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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

#91
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Nice, sheep in Lithuanian is “avis” ( https://lt.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/avis ) what I assume sounds like “hawis”

Yeah, Lithuanian is one of the most conservative Indo-European languages.

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

#92

[flagged]

Despite your best attempts to skim-read and then cake a Hindu-nationalist veneer on it, what you're saying is not even close to what this article is saying, even if it were correct. No serious scholar argues for an origin of the the language tree in the subcontinent or Iran.

Also nobody other than Nazis calls the Aryans "European";

The origin of the Indo-European language family tree is from the Pontic-Caspian steppe region; what is today southeastern Ukraine and southern Russia, roughly from the Dniepro to the Volga. The "Aryans" (really multiple names and multiple peoples) were people who moved eastwards from there, carrying early Indo-Iranian languages with them. (Over a 1000+ year history, winding their way eastwards across central Asia, so I'm not sure how you could spin that as "European")

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

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lite…

Sure - and of course let me preface this by saying I am not an archaeologist, merely someone who is interested. My comment was perhaps overgeneralizing specifically from the early neolithic transition in Europe more broadly than I should have been. One example of the work I am discussing is the work of Cavalli-Sforza (ie https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.94.15.7719 ). My understanding of the history of academic w…

Yeah, the situation with the European neolithic transition is one where there's a substantial amount of population discontinuity and people are partial to replacement specifically, though there's still some debate as to the exact nature and timeline of that replacement. For example, I've excavated areas with centuries of coexistence between foragers and early sedentary farmers during the neolithic transition, which makes the more universally violent replacement theories look a bit suspect. This is very a feature particular to Europe and older theories (~70s-90s) though and not common to modern Asian, or Americanist archaeologists.

As an aside, Cavalli-Sforza was a legendary figure, but a lot of this stuff has benefited from powerful new tools like eDNA and effective aDNA that he never had much of a chance to speak on.

For Kohler's paper, I'd point to the summary as a better example of what I was trying to communicate:

   Evidently, though, powerful blending forces were also at work. These included local exogamy, which, on the borders of linguistic groups, led to blending, movement of traders among increasingly sedentary groups, movements forced on populations increasingly reliant on agriculture by changing climates, and movements forced on increasingly large and sedentary groups by anthropogenic depression of local resources. One of my goals in this article has been to add convergent evolution to this list. This would have been driven by adaptive considerations, possibly bootstrapped by additional blending processes such as indirectly biased cultural transmission across groups (Mesoudi and O’Brien 2008). Together, these blending forces created the Pueblo culture area and Sprachbund.
The Pueblo cultural area isn't particularly unique in this respect. There's been a broad complexification of transition theories in archaeology, where specific common explanations are subsumed by everything everywhere all at once. Population replacement in particular has gone from being the default explanation for every new archaeological horizon to being a much more localized, one-of-many explanation.

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

#94

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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 peopl…

> 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.

Not this again. This is an old missionaries tale. There are descriptions of large cities and palaces in Mahabharata (of which Gita is part). Nomads don't construct palaces and large cities. Also, the Gita is about duty to preserve good not killing. (A few months ago I debunked a similar comment on this site lol)

https://vedicfeed.com/places-mentioned-in-mahabharata/

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

#95
post #49

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.

Nigeria is all the way on the other side of the African content while the Arabian peninsula is right across the very narrow Red Sea. So it would make less sense for Ethiopians to speak a language that’s related to languages spoken thousands of kms away in West Africa than for them to speak a language that’s related to the languages spoken on the other side of the Red Sea - which is exactly what they do. Edit: also, i…

Yeah, my wife is Ethiopian and she was shocked to see in TV news coverage how "Ethiopian" a lot of the Houthi rebels in Yemen looked, but this is actually not surprising once you know the histories of the Horn of Africa and Red Sea at a greater detail.

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

#96

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…

Thank you, thatʼs it: one of the biggest validations of the methodology for reconstructing languages. – Little nitpicks, if you allow:

- Saussure reconstructed only two of the three consonants now called “laryngeals” and called them “coefficients sonantiques”. Saussureʼs two sounds would be h₂ and h₃ in modern notation. The Danish linguist Möller added the third (h₁) and suggested that they were laryngeals.

- In Hittite, not all of the laryngeals are preserved: the Hittite sound transcribed as “ḫ” is certainly not a reflex of h₁, which had no reflexes in Hittite, and it certainly is a reflex of h₂. Whether it can also be a reflex of h₃ is contested.

(Edit: Your explanation below about the coloring by laryngeals is also correct in principle; just the specific example is problematic: because of Latin “ovis”, Greek “ὄις” we know that the late PIE form was “Howis” with “o” not “a”, either from “h₃éwis” with “h₃e” → “o” or from “h₂ówis”. The Hittite word you quoted may be evidence for the latter: “h₂ówis” → Hittite “ḫawis” with uncontested “h₂” → “ḫ”.)

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

#97
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding „matriarchal character“, what Marija Gumbutienė wrote and how postmodernist society nowadays is (mis)interpreting her writing is very different. It wasn't „matriarchal“ as in ruled-by-women. Instead, those societies were glorifying maternity (and women) through and through. Which is funny when modern feminists try to glorify Gimbutienė and those societies. While doing exactly opposite to what those societie…

Yes, I and Renfew know that but he still disagreed with her as do many other anthropoligists. I just read a book by a feminist, Karin Bojs, who concludes basically* what you just said but I don't think she'd appreciate your overheneralized jab at feminists. * Her thesis is that those societies valued women's work which included pottery and textiles in addition to maternity while the later IE societies were overtly pa…

My stab was more at people who ain’t anthropologists and just take whatever they can fit into their fantasies.

I’m not so sure about not valuing women work though. Home goods and arts (fairytales, singing etc) etc were valued for a loooong time. And virtually all IE cultures looove nice items. Heirloom traditions and alll that jazz. I’d argue only industrial revolution changed that. Although more war-oriented man-first cultures popped up all the time. It looks like ultimately they’d conquer Gimbutienė’s Old Europe. But maternal tradition would survive to big extent. Raiding warriors ain’t raising kids. And they have damn hard time controlling how women back home raise the next generation. It’s on women to form and propagate the culture.

Well, till recent era. When women are out there raiding the job market and men spend unbelievable amount of time with their offsprings. On the other hand, women have upper hand in public education system which is #1 by time spent with the next generation.

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

#98
post #96

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…

Thank you, thatʼs it: one of the biggest validations of the methodology for reconstructing languages. – Little nitpicks, if you allow: - Saussure reconstructed only two of the three consonants now called “laryngeals” and called them “coefficients sonantiques”. Saussureʼs two sounds would be h₂ and h₃ in modern notation. The Danish linguist Möller added the third (h₁) and suggested that they were laryngeals. - In Hitt…

Thanks, I was pretty sure the details weren't 100% right.

Another overlooked point is that it wasn't immediately obvious that the Hittite ḫ was related to Saussure/Möller's laryngeals, because the theory wasn't fully accepted at the time, and not everyone understood it. Even after the ḫ was identified in Hittite, it took a while for people to make the connection.

Do you know what Saussure's initial evidence for h2 and h3 was?

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

#99

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…

> Could these words not have been derived somewhat later independently That would require that the independent languages maintained the exact same derivational process of reduplication + zero-grade ablaut in the root. We know from the attested history of IE language that derivational processes last only for a while before they die out. That independent languages maintained that particular derivational process (which…

But could not a horizontal process between already separated languages/dialects smoothed that out by adapting the incorporated term to its host language, so that the date of the general phonetic bifurcations of two languages and the history of a lot of their vocabulary might be very distinct?

I am thinking of such cases as certain Anglicisms that were phonetically adapted when they were incorporated into German. For example the English term "password" is in the process to replace German "Kennwort", but its final consonant is adjusted to German "Wort" as "Passwort". So phonetically "Passwort" and "Wort" vs. "password" and "word" seem to share the very same derivational process, while their actual history of adaptation is quite distinct.

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

#100
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, and political power also move genetics around.
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