

English language 'originated in Turkey' - schrofer
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-19368988

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hetman
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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/259yt8/indoeuropean_languages_originated_in_turkey/chf4z77)

"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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jHsy4xeuoQ)

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

~~~
phaemon
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
>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.

------
cw0
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
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis)

------
fauigerzigerk
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.

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legulere
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](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/walk#Etymology)

------
camus2
like 'turkey' did existed 9000 years ago.But editors need to sell
articles.let's not fall for these cheap stunts.

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

~~~
return0
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"

~~~
Dewie
To my knowledge, Anatolia is not a strictly historical region. So one can also
say that Turkish is the majority language in Anatolia. Now you have the
problem with people not knowing what Anatolia is, on top of the possible
confusion between the Turkish language and the region that belongs to the
Republic of Turkey today (Anatolia).

The title doesn't reference the Turkish language. If English, or the family of
languages it belongs to, didn't originate near the British Isles, why would
one readily assume that the Turkish language (or its family) originated in,
and always belonged to, the region that is today known as Turkey?

~~~
return0
> Anatolia is not a strictly historical region

Of course it is, also known as asia minor since the ancient times:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolia)

And the relevant linguistic hypothesis:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_hypothesis)

~~~
Dewie
> Of course it is,

"Not strictly historical" by which I mean; not _only_ used as a historical
region. So if it is still used to refer to the modern region in some cases
(?), then it can be misleading in the same way that one uses "Turkey" to refer
to that region; it can be misunderstood to refer to this modern region, while
in fact one is talking about a time where that place had nothing to do with
modern Turkey. (whew!)

> And the relevant linguistic hypothesis:

Who cares what linguists call it? This is presumably meant for a more general
audience, an audience that probably knows where Turkey lies but may not have
heard of Anatolia. Anatolia is only slightly smaller than modern Turkey, and
is subsumed by it. I don't think it is misleading.

