their vulnerability to Hindu nationalist talking points which I assume tend to big up local ancestry instead of an ancestry that connects a lot of different peoples and religions together. Just…

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