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Home , Anatolian hypothesis, Romance languages, Yamnaya culture

Mind Your at Home No.10 Articles about Language

Dear Mind Your Language Colleagues Here we are at Issue No.10. Several more articles to keep your language interests alive during our stay-at- home time! Help me out and send me any articles, jokes, etc that you come across, and I will include them in the next edition! Rodney

Mysterious Indo-European may have been in the steppes of Ukraine and Russia

By Michael BalterFeb. 13, 2015

What do you call a male sibling? If you speak English, he is your “brother.” Greek? Call him “phrater.” , , ? “Bhrater,” “frater,” or “brathir,” respectively. Ever since the mid-17th century, scholars have noted such similarities among the so-called Indo-European , which span the world and number more than 400 if are included. Researchers agree that they can probably all be traced back to one ancestral language, called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). But for nearly 20 years, scholars have debated vehemently when and where PIE arose.

Two long-awaited studies, one described online this in a preprint and another scheduled for publication later this month, have now used different methods to support one leading hypothesis: that PIE was first spoken by pastoral herders who lived in the vast steppe lands north of the Sea beginning about 6000 years ago. One study points out that these steppe land herders have left their genetic mark on most Europeans living today.

The studies’ conclusions emerge from state-of-the-art ancient DNA and linguistic analyses, but the debate over PIE’s origins is likely to continue. A rival hypothesis— that early farmers living in (modern ) about 8000 years ago were the original PIE speakers—is not ruled out by the new analyses, most agree. Although the steppe hypothesis has now received a major boost, “I would not say the has been killed,” says Carles Lalueza-Fox, a geneticist at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, , who participated in neither of the new studies.

Up until the 1980s, variations of the steppe hypothesis held sway among most linguists and archaeologists tracking down Indo-European’s birthplace. Then in 1987, archaeologist of the University of Cambridge in the proposed that PIE spread with farming from its origins in the Fertile Crescent of the , moving west into and east further into Asia; over time the languages continued to spread and diversify into the many Indo- European languages we know today.

Traditional linguists, meanwhile, painstakingly reconstructed PIE by extrapolating back from modern languages and ancient writings. (Listen to a short fable spoken in PIE here.) They disdained Renfrew’s idea of an Anatolian homeland, arguing for example that the languages were still too similar to have begun diverging 8000 years ago.

More than 400 Indo-European languages diverged from a common ancestral tongue; the earliest ones (top right), Anatolian and Tocharian, arose in today’s Turkey and China, respectively. ADAPTED FROM R. BOUCKAERT ET AL., SCIENCE (2012)

But many archaeologists noted that genetic and archaeological studies did indeed suggest massive ancient migrations from the Middle East into Europe that could have brought PIE and sparked such language diversification. In 2003, evolutionary biologists Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand used computational methods from evolutionary biology to track words as they changed over time, and concluded that the Anatolian hypothesis was right. But steppe supporters remained unconvinced, even after Gray’s team published a confirming analysis in Science in 2012. Fans of the steppe hypothesis are now hailing a genetics study that used ancient DNA from 69 Europeans who lived between 8000 and 3000 years ago to genetically track ancient population movements. The work, now posted on the bioRxiv preprint server, was done by a large team led by geneticists and Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard Medical School in Boston and Wolfgang Haak of the University of Adelaide in . Among the team’s samples were nine ancient individuals—six males, two females, and a child of undetermined sex—from the north of the Black Sea in today’s Russia. Beginning about 6000 years ago, these steppe people herded cattle and other animals, buried their dead in earthen mounds called , and may have created some of the first wheeled vehicles. (Many linguists think PIE already had a word for “wheel.”) The team also retrieved ancient DNA from four skeletons from the later of , known for the distinctive pottery for which they are named (see photo above), as well as their dairy farming skills. Archaeologists had noted similarities among these cultures, especially in their emphasis on cattle herding.

The team focused on sections of DNA that they suspected would provide markers for past population movements and identified nearly 400,000 DNA positions across the genome in each individual. They used new techniques to in on the key positions in the nuclear DNA, allowing them to analyze twice as many ancient nuclear DNA samples from Europe and Asia as previously reported in the entire .

The comparison of the two cultures’ DNA showed that the four Corded Ware people could trace an astonishing three-quarters of their ancestry to the Yamnaya. That suggests a massive migration of Yamnaya people from their steppe homeland into central Europe about 4500 years ago, one that could have spread an early form of the Indo-European language, the team concludes. Thus the paper for the first time links two far-flung material cultures to specific genetic signatures and to each other— and suggests, the team says, that they spoke a form of Indo-European.

The Corded Ware culture soon spread across north and central Europe, extending as far as today’s Scandinavia. So the “steppe ancestry,” as the authors of the preprint call it, is found in most present-day Europeans, who can trace their ancestry back to both the Corded Ware people and the earlier Yamnaya. The work thus adds to genetic findings from last fall showing that the genetic makeup of today’s Europeans is more complicated than anyone expected.

The results are a “smoking gun” that an ancient migration into Europe from the steppe occurred, says Pontus Skoglund, an ancient DNA specialist who is now working in Reich’s lab but was not a co-author on the paper. (Although the paper is publicly available on a preprint server, it is not yet published, and the authors declined to discuss their work until it’s published.) The paper “levels the playing field between the steppe hypothesis and the Anatolian hypothesis by showing that the spread of farming was not the only large migration into Europe,” Skoglund says.

The second new paper to address PIE’s origin, in press at Language and due to be published online during the last week of February, uses linguistic data to on when PIE arose. A team led by University of California, Berkeley, linguists Andrew Garrett and Will Chang employed the language database and evolutionary methods previously used by Gray to create a family tree of the Indo-European languages from their first origins in PIE. But in certain cases, Garrett and Chang’s group declared that one language was directly ancestral to another and put that into their tree as a certainty. For example, they assumed that Latin was directly ancestral to such as Spanish, French, and Italian—something that many but not all linguists agree on—and that Vedic Sanskrit was directly ancestral to the Indo- languages spoken on the Indian subcontinent.

These constraints transformed the results from what Gray’s team has published: Garrett, Chang, and their colleagues found that the origins of PIE were about 6000 years ago, consistent with the steppe hypothesis but not the Anatolian, because the farming migration out of the Middle East was 8000 years ago. Once the original PIE speakers began to sweep out of the steppes about 4500 years ago, their languages spread and diversified, Garrett’s team says.

But many supporters of the Anatolian hypothesis remain staunchly unconvinced. Paul Heggarty, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, , questions Garrett’s methods, arguing that, for example, linguists cannot be sure if the Latin attested to in written documents really was the direct ancestor of later Romance languages, rather than some of Latin for which no record remains. Even small differences in the true ancestral language, Heggarty insists, could throw off the timing estimates.

As for the Reich paper, many archaeologists and linguists praise the data on ancient migrations. But they challenge what they see as its speculative link to language. The movement out of the steppes, Renfrew says, “may be a secondary migration into central Europe 3000 to 4000 years later than the spread of farmers, which first brought Indo-European speech to Europe.” If so, the Yamnaya steppe people would not have spoken PIE but an already derived Indo-European tongue ancestral to today’s Balto- such as Russian and Polish, Heggarty says. He adds that the wording of the Reich paper is “misleading.”

Indeed, in a lengthy discussion in the paper’s Supplementary Information section, Reich and colleagues do concede that “the ultimate question of the Proto-Indo- European homeland is unresolved by our data.” They suggest that more ancient DNA, especially from points east of the steppes, may finally our linguistic with our genes.

Here is an from Linguismstics on Tumblr…….. iIt’s a bit rawky …

These were too good not to share! They’re entries in a little glossary of terms from Cambridgeshire and neighbouring counties (cited from A Poet’s Field Guide by Dr. Robert Macfarlane in CAM Issue 74, 2015, pp 32-37). roke (n.) - smoke-like mist that rises in the evenings off marshes and water meadows; also very faint rain. rodham (n.) - a raised bank or ridge of silt in the Fens, formerly the bed and sides of a river or tidal creek; roddamy land is rolling or undulating land. tabernacle (n.) - farming term for an old barn or store-shed. fizmer (n.) - rustling noise produced in grass by petty agitations of the wind. rawky (adj.) - of weather or atmosphere: cold, damp, chilly, dull, foggy. donk, donkey (adj.) - wet, moist or damp; generally applied to land of soil. horizontigo (n.) - the malaise induced by sustained exposure to flat terrain; the sudden feeling of fright brought about by contemplation of an intensely lateral terrain (a coinage from a correspondent). smeuse, smuise (n.) - a hole in the base of a hedge caused by the repeated passage of a small animal; a hare’s track through a hedge. -ice (n.) - ice that has been cracked and crazed by fissures, usually produced by the pressure of walkers or skaters. bullfinch (n.) - a hedge that is allowed to grow high without laying. honeyfur (n.) - the soft seeds of grasses and rushes (a coinage by a 4-5 year old). mabish, mavis (n.) - regional names for the song thrush (Turdus philomelos)

Also from the same source: Darwin on language Charles Darwin is one of my intellectual icons – you could describe my appreciation of him as ‘stratospheric’. Having just read his passage on language in the Descent of , however, I think my appreciation has just gone ‘exospheric’! The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was first published in 1871. It’s quite hefty and dedicates less than 10 pages to language, yet within those pages are found ideas that are arguably the bedrock of modern linguistics. The similarities and compatibility between Darwin’s (and Wallace’s) theory of evolution by natural selection and historical linguistics were noted early on. Interestingly, when introducing the subject of language change, it is often by analogy to the evolution of new species, and when introducing evolution, it is often by analogy to the development of new languages! However, the question of the evolution of language as a mental faculty (i.e. the evolution of language as opposed to the evolution of a language) is still a matter of (mainly speculative) debate. In fact, the seemingly unbridgeable gap between linguistically-capable humans and other animals was taken to be a powerful argument against evolution (or at least it threw doubt on whether Darwin’s theory could account for all of humankind’s physical and mental characteristics – Wallace and Darwin parted company in this respect). But returning to Darwin’s observations on language. Darwin offers some speculative remarks on the evolution of language suggesting it may have arisen from proto-human song, an idea which is regaining currency in the language evolution literature. But I think Darwin’s main aim is to show that an evolutionary account of language is plausible rather than to evaluate a particular account of the evolution of language. Darwin distinguishes articulate speech and gesturing from non-articulate, but still meaningful, cries and signs, thereby recognising that language is not synonymous with communication. He is also careful to distinguish what could anachronistically be called performance and competence. He notes that some parrots can ‘speak’ and can connect sounds with meanings etc. What distinguishes humans is a more highly developed mental power for connecting sound and meaning. Whilst languages are obviously learned, there is a clear instinct or tendency to babble (a language instinct, to borrow Pinker’s title). During childhood, the child practises use of the articulators until they go from babbling to articulate speech/gesture. On an evolutionary scale, Darwin envisioned that there was sexual selection for those individuals who had the most articulate vocal use. Note Darwin is focusing on the evolution of speech rather than the evolution of the mental capacity itself, which remains mysterious. However, Darwin points out that this is not necessarily an insoluble mystery. Those who claim that language cannot exist without higher thought and that higher thought cannot exist without language, make a circular argument for themselves. Darwin’s main argument, however, is that animals have the rudiments of higher thought and the many of the rudiments of articulate language, i.e. the difference between humans and animals is quantitative, not qualitative. Consequently, there is no a priori reason why language could not have evolved. There are many more insights and observations that Darwin made in his short section on language. I’m just in awe of what careful observation, logical thinking and an open mind can accomplish.