STUDY FINDS ENGLISH ROOTS IN ANCIENT TURKEY
Last updated: August 23, 2012 8:38 pm
By Ling Ge and Clive Cookson in London
Where do Indo-European languages come from? A new study tackles this
200-year-old question and supports the contentious view that they first
emerged in Anatolia – modern-day Turkey – 8,000 to 9,500 years ago,
and spread with the expansion of farming.
Almost 3bn people are native speakers of Indo-European languages,
which include English, Russian and the many tongues of Europe, as
well as Hindi and Bengali.
Two main theories compete over the origin of the world’s largest
family of languages.
The conventional view, first proposed by Marija Gimbutas, a
Lithuanian-American archaeologist, places the origin in the steppes
north of the Caspian Sea 6,000 years ago, expanding with the spread
of a semi-nomadic horse-riding people, known as the Kurgan, across
Europe and the near east.
A later theory, developed by the British archaeologist Lord Renfrew,
holds that the languages began to diverge with the spread of
agriculture from Anatolia.
Scientists from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, tested these
two scenarios with international colleagues in a study published in
the journal Science.
They adapted a statistical method used by evolutionary biologists, but
looking at words rather than genes. Virologists employ the technique
to track down the origin of infectious disease outbreaks on the basis
of genetic similarities.
The study examined basic vocabulary terms that have a common
origin, such as “mother,” “mutter” and “madre”, from 103 ancient
and contemporary Indo-European languages. They used these words to
infer a family tree of the languages and, together with geographic
information about each language, traced the words back through time
to infer the location of the tree root – the Indo-European birthplace.
The region and age of the languages’ common ancestor supported the
Anatolian scenario.
However, the authors think it unlikely that agriculture was the
sole driver of language expansion on the continent. The five leading
subfamilies of Indo-European languages all emerged between 4,000 and
6,000 years ago, overlapping with a number of cultural expansions in
the archaeological record. The family tree also shows that within
each subfamily, the languages began to diversify between 2,000 and
4,500 years ago.
“These methods pave the way for reconstructing human prehistory
in other parts of the world, using the legacy of our past that is
documented in our languages,” said Quentin Atkinson, lead researcher
of the study. “It allows us to place these language family trees on
a map in space and time and play out histories over the landscape.”
Mr Atkinson added, however, that the research was overshadowed by the
“tragedy” that more than half the world’s languages were on the brink
of extinction.
“That’s a huge loss of knowledge for science and the arts – a language
diversity crisis to rival the current species diversity crisis,”
he said.
While the findings make a strong case for the Anatolian hypothesis,
some members of the linguistic community are likely to remain
unconvinced.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
