Re: Question about linguistics

On 2003-11-28, Graham Clark <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>

[snip]

>> An article in today's *Times* reports two Australian researchers who
>> claim that all the Indo-European languages derive from a Hittite
>> language spoken 8000 years ago in what is now Anatolia. This would be
>> remarkable if true. 
>
>   As far as I know from talking to linguists(/linguisticians/whatever 
> you call people who study linguistics), this is a fairly uncontroversial
> statement (except that the language wouldn't actually be Hittite, but
> would have been closer to that than any other language most people have 
> ever heard of). A friend did a PhD on this sort of thing, and she reckoned 
> 10000 years ago and just north of the Black sea (as opposed to south),
> but that's not a huge difference.
>

Yes, I think this is true; ideas of this kind have been around for quite
a time. As I understand, the new announcement is in line with the theory
advanced previously by the archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who believes
that the proto-Indo-European language was spread by Anatolian farmers
rather than by Kurgan warriors on horseback, and that this puts the
origins of these languages back from c. 6000 to 8000 years ago. But I
haven't seen the article in *Nature*; just summaries. See, for example: 

http://www.turks.us/article.php?story=20031127172853225

Quote:

        "Dr Russell Gray and Dr Quentin Atkinson, from the University of
        Auckland borrowed tools usually used by biologists to construct
        an evolutionary tree for living things.

        They used a technique called "glottochronology" which relies on
        the premise that, in common with the language of our genes, DNA,
        the words used in language also undergo "mutations" at a
        constant rate.

        This makes it possible to track a series of changes back to a
        common origin at a certain time, pointing to the common root of
        all Indo-European tongues being the extinct Anatolian language
        Hittite.

        The origins are too early to back a rival theory that the first
        Indo-European language emerged 6,000 years ago from nomadic
        Kurgan horsemen who made incursions from the Asian steppes into
        Europe and conquests south and east."


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