English language 'originated in Turkey'
bbc.com
bbc.com
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:
And some non-European languages are Indo-European, like Hindi or Persian.
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?
Obviously other languages originated there, because English is related to other languages!
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.
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.
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.
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?
Of course it is, also known as asia minor since the ancient times:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolia
And the relevant linguistic hypothesis:
"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.