Agriculture gave rise to one of world’s most mysterious language families | Hacker News Reader

Agriculture gave rise to one of world’s most mysterious language families

science.org

50 pointsinfodocket25 comments

I’ve never heard the term Transeurasian languages before, but it seems to be a rebranding of the Altaic languages[0]. The hypothesis that these form a real language family is viewed with extreme suspicion by modern historical linguists because the sound correspondences are not very convincing.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages

Right. It's a tantalizing hypothesis. My gut feeling is that it is likely at least a few of the identified language families (particularly Turkish and Mongolic and Korean) are related. But this simply has never been demonstrated by anyone adequately to make a scientific claim. A hunch at best. There just isn't enough data. There probably will never be.

As soon as you add even slight fuzziness in what constitutes a valid match, given you're dealing with thousands of words in hundreds of forms... and you're matching all of them against each other, the search space explodes and you start finding matches. Dozens. Hundreds even.

A great article by programmer, amateur linguist and imaginary world creator Mark Rosenfelder goes into this in some detail: http://zompist.com/chance.htm "How likely are chance resemblances between languages?" (Quite likely!)

I think this review [1] put it best: It goes without saying that an etymological dictionary of a non-existing language family is a paradoxon, to say the least. One possible way out of this is of course the conclusion that the family is after all real and that the existence of a work like this is the best proof of this fact. On the other hand, a quite different conclusion would be that there could after all be such a thing as a full scale 3-volume lexical reconstruction of a proto-language, which indeed never existed.

The full scale 3-volume lexical reconstruction of a proto-language, which indeed never existed can be downloaded here.[2].

[1] https://www.academia.edu/1629982/Review_of_Sergei_Starostin_...

[2] http://s155239215.onlinehome.us/turkic/40_Language/Starostin...

It’s not hard to create a fake protolanguage by focusing on borrowed terms and accidental cognates.

This is all mentioned in the first three paragraphs of the article btw. Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin

I think the debate around it points to an interesting issue in the quest of trying to taxonomize languages. It's a similar problem faced by bacteria and fungi taxonomists. These organisms are extremely prone to horizontal gene transfer (some even use functional horizontal gene transfer as an adaptation strategy to adapt to new environments). Languages can borrow a lot from each other and trying to untangle them is always gonna take a ton of guesswork. But it's also what makes the field so interesting. It forced this type of linguistic work to be very interdisciplinary

Absolutely. These debates are as old as linguistics, there was a lot of controversy in the 19th century between supporters of the tree and wave theories. It's an active area of debate now too with a lot of cross pollination between biology and linguistics. A good recent summary of the issues is Jacques and List 2019 which is available here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/objects/hc:25642/datastreams/C... The authors' application to historical linguistics of the concept of incomplete lineage sorting from population genetics I think is particularly cool

Ah thank you for this. Trees and waves both seem like really useful metaphors to talk about this and undoubtedly a clearer analysis would utilize both forms of analysis in different situations

Cool paper!

> Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin

From Wikipedia:

+> The original hypothesis unified only the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic groups

As a Turk who has occasionally looked at stuff and occasionally tried to learn Japanese, this limited version made more sense to me.

OTOH, back in the 20th century in Turkey, we had a Japanese Economics faculty member who learned Turkish very quickly and I have a Turkish friend who teaches Japanese to Turks and they both talked up the similarities, but the common origin stuff seemed to me a little too far.

Searching just now, I ran into this post[1]. Leaving aside all the arguments, I am going to note that:

(A) Ben dün mektubu yazdım.

(B) Ben mektubu dün yazdım.

Leaving aside the permutations of emphasis introduced by dropping "I" ("ben"), those three sentences convey different meanings in Turkish and each is appropriate depending on the intended meaning the speaker wants to convey.

(A) to emphasize what one did the day before, (B) to emphasize that one wrote "the letter" the day before, and (C) to emphasize that the speaker is the person who wrote the letter and did the the day before.

[1]: https://community.wanikani.com/t/similarities-between-japane...

I think the horizontal gene transfer analogy is spot on for what's going on in the Altaic grouping of languages. Even then, though, it's a weird kind of horizontal transfer that is not well understood.

Probably the most common kind of transfer among languages is loanwords: think of the many many foreign loanwords in English for example. It's easy to see how this happens. You learn a foreign word that has some convenient meaning, there's no good equivalent in your native language, so you start using the foreign word if you think the person you're talking to will know it too.

But in the Altaic languages, you see similarities in abstract structure, without much apparent sharing of words. Altaic languages have a certain strictly head-final syntactic structure, where the verb is the final element in the sentence, you have postpositions coming after nouns, lots of freedom to drop and reorder arguments of verbs, etc. They all have agglutinative morphology with case marking that creates long complex words. They all have, or show historical traces of, some kind of vowel harmony.

All these abstract commonalities happen with only very little sharing of words. You can line up a Korean sentence with its Japanese translation almost morpheme-by-morpheme, and yet those morphemes are all totally unrelated to each other.

It seems really odd that you could have a set of languages that share their abstract structure without sharing content. And Altaic isn't the only example of this kind of thing: you also see it in the North American native languages, which share a strongly head-initial head-marking structure, nearly the exact opposite of the Altaic languages, despite a lack of cognates among their morphemes. It's almost as if what was transferred among the languages was an aesthetic, rather than individual words.

We don't really understand how this happens. My best guess is that it happens in situations of massive multilingualism, so that certain habits of articulation and sentence formation get shared across languages within the mind of a multilingual speaker. It's something I'd like to understand more.

Multiple layers of creolization is the most likely explanation of common grammatic features and distinct vocabularies.

There's a language called Gagauz, spoken in Moldova. It has a Turkic vocabulary and Indo-European grammar. It was, in its infancy, likely to be a Romanian substrate, Cuman superstrate creole.

An Proto Altaic substrate with various superstrates must have played out quite a few times.

While it’s definitely an open question as to how this comes about, it’s not exclusive to the Altaic languages. For example, you have multiple unrelated Khoisan languages which all have click consonants.

> Yeah it does seem really wild that Japonic languages and Turkic languages could be from a common origin

Mainly, a few Turkish weebos are infatuated with the idea, that's about it.

Hey, French is a dialect of Japanese.

Proof:

The verb for "to have" is used for indicating that something exists somewhere in both languages. And, look at the tantalizing similarity: avoir (French) vs aru (Japanese).

Oooooh!

E.g. third person masculine avoir is a:

FR: Il y a un maison. (There is a house over there.)

JP: Soko ni wa, ie ga aru.

FR: Il a beaucoup d'argent. (He has lots of money.)

JP: Kare wa, o kane ga takusan aru.

QED.

A Sprachbund (extensive borrowing) is not remotely the same as being from a common root.

Interesting about millet though, I think theories about the origin of the Dravidian language family depend on words for different kinds of millet too.

No, but they can be hard to tell apart!

Somewhat tangentially, when you say, “no, but …” and you are actually agreeing, what is that called? I expand this in my mind to, “no, they are not the same, but …” while I would expect “yes, but …” to be the actual form of agreement.

I think German has a particle (doch) to alleviate this

Early Modern English used “nay” to reply to positive questions, and “no” to negative questions, too. And I think in French you answer a negative question positively with “si” rather than “oui”.

Yes, and the existence of regular sound changes does not prove anything, since the borrowings could have happened in antiquity.

Strangest borrowing claim I heard was that Germanic strong verbs (hence English) came from Semitic language verb forms. Columbia linguist McWhorter claims this his Story of English book.

> They focused on what Robbeets calls “culture-free” vocabulary, including words for basic items such as “field,” “pig,” and “house.”

Words for such material goods often jump languages. These aren’t the terms one should be focusing on if one is actually seriously trying to prove the existence of a language family. There is nothing in this research to suggest a change to the consensus view that the Altaic languages don’t constitute a language family.

> “It’s convincing,” says Peter Bellwood, an archaeologist at ...

Why are they asking an archeologist to comment on a linguistic theory?

Because those fields are incredibly interlinked, and people from archaeology/anthropology often study other fields in conjunction as well?

Those fields are not very related. We don't even know for sure what culture spoke Proto-Indo-European language.

There are a few threads in r/linguistics about this. Basically, there's no new evidence here proving Altaic (what she now wants to call transeurasian).

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