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Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
111–120 of 188 posts
Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual surviving texts are even less than 2000 years old. one just beliefs that the oral tradition was written down pretty unaltered but that's questionable in my opinion
There's one good reason to believe that they wrote it down (mostly) unaltered and continued transmitting it (mostly) unaltered, which is that they continued copying it and reciting it well past the point where they even understood what many of the words meant any more, and they developed a lot of techniques to recite it and memorize it based purely on phonemes and developed ideas about how the sounds themselves carri…
So someone wrote down chants in the 19th century and realized that similar chants were written down almost 2000 years earlier?
Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's one good reason to believe that they wrote it down (mostly) unaltered and continued transmitting it (mostly) unaltered, which is that they continued copying it and reciting it well past the point where they even understood what many of the words meant any more, and they developed a lot of techniques to recite it and memorize it based purely on phonemes and developed ideas about how the sounds themselves carri…
So someone wrote down chants in the 19th century and realized that similar chants were written down almost 2000 years earlier?
No, all of the texts we're talking about here have been passed down in written form for 2000–3000 years, if we ignore the Scandinavian ones. It was only the first 1000–1500 years of the preservation of the Rig Veda that were exclusively oral.
Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure if you’re talking about my comment, but I didn’t make that claim. I simply asserted that Rigveda might be not a good source of data if we’re looking for evidence of a migration.
No, I was talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43005206 , the ancestral comment containing the phrases I quoted from it, between quote marks. The Rig Veda does provide important evidence of a migration, but not by narrating it. Rather, the vocabulary, grammar, and mythological content are so similar to the Avestan texts that a common linguistic origin seems inescapable. That of course doesn't demonstrat…
Ah ok. I agree with you.
The prevalence of Steppe Ancestry in all modern day Indians should be enough to conclude that some form of migration happened.
All this politically tinged talk about supposed purity of DNA is utter nonsense.
Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
This study is about prehistoric Steppe peoples, there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time.
> there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time That's a very negative presumptions. How about the oldest attestation of Indo-European language or the long extinct language Hittite who once lived in Bronze age Anatolian Steppe? The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE. Hittite people…
That is about 2500 years after the period we're discussing, and in a region conventionally considered to be on a different continent. It isn't a mere presumption that the Kurgan culture didn't have writing; archaeologists have been looking for it diligently for more than a century and have found extensive collections of well-preserved grave goods, but no writing. Writing was invented about 1000 years later in Sumeria, probably in Egypt, and possibly in South America, but not in the Lower Volga homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. (The North American and Chinese inventions of writing seem to have been independent, but were another 2000 years later still.)
The Hittites adopted the Sumerian form of writing; they did not bring a writing system with them from the Volga. Neither did other Indo-European groups have writing, which is why Hittite is, as you say, the oldest attested Indo-European language.
Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Did you consider reading either of my comments or did you just feel the immediate need to reply in an insulting manner without contributing anything?
Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, I was talking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43005206 , the ancestral comment containing the phrases I quoted from it, between quote marks. The Rig Veda does provide important evidence of a migration, but not by narrating it. Rather, the vocabulary, grammar, and mythological content are so similar to the Avestan texts that a common linguistic origin seems inescapable. That of course doesn't demonstrat…
Ah ok. I agree with you. The prevalence of Steppe Ancestry in all modern day Indians should be enough to conclude that some form of migration happened. All this politically tinged talk about supposed purity of DNA is utter nonsense.
Do we know it's steppe ancestry because of DNA comparisons with Kurgan grave DNA, or from some other evidence? To me it seems a priori difficult to know where a gene hails from originally.
Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there are no Indo-European inscriptions from this time period nor would there be any until several millennia after this time That's a very negative presumptions. How about the oldest attestation of Indo-European language or the long extinct language Hittite who once lived in Bronze age Anatolian Steppe? The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE. Hittite people…
That is about 2500 years after the period we're discussing, and in a region conventionally considered to be on a different continent. It isn't a mere presumption that the Kurgan culture didn't have writing; archaeologists have been looking for it diligently for more than a century and have found extensive collections of well-preserved grave goods, but no writing. Writing was invented about 1000 years later in Sumeria…
The Hittite documents, besides recording several Indo-European languages from the same (Anatolian) branch of the Indo-European language family, also record some fragments from an Indic language, making that the older attestation from another Indo-European branch than that of the Hittites. (The next attested Indo-European branch is Mycenaean Greek).
That Indic language was the language of some group of people who at some point in time, perhaps after a war victory, had become the main members of the elites who ruled Mitanni, a Southern neighbor of the Hittites, located mostly in present Syria, where most inhabitants were speaking Hurrian, a non-Indo-European language.
Those Indic-speaking people were renowned as expert horse trainers, so the quotes from their language were encountered in Hittite documents about horse training.
Most known data is consistent with an older migration towards South Asia of the people speaking Indic languages, who had gone both towards East, reaching India, and towards West, reaching as far as Syria, where they entered in contact with the Hittites and other related populations, who had migrated towards South at an even earlier date and through a different path, reaching present Turkey.
The Indic migration has been followed much later by a migration on the same path of people speaking the closely related Iranian languages, who have reached the present territories of Iran, Afghanistan, Tadjikistan, forming the ancient Persian empires, after various conquests.
The people whom we now name Hittites used another name for themselves, and they called Hittites a non-Indo-European population, who were the former inhabitants of the territory ruled by what we call Hittites.
Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
The story with the Indo-Europeans is basically as follows: 1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European languages using comparative phonetics we can try and reconstruct the words of the proto-IE language, both their approximate sounds and approximate meanings. This gives us some information about the society. E.g., the PIE language very likely had a word for wheel, which puts the common PIE community…
PIE reconstructions are very interesting peaces of linguistic, but they seems often mistaken. One great analogy, I first saw presented in some Linguisticae[1] video I think, is "what if we had no direct trace of Latin and we were looking to recreate proto-Romance roots." Of course Latin itself refers to very wide set of linguistic practices, with all the diversity we can imagine through time, space, individuals and e…
That's what I wonder, whether there has been any blind backtesting of the methodology itself to see how reliable it even is. Reconstructed proto-languages tend to be overly complex and unnatural.
Re: Ancient-DNA study identifies originators of Indo-European language family
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the society of Rig-Veda I fail to understand how the Rigvedic society can be connected to this DNA research. Rigveda never mentions anything beyond the Punjab/Swat/Haryana region in any of the hymns. The flora and fauna mentioned in it is also exclusive to this region. Lastly there is no mention of an ancient homeland both in Rigveda and Avesta.
I think this comment is based on some confusion about how languages spread. Languages spread along with people, but while a local language may be replaced, the people are not generally replaced with the language. There may have been some genetic mixture, there may have been a time where they were conquered by them for a time, but there's no sense in which the people who wrote those works _were_ Yamnayan, any more tha…
> there are basically no migration stories
Irish have migration myths.
So do Greeks (probably a bit more localized intra-Balkan movement, though).
To be fair IE migrations were very long ago. It’s not inconceivable that oral myths might have been preserved for several thousand years and yet we might know nothing about them.
> wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time
Probably not true. At least genetic evidence points otherwise. IIRC we’ve found individuals as far as Britain who were closely related (a couple of generations) with remains found in the steppes. At least some elite groups were very closely related paternally and moved very fast across Europe.