English language 'originated in Turkey'
peacefrompaul
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peacefrompaul
Posts: 25,293
peacefrompaul
Posts: 25,293
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This is not quite the same thing as saying the 'English language originated in Turkey'. I suggest you edit the title of this thread.
If anything, English as we know it today, originated with the Norman invasion of England in the 11th century.
Anyway, good thread.
[By the way, If you liked this article, then I recommend a really good BBC documentary on the origins and the spread of the English language called 'The Adventure of English' presented by Melvin Bragg - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_English]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19368988
English language 'originated in Turkey'
By Jonathan Ball
24 August 2012
Modern Indo-European languages - which include English - originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago, researchers say.
Their findings differ from conventional theory that these languages originated 5,000 years ago in south-west Russia.
The New Zealand researchers used methods developed to study virus epidemics to create family trees of ancient and modern Indo-European tongues to pinpoint where and when the language family first arose.
Their study is reported in Science.
A language family is a group of languages that arose from a common ancestor, known as the proto-language.
Linguists identify these families by trawling through modern languages for words of similar sound that often describe the same thing, like water and wasser (German). These shared words - or cognates - represent our language inheritance.
According to the Ethnologue database, more than 100 language families exist.
The Indo-European family is one of the largest families - more than 400 languages spoken in at least 60 countries - and its origins are unclear.
The Steppes, or Kurgen, theorists hold that the proto-language originated in the Steppes of Russia, north of the Caspian Sea, about 5,000 years ago.
The Anatolia hypothesis - first proposed in the late 1980s by Prof Colin Renfrew (now Lord Renfrew) - suggests an origin in the Anatolian region of Turkey about 3,000 years earlier.
To determine which competing theory was the most likely, Dr Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland and his team interrogated language evolution using phylogenetic analyses - more usually used to trace virus epidemics.
Phylogenetics reveals relatedness by assessing how much of the information stored in DNA is shared between organisms.
Influenza virus The researchers used methods developed for tracing virus epidemics
Chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor and share about 98% of their DNA. Because of this shared ancestry, they cluster together on phylogenetic - or family - trees.
Like DNA, language is passed down, generation to generation.
Although language changes and evolves, Dr Atkinson realised that cognates describing the fundamentals of life - kinship (mother, father), body parts (eye, hand), the natural world (fire, water) and basic verbs (to walk, to run) - resist change.
The conserved cognates are strongly linked to the proto-language of old.
By searching different languages for shared cognate words, they were able to build a tree of language relatedness. The more words that are cognate, the more similar the languages are and the closer they group on the tree.
The team analysed 207 cognate words present in 103 Indo‐European languages that included 20 ancient tongues such as Latin and Greek.
Looking back into the depths of the tree, Dr Atkinson and his colleagues were able to confirm the Anatolian origin.
To test if the alternative hypothesis - of a Russian origin several years later - was possible, the team used competing models of evolution to pitch Steppes and Anatolian theory against each other.
Speech Cognate words represent our language inheritance
In repeated tests, the Anatolian theory always came out on top.
Commenting on the paper, Prof Mark Pagel, a Fellow of the Royal Society from the University of Reading who was involved in earlier published phylogenetic studies, said: "This is a superb application of methods taken from evolutionary biology to understand a problem in cultural evolution - the origin and expansion of the Indo-European languages.
"This paper conclusively shows that the Indo-European languages are at least 8-9,500 years old, and arose, as has long been speculated, in the Anatolian region of what is modern-day Turkey and spread outwards from there."
Commenting on the inclusion of ancient languages in the analyses, he added: "The use of a number of known calibration points from 'fossil' languages greatly strengthens the conclusions."
However, the findings have not found universal acceptance. Prof Petri Kallio from the University of Helsinki suggests that several cognate words describing technological inventions - such as the wheel - are evident across different languages.
He argues that the Indo-European proto-language diversified after the invention of the wheel, about 5,000 years ago.
On the phylogenetic methods used to date the proto-language, Prof Kallio added: "So why do I still remain sceptical? Unlike archaeological radiocarbon dating based on the fixed rate of decay of the carbon-14 isotope, there is simply no fixed rate of decay of basic vocabulary, which would allow us to date ancestral proto-languages.
"Instead of the quantity of the words, therefore, the trained Indo-Europeanists concentrate on the quality of the words."
Prof Pagel is less convinced by the counter-argument: "Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner."
I would Google the answer but I can't be arsed.
But it's been a long time since grad school. :shifty:
Edit: It's the Uralic languages, because the languages developed in the general vicinity of the Ural Mountains.
And I first said Estonian but changed it to Latvian. Estonian is correct.
http://anthropology.net/2008/02/05/the-indo-european-language-tree/the-indo-european-branches-of-the-language-tree/
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
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Just guessing.....but isn't Hungarian based on an Asiatic language??? Didn't the Magyars migrant from the Asian steppes to present day Hungary?
http://i38.tinypic.com/qsqowo.jpg
Sorry not to post the image. I think it would be too small to read.
Right.
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