--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Piotr Gasiorowski"
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:> How their results exclude other
homelands is a mystery to me.
Even assuming that gottochronology is not reliable for determing
absolute dates, doesn't the report point to a possibility that PIE
breakup much earlier than the domestication of the horse?
Kalyan
Language tree rooted in Turkey
Evolutionary ideas give farmers credit for Indo-European tongues.
27 November 2003
JOHN WHITFIELD
Languages, like genomes, encode information.
© Corbis
A family tree of Indo-European languages suggests they began to
spread and split about 9,000 years ago. The finding hints that
farmers in what is now Turkey drove the language boom - and not
later Siberian horsemen, as some linguists reckon.
Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in
New Zealand use the rate at which words change to gauge the age of
the tree's roots - just as biologists estimate a species' age from
the rate of gene mutations. The differences between words, or DNA
sequences, are a measure of how closely languages, or species, are
related.
Gray and Atkinson analysed 87 languages from Irish to Afghan. Rather
than compare entire dictionaries, they used a list of 200 words that
are found in all cultures, such as 'I', 'hunt' and 'sky'. Words are
better understood than grammar as a guide to language history; the
same sentence structure can arise independently in different tongues.
The resulting tree matches many existing ideas about language
development. Spanish and Portuguese come out as sisters, for
example - both are cousins to German, and Hindi is a more distant
relation to all three.
All other Indo-European languages split off from Hittite, the oldest
recorded member of the group, between 8,000 and 10,000 years ago,
the pair calculates1.
Around this time, farming techniques began to spread out of
Anatolia - now Turkey - across Europe and Asia, archaeological
evidence shows. The farmers themselves may have moved, or natives
may have adopted words along with agricultural technology.
The conclusion will be controversial, as there is no consensus on
where Indo-European languages came from. Some linguists believe that
Kurgan horsemen carried them out of central Asia 6,000 years
ago. "No matter how we [changed] the analysis or assumptions, we
couldn't get a date of around 6,000 years," says Gray.
"This kind of study is exactly what linguistics needs," says April
McMahon, who studies the history of languages at the University of
Sheffield, UK. It shows how ideas about language evolution can be
tested, she says: "Linguists have always been good at coming up with
bold hypotheses, but they haven't been terribly good at testing
them."
Linguists have always been good at coming up with bold hypotheses,
but they haven't been terribly good at testing them
April McMahon
University of Sheffield
But the technique is still fraught with difficulties, McMahon warns.
There is lots of word-swapping within language groups. English
took 'skirt' from the Vikings, for example, but 'shirt' is original.
Linguists must separate the shared from the swapped, as any error
will affect later studies.
The Kurgan might not be out of the picture entirely, says McMahon -
they may have triggered a later wave of languages. "This isn't going
to knock the debate on the head," she says.
Biology and linguistics can learn a lot from each other, comments
geneticist David Searls of GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals, based in
King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. "There may be some fundamental
principles of evolution of complex systems, such as languages and
organisms," he says.
References
Gray, R. D. & Atkinson, Q. D. Language-tree divergence times support
the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin. Nature, 426, 435 -
439, doi:10.1038/nature02029 (2003). |Article|
http://www.nature.com/nsu/031124/031124-6.html