The Promise of Historical Linguistics and the Conundrum of Indo-European Origins - Martin W. Lewis
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- Опубліковано 15 жов 2024
- Talk by Martin W. Lewis of GeoCurrents.info on October 27, 2013 at the Oakmont Sunday Symposium.
Original audio recording can be found at www.oaksunsym.o...
"Historical linguistics, along with archeology and genetics, provide one of the main windows into the deeper reaches of the human past. This allows us to partially reconstruct the historical processes and geographical patterns found in times and places without written records. The most important-and most abused-issue in historical linguistics is the origins and spread of Indo-European, by far the world's largest language family. From Nazi dreams of Aryan demigods to radical feminist visions of blood-drenched Kurgan warriors, the original Indo-European speakers have been forced into a variety of unsupportable, ideologically-derived positions. Dr. Martin Lewis, a senior lecturer in the Department of History at Stanford University, discusses the archeological and linguistics approaches that allow us to understand the first "Indo-Europeans" for what they really were."
A mistake many linguists make when comparing Ancient Greek words with other Indo European cognates is that they use Attic Greek (Classical Greek). When you want to compare ancient Greek with other language you must remember that Attic Greek had already changed rapidly from Homer's time which in turn had also changed from Mycenean times. So far we can use Mycenean words (Linear B). When doing this, you are more accurate in your approach. Dont forget other Greek dialects such as Aeolic and Doric Greek as spoke by the Spartans, These last two retained old style archaic Greek sounds and formation of words. That is, Attic Greek loses many consonants in the beginning of many words. Attic Greek loses some Greek lettters like Sampi and digamma.
Why not an actual video if you're commenting on and referring to maps and slides during a presentation?
kivinen1 ...you took the words right out of my mouth! This is the sort of thing that "Pod"-casts (or, rather, "MP3Casts", since Podcast comes out of the Apple brand of MP3 players, iPods which, IMO, are cheaply made and WAY, WAY overpriced (drop one & it either breaks or the screen cracks...no thanks)!!!
Very interesting, can we have the slides?
Very interesting lecture but lack of visuals somewhat hamper when he refers to things on slides.
The cool thing about Chinese, is that it's it's a consistant written language that is shared amongst many distinct members of the language family. It's mostly ideograms, kind of like American Sign Language
The big question is, did Indo-European language/culrure come to the Indus Valley, or did it originate from the Indus Valley? Can we find any hints, or clues in the arcaic build-up of words that can give a more certain theory? I wonder because there is no archological evidence of an indo-european site in north-west or north India that suggests that Indo-Europeans ended the Indus Valley culture, and replaced it? Sounds more like colonial british "overlord" thinking to me.
Obviously to. We have archeological, genetic, and linguistic evidence for and zero contra.
Ma, as in mother, is also perhaps the first adult-identifiable sound infants can articulate. In Sicily,the word for mother is Mafia. (I just made that up) :)
Maps, please!...
an example to show Indo-European theory is misleading : Most interestingly, Old Saxon and Germanic in general can be shown to have a large percentage of non-indo-european substrate words (such as “Sheep”,”eel”,”roe”,”boar”,”lentil”,”land”,”delve” and ”prick”) derived from a long-lost prehistoric Northern Europen language .Acourding to historian Victor H.Mai
+nergiz gündüz NErgiz, there are many examples to show there is a link. For sure, people from other groups influenced each other. Dont forget that some groups were isolated from each other and developed a certain noun later on in time.
If farmers spread from Turkey to the fertile crescent, why did the first great civilization there, Sumeria and Akkad speak Sumerian -- a language isolate (possibly distantly related to Chinese) and Akkadian -- a semitic language? How come people in Iran and northern India don't speak a semitic language today or one derived from Sumerian?
Basque language in Europe, Burushaski in Kashmir, Andamanese in Indian Ocean. Where are they from?
Are you sure you know what Greek is?
Attic Greek is the Greek spoken and written in Attica - territory around Athens - in about the 5th century BCE.Homeric Greek is not an earlier stage of Attic. Homeric Greek is a mixture of dialects, though primarily Ionic. Homer uses forms that are older side by side with forms that are later, often because of the demands of the meter.
The term "Classical Greek" would include Herodotus, whose Greek is Ionian. I picked it up fairly easily after having read Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon and the usual authors in beginning Greek. We have little idea of the relationship of Mycenean Greek to later Greek dialects, because the writing system is not sufficiently detailed. Also, the wordstock is not all that large.
I think you should get a little more familiar with Greek linguistic studies.
Who are you talking to?
GIM - YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN THIS BOOK: HEBREW IS GREEK. A GREAT ACADEMIC STUDY. IT MAKES SENSE THAT MOST OF THE EPISTLES WENT TO THE GREEKS.
GIM, thanks for that. You are correct.
I think the Indonesians settled all along the Indian Ocean coast from Kerala, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Oman, East Africa, Madagascar. It is only in Madagascar their language and racial characteristics survived because Madagascar was an island. In other places they have been diluted by local inhabitants.
one of the most reasonable/ honest ive heard yet
One important word is ‘fire’. Where the word fire came from?
In IE it is Agni. The word ‘ignite’ comes from it.
Also local climate influence the pronunciation of the words and may add new words.
My name Ognjen ( closest I can spell it in english is Ognyen) comes from Serbian Oganj ( closest eng spelling Ogan) which means "Fire". In sanskrit is "Agni"
I belive the original language is older and more spread than the different theorys tell. There were tens of thousands of years before agriculture, and the hunter gatherers did not just go away because farming came.
Can you explain the words“ car cu boi” as in Romanian painting from 1899. Thank you!
im half Latvian, next country down from Estonia, and we speak an indo-European language. but one of my great grandmothers looks like she is straight out of mongolia. and half my family has "mongoloid" eyes. my grandfather mentioned that they think latvians came from asia (like the finns and estonians). which we can tell now with genetics. i cant recall the group name, but his Y chromoson is not only found in latvia, but all the way across russia into Siberia, nearly crossing over into Alaska. Some north asian tribes that live in russia, but look "Mongolian" have this Y chromosome at 90% or higher. with Latvia, 50% of Latvian men (not russian or other group but latvian latvians) have it. so therefore 50% of the Latvian population is disended from this asian heritage. yes we do look as blond and blue eyed as everyone else, but not all of us. physical charictoristics can change and languages adopted but that doesnt mean the fins and estonians dont have that asian heritage. there is a joke actually that Latvians are Estonians that speak Lithuanian badly.
+ragana and broo I am from Kazakhstan, from the land where the ancient Kurgan folks lived and from where they spread to West, East, and South. You said that you great grandmothers looked like asians? Lol...One of my grandfathers had greyish/greenish eyes :). My aunts, brother, nieces, nephews, cousins have the same eyes as my grandfather and the colour of their hair is not black or dark brown but lighter. And there are a lot of Kazakhs with so called european eyes and blondish/reddish hair. But we also have folks with "true" Asian types of facial features like Chinese etc. The number of "asian' looking Kazakhs is bigger than the number of "european" looking Kazakhs but so called "european" looking Kazakhs are everywhere and even other asian folks further to the East to Altai region In Russia etc have such "european" features.
+ragana and broo The Finns and Balts and other European looking europeans have become so blue/grey eyeish and blondish and redish because of lack of "building" material meaning they probably after getting far away from homeland in Central Asia were getting married closer and closer to their relatives (forth/third/second cousins and etc). In Kazakh culture it was a taboo to marry someone who might be closer than seven generations genealogical distance. It is called "Zhety Ata". This is why we Kazakhs are not all blue/grey eyed and blondish like Finns or other Northeren European or not so red haired like Irish though there are blue/grey/green eyed and blondish/redish haired among us. Nowadays, probably not everyone follows this taboo because not all young people know their genealogical history. Though it is a good way to prevent occurence of a genetic decease in the family.
And can you explain the origin of word taur, please
Olga Roche
*TAUR- in ligurian, the language spoken in Europe from after the last glaciation until well into Roman times , signifies " mountain" lat. Taurini : the people living in the mountains, die Tauren: mountains in Austria. Since this oronym was also used in the Orient, -The Taurus mountains- it. could even be a noon from the mediterranean substrate ( earlier than ligurian). The modern oronym Cavallo del Toro has no relation with a bull but means " the passage of the mountain"
I love how people act like they know everything when they give lectures like this. The fact is there many fins do are Asiatic and they have genetic similarities to the Caucasian looking people of northernJapan but the truth is there more related to Eskimos and Inuits and anything because the further north you go the more people start looking like that with the epicanthic fold and everything hungry was named after the huns and Asiatic race or tribe and there's many people there that are Asiatic just as thier scythian ancestors were. I guarantee anywhere you find a certain language you'll find at least some genetic makeup of The originators of that language in the population
secret in word formation such as Paper vs. page, ... in my book
americans and history....right..
There really is no point posting a talk without the accompanying visual aids like maps, charts, to which the talk obviously refers. Do please make an effort and post the accompanying slides.
Ah, the sheer joy of an authoritative debunking :-)
Odisey wondered around Dalmatia and Troy was in Balkans, oldest culture in Europe is Vinca Culture. Vedic Sanskrit is the same as old Serbian. Persians Turks and Russians understand Serb language, not vice versa. The Etruscans, forefathers of Rome, called themselves Rasenna, which was syncopated to Rasna or Raśna. Early Serbian state is called Raska with the capital of Ras from word RAS - race or people. If you know Serbian and Sanscrit well, you understand Etruscan...
How can an Amèricän speak about linguistics and how the AKKADI, ROMANS, GREEKS ,Farsi Hittites pronounced....
He called the scythians ancient turks!!! it's funny how he doesn't know the scythians were definitely eastern Iranian people and ancestors of parthians
Theology and science is important to follow together,I believe Mesopotamia (kurdistan) today in Turkey,Iran,Syria and Iraq before and after Noah’s ark fload . All ind- Eouropean race and kingdom started there so we need more and more to know what happened, the victorious wrote history!!!!!
There is a linguage in europe that if they start to invistigate they will have many problems to link this language to other languages but they don't even bother to see this. Anyway we are not yet ready for the truth, love to all.
Could anyone present criticism of a video without using ridiculous and clichéd excuses like "capitalist imperialist propoganda"?
+周 むてん（Lel On'Yomi Readings） The only one I had was it wasn't clear if he meant that languages don't evolve the way biology does broadly speaking or specifically. If he meant some specific aspect, which he went into a little bit with the difference between gene borrowing frequency and word borrowing frequency, but broadly speaking, they're practically the same process. The details are different, but he really should have clarified more.
Classic ignorance! In Romania are only about one million Hungarians and they speak Romanian very well. Except gypsies, every other ethnic group in this country had their numbers plummeting sharply.
Gimbutas, still looking for that Shangri-la and looking for that scapegoat.
I give it a C minus.
Martin, I have a degree in Linguistics with Artificial Intelligence, A-Levels in Latin, French and Biology, working knowledge of Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese and others as well as a particular interest in PIE, Historical Linguistics, Genetics, Ancient History etc. I had high hopes for this talk. Here's my feedback - forgive me if it is blunt. Instead of sitting in your ivory tower, berating these scientists for daring to bring innovation into your field of study - threatening your hegemony - you should be searching their results for original findings that have not been made via the classical approach and offering to work with them to improve their model to accommodate the different forms of spread, transfer, and loan that you have identified. Your metaphor in which mammals evolved from both birds and ?fish? was poor - this happens in biology as well - it is called 'convergent evolution' it is the reason that whales and fish or bats and birds share similar structures... Stop being so destructive and start being constructive. Your working with these people is a win/win - either you convince them that Linguistics is much too difficult for them and that they should go away and leave it to experts like you - you win. Or, together you contribute new knowledge to the field of Historical Linguistics and your name is on the paper - You win. It's a no brainer.
PS: This talk is very out of date - modern analysis of Ancient DNA overwhelmingly supports Gimbutas and puts paid to Renfrew's theories. It's telling that Lewis ridicules Gimbutas kurgan theory, and how he does it! He finds it ridiculous, so he ridicules it as absurd without providing any real facts and arguments! Gimbutas must have had a hard time - too many arrogant, self-invested experts refusing to acknowledge their paradigm is wrong!
Hopeless presentation. Many errors. The Turks are a Mongol people. Today they are mixed with various people. THis is revisionism. Finns are not Nordic.
The Turks are not a Mongol people, either ethnically or linguistically. Ethnic Turks form a instinct group in Turkey today. However, the overall population of Turkey is mixed. I have been told that a serious part of the population that does not want to identify with the Seljuk invasion refer to themselves as Anatolians, which means anyone other than the Turks who live in the country today.
Language can be matter of commodity and politics! But there are famillies of languages, special Slavic ones, which are very old and not at all from 6th a.c.! For Slovene people there is no single evidence in Roman and Bisantitian histories, that in northeren part of Balkan came som Slovenian group of people. And latest reserch on linguistic matter clearly shows, that slavic is much older than germanic and latin languages! Slav group of people IS the biggest in Europe and some times ago it was still much bigger!!!Fact is, that Germanic people like to conquer and Slavic people like to farming! So it is possible, hat Slavic peole are connectet to old Europe culture (Ware cups culture, vinca writings, mother goddnes,...) from neolitic times!
true. slavic languages are indigious EUROPEAN!!! not indo-european!! sanskrit is old slavic. latin and greek are derived from slavic, as indoeuropean and celitc elements inside european linguistic group. see how jews hate anything european with their so called science?
As a slav with a degree in linguistics myself - hail Mother Russia! - I feel competent enought to say that both of you are talking fucking bullshit nonsense.
Indo-European theory is wrong ! : Tablet words represent the non-Indi-Iranian languages spoken in Iran and in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent at the time these texts were composed, that is , late in the second and early in the first millennium Iran , as such there are invaluable materials for the study of languages preceding the introduction of Indo-Aryan and Old Iranian (Old Persian, Avestan). More important, both types of hieratic texts share a common substratum that can only be that of the southern part of Western Central Asia. It can not come from else where both Verdic and Old Iranian individually imported it into their particular habitats, the Grater Panjab and Iran/Afganistan. According to Historian Victor H.Mair
Modern greek is probably closest to proto-indoeuropean. Lituanian is very close in aspects of the noun declension, but not so much in other ways.
Modern Greek and even Ancient Greek underwent extensive phonological changes. Like, extensive. I would say it is on the par with the Baltic languages in that regard. I am no Lithuanian, but I always get shocked by howarchaic this language is.
Modern Greek has preserved archaisms like the old aorist, the the old imperect, the augament, the medial declenison and much of the original shape of personal endings. Modern Greek has the 3 old genders, while the Baltic languages hae conflated the system to masculine and feminine. Greek has much the same basic vowel structure as those of older stages. The verbal structure in the Baltic languages has been greatrly rebuilt. What is archaic in the Baltic languages is the case system
It's quite complex. Some Slavic language like Slovene retain the dual which was about to be dropped already in Attic.
terribly weak rebuttal
7:20 I can explain. Look at the names of the men writing and publishing these books and you will find that they are Jews. Might Jews have some hang ups about race? Don't they like to confuse the issue even to this very day? Yes, they do!
Albanians don't know where they came from.
Indo-European language spreaded from Iceland to Bangladesh!
keep American racists out of science please... keep to the facts....
"KurGONS", yeah, right. Who would pronounce Kurgan that way? Don't cheapen yourself with ignorant pronunciations.
Most of the things German said are now being proven true. Although Scandinavia is not the original place nor Germany. It was Ukraine. That's also where the earliest known civilization was.
Much is spoken in great ignorance in his presentation. There were, and are, sound reasons to believe that Indo-European languages were, to some extent, spread by relatively tall, fair-haired people of European type. Much of the evidence had been actively suppressed and denied by post-WWII "scholars" for political reasons. Never mind that the "history" of Nazi Germany, as it is taught in schools and conveyed in popular culture amounts to blatant lies and black propaganda.
See, for example, the early 20th century work of Albert von Le Coq, Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein regarding the mummies of the Tarim basin.
The current (as of June 2014) genetic evidence seems to be coming down solidly in favor of Germanic, Insular Celtic, and Galo-Italic having origins involving significant demic diffusion.
When you can define "European type", smiles, you might get somewhere with someone. I am guessing you work talking points with Ken Ham, and his famous "type kinds" of animals. Italy is Europe. Spain is Europe. Greece is Europe. They are not "relatively tall, fair-haired people"....they are Europeans. What are you talking about?
Steven Hatton
The pigmentation genes of these Steppe groups believed by many linguists to be the earliest Indo-European has been tested. They're werent very depigmented [blonde and blue eyed]
www.pnas.org/content/111/13/4832.full.pdf+html
Luke Christopher Nonsense! The appearance of the earliest indo europeans is easily demonstrated by the appearance of the earliest Tarim Basin mummies. These people moved into an area where their european type was isolated from from all other european types and hence could be mixed with no other european type. Their range of types is completely consistent with types you find today in Russia and other northern European countries. The existence of these mummies is best explained, in fact, is only explained by their spread from the original indo european homeland. Only an excess of scholarly caution prevents true scholars from declaring the case closed.
peter henry Nope, the Yamnaya culture [3,300 BC - 2,400 BC] which is identified as being synonymous with middle to late Proto Indo-European speakers were found to be darker pigmented than contemporary Southern Europeans in skin and eyes.
dienekes.blogspot.com/2015/03/natural-selection-and-ancient-european.html
Check page 11 of this PDF and read for yourself.
biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2015/03/13/016477.full.pdf
Tarim Basin mummies come much later and are not proto Indo-European, but rather Tocharian specific.
You link to a blog that is well known for an agenda. The agenda of this blog is to prove the out of anatolia theory. Some say the administrator is a Turk. I take nothing from this blog seriously.
Narrow minded guy !! Study geography too !!! The world full of HUNGARIAN sounding names from Karpathian basin !! Few example Samos,Karpathos,Kos, (Gr ) Uru-Solyma,Hiero-Solyma, Schytopolis =Jerusalem ,Arpad,Arad ,Bab-ilo in Canaan -Bihar (India) Bator (Mongolia) Tokai (Japan-Italy) Sala-saca (Equador) Birka(Sveden ) + 1000,s more all over the world .SOO ?? --what was the 1st language in Bab-el . You need more written proof ? This people still speaking the same language in Buda !-Pest . Rivers ? Arpa=Armenia, Zab-Turkey etc..etc . You should start intelligent study !!
Huh. Thanks. You wouldn't care to translate the words in question? Especially Birka drew my undivided attention. That means birch in Scandinavia and the genera name, lønn, has become the word for wages.
Not for nothing that Numitor was the father of Rhea Silvia, the shewolf who suckled Romulus and Remus.
Birka =means in hungarian (Lamb ) as is !! no birch . But all the names I quoted are Karpath basin geographical names sometimes even we don,t now the meaning -but exist only here and sounding only in magyar language
Well, you'll get no argument from me that naming your biggest trade settlement lamb in a world dominated by Magyars... Is not wholly unwise.
Google Translator gave me hawk from Solyma and Saca I'm quite positive is related to goat and, thus, sacred. Tsarion has a lot of material on the Schytians, but he connects them with Ireland, not that that excludes the other theory. Irish has a lot more in common with Arabic than previoulsy believed. That's a very interesting topic too. Phoenicians tin traders went there for ages, before the migration period began for real around 100 BC, when the hoards known only as Cymbri and Teutones showed up at the border of Toscana.
Online Etymological for sage:
sage (adj.) "wise," c.1300 (late 12c. as a surname), from Old French sage "wise, knowledgeable, learned; shrewd, skillful" (11c.), from Gallo-Roman *sabius, from Vulgar Latin *sapius, from Latin sapere "have a taste, have good taste, be wise," from PIE root *sap- "to taste" (see sap (n.1)).
The Sabines were a hill tribe in Italy and later, Sabir was a pidgin-language throughout the Mediterranean and Sabi is a common mans name in Iran today. Sabir is derived from the Latin word for know. Know is the Pen and no is the Sword, right? Wow is the Lute, of course (:)
saber (n.) type of single-edged sword, 1670s, from French sabre "heavy, curved sword" (17c.), alteration of sable (1630s), from German Sabel, Säbel, probably ultimately from Hungarian szablya "saber," literally "tool to cut with," from szabni "to cut."
The Balto-Slavic words (Russian sablya, Polish szabla "sword, saber," Lithuanian shoble) perhaps also are from German. Italian sciabla seems to be directly from Hungarian.
Huh, interesting.. Hungarian and Latin have the same word for no; en. And yes in Hungarian is igen, which is frighteningly close to again in Norwegian; igjen.
I reccommend to check the work of Mario Alinei , Micheangelo Naddeo -unbiased historians . Unfortunatelly Hungarian official historians (LIERS) -under world order !! But real historians wiew that Karpath basin survived ice age (Due to hot springs all over the country _still today too ) Archaic knowlegde saved by people here and spread to east (Schytians) west (Celts) and not from Mesopotamia . 7-8000 proof of writing (Tatarlaka)-Bosnia Pyramids 30 000 (hungarian runic)Sumer=3500 .My privat opinnjion Vikings also Schyta origin .
Wooow, that's so in-theus-ra-esting. Thanks a lot!
Yeah, I think it's very Celtic too, when looking at the style of art, but there's another link - Beal-Zebub, or lord of the flies. Hair is bál in Punjabi, which is the old word for Beal-Zebub, a child sacrifical God all over the middle east and it also means midsummers day fire, or just fire as in camp fire, in Norse. Who has flaming hair? Probably all of the ancient royalty of the North West, the last places to hide from the hordes (Phoenician traders, steppe horsemen, arctic nomads). There's many famous kings with Red in their names and the word we use for red today meant to speak. In the central dialects, it's actually the same as a vulgar one for 'lower back'. Like QotSA puts it: "First it giveth, then it taketh away". The red hair trail is a very interesting topic too. Berbers have it more frequently and they are supposed to have come from Europe. There's also red hair on the Tocharian mummies and a tribe nearby has it to this very day, as well as a village in Chin where, I believe, much of their DNA was European.