LL-L "Language varieties" 2003.12.01 (02) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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L O W L A N D S - L * 01.DEC.2003 (01) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Peter Snepvangers <snepvangers at optushome.com.au>
Subject: History

Hello Ron,
I read this article in our Sydney paper today and thought it sounded
interesting. I have always felt there was movement from the Middle East to
Europe via Russia. What do you think of this theory below:-
English language traced to Turkish farmers

December 1, 2003

Auckland University researchers have stunned academics around the world 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 the roots of the English language go back
about 9,000 years to Turkey.

Associate Professor Russell Gray and PhD student Quentin Atkinson published
their research in the British journal Nature and their findings on the long
debated origins of the language have quickly spread in news headlines around
the world.

The origin of the Indo-European language family has been the most
intensively studied problem of historical linguistics, but numerous genetic
studies had 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 either spread by rampaging Kurgan horsemen
who swept down on Europe and the Near East from the steppes of Russia 6,000
years ago, or by farmers from Anatolia (modern day Turkey) who had tilled
their way westwards several millennia earlier.

Gray, an evolutionary biologist within the university's psychology
department, said his results showed only the latter theory could be correct.

Gray said he had used computational 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 he believed 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 7,800 to 9,800 years ago.

Gray was encouraged that his research had been supported in the United
States by Stanford University's eminent geneticist Luigi Luca
Cavalli-Sforza.

Gray and Atkinson had analysed thousands of words from 87 languages (past
and present) 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."

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.

Gray said Hittite (an extinct Anatolian language) was the first major
language group to branch from the Indo-European trunk.

Over subsequent millennia the same trunk sprouted Tocharian, Armenian,
Greek, Albanian, Iranian, Indic, Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, French/Iberian,
Italic and Celtic language groups.

Gray said the findings had wider implications than just language
development.

Languages, like genes, provided vital clues about human history, and
archaeologists and geneticists had taken as active a part in the debate as
linguists, he said.

A Marsden Fund grant from the government and a James Cook Fellowship from
the Royal Society of New Zealand helped pay for the research.

NZPA

This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/30/1070127275013.html

Cheers
Peter Snepvangers
snepvangers at optushome.com.au

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Language varieties

G'day, Pete!

Thanks for the interesting piece above, mate!

> What do you think of this theory below

It's interesting all right, as I said, but I don't know what's supposed to
be so "stunning" about it.  Isn't this just another case of apparent
confirmation of what has been floating around for quite some time?

Of course, I know practically nothing about the methodology and the details
of the findings.  I therefore advise caution at this point, in large part
also because I wonder how exactly the methodology copes with data noise
caused by direct and indirect loaning, bearing in mind that linguistic
mingling does not necessarily coincide with genetic mingling in all details.
Has basing language family evolution findings merely on collections of
words, though useful in a very general way, not been shown to lead to
oversimplifications?  If this study and similar ones are as sophisticated as
I hope they are, they ought to be compared with findings derived from
DNA-based data.  As I said, I don't expect a complete match, but a
cross-discipline approach of this sort should be pretty interesting in a
general way.  This reported study seems to confirm this.  But was it
conducted free from influence of these genetic data?

Of course, it doesn't exactly help that we are getting this information
through the filter of the popular media.

> Auckland University researchers have stunned academics around the world by
tracing
> the origins of the English language to Turkish farmers.

Case in point.  The non-linguist who reads this is likely to understand it
as meaning that English somehow developed from Turkish, because there is no
clear explanation that much of what nowadays is Turkey used to be
Indo-European speaking, and Turkish, which belongs to the Altaic family
rather than to the Indo-European one, was introduced from Central Asia to
Anatolia relatively late, being firmly attested no earlier than in the 13th
century C.E.

I am sure this subject is of interest to quite a few of our subscribers, and
it so happens that a biological anthropologist joined us yesterday.
(Welcome!)  If you discuss it though, folks, try to keep the Lowlands
languages in the center of it all.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
(back in Seattle)

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