English language 'originated in Turkey'

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19368988

by schrofer • 12 years ago

37 18 12 years ago

Houshalter• 12 years ago

Ridiculous title if I understand it correctly. They are saying all European languages originated there, not just English.

aristidb• 12 years ago

All Indo-European languages. Not all European languages are Indo-European, for example Hungarian is not.

And some non-European languages are Indo-European, like Hindi or Persian.

Dewie3• 12 years ago

One might add that the Turkic language family isn't Indo-European. They seem to have originated in Central Asia.

phaemon• 12 years ago

Seems a reasonable title to me. If it was a person saying he had Turkish ancestry, you wouldn't say it was a ridiculous title because "many people have Turkish ancestors, not just him".

Obviously other languages originated there, because English is related to other languages!

tty• 12 years ago

Seems a reasonable title to me

To you it might, but to any linguist this is as ridiculous of a title as saying "English people originated in Africa". You will imediatelly think "wait, but the actual ethnogenesis happened nowhere close to Africa, so why would one say 'English people'? it's not useful to reference it".

It's the same with this title. It's as useful as saying that Farsi originated in Turkey. Or any language descended from PIE, for that matter.

Not even the separation into IE families like Germanic, Balto-Slavic, etc. happened at that time. Not even Anatolian had separated from IE. Yet the title references the ''English'' language.

Obviously other languages originated there

No, the thing is, they didn't. Nor did English.

What originated there is an ancestor of a group of languages.

vorg• 12 years ago

A better title for Hacker News would be the BBC subtitle "Modern Indo-European languages like English originated in Turkey 9,000 years ago". That includes the language family name (though of course the super-family of Indo-European and its cousins originated elsewhere).

louthy• 12 years ago

Ridiculous title if I understand it correctly.

It's on the BBC. Based in the country that gave English to the world. For an audience of mainly English/British readers. 'Ridiculous' could be seen as a slight exaggeration, no?

camus2• 12 years ago

like 'turkey' did existed 9000 years ago.But editors need to sell articles.let's not fall for these cheap stunts.

thaumasiotes• 12 years ago

What do you want them to say? Anatolia? The headline has some problems, but I wouldn't have called that one of them.

return02• 12 years ago

It is actually "the Anatolian hypothesis". The thing with Turkey is that it has its own language which is not related to this, so the title can be confused for "English comes from Turkish"

legulere• 12 years ago

walk is actually a bad example for words that don't change as it changed quite a lot in meaning.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/walk#Etymology

cw0• 12 years ago

I'm sure their mathematical models are very beautiful, but the facts just don't support this theory at all. The "wheel" argument against this theory is just too damning, and their counterargument is weak: that nearly 4000 years after the language family split up, words for wheel, axle, and yoke managed to spread to nearly all daughter languages as loan words. But the problem is that these supposed loan words words reflect the same sound changes as all of the basic, inherited vocabulary. Thus the wheel vocab must be inherited from the same point in time as words like thou/tu/du.

Not to mention that the material culture found at the Ukraine sites is a much better match for what we know about early Indo-European culture.

jqm• 12 years ago

Black Sea deluge is one theory for the initial dispersal of Indo-European speakers. Although wikipedia I don't think mentions this directly, the idea is that forced relocation caused the spread of the language. The timeline is approximately in line with what other theories suggest as well. And yes, Ukraine would have been the center. Or more correctly, what is now at the bottom of the Black Sea south of Ukraine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

hetman• 12 years ago

There's a great comment about this on reddit (I'll quote the relevant part below):

http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/259yt8/indoeuro...

"This is essentially the conclusion of biologists who treated the spread of language like the spread of disease. They specifically only modeled slow expansion through cultural diffusion, meaning they completely ignored things like languages spread through conquest. They literally ignored the Roman empire in the evolution of Indo European. So if you look at the actual timeline their simulation puts forth, it has things like Iceland being populated by settlers from the Faroe Islands, who took fifty years to cross the sea there. They also did much of this on the basis of cognates, and so by their model Russian splits off of the slavic languages first and Polish is closely related to Ukrainian, because Russian has a bunch of Greek words that make it seem superficially different.

Overall, it's not good science."

The poster also recommends a video that breaks this apart in greater detail, though it's over an hour long:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ

fauigerzigerk• 12 years ago

I find it somewhat surprising that these studies focus so much on vocabulary. Syntax seems to be much more stable over time.

All languages have so many "loan words" (do they ever give them back?) and borrowing words happens so quickly that I find it impossible to model this over millennia. Surely, we're dealing with a more general graph here, not with a simple tree.

English language 'originated in Turkey'

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