Fwd: [sovernspeakout] FW: White man's language from Turkey

[David Lewis]

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>First farmers planted the seeds of language
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>By Tim Radford in London
>November 29, 2003
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>http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/28/1069825991027.html
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>At last the answer in black and white, or beltz and zuri if you happen to be
>Basque, or noir and blanc, if you are French: you owe the words to
>Hittite-speaking farmers from Anatolia, who invented agriculture and spread
>their words as they sowed their seed 9500 years ago.
>
>Languages, like people, are related. Russell Gray, of Auckland University,
>reports in the magazine Nature that he and a colleague decided to treat
>language as if it was DNA and compared selected words from 87 languages to
>build an evolutionary tree of the Indo-European languages. This could help
>solve an old argument: who picked up the original language and began to
>spread gradually evolving versions of it across Europe and Asia?
>
>For decades the focus has been on a tribe of nomad herders called the
>Kurgans from central Asia, who domesticated the horse 6000 years ago and
>invaded Europe.
>
>"It [language] spread not by the sword of conquest, but by the plough," Dr
>Gray said.
>
>Others have argued that the Indo-European family of languages must have
>spread with barley and lentils - the first agriculturalists in the Fertile
>Crescent would have exported not just their techniques, but also the words
>that went with them.
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>Dr Gray chose 2449 words from 87 languages, including English, Lithuanian,
>Gujarati, Romany, Walloon, Breton, Hindi and Pennsylvania Dutch, and began a
>series of comparisons to build up a pattern of descent.
>
>The choice of words was critical. "For example, English is a veritable fruit
>salad of a language, with chunks of vocabulary from the Celts, Romans,
>Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Vikings, Normans, and slices of Latin, French, Greek,
>and Italian tossed with some more recent garnishes from Arabic, Persian,
>Turkish and Hindi. There is even the odd Polynesian borrowing, like tattoo,"
>he said.
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>"Ninety nine per cent of words in the Oxford English Dictionary are in fact
>borrowings from other languages."
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>But English has a basic vocabulary of 200 words - star, dog, earth, blood,
>woman, year and so on - that can be linked to an original shared language.
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>The answer is that words were on the move long before horses. Dr Gray's
>language tree ended with its roots in Anatolia in modern Turkey about
>7500BC, when villagers speaking a form of Hittite kindled pahhur, or fire,
>to boil watar, or water, before setting out on pad, or foot, to spread the
>good word.
>
>Dr Gray was trained as a biologist, not a linguist, which some scientists
>said could explain the generally cautious reception this week's announcement
>in Nature received from linguists.
>
>"Partly, I think they are irritated," said Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, an
>expert on historic population migrations and a professor emeritus at
>Stanford Medical School.
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>"It is a very good paper."
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>The Guardian, The Boston Globe
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>