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<div class="moz-text-flowed" style="font-family: -moz-fixed;
font-size: 14px;" lang="x-western">A Science Friday audio article
with the voice of the lead researcher:
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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://sciencefriday.com/segment/08/24/2012/mapping-the-birthplace-of-modern-languages.html">http://sciencefriday.com/segment/08/24/2012/mapping-the-birthplace-of-modern-languages.html</a>
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A Voice of America web page about the subject:
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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.voanews.com/content/study-english-language-rooted-in-turkey/1494978.html">http://www.voanews.com/content/study-english-language-rooted-in-turkey/1494978.html</a>
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The beginnings of the English language are rooted in Turkey, a new
study suggests.
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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.
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The common origin of all those languages, scientists say, must be
somewhere on the European continent.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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.”
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The study analyzes 200 cognates or words with shared meanings and
similar sounds across 103 languages, including 20 that are now
extinct.
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Atkinson says examining the similarities and differences helped
establish family ties.
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“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]."
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According to Atkinson, although some words are more closely
related than others, they are tied together on branches of the
Indo-European family tree.
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“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.”
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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.voanews.com/content/study-english-language-rooted-in-turkey/1494978.html">http://www.voanews.com/content/study-english-language-rooted-in-turkey/1494978.html</a>
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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://sciencefriday.com/segment/08/24/2012/mapping-the-birthplace-of-modern-languages.html">http://sciencefriday.com/segment/08/24/2012/mapping-the-birthplace-of-modern-languages.html</a>
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Ken
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<div class="moz-txt-sig"><span class="moz-txt-tag">-- <br>
</span>_______________________________________________
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href="http://groups.google.com/group/the-intp-trust?hl=en">http://groups.google.com/group/the-intp-trust?hl=en</a>
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