[Vision2020] PIE came from nomadic Neolithic Anatolian farmers

[Kenneth Marcy]

A Science Friday audio article with the voice of the lead researcher:

http://sciencefriday.com/segment/08/24/2012/mapping-the-birthplace-of-modern-languages.html 


A Voice of America web page about the subject:

http://www.voanews.com/content/study-english-language-rooted-in-turkey/1494978.html 


The beginnings of the English language are rooted in Turkey, a new study 
suggests.

The Indo-European language family - which includes English, French, 
Russian, Persian and even ancient Greek - is one of the world's largest 
language groups and extends from Iceland in the West to Sri Lanka in the 
East.

The common origin of all those languages, scientists say, must be 
somewhere on the European continent.

One hypothesis suggests it emerged 6,000 years ago from a semi-nomadic 
horse-riding people in the Russian Steppes north of the Caspian Sea.

Another says it is much older and came from what is now Turkey, 
spreading as agriculture did between 8,000 and 9,500 years ago.

Writing in Science, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of 
Auckland in New Zealand expresses support for the second theory. Quentin 
Atkinson's team worked in much the same way that evolutionary biologists 
do, using DNA to determine the origin of virus outbreaks.

"They use the DNA to reconstruct the family tree of the viruses. But 
rather than looking at viruses, we were looking at languages," he says. 
"And rather than looking at DNA, we were looking at the words in the 
different languages."

The study analyzes 200 cognates or words with shared meanings and 
similar sounds across 103 languages, including 20 that are now extinct.

Atkinson says examining the similarities and differences helped 
establish family ties.

"For example, in English and other Germanic languages, the word for 
'water' sounds something like the English word 'water,' or 'wasser' [in 
German], 'water' [in Dutch], whereas in the romance languages descended 
from Latin, the word sounds quite different, something like 'agua' [in 
Spanish] or 'acqua' [in Italian]."

According to Atkinson, although some words are more closely related than 
others, they are tied together on branches of the Indo-European family 
tree.

"We know where the languages are," he says. "They are like the leaves of 
the tree, and we know how they are connected, and we trace back along 
those branches back through time and space to work out where the origin 
is."

http://www.voanews.com/content/study-english-language-rooted-in-turkey/1494978.html 


http://sciencefriday.com/segment/08/24/2012/mapping-the-birthplace-of-modern-languages.html 



Ken

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