LL-L "Language varieties" 2003.12.03 (02) [E]

Wed Dec 3 16:03:37 UTC 2003

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From: Frédéric Baert <baert_frederic at CARAMAIL.COM>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2003.12.01 (03) [E]

Good day

Here follow a comment in "Nature" about the article we're all talking about
and the summary and references of the original article. I hope it will be
interesting :

Language tree rooted in Turkey
Evolutionary ideas give farmers credit for Indo-European tongues.
27 November 2003
JOHN WHITFIELD

 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."

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).

see the original page at :http://www.nature.com/nsu/031124/031124-6.html

Here is the summary of the original article :

Nature 426, 435 - 439 (27 November 2003); doi:10.1038/nature02029

Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-
European origin

RUSSELL D. GRAY AND QUENTIN D. ATKINSON

Department of Psychology, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019,
Auckland 1020, New Zealand

Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to R.G.
(rd.gray at auckland.ac.nz).

Languages, like genes, provide vital clues about human history. The origin
of the Indo-European language family is "the most intensively studied, yet
still most recalcitrant, problem of historical linguistics". Numerous
genetic studies of Indo-European origins have also produced inconclusive
results. Here we analyse linguistic data using computational methods
derived from evolutionary biology. We test two theories of Indo-European
origin: the 'Kurgan expansion' and the 'Anatolian farming' hypotheses. The
Kurgan theory centres on possible archaeological evidence for an expansion
into Europe and the Near East by Kurgan horsemen beginning in the sixth
millennium BP. In contrast, the Anatolian theory claims that Indo-European
languages expanded with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia around
8,0009,500 years BP. In striking agreement with the Anatolian hypothesis,
our analysis of a matrix of 87 languages with 2,449 lexical items produced
an estimated age range for the initial Indo-European divergence of between
7,800 and 9,800 years BP. These results were robust to changes in coding
procedures, calibration points, rooting of the trees and priors in the
bayesian analysis.

original page at : http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?
file=/nature/journal/v426/n6965/abs/nature02029_fs.html&dynoptions=doi107044
6895

I think it must be pointed out that the article is dealing with the origins
of indo-european languages and not of english as the Sydney paper made it
believe.

Cheers

Frederic Baert

----------

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

Thanks a lot for sharing that with us, Frédéric.

One thing I really wonder about is how the researchers propose to reliably
gauge phonological change rates, given that rates appear to differ depending
on various factors, including the rate of intensity of foreign
influx/influence, and given that in early times most instances of
influx/influence must be assumed to have been unrecorded.

Under certain circumstances, there may be sudden bursts of intense foreign
influence, such as medieval French influence on English and Scots during and
after Norman occupation of Britain, or relatively fast absorption of foreign
speakers, such as in the case of Saxon and German in Slavonic- and
Baltic-speaking regions, and Romance varieties in previously predominantly
Celtic-speaking France.  It includes also absorption of speakers of
non-Indo-European languages with dramatically different phonologies.  As
examples of this may serve Gaulish and later Romance on Iberian, including
Basque, substrates, and Aryan languages being phonologically (and otherwise)
transformed by intensive contacts with and absorption of speakers of
Dravidian languages in India.  At the other end of the spectrum there are
cases like Icelandic which, although its Germanic ancestor assumedly changed
considerably, changed relatively little in the past 15 centuries or so,
partly due to isolation and partly due to conscious efforts to minimize
foreign (i.e., Danish and English) influences for centuries.

As far as I am concerned, anyone who comes up with a fail-safe method of
determining past language change rates deserves a Nobel prize.  Before that,
let's not even talk about determining the intricacies of linguistic
provenance on the basis of a mere 200 words ...

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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