NZ study cracks origin of English language

[Harold Schiffman]

ORIGIN OF ENGLISH
NZ study cracks origin of English language
By ANGELA GREGORY 1/12/03

Auckland University researchers have stunned academics worldwide by
tracing the origins of the English language to Turkish farmers.Using a
novel approach to develop an Indo-European language tree, the
researchers say they have evidence that the roots of the English
language go back about 9000 years to Turkey  Associate Professor
Russell GrayAND Quentin Atkinson published their research in the
British journal Nature. Their findings on the long-debated origins of
the language have quickly spread. The origin of the Indo-European
language family has been the most intensively studied problem of
historical linguistics, but numerous genetic studies have produced
inconclusive results.

For almost two centuries linguists and archaeologists debated two
theories on the origins of the language family, whose members ranged
from Greek and Hindi to German and English. It was thought the
language was spread either by rampaging Kurgan horsemen who swept down
into Europe and the Near East from the steppes of Russia 6000 years
ago, or by farmers from Anatolia (modern Turkey) who had tilled their
way westwards several millenniums earlier. Professor Gray, an
evolutionary biologist in the university's psychology department, said
yesterday that his results showed only the latter theory could be
correct. He had used methods derived from evolutionary biology to
study the problem for the past five years. He accepted his approach to
build an evolutionary tree of the Indo-European languages was
controversial and subject to criticism. But Professor Gray said he
thought it was a valid technique that had clearly shown the origins of
the English language went back further than had been thought,
excluding the Kurgan horsemen theory. It appeared that Indo-European
languages had expanded with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia
7800 to 9800 years ago.

Professor Gray and Mr Atkinson had analysed thousands of words from 87
languages to find out when the various branches of the Indo-European
family tree started diverging. "We looked at words from different
languages that were clearly related and grouped them in sets."
Professor Gray said a simple example was that five was cinq in French
and cinque in Italian.

"We built matrices of all our information, gleaned from the internet
and every obscure etymological dictionary we could find." The
researchers then used sophisticated computer programs to do the
analysis and build language trees. The length of the resulting
branches and their various offshoots showed when each language
diverged from its predecessors and developed a separate identity.
Professor Gray said Hittite (an extinct Anatolian language) was the
first major language group to branch from the Indo-European trunk.
Over subsequent millenniums the same trunk sprouted Tocharian,
Armenian, Greek, Albanian, Iranian, Indic, Slavic, Baltic, Germanic,
French/Iberian, Italic and Celtic language groups.

A Marsden Fund grant from the Government and a James Cook Fellowship
from the Royal Society of New Zealand helped to pay for the research,
which included the equivalent of three solid years of computer time.

http://www.clipclip.org/Bevsiem/clips/detail/67203
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