NZ study cracks origin of English language

[Siegel, Jason F.]

It seems like several older stories have been turning up in Google News 
as of late. For an interesting analysis of the story below, see this 
LanguageLog post.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000208.html

--
Jason F. Siegel
Ph.D. Student, Linguistics & French Linguistics
Department of French & Italian
Ballantine Hall 642
1020 East Kirkwood Avenue
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405-7103
USA
siegeljf at indiana.edu


Quoting Harold Schiffman <hfsclpp at gmail.com>:

> 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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