Matthew Scarborough posts on a paper by K. Sampanis and Karantzola, “The perception of historical and Indo-European linguistics in the instruction of Greek,” which he says “contains an interesting discussion of the perception of Indo-European linguistics in modern-day Greece, and how better education in historical linguistics in Greece might help combat linguistic pseudo-science.” He quotes this paragraph (which I presume is the abstract):
Indo-European linguistics has a long tradition which is manifested by an extensive bibliography and findings that are integrated into other domains such as lexicography or comparative philology. Still, one may observe a certain degree of scepticism towards the Indo-European studies, which is largely attributed to the fact that Historical Linguistics’ and Archaeology’s methodologies do not easily comply with each other, so the results of one may question findings of the other. What is more, within the language discourse in Greece, Indo-European linguistics is confronted with an intensive denial of its theories which is based on a ‘hellenocentric’ paralinguistic pseudo-science. The article traces the roots of this anti-Indo-European rhetoric in Greece and indicates the deficient incorporation of IE theory into the language instruction of (Ancient) Greek at primary and secondary education with respect to the way the findings of comparative linguistics are presented in relevant handbooks.
Another sad illustration of the toxic effects of nationalism on one’s sense of reality.
Interesting. I have met a number of Greeks who claim that Ancient Greek was always pronounced as Modern Greek is today (umpteen different letters for the sound /i/ and all) – that seems something that the average Greek is passionate about, and I’ve read somewhere that the Greek Orthodox Church has pushed it – but I had no idea that people who knew of the IE family and Greek’s place in it disputed those findings.
Is the Greek situation that much different from the rejection of IE by Hindu nationalists?
Bathrobe.
Due to the recent genetic studies, a number of hard-line Hindu Nationalists have changed their views, although many are still skeptical. Of course, they already had this kind of data for Greece last year.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/south-asians-are-descended-mix-farmers-herders-and-hunter-gatherers-ancient-dna-reveals
@Bahtrobe: Well they don’t reject IE per se, but they hold that the IVC was the urheimat. I wouldn’t be surprised if the situation in Greece were similar, especially since there was a phase when a Balkan origin was popular.
@Lazar, “Well they don’t reject IE per se, but they hold that the IVC was the urheimat.”
There is a rather prevalent school among Hindutva cranks that Sanskrit has existed since time eternal, and in fact all peoples of the world originally spoke Sanskrit and worshiped the Vedic deities. They claim purported connections between Sanskrit-speaking India and elsewhere that greatly predate the IVC.
“IVC” means “Indus Valley Civilization,” not “Irvine Valley College.”
Ceteris paribus I would rather have kids taught true things about historical linguistics than false things, and I teaching true things would also be better than teaching nothing at all. But I see no reason why any understanding of the broader Indo-European context is necessary to effectively teach Ancient Greek to L1 speakers of Modern Greek. For that matter, I don’t think that the way I was first taught Ancient Greek (let’s see … 33 years ago) was particularly informed by any of the previous almost 200 years of work on comparative IE scholarship and reconstruction. In other words, I was probably taught it (as an Anglophone kid with prior exposure to Latin, whose structural parallels to Greek were obvious but the whys and wherefores of them not explained very well in class) more or less the same way the not-yet-Sir William Jones had been taught it as a boy almost 230 years earlier. Maybe it’s nice that (as the article notes) kids learning Ancient Greek in a German Gymnasium have a text book that mentions in the preface that Greek Latin and German are all related to Lithuanian, but does that really led to better mastery of Greek-qua-Greek? (It might if they already knew Lithuanian, but I suspect that’s the exception rather than the rule …)
(I do recall one day after class in Homeric Greek when our very old-school-tweedy professor explained to one of my classmates that a particular Gk word was cognate to a particular extremely vulgar/offensive English word – although I think there’s actually a scholarly dispute on the accuracy of that particular etymological relationship. A lovely moment, but not one that made the Greek itself much easier to master.)
Rick.
Thanks for the link. The biorxiv version was posted three weeks ago.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/03/31/292581.full.pdf
One Sentence Summary: Genome wide ancient DNA from 357 individuals from Central and South Asia sheds new light on the spread of Indo-European languages and parallels between the genetic history of two sub-continents, Europe and South Asia
Teaching children the true origin of their language is just as important as teaching them the true origin of their ethnic group (in terms of biology and evolution). Political groups often use, and promote, misunderstandings in these fields to harm minority populations for their own advantage.
I see no reason why any understanding of the broader Indo-European context is necessary to effectively teach Ancient Greek to L1 speakers of Modern Greek.
It’s not, of course, but that’s not the point — the point is that the willed ignorance of nationalism prevents both an understanding of the Indo-European background of the language and the truth about what Ancient Greek was like (very different from Modern Greek). Of course, you can say that it’s not necessary to know anything at all about the background of one’s language, but that’s a pretty minimalist approach. Certainly if you’re going to teach the background, you shouldn’t be teaching bullshit.
Well, if modern Greek school children are taught to read the Iliad as if it was composed with modern values for the letters, they will still learn something — and you could reasonably adopt the view that teaching them the reconstructed pronunciation would take up too much time for what is gained.
But if they are actively taught that the sounds of Greek never changed, and if the fact that they can still sort of read Homer that way is used to prove that Greek civilization alone among the corrupt multitudes maintains its greatness and rabid nationalism is OK, then some sad shaking of the head is in order, or even a deep sigh.
Even if you focus on the differences between Modern Greek and Homeric Greek, there’s still a reasonably straight progression from the latter to the former, and the fact that whichever neighboring ethnic groups might be on the receiving end of modern Greek nationalist ire do not have their own famous/canonical texts in comparably old ancestors of their own languages would be more than enough to support a chauvinistic spin on the linguistic history.
Obviously it’s hard to teach a “puristic” version of the history of English with a straight face, but it’s perfectly easy to spin the true history of the language in a way that shows its obvious superiority over foreign tongues. The glorious synthesis of the Saxon and the Norman, creating something better than each component would have been standing alone, keeping some toponyms and whatnot from the Celts the Saxons had conquered and with judicious subsequent borrowings from Latin Greek and other tongues as appropriate (and, mind you, those borrowings were done from a position of cultural strength and confidence rather than weakness!) is a perfectly good rah-rah-us triumphalist narrative. Cf. McWhorter’s book title “Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue,” where only the cute wordplay of using a typically-pejorative word for the synthesis makes it a slogan not fully suitable for humorless triumphalists.
Even if you focus on the differences between Modern Greek and Homeric Greek, there’s still a reasonably straight progression from the latter to the former
I’m not sure how that’s relevant. Far more relevant is that using modern sound values completely destroys Ancient Greek poetry, for example.
My point is they could teach the pronunciation change w/o having to give up much in terms of a nationalism-friendly narrative, just as Anglophone triumphalists certainly would not feel obligated to even consider the possibility that the substantial change in pronunciation since Chaucer might be a sign of cultural decline or decadence or lack of continuity.
David,
There is obviously a lot more information packed into the pre-print.
The other big points are that the steppe people who arrived in South Asia were closely related to the Middle Bronze Age Andronovo and Sintashta people, and so they already had a bit of Early European Farmer ancestry (and that steppe- related ancestry is heaviest in Northern Brahmins).
The IVC people had a large amount of ‘Ancient Iranian Farmer’ related ancestry, and that ancestry is now heavier in the Dravidian speaking groups.
And some Austroasiatic speaking groups do not have steppe-related ancestry, hinting strongly that those languages arrived in India before the IE languages did.
My point is they could teach the pronunciation change w/o having to give up much in terms of a nationalism-friendly narrative
Oh, I see. Well, theoretically, yeah, if Greek nationalism were completely different. The immutability of the language is a firm, if theoretically unnecessary, component of their nationalism, just as anti-Semitism is of certain other forms of nationalism.
As long as you think of the written form of the language as the Real Thing and the spoken form as a variable second-hand approximation of the Real Thing (which is a thing very widely believed by members of literate societies who haven’t taken an intro college linguistics class), acknowledging pronunciation changes need not be thought of as a threat to a narrative about immutability.
“I see no reason why any understanding of the broader Indo-European context is necessary to effectively teach Ancient Greek.”
Some knowledge of prehistoric sound changes is very helpful in teaching introductory Greek: knowing that earlier *s and *w was lost makes it much easier to memorize all those pesky contractions in declension (it also helps to go on from a beginner’s Attic to reading Homer more smoothly). Ditto for -tt-/-ss- verbs. Even just knowing that the neuter in Indo-European languages was originally a collection makes it less weird for students that neuter plurals take the 3rd person singular of the verb.
@Hat: “using modern sound values completely destroys Ancient Greek poetry, for example.”
That doesn’t seem to bother the Chinese and Japanese, who read their poetry canons with sound values vastly different from what those ancient poets would have actually uttered, but these peoples still continue to feel that this poetry has value.
I will defer to Mr. Culver’s interesting points about what might make learning Greek easier for some students while simply noting that none of that approach was thought necessary by (and might not have been understood by) the distinguished academics who taught me Attic/Homeric/NT Greek at an Ivy League university in the 1980’s, whose motivation for the omissions was surely not that they were devotees of the Hellenic flavor of modern Balkan nationalism. We learned Greek the unscientific way they had learned it, and their own teachers (and those teachers’ teachers) had learned it in turn, back, as I said, to the way Sir William Jones had probably learned it as a boy in the 1750’s and beyond that into the mists of time. Indeed, revealing some helpful inner logic and pattern to the declension tables might have undermined the important character-building function of studying the classical languages, which was enhanced by the need for rote memorization of the seemingly arbitrary!
Come to think of it, I may have been taking Homeric Greek the same semester I was taking my undergrad class in Historical Linguistics as taught by hat’s erstwhile grad school contemporary Stephanie Jamison, who later went on to run the Indo-European Studies program at another leading US university. And If I’m wrong about that I took HistLing before HomGk not the other way round. I’m not sure how much I bothered to apply what I was learning (or had previously learned) in the latter class to the former, as I was mostly glancing over the next day’s assigned chunk of the Iliad late at night while watching MTV …
There is a widespread belief that classical poetry is best read aloud in $_southern_dialect (not necessarily the one of the person who brings this up…), but I don’t know if that is about making the rhymes work better or just about decreasing the homophone load (Mandarin having lost the syllable-final plosives and merged -m into -n).
Actually, for making the rhymes work, Vietnamese is best, as we learned here a while ago. I’m not going to look for it at this time of the night, though.
That doesn’t seem to bother the Chinese and Japanese, who read their poetry canons with sound values vastly different from what those ancient poets would have actually uttered, but these peoples still continue to feel that this poetry has value.
It doesn’t bother the Greeks either; I’m not sure what your point is. Surely you’re not claiming they’re all better off not pronouncing the ancient poetry accurately? Furthermore, there is no generally accepted standard pronunciation of Ancient Chinese, so the position is very different than for Greek, where we know quite well how the original was pronounced. And of course classical Greek poetry depends crucially on the interplay of long and short syllables, which is lost in modern renderings; you can still get the pretty images and deep thoughts, but the poetry is utterly lost.
You can read a book of song lyrics, and they can be fantastic. However, when you do this, you are not hearing the song, and you have a totally different experience.
Poems are very much like songs. If the rhyming and/or breathing pattern is not the same, then something is lost.
Directly translated traditional haiku will still have juxtaposition of images or ideas with a cutting word between them, but they will almost never retain the 5, 7, 5 structure. Again, something is definitely lost.
In the case of poetry, the change in sounds from an ancient language to a modern one is similar to a translation.
This reminds me of starting a semester of Old Spanish Lit. to find that it was to be read in Mod. Span.
Having taken Hist. of Span. Lang. in the previous semester I got quite uppity about what I considered
to be a stupidity. I don!t recall what the prof’s defence was (possibly that not everyone took HSL) but
I withdrew in high dudgeon.
“Teaching children the true origin of their language is just as important as teaching them the true origin of their ethnic group (in terms of biology and evolution). Political groups often use, and promote, misunderstandings in these fields to harm minority populations for their own advantage.”
Ironic, because in the Indian case, it was a minority group – the British – promoting the idea of white racial superiority to harm the majority population for their own advantage. It seems to be missed that this present day Hindu nationalist rejection is ultimately the legacy of the British rule of India, which is still fairly recent, when you consider when India became independent.
It isn’t that Hindu nationalists are intrinsically opposed to the idea that their ancestors were a mix of external migrants and indigenous peoples – or rather, older migrants. It’s that it skirts too close to the ideas the British pushed in order to cow the native Indian population into submission. Indian nationalism, like all nationalist resistance movements in the last century, was predicated on the idea of native equality and independence. Gandhi’s rejection of British rule was based on the premise that the Indians didn’t need the British, that they were a proud, accomplished people in their own right deserving of equal treatment. Obviously, the idea that much of what we know as Indian civilization is itself the product of Indo-Aryan colonization threatens the foundations of India’s perceived independence, made worse by the fact that these Indo-Europeans are particularly associated with modern Europeans by most Western literature.
Basically, in the eyes of many Indians, accepting Indo-Aryan colonization is tantamount to accepting that the Nazis and the British were right – that the natives of India were inferior and did require a superior white race to bring them civilization and to rule over them. Thus the vehement denial. In the days to come, we will see what narrative Indians ultimately settle on, but I doubt it will be one that accepts wholeheartedly the Indo-Aryan invasion theory – the white supremacist version, any way.
That is good, because the white supremacists version is wrong. There is no sign of an invasion, but there are absolute signs of language and genetic shifts just after the IVC collapsed.
A major issue, that is incredibly difficult for people to come to terms with, is that some proportion of their ancestry comes from populations that they consider to be intrusive. Those ancestors are also part of their heritage.
Basically, in the eyes of many Indians, accepting Indo-Aryan colonization is tantamount to accepting that the Nazis and the British were right – that the natives of India were inferior and did require a superior white race to bring them civilization and to rule over them. Thus the vehement denial. In the days to come, we will see what narrative Indians ultimately settle on, but I doubt it will be one that accepts wholeheartedly the Indo-Aryan invasion theory – the white supremacist version, any way.
It isn’t like the same argument didn’t apply to Europe as well? The cave-painters, the Minoan kings and the Stonehenge builders likewise “required” a superior invading population to subjugate them all? Andronovo people weren’t Europeans. Just consider them ancient Indians, and the problem is solved
Rick: “You can read a book of song lyrics, and they can be fantastic. However, when you do this, you are not hearing the song, and you have a totally different experience.”
In the Lieder tradition, the lyrics of songs are poems, so if you read them your experience is what someone intended.
Basically, in the eyes of many Indians, accepting Indo-Aryan colonization is tantamount to accepting that the Nazis and the British were right – that the natives of India were inferior and did require a superior white race to bring them civilization and to rule over them.
That’s an idiotic response, but I guess whatever it takes to keep from having to think seriously about history (or anything else) is a port in a storm. Better to stay snug in one’s warm bath of self-regard.
Does the idea that the Aryans were light-skinned / blond / blue-eyed have any actual basis in genetics or ancient literature? What I gather is that Gobineau (later channelled by the Nazis) thought the Aryans of the Rg-Veda were ‘bright’ and ‘noble’ and therefore white, but if they were in fact mostly Iranian steppe dwellers they might not have looked very much like the archetypical German Junker or English Lord.
Of course words have power so you might have to call the Proto-II speakers something else than Aryans to make the idea palatable to former British subjects, but conflating them with Northern Europeans is just 200 year old fake news.
actual basis in genetics or ancient literature?Andronovo people were heterogenous, lighter-skinned compared to ancient inhabitants of India, but likely looking swarthy to today’s Europeans, with a spectrum of variation of eye colors and hair. There has been a lot of selection on skin / eye / hair color in recent millennia “after PIE”, generally thought to be a sexual selection for lighter colors. The precise conclusions about the past populations are harder to get even after their genomes are read, because the “genetics of colors” isn’t as clear-cut as the one-page primers on Mendelian inheritance in men would paint it. The main genetic loci are by far the most important today, but they don’t explain the whole picture (there are numerous additional genetic factors, including inferred-but-undiscovered “missing heritability” factors, with relatively minor roles at present, but potentially stronger roles in the past)
David Reich, the last author of the biorxiv paper on PIE, has recently published a book on population genetics. There is a review in the NY Times.
Blue eyes must have been very rare, though, because they come from the Western Hunter-Gatherers in the western half of Europe. (All of the few WHG sequenced so far had blue eyes – and skin about as dark as found in southern India today. None of the contemporary Early European Farmers had blue eyes before people started to mingle, and the same is true for the Yamnaya people yet sequenced.) That said, there’s some Early European Farmer ancestry in Sintashta, so there must have been some WHG ancestry there as well.
Another review, by a historical linguist, is here.
The light eye color allele of HERC2 was also found in a 13,300 year old Caucasus hunter-gatherer, and the Bronze Age steppe people had considerable ancestry from this population.
But the recessive allele has only found in ~15% of Middle to Late Bronze Age samples, so blue or green eyes must have indeed been quite rare (~2%) in the region.
Oh, I missed that.
With regard to Reich’s book, he suggests that Greenberg’s Amerind hypothesis that all Native American languages with the exception of the Eskimo-Aleut group and Athabascan are related was vindicated by DNA analysis showing that all Native American populations have ancestry going back to a group he refers to as the “First Americans”, who entered North America at a time depth of more than 15,000 years ago. (Some Native Americans, e.g., Eskimos and Athabascan groups, also have ancestry from a few other ancient populations that entered North America at a later date.) But isn’t he assuming that the ancient First Americans all spoke the same language or related languages?
He is assuming that largely because the First Americans were extremely homogeneous genetically, and had experienced a very strong genetic bottleneck in Beringia.
It may be that there were multiple languages involved, but it seems very unlikely that people would be so closely related without speaking the same language, given the circumstances.
So where do Meadowcroft Rockshelter, Pedra Furada, etc. fit? Because there were humans in the Americas before Clovis.
This recent paper clarifies a lot of the ancient (and modern) genetic data about the peopling of the American continents.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature25173
Basically, there were distinct, but very highly related populations in Beringia for many thousands of years. It is not unlikely that there were several early, but ultimately unsuccessful, migrations south along the coastline. Perhaps some of these left traces in the heart of the Amazon, where some tribes have extra minor genetic affinity to Andaman Islanders.
But ultimately, the major wave of expansion occurred very quickly from a small population, and all the way down to the most southern point, and then northward on the other coast, and inward along all the major rivers.
Didn’t there use to be a faux-British “Shakespeare accent” — a non-rhotic, mid-Atlantic stage pronunciation employed by American actors in elevated drama? After all, it stands to reason that Shakespeare was an RP speaker.
I wonder if the proponents of the theory that Greek pronunciation hasn’t changed much since Homer would be prepared to re-reconstruct PIE with the sounds of Modern Greek. The Hindutva “linguists” I have met in various discussion groups certainly insisted that “true” PIE was practically synonymous with Vedic (with a few reluctant concessions on their part). They even questioned Grassmann’s Law and the Law of Palatals.
The whole Clovis culture is only 13,200 years old.
I wonder if the proponents of the theory that Greek pronunciation hasn’t changed much since Homer would be prepared to re-reconstruct PIE with the sounds of Modern Greek.
Evidently ludicrous. PIE had the sounds of Modern Welsh. (As you’d expect, given that recent genetic advances show that the Indoeuropean homeland was in Llanelli.)
All Yesterdays!
I read the India paper a couple of weeks ago on a tip from Dmitry Pruss. By compiling a lot of data from Central Asia and Western Siberia, it also has things to say about BMAC, and the Andronovo culture comes out as extremely interesting. What it does not incorporate is the recent results on the genetic history of Southeast Asia and the Austroasiatic migrations, which might have thrown even more light on the Indian East-West gradient and the place of Munda.
Poking around I also found a recent paper on the genetics of Minoans and Mycenean Greeks that concluded that the two were almost identical, with only a tiny bit of Steppe ancestry in the Myceneans.
Didn’t there use to be a faux-British “Shakespeare accent” — a non-rhotic, mid-Atlantic stage pronunciation employed by American actors in elevated drama?
We discussed the “Transatlantic accent” back in 2011.
I wouldn’t say they found a tiny amount of steppe ancestry in Mycenaeans. They averaged ~20% ancestry from Middle-Late Bronze Age ancestry (most similar to Sintashta, Srubnaya, or Corded Ware), and the rest was like Minoans (who already had additional ancestry from a Caucasus related population).
Thanks. I concluded that they were the result of a recent IE intrusion into the Minoan civilization, but I must have misremembered the proportions.
Re: Myceneans
Robert Drews believes that Mycenean Greece was something similar to later Hellenistic empires in Asia – Greek conquering elite (tiny percentage of population, perhaps running under 10%) lording over masses of non-Greek population.
Greece became majority ethnically Greek sometime during Dark Centuries after fall of Mycenean Greece.
The study looked at 4 Mycenaeans from 1700–1200 BC. They were not from ruling elite burials, and they had from 15-30% Middle-Late Bronze Age (steppe-like) ancestry, which is genetically similar to modern Greek people.
Here is how they described the graves:
“Seven rock-cut chamber toms were excavated between 1985 and 1993 in the area of Apatheia, ca. 2 km west of the modern town of Galatas, in the northern foothills of Mt. Adheres. Those tombs held the burials of ordinary people, judging by the few, common-type furnishings of the deceased.”
“In 1995 a group of nine Mycenaean tombs were excavated in the modern town of Salamina, near the church of Ayia Kyriaki on Demosthenous street. The furnishings of the deceased included faience jewelry and some objects of bronze, indicating that the individuals buried in that tomb were wealthier than the average people, although they may not be viewed as members of a ruling elite, judging by the absence of any prestige items in the grave offerings.”
Robert Drews believes that Mycenean Greece was something similar to later Hellenistic empires in Asia – Greek conquering elite (tiny percentage of population, perhaps running under 10%) lording over masses of non-Greek population.
The trouble with this idea is that many of the taxpayers mentioned in the Linear B tablets have very obvious Greek names, some of them with transparent Greek etymologies even though not recorded in later times. For example, the name Qe-ra-di-ri-jo comes out *Τηλανδριος ‘far:man:PATRONYMIC”, a perfectly plausible piece of Greek; on the other hand, Ka-na-to-po is a woman’s name, but not identifiable.
(Chadwick’s examples).
Yes, Drews mentions the names, says they indicate about 40% Greek and the remainder non-Greek. All the people in the records were part of the palace economy which should have the highest concentration of Greeks, but even here they fail to achieve a majority!
So it follows that the ratio in the country as a whole was much more in favor of non-Greeks, maybe 20:80, maybe 10:90.
Greek conquering elite (tiny percentage of population, perhaps running under 10%) lording over masses of non-Greek population.
Such as in Sparta?
There must have still been a considerable migration to Greece at this time, because 4 out of 4 non-elite burials tested from the 1700–1200 BC timespan already had this additional 20% ancestry from presumably Indo-European speakers.
This was not from a ruling class that kept themselves separated from the rest of the population. So, even if we assume a higher rate of population growth in the migrants, it still requires a lot of people moving in.
What is known about the process of naming children in Minoans and Mycenaeans?
Except that Sparta was Dorians ruling over Arcadians. Mycenaean Greek already has one or two Arcado-Cypriot innovations, IIRC.
In Minoans nothing as usual.
What Mycenaen has in common with Arcadio-Cypriot is more probably shared primitive characters. Indeed, the same may well be true of Arcadian and Cypriot themselves.
I found and reread Lazaridis et al.: Genetic origins of the Minoans and Mycenaeans. From the abstract:
I had noticed the almost totally dominant haplotype J Y-chromosome, seemingly associated with the Caucasus/Iran element, and the speculation (later in the paper) of genetic diffusion into Mycenaean from Balkan neighbours rather than a migration event into Mainland Greece from north, but I must have missed the inferred admixture rate of 13-18%. Four Mycenaeans is a small sample, though, so the similar genetic composition could still be a coincidence.
Another point I missed last time is that the Caucasus/Iran element may actually represent the wave that brought Anatolian languages to Anatolia.
But then we should expect an Anatolian substrate in Greek, right?
Yes, probably. And an Anatolian language in Linear A. Both have been suggested. But I was careful to say “the wave that brought Anatolian languages to Anatolia”. The wave could also have picked up some Ante-Anatolian language on its way through Anatolia.
Very good point.
Too bad the term chain migration is taken…
Rick: This recent paper clarifies a lot of the ancient (and modern) genetic data about the peopling of the American continents.
I took this over in another thread.
“It isn’t like the same argument didn’t apply to Europe as well? The cave-painters, the Minoan kings and the Stonehenge builders likewise “required” a superior invading population to subjugate them all? Andronovo people weren’t Europeans. Just consider them ancient Indians, and the problem is solved.”
The disparity in perception is logically explained by differences in history. Europe was not recently colonized by Indians; India was recently colonized by Europeans. Without this memory, it would not be much of an issue – at worst an arcane dispute between fringe nationalists about who is “closer” to the “Aryans.” But because the shadow of British rule is but seventy years old, and still relevant to discussions of Indian national identity today, sensitivity is much higher. History is always interpreted in the present, after all.
The possible Anatolian substratum in Greek. But we don’t really know if the words are substratal or shared primitive characters.
The -nd-/-nth- suffix is much more widespread in space and in the lexicon (e.g. agricultural terms), so probably comes from a common substrate. The list of possible Anatolian loanwords (which includes a few clear Wanderwörter from, at least ultimately, elsewhere) comes from this paper, which makes clear in its first footnote that it’s not arguing for Anatolian languages in Greece, and then calls Miletus the “center” of a “zone of intense Mycenaean settlement”…
Speaking of Anatolian, there is a new paper that doesn’t find any Yamnaya-like ancestry in either the first horse herding Botai people, or in Copper or Early Bronze Age Anatolians (Hittites).
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2018/05/08/science.aar7711.full
The supplement is free.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2018/05/08/science.aar7711.DC1/aar7711_de_Barros_Damgaard_SM.pdf
Thanks. The apparent lack of Yamnaya ancestry in Anatolia has been around for a while, and this adds to the evidence.
I’ve worked my way through the supplements, but I won’t pretend to have anything near a comprehensive understanding. Reading the paper itself might have helped with context, but at least I’ve read the article in Science and the university press release.
The description of the Anatolian archaeological sites is interesting. Apparently they have large numbers of skeletons from defining events in the history of the Hittite empire, and a clear theory of which skeletons that group together as defending or attacking forces. This could mean that…
1) they were able to assign ethnicities (yes, I know) to members of the different groups much more confidently than with single graves or even graveyards.
2) the few Anatolian genomes they used for the current study is just a sample of a much larger inventory, chosen for their typicality or representativity, which would mean that the lack of steppe ancestry in Hittite Anatolia is more certain than the number suggests.
3) there’s a much more comprehensive study of ancient Anatolian genomes coming up, detailing how they vary over time, how the sides in the dramatic events differ from eachother and who they are related to, and how each of them represent different layers in the history of Anatolia.
Very interesting, I’ll read it tomorrow.
Speculation: Hyllested’s *kobʰ- “slow horse*” is a loanword from the Botai people…
* As opposed to *h₁éḱ-u- “the fast one”, Non-Anatolian *h₁éḱ-w-o-.
Please do. But note that none of my points 1-3 are there. They are entirely speculative — or wishful thinking — based on the description of the Anatolian sites.
And just to keep things interesting, today there is a pre-print paper about the ancient genetics of the Caucasus, including from the Maykop Culture.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/16/322347
…today there is a pre-print paper about the ancient genetics of the Caucasus, including from the Maykop Culture.
I give up on genetics. It’s coming in too fast and getting faster.
That is true. But it does give a very fresh perspective on the interactions and relationships between ancient cultures.
Y: I give up on genetics. It’s coming in too fast and getting faster.
I made that observation a few days ago. And then this came.
Still, I read the paper yesterday night. It’s not fine-grained enough to be the final word on the Caucasus, but it shows a long period of contact through the region, showing up as a steadily increasing “southern” genetic component on the steppe and likewise a “steppe” component in (especially the northern) Caucasus. I.e. the cultural mix apparent in the Maykop culture is mirrored in the development of the genetic makeup.
Another insight is that Yamnaya, from the fourth millennium BCE, had a stream of “Anatolian” genes, but because it contained a WHG (rather than CHG/Iranian) element this must be from a different source than the Caucasus, likely an undefined (or maybe varied) source in the European farming cultures. Cucuteni/Tripolye and Globular Amphora were mentioned, but the math works just as well with Iberians, apparently, so it can’t be specified further yet. There were settlements of early farmers along the Ukrainian rivers.
The paper mentions the increased exchange of goods and ideas in the 4th millennium, well before the Yamnaya explosion that spread IE languages. What we see in the steppe genes, then, may be that the steppe populations had developed long-distance trade (or before the horse: a web of medium distance exchange that nevertheless transmitted goods and produced added value). What we see in the Northern Caucasus may be that it was important to be connected to this web.
Finally, the authors suggest that the ultimate IE homeland may be south of the Caucasus. This would mean that Anatolian languages never moved north, while Yamnaya was Indo-Europeanized through the Maykop culture. That could be elite replacement, but we may also imagine Maykop IE as lingua franca of the steppe trade and a long period of bilingualism. They say that a southern homeland would work for Greek and Armenian as well. This may be true in terms of genetics, but I don’t see how they could have developed outside the main body of IE.
Also: Consider Kurdish. It may be spoken just south and west of the IE homeland, but it came there by a route north through the Caucasus, west through Ukraine, northwest to Poland, east through Belarus and down the upper/middle Volga to the Southern Urals, a long period of back and forth on the Steppe and in Central Asia, and finally south and west through Iran. Take that, parsimony!
Rick: That is true. But it does give a very fresh perspective on the interactions and relationships between ancient cultures.
Yes. The triangulation between genetics, archaeology and linguistics has made the Eneolithic and Bronze Age come alive in a whole new way, Just a few years ago pretty much everything before the Migration Era was considered static, with slow changes through internal development and cultural diffusion. Now it has moved to the point were every cultural change was transmitted by migration. But that’s just low-hanging fruits. With even finer grained genetic maps, I expect we’ll see a more nuanced picture, or a mosaic of tiny nuanced pictures, with periods of cultural transmission accompanied by genetic flow interchanging with major upheavals as well as periods of relative isolation. This paper, with its analysis of admixture rates over time, may be taking us in that direction. And not only in the history of Indo-Europeans. That’s just low-hanging fruit too. The spillover effects are about to do great things in Siberia.
Don’t say that too loud, Erdoğan might be listening…
More seriously, where does that path come from? I’m not up on the latest reconstructions of Iranian family relations, but if the Andronovo culture represents the Indo-Iranian homeland, why would Kurdish need the extra peregrinations beyond a clockwise (or counter-clockwise, like I said, my knowledge of the Iranian language family is pretty broad strokes) turn around the Caspian into the Zargos-Taurus highlands?
Because I wanted to overstate the case. I’m not sure the language took the full circle through Russia or if it’s just a part of the genes that did. But that Iranian formed on the central Steppe is pretty clear.
This would mean that Anatolian languages never moved north
isn’t that impossible given what we know about language contact between Hittite and Hattic?
it strongly suggests rather recent (circa 2000-2200 BC) first contact with Hattic being the aboriginal language.
Then there’s the presence of Indo-Aryan/Indo-Iranian theonyms in Hurrian rulers in more-or-less-current Kurdistan in the second half of the second millennium BC. So who knows what the heck in going on there…
I give up on genetics. It’s coming in too fast and getting faster.
I rely on Trond’s summaries.
“Finally, the authors suggest that the ultimate IE homeland may be south of the Caucasus. This would mean that Anatolian languages never moved north, while Yamnaya was Indo-Europeanized through the Maykop culture. That could be elite replacement, but we may also imagine Maykop IE as lingua franca of the steppe trade and a long period of bilingualism. They say that a southern homeland would work for Greek and Armenian as well. This may be true in terms of genetics, but I don’t see how they could have developed outside the main body of IE.”
I really don’t see how the authors can come to this conclusion based on the data presented. They are basically just saying that because Maykop artifacts are found in “Steppe Maykop” mound burials, it shows that they could have also passed a language to the other people of the steppe. However, the earliest Yamnaya have a distinct genetic profile, that seems to have formed before the Maykop (because it lacks the farmer ancestry) and is also distinct from the “Steppe Maykop”.
They are basically suggesting that the CHG ancestry took the IE languages to Anatolia, Armenia, and Greece. But we can see clearly that the Minoans already had this CHG ancestry, and the Mycenaeans had an additional Yamnaya-like ancestry on top of that. Additionally, there were many non-IE speaking ancient cultures that had heavy CHG ancestry from a closely related source.
The data definitely can not be used to suggest that Maykop were IE speakers. There is just no evidence for that.
SFReader: isn’t [Anatolians never moving north] impossible given what we know about language contact between Hittite and Hattic?
it strongly suggests rather recent (circa 2000-2200 BC) first contact with Hattic being the aboriginal language.
I don’t know. Can we time the first contact that precisely? de Barros Damgaard et al. looked at genes from Hittite sites in Anatolia in a broader Eurasian context, and they included some new linguistic evidence. From Copenhagen University’s press release:
It’s increasingly clear that Anatolians lacked the genetic trace of an intrusion from the Steppe. That forces us to consider other options.
Hat: I rely on Trond’s summaries.
At your own peril.
Rick: I really don’t see how the authors can come to this conclusion based on the data presented.
No, and I don’t think they mean to conclude as much, just suggest the possibility. They clearly see the need to explain the discrepancy between Anatolian and Yamnaya genes. As do I. The sentence about elite replacement and lingua franca status was my shot at how this might have happened.
But as I said above, the description of the archaeological sites in the supplementary materials to de Barros Damgaard et al makes me think there’s a larger study of the genetics of battles in ancient Hittite cities coming up. That might turn things around.
“It’s increasingly clear that Anatolians lacked the genetic trace of an intrusion from the Steppe. That forces us to consider other options.”
Right. There were definitely not massive IE migrations at this early time, because we don’t see anything obvious from the first handful of genomes. And so, the source and direction of movement of the common PIE language are now again unclear.
What is clear is that (other than Anatolian) the Indo-European languages we’re initially spread from large-scale migrations of Yamnaya-like populations.
And so, the source and direction of movement of the common PIE language are now again unclear.
I don’t think it is. Surely I don’t mean to suggest anything like that. What may be unclear, but that never was very clear anyway, is what happened before the Yamnaya explosion spread IE languages left, right and center. But I do agree that the conclusion of the article is muddling the matters by being, er, not clear enough in its adherence to the Yamnaya account. Even the rejection of a direct eastward spread of Indo-Iranian comes through as somewhat preliminary.
What is clear is that (other than Anatolian) the Indo-European languages we’re initially spread from large-scale migrations of Yamnaya-like populations.
Quite right. And surprises like the Corded Ware element in Indo-Iranian don’t change the big picture.
I also agree that there’s much room for change in Anatolia when more genomes get sequenced.
…by which I mean tomorrow, or the day after. I’ve started reading the preprint on the genetic history of the Caucasus, though.
People buried by the Andronovo culture, as well as people living in northern India today, have enough Early European Farmer ancestry that they must be descended from people who first went west from the Yamnaya culture before turning back east and beyond.
Hittite isn’t indigenous to Hattusas. That doesn’t mean it can’t be indigenous to Kanes, or perhaps to Armenia or whatever. There’s a lot of space in and around Anatolia.
One of them is Indra, who seems to come from the BMAC much farther east.
Oho! We’re almost getting close to Euphratic here.
“One of them is Indra, who seems to come from the BMAC much farther east.”
This is especially interesting because (now that we have BMAC genomes) there is no evidence that the main BMAC population contributed at all genetically to later South Asians, but steppe communities did mix into the BMAC population.
This genetic information actually fits well with earlier assumptions.
Although, if Soma also comes from BMAC, then that might rule out it being Ephreda, but I’m not positive on the geography.
ə de vivre: Then there’s the presence of Indo-Aryan/Indo-Iranian theonyms in Hurrian rulers in more-or-less-current Kurdistan in the second half of the second millennium BC. So who knows what the heck in going on there…
The Indo-Aryan element in Mitanni is quite well explained as Indo-Aryan specialists in horses, chariots and composite bows, innovations that spread across the Middle East in the early 17th century BCE. Kurdic languages came later, maybe in the same wave as the Medes, sometime around 1100 BCE. As Northwest Iranians the Medes are closely related to the Kurds, linguistically speaking, but probably not directly ancestral. We may also consider the Cimmerian invasion(s) of the 8th-7th centuries BC, but I tout them as the ancestors of the Armenians.
David M.: Hittite isn’t indigenous to Hattusas. That doesn’t mean it can’t be indigenous to Kanes, or perhaps to Armenia or whatever. There’s a lot of space in and around Anatolia.
We need to make room for more than one Anatolian language, but Luwian and the lesser known languages of western Anatolia may perhaps have developed in their attested locations. It would be nice to have a date on the wave of “Caucasus/Iran” genes spreading west through Anatolia.
Oho! We’re almost getting close to Euphratic here.
Whittaker’s Euphratic is clearly Non-Anatolian, as I recall. And weirdly early.
Er, yeah, I didn’t mean to suggest that the Indo-Aryan elite of the Mitanni were ancestors of the modern Kurds (they’re on the wrong side of the Indo-Iranian divide), only that it’s interesting that Indo-Aryan personal names show up so far west. Wandering steppe elites is a pretty plausible explanation, though it’s my understanding that evidence for horsemanship shows up at Hurrian Urkesh before detectable Indo-Aryan presence.
I’d be curious to see what these supposed “Indo-European” words in the Ebla archives are. Colour me dubious. And Whittaker’s Euphratic is mostly wishful thinking.
I’d be curious to see what these supposed “Indo-European” words in the Ebla archives are.
Yeah, me too.
Not so fast.
And yes, it does seem to be non-Anatolian, fully formed feminine and all.
I’ve now read the paper. There’s nothing about linguistics in the supplementary information. But ref. 49 is this “Linguistic supplement”, which really ought to have been supplementary information but has only 3 authors. Page 6 lists a bunch of names with distinctively Anatolian roots and/or endings, said to belong to people from a place called Armi which has not been identified but controlled Ebla’s access to Anatolia-associated things like metals. I recommend the whole thing.
Ref. 48 is “Archaeological supplement A”. Archaeological supplement B is not cited in the paper at all, but is cited in the linguistic supplement…
Archaeological supplement A. Abstract:
Interesting phrase, “the sown lands”.
Like the linguistic supplement, this is in a tiny, thin font with 2 pages per PDF page.
Archaeological supplement B. Abstract:
The linguistic supplement consistently renders “Okunevo” as Okunëvo. Good to know, I wouldn’t have guessed.
Given that the Zenodo numbers are not consecutive, I wonder if there are any more secret supplements.
Okunevo culture is named after Bronze Age mound in Okunev ulus in Khakas Republic of southern Siberia.
The name Okunev is of Khakas origin and unrelated to Russian surname Okunev and Russian placename Okunevo (from Russian okun’- European perch).
The original Khakas surname was Okunner (lambs in Khakas).
So Okunëvo referring to Bronze Age archeological culture is both factually wrong and cultural appropriation at its worst.
Ouch.
Interesting phrase, “the sown lands”.
The Desert & The Sown.
So Okunëvo referring to Bronze Age archeological culture is both factually wrong and cultural appropriation at its worst.
So how should it be stressed? There are a number of places called О́кунево with initial stress, but that too is of Russian rather than Khakas origin.
If it was purely Khakas word it would be stressed on the last syllable.
But it’s not – it’s Russian placename of Khakas origin, so I am not sure which language’s stress rules apply.
Incidentially, traditional English spelling Okunevo culture is wrong too. In Russian, it’s Okunevskaya kultura from Okunev ulus. The adjective Okunevskaya can be formed both from Okunev and Okunevo – the former is masculine, because ulus is masculine in Russian, the latter is neuter, because it refers to selo (village with a church) which is neuter. If it was derevnya (village without a church) it would become Okunevka (for some reason all derevnyas get dimunituve suffix -k)
Huh, that’s complicated. I guess until I hear otherwise I’ll mentally say Okunévo with penultimate stress.
I’ve finished reading the known archeological supplements and the preprint on the genetic history of the Caucasus. I now wonder if the Trialeti culture is where the Armenian-Phrygian-Greek branch comes from. Unfortunately it’s not sampled in the preprint. Even more speculatively, I wonder if the late extension of Yamnaya up the Danube is at the origin of “Crotonian”…
That discussion of names reminds me that every time I see the name “Yamnaya” I feel like it’s something really exotic, before trying to mentally pronounce it and realizing that it’s just Ямная “of the pits”.
(Also I’m reminded of some place – Geohashing Wiki, IIRC? – that keeps referring to the town of “Belozërsk”, which is actually supposed to be Belozérsk.)
Yamnaya sounds like some town on Tierra del Fuego
Yamnaya sounds like some town on Tierra del Fuego
Or an Australian Aboriginal language.
So I finally took a look at the English Wikipedia. There, it’s called Yamna culture, and the article starts with:
“The Yamna people or Yamnaya culture (traditionally known as the Pit Grave culture or Ochre Grave culture)”
The second paragraph is:
“Yamna and Yamnaya are borrowed from Ukrainian Ямна культура and Russian Ямная культура respectively. Both mean ‘pit-culture’. This refers to the characteristic pit-burials.”
The German version similarly starts out:
“Die Jamnaja-Kultur (nach russisch und ukrainisch яма „Grube“; russisch Ямная культура, ukrainisch Ямна культура, deutsch traditionell Grubengrab- oder Ockergrab-Kultur, englisch Yamna culture, Yamnaya culture oder Pit grave culture)”
and then adds an etymology section to whine twice over:
“Die sinngemäße, herkömmliche und weiter aktuelle deutsche Bezeichnung Grubengrabkultur wurde durch Übernahme der englischen Bezeichnungen Yamna culture (Mallory 1997) und Yamnaya horizon (Anthony 2007) verdrängt. Diese Namen beruhen auf der russischen Bezeichnung jamnaja kultura, die ein Adjektiv zu dem Wort jama (Grube) verwendet; die deutsche oder englische Wiedergabe als Kompositum hätte insofern richtiger Jama-Kultur gelautet.”
Jama-Kultur
no doubt related to Emo-Kultur
Or an Australian Aboriginal language.
My favorite Australian Aboriginal language is Ecnalubma.
J1M: Or an Australian Aboriginal language.
I had that thought too. But I got it from the Yanyuwa post.
David M.: There’s nothing about linguistics in the supplementary information. But ref. 49 is this “Linguistic supplement”, which really ought to have been supplementary information but has only 3 authors. Page 6 lists a bunch of names with distinctively Anatolian roots and/or endings, said to belong to people from a place called Armi which has not been identified but controlled Ebla’s access to Anatolia-associated things like metals. I recommend the whole thing.
Thanks for that. I finally had time to read it. I too was struck by the Anatolian-ness of the names. But until I see a more detailed examination of the attested names I can’t judge to what degree they reflect e.g. wishful reading of the Eblaite evidence or Ante-Anatolian naming practices, so I’ll wait for the professional judgment.
The rest of the supplement is a good overview of current thinking on the Asian branches of Indo-European, with the precaution that the precise linking of the early stages of Indo-Iranian to defined archaeological cultures and periods may still be a matter of discussion. I agree that BMAC is the most probable source of Indo-Iranian borrowings, but I wouldn’t rule out that there could be some very early ones of Corded Ware origin, in which case they may even be shared with Germanic and have been accepted as Indo-European. Any candidates?
Onwards to the archaeological supplements.
I had that thought too. But I got it from the Yanyuwa post.
I think the same might have happened in my case, actually. (In any case, to sound like a real Aboriginal language, it should have at least one R, J, or at least W.)
My actual first association (which I almost posted, but my internet shut down for the last five minutes of the editing period) was Yennayer, the North African (Berber, IIRC) holiday that happens to be a curious coincidental equivalent to what is known in Russia as Old New Year.
to sound like a real Aboriginal language, it should have at least one R, J, or at least W.
Like Yidiny?
I’ve now finished reading Archaeological Supplement A. Much could have been achieved with maps.
I agree that the Trialeti culture is interesting, but I’m not ready to give it a label yet..
Oh yes.
A familiar hobby horse!
That’s brilliant.
David M.: I now wonder if the Trialeti culture is where the Armenian-Phrygian-Greek branch comes from.
To keep this discussion here. How does that work if Armenian-Phrygian-Greek is close to Indo-Iranian, which developed in the Eastern steppe before 2000 BCE? Just that all developed from languages that stayed behind on the steppe after the western branches branched off westerly?
Steppe left steppe right. 🙂
The barbarians are never more than a steppe away.
That is, in fact, supposed to be one of the descendants of that word.
Is it closer than Balto-Slavic? I don’t think it is.
I don’t know. Some seem to see the closeness of Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian as primarily a contact between Slavic and Iranian. But even if Balto-Slavic-Indo-Iranian is a branch, the question of the perceived closeness til Greek stands.
That happened, a lot, but it’s clearly not the whole story.
I’m just trying out scenarios that may reconcile the different suggestions for special relationships. Another such relationship is Germanic-Slavic-Albanian. That might work if they all came out of Post-Tripolye.
One source of BS-II closeness could be the Corded Ware element in Sintashta, but then we ought to see some isoglosses shared with Germanic too.
Not coincidental at all – the (northern?) Berber languages have the whole Julian calendar. All roads lead to Rome.
I can’t see why Greek students should be subjected to tracing the etymology of Greek words back to a reconstructed Indo-European proto-language, considering that neither Italian, German or French students are forced to do this.
The fact that Greek is a member of the Indo-European language family is taught in school, it’s considered standard common knowledge and raises no eyebrows among people with anything above a high school degree.
The straw man that Sampanis is attacking consists of fringe groups popular with the far right who like to peddle ideas close to those of Erich von Däniken and have no status in the academic community, and cherry-picking his arguments.
So please spare us with utterances like “another sad illustration of the toxic effects of nationalism on one’s sense of reality.”
The fact is Greeks are far more resistant than “Italian, German or French students” to the idea that their language has been continually changing, and you can’t wave that away by sarcasm and outrage. It is and always has been true that nationalism has toxic effects on one’s sense of reality. (Note that I do not exempt my fellow Americans from this.)
“The fact is Greeks are far more resistant than “Italian, German or French students” to the idea that their language has been continually changing”.
Well, it’s not a fact, it’s your personal opinion. The idea of change and evolution is explicitly stated in ancient Greek school textbooks. If some students are resistant to this, they’ll be resistant to them citing linguistic evidence regarding IE languages.
I’ll repeat that the anti-IE sources quoted by Sampanis and Karantzola are: convicted far-right conspiracy theorist Constantinos Plevris, former Communist turned member of the Greek Junta government and far-right theorist George Georgalas, and Law school alumnus and the president of the Arvanites Association Aristides Kollias – these are Alex Jones-style fringe theorists, hardly figures of authority. And they certainly don’t have much to do with “the perception of historical and Indo-European linguistics in the instruction of Greek’.
On the other hand, Sampanis and Karantzola do admit that “a more straightforward reference to the IE family is traced in a recent school dictionary of Ancient Greek (Simeonidis, Xenis & Fliatouras 2009) in which etymological information goes back to Proto-Greek reconstruction and cognates from other IE languages are provided.” The textbook explains that “Frequently, reference is made to cognate and parallel forms in other IE languages so that the student becomes aware that Greeks is part of this large linguistic family that covers all Europe and reaches India.” So what’s the point again?
One last point is that IE etymology might as well encourage “toxic nationalism” and help embed it into a wider pan-European nationalism, this time aimed against non-European immigrants. Maybe then you’ll have a new blog subject to write about.
Terminology is a big factor here. No Romance speaker today thinks that their language is basically the same as Latin. However, the fact that Homeric Greek and Modern Greek are both labeled “Greek” makes it easy to forget that the time depth between Homer and today is nearly twice that between Augustine and twenty-first-century Portuguese. Plenty of Greeks, in my experience, think of the language of classical and pre-classical Greek as fundamentally the same tongue as is spoken today, not the (family of) precursor language(s) they actually are.
History Twerp: I have no idea what your problem is or why you’re so belligerent. I don’t care what’s taught in schools, I care how Greeks think; I have spent time in Athens and lived for years in Astoria (the Greek center of New York), and I am very familiar with the nationalistic mindset that claims Ancient Greek was spoken just like the modern language (and insists that “Macedonia is, was, and will be Greek”). This is not “far-right conspiracy theorists,” this is your average Greek. Maybe things have changed in recent years and that form of crazy nationalism is less widespread, which would be great. But I am not making it up.
One last point is that IE etymology might as well encourage “toxic nationalism” and help embed it into a wider pan-European nationalism, this time aimed against non-European immigrants.
I have no idea what you’re on about here, but it has nothing to do with linguistics.
I think there is a big difference between Greek and the Romance languages. Latin has left several major descendants — French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Roumanian, and no one would regard these as just one language. If Spanish and Portuguese were the only ones, extreme Spanish nationalists might claim that Portuguese was badly pronounced Spanish, but no one could possibly claim that about French and Roumanian. Greek is different: there is only one significant descendant, and the forms spoken today in southern Italy and in remote areas of Turkey can just be dismissed as minor dialects of no importance.
The Chinese have a similar mentality to the Greeks. Even though it’s well-removed from modern Chinese, the Chinese feel that ancient Chinese is still “Chinese”. It’s as much cultural as linguistic.
Hit is probablice the hiʒlice conservative writing conventiones of Greeke and Chinese þat maken þeir vseres belyfe þat þeir language is vnbehwierft. If we bi the same token wrote English wiþ þe conventiones of þe Beowulf poets daʒ, we miʒt þink þe same þing.
I understand hat’s priorities when he says “I don’t care what’s taught in schools, I care how Greeks think,” but wasn’t the original premise here (perhaps a naive one?) that what Greeks think is causally affected by what Greek school curricula do and don’t teach about the history of the language and thus might change if the curricula changed?
Had some form of not-just-Eastern Roman empire stayed intact or formed again soon enough, they totally would, as they do with the analogs in China.
It is said that the language of the Lay of Igor’s Campaign is described as Old Russian by the Russians, Old Ukrainian by the Ukrainians, and Old Belarussian by the Belarussians.
(It is, of course, essentially all three, because it predates the divergence of the three languages.)
@ January First-of-May
Ah, yes, but who is The Lay of the Host of Igor (I like the older title for the totally puerile reason that it suggests that Igor’s host obligingly provided him with a ‘lay’ for the night) claimed by? Is there any dispute among the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians as to who actually ‘owns’ it? That is where the toxicity of nationalism would come in.
Ah, yes, but who is The Lay of the Host of Igor (I like the older title for the totally puerile reason that it suggests that Igor’s host obligingly provided him with a ‘lay’ for the night) claimed by? Is there any dispute among the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians as to who actually ‘owns’ it? That is where the toxicity of nationalism would come in.
Pretty sure that both Russians and Ukrainians claim it as their own; no idea what the Belarussian position is.
Novgorod-Seversky is now in the Ukraine, about forty miles from Russia and maybe a hundred miles from Belarus; as for the Kayala (where most of the story is set), as far as I can tell, historians aren’t quite sure enough as to where it was to tell if it would have been in Ukraine or Russia, but it clearly wasn’t in Belarus.
As for the title, for what it’s worth, my English edition (with the original side-by-side with English, and Russian separately at the end; don’t recall what language the footnotes are in) gives the title as The Lay of the Warfare Waged by Igor, which I always thought makes for a half-decent description but a terrible title.
“Lay” would be better rendered as “song”. “Lay” is pretty archaic and I’m sure there are not a few trivial minds out there that would interpret it the same way I did.
“Lay” would be better rendered as “song”. “Lay” is pretty archaic and I’m sure there are not a few trivial minds out there that would interpret it the same way I did.
…Well, at least, to the best of my knowledge, no one is seriously trying to render it as Word of Igor’s Regiment (or similar).
Fun fact: a collected-works volume of Lewis Carroll that I have lists one of said works as Лэ, исполненные скорби. It took me at least several weeks to figure out that Лэ had to be an attempt at transliterating Lay (specifically, Lays of Sorrow).
which I always thought makes for a half-decent description but a terrible title.
No worse than
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates
I think that J. W. Brewer’s comment pretty much covers me when he said that
“I understand hat’s priorities when he says “I don’t care what’s taught in schools, I care how Greeks think,” but wasn’t the original premise here (perhaps a naive one?) that what Greeks think is causally affected by what Greek school curricula do and don’t teach about the history of the language and thus might change if the curricula changed?”
But let’s go over this again. My comments were specifically aimed at the article’s two main points:
a. supposed intensive denial of the theories of Indo-European linguistics within the language discourse *in Greece* (not Astoria, Melbourne or Toronto).
b. The deficient incorporation of IE theory into the language instruction of (Ancient) Greek at primary and secondary education (again, of Greece).
Regarding a., I pointed out that their claim of a denial “within the language discourse” is based on the examples of three far-right fringe theorists and not much else (e.g. actual survey data) and that it’s not a problem that’s seriously discussed in academia, the media or public education.
Regarding b., the writers claim that this denial is because IE theory isn’t taught in schools (they then contradict themselves by admitting that IE etymology is included in more recent school grammar textbooks).
Their central argument (which you repeat) is that nationalism is tied to ignorance of IE etymology, and placing Greek in the context of the wider IE language family will help ameliorate that. I pointed out that this argument is naive and wouldn’t necessarily do much to combat nationalism. It might even reframe local nationalism within a wider ideological frame of an Indo-Aryan European homeland that will have to be defended against non-Indo-European immigrants. The writers of the article admitted as much when they said that the far right party Golden Dawn actually embraced the IE theory because it fits well with their “Aryan” ideology.
If you say that you can’t understand my arguments, or that you “don’t care what’s taught in schools”, you “care how Greeks think” then you didn’t bother to read my comments, the article or the abstract that you quoted in your blogpost, or you didn’t care to do so because your point was never discussing the article anyway.
I assume that, since you have spent time in Athens and lived for years in Astoria (the Greek center of New York), you have a superior insight into the “language discourse” in Greece, Greek high school education and what constitutes the opinions of the average Greek high schooler – far superior to that of someone who went to school in a humanistic high school in Greece, was taught ancient Greek for six years, went to a Greek university and actually lives in Greece.
@ History Twerp
I am sure that your insights would have received a more friendly reception if they had not been expressed in such a belligerent manner. This appears to be an issue close to your heart.
It would be interesting to hear your views on the state of Greek nationalist ideology today — academic and otherwise. I have often felt that some of the most deep-rooted nationalist beliefs in any society can persist despite enlightened educational policies. They seem to hang on in the background and resurface in bizarre ways in far-right theories, whether in Greece or the American alt-right. Do you have any light to shed on the Greek situation?
I am sure that your insights would have received a more friendly reception if they had not been expressed in such a belligerent manner.
Quite. I actually agree with most of what you say, and I’m still not sure why you’re so hostile.
whether in Greece or the American alt-right
And now in “ordinary working-class Australians” who nip across to New Zealand to commit mass-murders.
Looked up Golden Dawn far-right party on WP.
Was very excited for a moment to learn that their political platform used to include revival of ancient Greek Pagan religion and worship of 12 Olympians.
But then the article went to say that they changed their mind and now they are just boring Greek Orthodox Christians.
What a let down.
I am in the process of looking for a publisher of my work, INDO-EUROPEAN AND ITS SPEAKERS, which derives European and many Mideastern words from archaic Greek. (No P.I.E. or Semitisms for me.) Entire chapters are devoted to the etymology of Anglo-Saxon, Basque, and Etruscan (thereby translated into English). The epicenter of “Greek” as a primordial human language was the Levant or area south of the Caucasus.
Go on. There’s no limit to what you can achieve when you discard all evidence and a long history of scholarship in geography, linguistics and history.
I’m afraid you’ve reinvented the square wheel.
Subtitle: It’s All Greek To Me
I think we can all find comfort in the knowledge that every language is Gricean.
Despite DM’s animadversion as to originality, the author might want to enquire at the Annals of Improbable Research.
After all,
# A square wheel can roll smoothly if the ground consists of evenly shaped inverted catenaries of the right size and curvature.[1][2][3] #
I am not too sure as to whom I should respond. Anyway, I do not claim that all languages are based on Greek (or are “Graecian”). Up to now, Basque, Etruscan, and Eblaite (etc.) have been considered non-Indo-European by linguists who have never defined (non-geographically) what an Indo-European language is. My work is not speculative; empirically, etymogically, it derives many languages from ancient Greek. The Pokorny reconstructed roots of Indo-European suffer from his confusion of cognates and homophones. (The same is true for Semerano, who in four volumes, attempted to derive I.E. languages from Akkadian, which he erroneously considered a Semitic language. ) Sorry I can’t reproduce my work in this small space.
Sorry I can’t reproduce my work in this small space.
Please don’t try; nobody here will believe it anyway.
Joseph Yahuda’s “Hebrew is Greek” is still available on Amazon at the low, low price of $895.
I actually saw a physical copy of this in a real-life bookshop many years ago. The author means exactly what the title says: not “Hebrew is derived from Greek” or “Hebrew is related to Greek”, but “Hebrew is Greek.” You wonder why it took so long for people to notice …
I’m still working on my own “Navajo is Polish.” Influential people don’t want the truth about these things to come out.
Oh, so that’s why they sent you to West Africa and kept you busy inventing Kusaal.
Though it be said in charity
“He did the best he could, and more”;
There is too great disparity
To what has gone before.
The learnèd ones who hold the reins
Are sitting tight on paradigm.
Unless he’s got much better stuff
His best is just not good enough.
Well, the definition is “Proto-Indo-European and all its descendants”.
The diagnosis, as biologists have begun to call such things, is of course trickier – but really not by much. A few basic words plus regular sound correspondences and a few regular and irregular patterns in the grammar ought to tell you pretty quickly whether a language is IE or not. That is why there is no language on which there’s any disagreement on whether it is IE, unless you count the least well attested parts of what’s called Pictish.
Similarly, Akkadian is obviously Semitic. A short look at verb conjugation should make this obvious all on its own.
Oh, from lots of things. It’s outdated, plain and simple. Your starting point should be the LIV² with its Addenda & Corrigenda.
Now, finally: do you know what a regular sound correspondence is…?
My work is not speculative
But pure epistemology.
My evidence cumulative
Will shatter etymology
And Indo-Europeanism
Until they see it through my prism
And they will praise your servant meek
In every modern form of Greek.
>> The Pokorny reconstructed roots of Indo-European suffer from
Oh, from lots of things. It’s outdated, plain and simple. Your starting point should be the LIV²
(Trying to get something useful out of this distraction …)
It wouldn’t be obvious from the title that ‘Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben’ is about IndoEuropean in general(?) Because ‘german’ just means closely-related, not necessarily European. Am I right in remembering that it was Pokorny’s wordlists (very out of date) of proto-Germanic that appeared in one of those SPP papers as ‘demonstrating’ (not) the parallels between early Sinitic and PGc? So was I/the SPP author terribly confused Pokorny’s lists are I-European? Not specifically Germanic/NW Europe branch?
What’s the usual term German academics use for ‘Indo-European’? I mean, to include the Greek and Romance and Iranian branches as well as what we call “Germanic”. And what do German academics use for the specific Germanic branch?
I see our friend’s speculation encompasses Basque. I do hope the work has closely studied Edo Nyland’s seminal analysis.
As a partial answer to AntC’s question, let me point out that the German wikipedia article linked from the English article “Indo-European languages” is https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indogermanische_Sprachen.
Indogermanische covers the language family stretching from Indic to Germanic. Indo-European covers the language family stretching from India to Europe. Same thing.
(Plus Tocharian.)
Assam-Icelandic would work, too.
stretching from Indic to Germanic. Indo-European covers the language family stretching from India to Europe. Same thing.
No those don’t seem the same thing to me. (Of course the words mean what they’re used to mean, not what my logic/misapprehension expects. And the important thing is what Pokorny et al means.)
Given that the Germanic family branched off quite early in the history, an arc ‘Indic to Germanic’ would not include Southern European branches. Whereas ‘India to Europe’ does.
Does LIV2 have separate lists for (what English speakers call) Proto-Germanic vs (older) Proto-Indo-European? How about the 1956 edition of Pokorny?
If you had to represent the family by its two farthest extremes, those would be Assamese (Indic) and Icelandic (Germanic).
Of course the language family is not spread along a line and reaches off to the sides, toward Hittite and Greek and Latvian.
Technically speaking, the farthest extremes would be English and Russian.
Because ‘german’ just means closely-related, not necessarily European.
… the German wikipedia article linked from the English article “Indo-European languages” …
Having perused the earnest exposition there and at the many links, I’m now not even sure what “Germanic” and “European” might mean. Words like “Aryan”, “Anatolian” abound. The cumulative terminology of centuries is unmistakeably conducive to crackpottery.
I conclude that Wikipedia is not the go-to starter reference for linguistic matters.
Technically speaking, the farthest extremes would be English and Russian.
Or Spanish and Afrikaans.
I conclude that Wikipedia is not the go-to starter reference for linguistic matters.
Indeed: if you really want to find out, ask at LanguageHat.
The article in German at least offers an alternative indoeuropäischen Sprachen.
To answer one of my questions what do German academics use for the specific Germanic branch? from de.wikipedia, that would appear to be ‘Germanische Sprachen’. I see plentiful opportunity for confusion: are the Germanic family languages any more closely-related than within the Romance languages, or within any arbitrary language family?
Technically speaking, the farthest extremes would be English and Russian.
Not at all, they meet up on the other end. You may recall that some speakers of American English can see Russian speakers from their house.
@AntC:
1) Indogermanisch is what is used traditionally for “Indo-European” among German-speaking scholars. Indoeuropäisch is also used. There exists no difference in scope or meaning between these terms. As was said before, the idea was that the term repesented the most extreme (NW vs. SE) branches of the family, whatever shortcomings that has. (The usual objection against Indoeuropäisch is that there are European languages that are not Indo-European. Of course, there are also languages in India that are non-I-E. I think the entire discussion is fruitless.)
2) I see plentiful opportunity for confusion: are the Germanic family languages any more closely-related than within the Romance languages, or within any arbitrary language family?
I don’t really understand what you’re asking here, but the Germanic languages certainly are more closely related to each other than to any other I-E languages, and that’s true of each other branch of IE. Romance is not a direct branching of IE, but consists of the descendants of one I-E language, Latin, which belongs to the Italic branch.
@Stu: For some time (19th / early 20th century), “Aryan” was used as a synonym for Indo-European. Due to the ideological tainting of that term by the Nazis and similar folks, I-E scholars don’t use it that way any more. Nowadays, it’s use is mostly limited to being a part of the compound “Indo-Aryan” (the Indo-European languages of India, a sub-branch of Indo-Iranian), and historically for the speakers of Old Indo-Aryan, who brought the language to India.
@Hans: thanks for the clarification about I-E.
As for India, where does “Sanskrit” fit in ? I thought that was the mother of all I-E ?? I reach into my cookie jar of hearsay knowledge and find only dry crumbs.
I won’t ask any more questions, clearly the dew is off the grapes.
Dept. of useless information: for IE-majority antipodes, you have your choice of New Zealand and Spain, or of southern Patagonia and the Baikal region.
@Stu, Sanskrit is of a kind with Classical Latin: It was already archaizing when it was used to write the classical literature, but it also had some specific developments relative to an older stage of Indo-Aryan and even the modern Indo-Aryan languages do not share all of them — just like Romance languages have to be derived from Old and Vulgar Latin contemporary with Classical, rather than the patrician sociolect of Cicero.
The idea that IE was basically Sanskrit with Greek vowels may have looked sensible 200 years ago, but it died from a surfeit of data soon after.
The idea that IE was basically Sanskrit with Greek vowels may have looked sensible 200 years ago, but it died from a surfeit of data soon after.
More like 150 years ago, I would suspect?
Still better than Schleicher’s original, which had it basically be Sanskrit with Sanskrit vowels, and thus almost indistinguishable from Sanskrit proper.
(If I saw the text of Avis akvāsas ka without knowing what it was, I would probably have assumed it was in Sanskrit.)
The idea that IE was basically Sanskrit with Greek vowels may have looked sensible 200 years ago, but it died from a surfeit of data soon after.
Nobody outside the marbled halls of academe knows this, that’s where I am and nobody knows it. You guys have got some missioning (missionaryizing ?) to do. Spread the शब्द !
Trond wins this thread.
Indogermanisch, mostly. Indoeuropäisch is rare.
I don’t think either of them contain Proto-Germanic reconstructions at all. That’s not their point; their point is PIE (Urindogermanisch), not PGmc. (Urgermanisch).
There are separate etymological dictionaries for PGmc., the most recent one by Guus Kroonen (2013).
All Germanic languages are descended from a single Proto-Germanic language, which, actually, must have been spoken around the same time as the particular kind of Vulgar Latin that is Proto-Romance, within 200 years of each other anyway.
The reason for that was: 1) ārya was the self-designation of the speakers of Vedic Sanskrit and of (Old?) Avestan; and there are Roman-age Celtic names that start with Ario-. So people figured it was what the speakers of PIE, die Indogermanen, called themselves. More recently, these Celtic names are interpreted as starting with *pr-, “first & foremost”, by the regular Celtic loss of *p and the regular Celtic treatment of syllabic *r. That restricts ārya to Indo-Iranian. Most likely it was what the speakers of Proto-Indo-Iranian called themselves, but there’s currently no evidence it goes farther back than that.
So “Aryan” could be used for Indo-Iranian, but that hardly ever happens, firstly to avoid confusion with the older usage, secondly because the Nazis have thoroughly skunked it. You can still find “Indo-Aryan” today, apparently as a way to distinguish that branch from the non-IE languages of India, but even that has mostly been replaced by “Indic”.
Also, the Nazis tried to exclude “the Slavs” from being “Aryans”. The Slavic languages are quite obviously IE, as the first generation after Jones noticed.
Only Schlegel ever actually believed that […edit: outside of Hindutva, see below]. Even Sir William Jones didn’t; he believed instead that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had “sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists”.
The Vedas are quite old, and they’re long enough to illustrate a lot of vocabulary and grammar, so they have always been overrepresented in shaping the general perception of what PIE was like. There’s been a very long, slow trend away from this since Schleicher, who, in the 1870s, thought that PIE was basically a kentum version of Vedic Sanskrit as mentioned above.
Well, Classical Sanskrit (with a more regular grammar, predictable stress, and not quite as many verb forms) was used after Sanskrit had ceased to be spoken. Vedic Sanskrit (more wildly irregular, with more verb forms, and with unpredictable stress placement which correlates to such things as Verner’s law elsewhere in IE) was the poetic register of an actually spoken language, which is why you can watch it change from the oldest to the youngest songs within the Rgveda, and from the Rgveda to the Atharvaveda and then to the Yajurveda and so on.
Even Vedic Sanskrit was not Proto-Indo-Aryan, BTW. It has merged a few things that remain separate in the Prakrits (which are contemporary with much of Classical Sanskrit) and the modern languages.
Have that many people outside India ever heard about Sanskrit at all? You are the first time I encounter the idea that Sanskrit was PIE outside of Schlegel and the Hindutva people (e.g. Vedic creationists).
You are the first time I encounter the idea that Sanskrit was PIE outside of Schlegel and the Hindutva people
I think this idea is actually fairly widespread, in the sense that the relatively large cohort of people who have heard of Sanskrit but not of historical linguistics are quite often under the misapprehension that Sanskrit is the mother of most European languages as well as most Indian; I saw it in the wild not long ago in the Guardian. This may be simple failure to keep up with the scientific times (most journalists are still in the phlogiston era), but I suspect that (alas) the Hindutva nutters are actually a good more in the public eye than historical linguists – there are a lot more of them, and they have better PR skills.
Linkless version — the linkful one may be in moderation, if so Hat can remove this one when he rescues the other one.
— Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911), “Bopp, Franz”, Encyclopædia Britannica, 4 (11th ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 240–241
So 199 years ago at least there was awareness that Sanskrit wasn’t the proto-form of IE. (pace DM on Sir William Jones, I’m not sure what way scholarly opinion swung between him and Bopp).
So was Schleicher 50 years out of date when he wrote his fable in 1868 with forms like varna for wool? (Never mind the vowels). It must have taken great powers of concentration to remain in ignorance of the fact that all the other branches show -l- where Indo-Aryan (IIr?) has -r-. Or maybe it was meant as a less literal representation of the Ur-language than we now think.
@Stu, it is a strange thing how outdated knowledge survives like that. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, for instance, has five pages on IE that detail (i.a.) how Indo-Aryan is only a branch of IE, mentioning Sanskrit only in passing, and I’m sure that any reference work published in the last 100 years would say much the same. Including, I’m pretty sure, the popular books on language that I used to borrow from the public library 45 years ago.
My digital OED, about 15 years old, says under “Sanskrit”
#
A.A n. The ancient and sacred language of India, the oldest known member of the Indo-European family, in which the extensive Hindu literature from the Vedas downward is composed. In a narrower sense, the ‘classical Sanskrit’ (opposed to the ‘Epic’ and ‘Vedic’), the grammar of which was fixed by Pāṇini (? 4th c. b.c.).
#
What is a normal ignorant person to make of that, if not that Sanskrit is the origin of the I-E family ? If there were some other, older language, a common substrate, Sanskrit wouldn’t be the oldest known member, now would it ? Or that substrate is not being counted as I-E, for some reason. Sanskrit is at least being presented here as a branching point at which it arose as an I-E language, and all other I-E languages as well.
This is expository horseshit at its steamiest, if I can rely on you guys as Hercules proxies.
Russian is the easternmost IE language (as spoken in Chukotka) and English is the westernmost (in Alaska).
They are separated by the International Date Line and the Bering Strait.
Not at all, they meet up on the other end. You may recall that some speakers of American English can see Russian speakers from their house.
Well, the Earth is round and that’s why the person in front of you is the farthest behind you.
the oldest known member of the Indo-European family — well, the ancestral stages are reconstructions and not directly known, and older stages of other branches are not as well known — still, I agree that this is strongly misleading and they should have their knuckles rapped, even if it’s a dictionary and they don’t have 5 pages to explain things. (So my “reference work” phrasing was a bit optimistic, sorry, I still hope encyclopedias and books specifically about language get it right).
Vedic Sanskrit may be the oldest form of any IE language that is well attested, but only by a few hundred years if we go by date of composition, depending on your beliefs about the Iliad; I think we have full Hittite texts that were written down much earlier than the Ṛgveda, and there are things like probable IE loans into Sumerian that must be dated even earlier.
I think Steve knows a set of knuckles at the OED or in its environs.
No, I’m afraid I have no OED contacts. I used to be able to send them e-mail, but they stopped that service.
But that entry hasn’t been updated since 1909, so that’s basically a 19th-century formulation; I think I can guarantee that when they get around to updating it it will read much more sensibly.
Have that many people outside India ever heard about Sanskrit at all?
Of course hippies were before your time.
OM
Most certainly I knew from the childhood years that Sanskrit was the root of IE languages. Not necessarily that it was PIE, but whatever I heard made me imagine that IE languages radiated from India by a mechanism unknown. Take is as a sampler of what a non linguist might have imagined not too long ago
the oldest known member of the Indo-European family
It’s that sort of misperception which continues today, when people ask “what is the oldest language” or get into “my language is older than yous” arguments. Sometimes ignorant science columnists reflect this kind of view, and then cranky commenters to language blogs bitch about it.
Must be due to Hindutva nutters publishing in English, then.
I didn’t know most hippies had heard of Sanskrit beyond om, namaste and hare Krishna, hare Rama…
Sarah Palin didn’t actually say that; she only said “you can see Russia from there” (Alaska, not her house). It was Tina Fey in very convincing character as Failin’ who said “I can see Russia from my house!”.
Alas, no.
The WP article on Verner’s law has a link to Verner’s actual paper from 1875. I read it once. In it, Verner – a revolutionary Young Grammarian, as in “Young Turks” – treats the idea that sound changes don’t have lots of sporadic exceptions as very recent, and still takes for granted that IE has a “European” branch, of which one of the diagnostic innovations is the split of *a into *e, *a and *o for reasons that remain as yet unknown. Before that paper, it was widely taken for granted that Grimm’s law, aka Rask’s rule, was just the majority, default development, and the forms Verner used as evidence for his law were just a big heap of sporadic exceptions. (And the Uralists retained this mindset right up until 1981, after their Pokorny-equivalent dictionary came out in 1980.) So, Schleicher probably thought that *r sometimes drifted into the open space for *l, sometimes not.
The other thing going on here is that Sanskrit (unlike Avestan or Old Persian) has a /l/. It occurs not only in substrate words, but also in words of IE origin; and its distribution there appears to be chaotic. I’ve encountered the idea that there was at some earlier point a western dialect with only [r], an eastern dialect with only [l], and the chaotic situation found in the Vedas and later is due to dialect mixture, i.e. the western dialect sometimes borrowing from the eastern one (presumably after substrate words established /l/ as a phoneme).
It was, in 1909, the oldest attested member, “known member” as it says, as opposed to the oldest reconstructed (inferred, hypothesized) member. To me that seems like the only natural reading.
A substrate is something quite different in historical linguistics: English has a British Celtic substrate and a French superstrate (or two).
Yes, by some 500 years probably.
There wasn’t much scholarship or time between Jones and Bopp.
Hindutva nutters publishing in English
I suspect that it was Nicholas Roerich in Russian, and probably Mme Blavatsky before him… But the imagined sheer antiquity of India seemed unquestionable even to the Alexander’s Greeks? The Hundutva thesis of uncounted millennia of Vedic history must have been really easy for the outsiders to accept…
It was, in 1909, the oldest attested member, “known member” as it says, as opposed to the oldest reconstructed (inferred, hypothesized) member. To me that seems like the only natural reading.
I’m not surprised it seems that way to you. It was apparently written to be understood by people who already understand what is meant – like Literary Sinitic, as Moser remarks. That’s why it could do with a rewrite.
Here we have the Mr. Natural mindset, with all the requisite self-deprecating hangers-on: “to me”, “seems like”, “the only natural”. Apart from imparting personal information, it says nothing about the intelligibility of the dictionary definition to other people. The appeal to Mr. Natural is like the appeal to Reality – it is an attempt to cut off further discussion by invoking A Thing That’s Bigger Than Both Of Us. Nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s a free country, there’s a sucker born every minute, and somehow progress must be made.
You seem to be privileging proud ignorance over humble knowledge.
In talking with developers, especially over the last 13 years of doing code reviews (in addition to programming myself), I have learned that there is no “natural way to understand this”, for any value of “this” in the context of specific code. I don’t hold up my own current way of understanding something as a shining example of how the other guy should think of it, instead of the screwy way he does (which I don’t say, of course). That just doesn’t work. Maybe it should work, but it don’t.
Instead, as we talk, I try to figure out what the background is to that screwy understanding, and use these clues to think up examples that show how a different viewpoint recommends itself. This can take a lot of time, and certainly a great deal of imaginative cunning on my part. But it usually pays off. Sometimes I conclude that my own current understanding is not the bee’s knees.
You seem to be privileging proud ignorance over humble knowledge.
Now that’s cute, I thought we were dealing with humble ignorance here, and there proud knowledge mine de rien. Just goes to show.
David M.: Trond wins this thread.
I just tried to follow up on Stu’s. I wish I’d written “semitology” instead of “etymology”, though. I was at two minds and think I made the wrong choice.
I’ve met the “Basically everything comes from Sanskrit” misapprehension often enough, but outside of rigorous Vedicism it’s rarely a deeply held belief, and it doesn’t take much effort to correct it — if I care to.
I have already torn up my Vedic party book.
Good. I’ve tried the Yajurvedic children’s birthday, and it was no fun after the first couple of gāna, when it turned into a fight over Ranayaniya versus Jaiminiya.
Do people make Darth Veda jokes? They must.
Reciting the Lukayamjapāda.
English is just a broken Sanskrit
—Tattúínárdǿla saga, Jackson Crawford
Sez GT:
# “It is not true,” said Veiðr, “Okay I am your father.” #
I surmise that “ok” is closer to the German “auch” than to “okay”. But it’s still Darth Veiðr !
A challenge to all believers in Proto-Indo-European: Use your lexicon of I.E. roots and make a meaningful translation of either the Lemnos Stele/Stela or the two Etruscan Pyrgi tablets. If you cannot, who or what is to blame?
Truly, you are wasting your time and energy here. You should expend it at venues where people know nothing about the topic.
Wait, why not let him give the Greek readings which he obviously has produced with much innovative labour and is now holding up his sleeve?
Has this “Philotheos” passed the Turing test ?
Easy: the fact that the Tyrsenian languages are not Indo-European. They may be fairly closely related to IE, actually, but they’re not inside – they’re not descended from PIE. You might as well try to understand Greek from a lexicon of Proto-Germanic – it’ll work better than trying to understand Hungarian, but not a lot.
Here is how an expert on both IE and Etruscan has translated the Lemnos Stele, with complete explanations of how & why: first part, second part, both in German with English abstracts at the beginnings and Russian abstracts at the ends.
Here is a dissertation that calls Proto-Indo-Iranian urarisch. It may be relevant that the author did not grow up in a German-speaking country…
Close as can be to urarsch.
A final word before saying Farewell.
According to a tradition (which you know very well), Etruscan, Lemnian, Basque, and some other lanuages, are language isolates. The reason for this doctrine cannot be that they cannot be derived from Proto-Indo-European, because NOTHING can be derived from a language that never existed: ex nihilo nihil fit. As you know, P.I.E. is a mental construction made on the basis of some historical (existing) languages. It’s like considering terriers, bulldogs, hounds, etc., and abstracting “DOG” as that from which they sprang. The uncritisized Plato would say: “Dog” is an eidos, eternally and immutably existing, in which all existing dogs participate, or that which is the cause of the nature of many things (the existing dogs). As you know, Aristotle rejected the doctrine of participation, since he empirically found that the “dog-nature” of many things, is transmitted through physical reproduction. To posit an eternal DOG is to multiply realities unnecessarily.
Live and learn, tells us Aristotle.
I do not know if Plato considered dog mess, so I do not claim originality in postulating an eidos DOG MESS in whose nature many claims by both learned and unlearned authors participate. I agree it is not a necessary entity, but posterity may consider it a useful one.
Our learned friend Phi(l)otheos has a point. We already know that all languages stem from Phrygian, and Swedish, and Belgian. Why multiply realities any further to add Greek?
In this case I believe the eidos is DOG’S BREAKFAST. But what’s ironic here is that both dogs and languages descend from unitary proto-{dogs,languages}. The Platonism that Amedeo accuses historical linguists of is actually not what they hold at all.
In the case of dogs, there is evidence from ancient DNA that the dog-wolf ancestor (which I suppose I must call a wolf though it was not quite Canis lupus) was domesticated twice, but apparently all dogs from the old European line have died out, leaving only Asia-domesticated dogs today. At least that is the best sense I can make out of contradictory articles.
Cattle, on the other hand, were domesticated from the aurochs at least twice: the ancestors of the usual sort and the zebus (humped South Asian cattle) came from different branches. They can interbreed, and there is the usual kerfuffle about whether they are separate species from each other and the aurochs itself, or not.
You mean our learned friend has set up a straw dog to knock down ? That’s not very Platonic. As regards the dog’s breakfast, he seems to be saying: cur quis non prandeat hoc est?
We could count the fringe proposal that Hurro-Urartian is closely para-IE (in the same sense as Anatolian, not in a clean binary split sense); it has yet to be criticized as much as the handful of similar proposals about Basque and Etruscan.
My understanding is that the content principles of Uralisches etymologisches Wörterbuch had been mostly nailed down already in the late 60s, with the following two decades (first sections were released in 1986) mostly spent on tasks like formatting, copyediting and bibliography assembly.
There were a few good orthodox Neogrammarian sub-branch reconstructions in the early 1890s though; but after this, poor understanding of morphophonological alternation largely derailed Uralic historical phonology for the next 40 years.
I wonder if any other language family encircles the globe in modern times the way IE does (in terms of native speakers, not world travelers or international English). You have to go way up to the Arctic to bridge the Atlantic and the Pacific, but it can be done (about 10% of Greenlanders speak Danish natively).
cur quis non prandeat hoc est?
“Why wouldn’t the cur eat this?”
Cattle, on the other hand, were domesticated from the aurochs at least twice
+the non-auroch bovines banteng and gaur:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banteng
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaur
The next closest is Austronesian, though the gap between Madagascar and Easter Island is rather substantial.
“Why wouldn’t the cur eat this?”
Again with the dogs!
Is it my fault if it’s right there in the Latin? Even if I did translate it twice. I mean, you’re talkin’ to the guy who didn’t know that triclinium has two meanings, and translated one of Cicero’s letters referring to a dining porch projecting over the river as a “couch floating down the river”!
https://www.academia.edu/36998766/Five_waves_of_Indo-European_expansion_a_preliminary_model_2018_
There is a new study out by the Reich team along with the ASI and the Birbal Sahani Institute
https://twitter.com/vagheesh?lang=en
Mayuresh Madhav Kelkar: There is a new study out by the Reich team along with the ASI and the Birbal Sahani Institute
Interesting, but did you post the right links? The first seems to have nothing to do with genetic studies. The link to Vagheesh Narasimhan’s Twitter feed is more relevant. I didn’t have to poke around for long to find this link:
Narasimhan, V. M., Patterson, N. J., et al (2019): The Formation of Human Populations in South and Central Asia; Science; 365:eaat7487
I gave the wrong link too. That’s the link to the published article in Science. The article is freely available at Vagheesh Narasimhan’s Harvard.edu page.
Hello,
The other one is a paper on the IE homeland issue by Igor Tonoyan-Belyayev a Russian linguist based in Saint- Petersburg.
https://www.academia.edu/36998766/Five_waves_of_Indo-European_expansion_a_preliminary_model_2018_
“Five waves of Indo-European expansion from the South Asian Urheimat: An OIT Model”
Narsimhan and Igor TB have been attempting to square off the genetic data with linguistic theories.
Mayuresh M. Kelkar
RIght? At least at first glance the two papers seem to have very little in common. The Tonoyan-Belyayev paper is stating upfront that it’s an Out-of-India model. The Narasimhan et al paper is expanding massively on previous work that shows population movement into North India from the Steppe in the Bronze Age and as such another genetic nail in the coffin for Out-of-India.
If you’re trying to save Out-of.India by squaring it off with genetics, I guess you’d have to come up with a really elaborate model of cultural diffusion in the opposite direction of human migration. It would be interesting to see in a perverse sort of way.
Igor Tonoyan-Belyayev a Russian linguist
not exactly a linguist? He is a health, diet, and spiritual guru and an author of youtubes and stories on all things Tibetan and esoteric (the best known of which is a translation of a book on the secret Tibetan spiritual energy harnessed by Adolf Hitler to bring the German nation to its not-quite-triumph, grrr). He has a series of essays looking for origins of all sorts of words in the ancient Tibet, and on the true meaning of Harappan records in his official capacity of an unaffiliated researcher.
But isn’t the need to postulate numerous waves of successive population migrations from India one of the major achilless heels of the OIT anyway?
Public-service reminder: the 115-page paper trouncing every single detail of the Out-of-India hypothesis is freely accessible here, and it’s from 2001 – long before the first genetic data.
Citation:
Michael Witzel (2001): Autochthonous Aryans? The Evidence from Old Indian and Iranian Texts. Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 7, whole issue 3 (well, including the “colophon” on p. 116 and the addendum on p. 117–118).
Gone these four years: archive.
orthoepic diaskeuasis — rolls off the tongue something fierce, it does.
From the conclusion:
Sounds about right.
I’ve read the Narasimhan, Patterson et al. paper. There’s a lot of good stuff. The most significant new development (to me) is that we have reached the point where there’s enough samples to not only identify the local outliers but definitely characterize them as travellers and pinpoint where they came from, thus charting cultural and economic exchange at the time before genetic admixture. Also, they could infer that a number of outliers in Eastern Iran and BMAC came from the Indus Valley Culture and use this to model the IVC population which notoriously lack direct genetic data.
>> That discussion of names reminds me that every time I see the name “Yamnaya” I feel like it’s something really exotic, before trying to mentally pronounce it and realizing that it’s just Ямная “of the pits”.
>> (Also I’m reminded of some place – Geohashing Wiki, IIRC? – that keeps referring to the town of “Belozërsk”, which is actually supposed to be Belozérsk.)
When Randall started the geohashing wiki, I expected that would be exactly the result (based on my previous experience with wikipedia and geocaching).
Entirely unrelatedly, the name of the Yamnaya culture comes form “яма”? I never knew that.
A new ancient DNA paper shows that the demographic contribution of the migrating Indo-European males in the post-Mid-Bronze Age Greece has been dramatically underestimated. The emerging picture looks like a quite pervasive replacement of the pre-migration male DNA.
It also turns out that the Bronze Age Greece practices cross-cousin marriage. Of course the Indo-European terms of relatedness were long suspected of reflecting the past practices of cross-cousin marriage, but in practice such a practice didn’t seem to exist in the previously studied branches of the Indo-Europeans. Well, it’s just been found…
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01952-3
Withdrawing my comment because on re-reading, the antecedent of “such genetic signatures” is not what I initially thought it was. Anyway, looking forward to digesting the paper Dmitry pointed to.
In the first millennium B. C. E., the Greeks already had an explanation for the pervasive replacement of late Bronze Age (elite) Y-chromosome lineages.
Thanks! Once again prehistory got more interesting.
“Luristan Music Inc.”? How did that happen?
Oh course, I was being flippant* with the The Mighty Sons of Hercules** music. However, there may actually be some relevant information embedded in the development of Greek mythology and the changing nature of claims of divine ancestry. Poseidon seems to have been the particular divine patron of the Bronze Age wanax priest-kings and thus the most important deity among the Mycenean warrior elite. However, after the Greek Dark Ages, the more primordial Indo-European chief deity Zeus returned to being more prominent than his more distinctly Balkan and chthonic brother. The Greek monarchs of the archaic period typically claimed descent from Zeus (via Herakles), rather than Poseidon. This is conceivably related to a significant (elite) population replacement by men from a different Indo-European lineage, who has never worshipped Poseidon.
* However, see here.***
** The Mighty Sons of Hercules was a 1960s syndicated television show that showed lower-budget Italian sword-and-sandals movies that wouldn’t have otherwise gotten play in North America.
*** Actually, that won’t be visible until 2 p.m. Eastern Time on the day after tomorrow. My blog posts are on a strict schedule. It is blog law.
“It took me at least several weeks to figure out that Лэ had to be an attempt at transliterating Lay ” – I am familiar with the word in the context of old French literature.
“It is said that the language of the Lay of Igor’s Campaign is described as Old Russian by the Russians, Old Ukrainian by the Ukrainians, and Old Belarussian by the Belarussians.
(It is, of course, essentially all three, because it predates the divergence of the three languages.)”
And there are Soviet Old Russian dictionaries, Old Ukrainian dictionaries and Old Belorussian dictionaries.
I don’t know if it is good or bad. The more the merrier. But they are based on different corpora, as I understand, so when I am interested in earliest usages of some words I search in all of them.
I am somewhat surprised by the association of weird views on IE with Hindutva above. My first counversation about it was with a politicised Muslim from Bangladesh. She mentioned “Aryan invasion”, a colonialist invention, I asked how does she explain similarity of langauges and she said that there are borrowings and IE is pseudo-science. It seems she is open to possibility that IE is not necessarily pseudo-science – but less open to Aryan invasion.
FWIW, we operate with urnordisk, oldnordisk (or olddansk when distinguished from the dialect ancestral to Swedish), gammeldansk, ældre nydansk and moderne dansk. The point being that we don’t claim that the shared ancestors were “Danish”. (Even if Old Norse was called dǫnsk tunga at the time).
So old is older than gammel?
You probably know that (ver-)gammeln means “to rot” in German, and the simplex also (nowadays mainly) means “to bum around”, so learning the word for “old” causes hilarity whenever Germans learn Danish.
@Hans, cf. ветхий in “Old Testament”
In the late 1960s, Gammler was the quasi-official German translation for hippie. Conservative media (i.e. Bild and Welt — die Springerpresse) and politicians loved that word.
I remember Gammler back then as precursors of hippies. The flowers and yellow robes came a few years later. Opposed to both groups were the provos. There was some overlap with APOs. And breasts were bared at Adorno at some point.
Old(e)- is of course cognate with old and alt, but it’s no longer usable as a free adjective, only in compounds. (However the root supplies the suppletive comparative and superlative in gammel, ældre, ældst; this goes back to ON at least). As you saw, it’s used for the older stages of various languages, like oldengelsk, though for some reason gammelrussisk sounds better to me than oldrussisk — but also oldeforældre = ‘great grand parents’. (And now you’re all trying to apply logic and derive †gammelforældre = ‘grand parents’. Nope. That’s bedsteforældre).
There is an old but doubtful stem equation of PG *gamalaz with L hiems, but Wikt also suggests *ḱom-h₂el-o- to the stem of old. (Which I think is neat if it could be proven — I wonder if there are any other cases where the ge- prefix [< *ḱom-] might have kept its *-m- before a vowel. Come to think of it, that would mean that the comparative and superlative are not really suppletive, they just lost a prefix. A minor detail, as Karlsson would tell you).
Quoted for fun:
Ha! I didn’t know that. I guess it was just politely glossed over, as opposed to blown up into a scandal when some Beatle said “we’re bigger than Jesus now”.
Interesting he’s on the roof in the original. The German translation makes him from the roof (Karlsson vom Dach).
Two are known from West Franconian law texts (in Latin). They also have h-, showing they’re the Grimm form while gV- is the Verner/Kümmel form.
I recently claimed the only cognate of Slavic po in Germanic was the b in bring. I had misremembered the same paper (and a poster by the first author); br- is the Verner/Kümmel doublet of German ver- and its cognates. The cognate of po occurs in Grimm form as the f- in e.g. fall.
I don’t feel like registering with Academia.edu; could you say what the two are?
WF (in Latin text) hamedii (pl) ~ OHG gi-eido (sg), hamallus ~ gi-mahalo. (The latter had an -m- already, but the -m- is not the point of that article — the thesis is that *ḱom was at some point a “ditropic” clitic which behaved as a(n unstressed) suffix to the previous word, hence Vernerized to -gam which > -gan > -ga by other well-known sound laws, relegated to a footnote. So the vowel-initial root is irrelevant, it’s the oddity of WF in preserving the [non-ditropic] unVernerized form that also preserves the -m-; presumably it would have been kept before roots with initial non-nasal consonants as well, had any such words survived).
I did think about that article when I asked about the -m-, but I didn’t recall that it dealt with that issue too. (If I ever noticed). The question is then if that all rules out the *ḱom-h₂el-o- idea, after all it’s not hamall in ON.
I don’t feel like registering with Academia.edu
Just say no ! You don’t want a monkey on your back for the rest of your life.
Also about gammeln in German: The categories of “aged” and “rotten” do overlap. Cheese, partridges, strömming. Why proto-hippies in particular were called “rotters” I don’t find obvious, though.
I’m not logged in, have never touched the page I accidentally created by downloading a PDF once (“logging in with Google” creates a page and floods you with spam for at least the aforementioned rest of your life), and can still see anything in the so-called preview. I just can’t download.
The words seem to mean “people who take your oath together with you” and “fellow members of the assembly”.
Two clicks away, BTW, is this paper where a sword Beowulf just broke is called gomol. The paper also establishes that Beowulf is not Django, but Keoma; not the Doom guy, but Captain America.
They were “engaged in rotting” by wearing clothes other than suits & ties. I think the word has also been applied to homeless beggars and wasn’t specially coined for hippies.
(What I don’t know is how widespread the root is in German, BTW. It’s wholly absent from my active vocabulary.)
P. 13 of this presentation shows Celtic Codun- etymologically nativized into Germanic as Gantun-.
Interesting he’s on the roof in the original. The German translation makes him from the roof (Karlsson vom Dach).
And the Russian translation uses a circumlocutory construction: Карлсон, который живёт на крыше “Karlson, which lives on the roof”.
(Previously on LH.)
But what does “on the roof” mean in the original? Is it as in [city name] upon [river name] or what?
(What I don’t know is how widespread the root is in German, BTW. It’s wholly absent from my active vocabulary.)
Duden has it as colloquial, but not as regional. It also notes that it comes from Low German, so maybe its spread simply hasn’t reached Austria yet. It’s a word that is used in the media without explanation, e.g. in reporting about scandals involving the use of Gammelfleisch (rotten meat) in food products. Here is an example from a newspaper from Augsburg , showing that the root is expected to be understood also in Bavaria, not just in the North.
There is a Danish brand of jam called “Den gamle fabrik” that is sold at my local EDEKA supermarket; I guess they’re lucky that it’s not *Den gammelfabrik in Danish, because in that case noone in Germany would buy their products 😉
We also have drevne- “ancient” and staro- “old”. The Soviet Russian name for Chagatai lnaguage was starouzbekskij and Nava’i is “an Uzbek poet” in Uzbekistan – but not among other Turkic speakers.
Old Slavonic as opposed to Church Slavonic is “staroslavjanskij here. In Bulgaria it is “Old Bulgarian”.
@drasvi, Karlsson (no first name, IIRC) is a little man who lives in a little hut behind the chimney of the apartment building where the viewpoint character (a young boy, Lillebror) lives on the top floor. Most of the stories happen in the boy’s bedroom, and I don’t think he ever returns the visits.
Money quote, when something breaks or disappears [like a Germanic prefix]: “That’s just a material thing and nothing to get upset about!” (The Swedish värdslig ting was biting = ‘minor matter’ in the Danish version I heard on the radio 50+ years ago).
So literally on the roof, but the style of nickname/conventional name is used for real people too. There are similar town names, like Mo i Rana (though that one is Norwegian), but I don’t recall any that uses a river name. (Rana is a district or municipality). In Danish we omit the preposition, at least sometimes: Nykøping Sjælland, Nykøping Falster, Nykøping Mors, using the names of the islands they are situated on. (These are the “new market towns” that still exist; there’s one south of Stockholm as well, but with slightly greater inventiveness they also have Jönköping [on river Junebäcken} and Linköping [anciently Ljung- ~ ‘heather’] and more that I forget. We have Ærøskøping [on Ærø island]).
Århus, Nidaros, Västerås all simply mean “mouth of X river.” Sweden also have Luleå, Piteå and Umeå named after the rivers they are on. These all grew around market sites so there were no older populated places to name them after, and no need to disambiguate their names.
It strikes me that in the ham- compounds, the sense of the *ḱom- element is a fuller ‘together,’ not the bleached TAM one that occurs in German participles — I’m not sure what to call its function, so I don’t. Anyway, maybe it never was a clitic in those two words, and maybe it was even stressed at one point, but merged with the bleached one in OHG gi-eido/gi-mahalo because that was the expected form.
Oh, and speaking of Jeppe på Bjerget, Holberg has another play Erasmus Montanus about Rasmus Bjerg, a wannabe cosmopolite. I don’t know if the difference (in the Danish names) reflects changing customs in the 1720s, but there it is. When Astrid Lindgren wrote about Karlsson på Taket, that was an archaic naming custom. But then the Swedes are conservative. I had a boss around 2010 who used the name of his farm as his surname, which was legal. (Also his postal address was just the farm name plus the post code of the market town. Some people were in litigation with the privatized postal service to keep that, the PS wanted to give all rural roads names and assign house numbers to properties).
@Lars, thank you. The books (and a Soviet cartoon) are famous here, the problem is that a phrase “[name] on the roof” sounds weird in Russian. “Fiddler on the roof” is normal (but can be interpreted as “there is a fiddler on the roof”)
the style of nickname/conventional name is used for real people too.
Do you mean that in Danish or Swedish names in the form “John on [place]” are common – and the in/on part is merely a way to identify this John as opposed to other Johns?
Then it’s a funny isogloss that I did not notice before. In Russian it is always “from” (which has two forms: iz “from within” s “from the surface of”, they merge in the West: Ukrainian, Belorussian z, Ukrainian Russian s.)
Well, to be precise I think it was common before family names were mandated, but it’s common enough in old texts that it doesn’t look strange. And yes, it’s to disambiguate. Jeppe på Bjerget was just called Jeppe to his face. It may have persisted longer in Sweden.
In the Karlsson case, it feels like a literary device to make the character a little more homely; in Swedish at the time, bare surnames were used to address underlings, and people wouldn’t introduce themselves like that. Between firstname-surname (informal), Hr. Karlsson (formal, but cp Herr Nilsson in Pippi Longstocking, pretending the monkey is a [serious] adult), and the rural på Taket, this is what Astrid Lindgren chose.
Unlike German von-names, these never became hereditary family names. Forms without the preposition and the definite marker did, however. Like Bjerg. Villages, farm names, occupations — I would guess that apart from the frozen patronymics, those are most of the rest.
At this point it’s just part of the circumfixes that form these participles unless there’s something to prevent application of the prefix (non-initial stress, that is). They also occur throughout the entire paradigm of a few verbs for no synchronically discernible reason, e.g. gewinnen “win” or gelangen “reach a place”, and unrecognizably in a few originally vowel-initial ones, e.g. gönnen < *unn- (past participle gegönnt).
The closest cromulent form would be Gammelfabrikken, but that might not be much better for Germans. Pragmatically, Danish does not form compounds with any old adjective, in fact I think that the first member has to be a noun or an adverb(!). Marmeladefabrikken is just fine, østfabrikken is the only option for a simple noun phrase (†den øst fabrik is invalid), but den gamle fabrik is by far the best option for that combination.
It’s a well known fact of Scandinavian dialectology that compounds with adjectives become increasingly idiomatic with northern latitude. In Denmark you don’t. In the middle you do it for lexicalized compounds and coinages in a specific sense. In the north it goes even for attributive constructions, and may in rural dialects be almost obligatory.
@Lars: What do you call the blue lights on an emergency vehicle?
Blå blink. (That’s a plural). An emergency response as a unitary event is en udrykning, and the vehicles are udrykningskøretøjer, but I don’t think I’d talk about udrykningslys or anything similar. The idiomatic phrase for using all visual and auditory warning systems is at køre med blå blink og sirener
Norw. blålys in one word. Also e.g. hvitskjorte “white shirt”, tjukkgenser “thick (= wool) sweater”, kortbukse “shorts”. Lexical meaning.
But also: Eg trakk tjukkfrakken øver raudrutåtskjorta og gjekk ut i kaldvêret “I pulled the thick coat over the read plaid shirt and went out in the cold weather.” This is northern.
German seems to be in the intermediate camp here – it’s Blaulicht, and similar compounds with specialised meanings are normal, but Trond’s Northern example would sound weird in German.
When did Danish loose the ability to form such compounds? After all, in Viking times it had a king called Blátǫnn /Blåtand.
I don’t know when we stopped, and we do still have some, like blåmusling or småbarn (not †lillebarn). But it’s not freely available, not even in, e.g., korte bukser which is not really compositional. Though with deeper compounding the constraint is less severe, I’d be happy with kortbuksedreng as a nonce word even though †kortbukser is not in use.
(Like E shorts they can only cover the upper third or so of your thighs. Think younger public school boys and boy scouts. Longer than that we’re into cargo pants territory for which Danish doesn’t really have a simple native name. Plusfours were a thing, with emphasis on were. If you really need to, you can specify trekvart-lange ben = ‘three-quarters length legs’).
Surely Skellefteå belongs to that lot as well — or is the river name a back-formation?
Funnily enough, during my time at Umeå university I had a colleague who’d often affect impeccable gamekeeper’s tweeds, though he favoured plus-twos over plus-fours.
korte bukser
The German equivalent is also a non-compounded kurze Hosen, although kurz can be used in compounds, e.g. Kurzschwert “shortsword”, Kurzarbeit “furlough”. BTW, we also have Bux(e) / Buchs(e) / Büx “trousers” in Low German and in Northern regiolects of Standard German.
@Alon, I wasn’t trying to be exhaustive, there are lots of ever-smaller towns named on the same scheme, but in the case of Skellefteå it’s not certain if the river named the town, or some other (Sami) place name named both (saith WP.se). Though one upper part of the river is Sieldutjokk, so maybe the Swedes thought that was the name of the whole run.
I learned a pronunciation of plusfours without the final /s/, as if from French, and I never heard about plus-twos or plus-sixes so the sense was opaque to me. (plus fully Danish, fours more or less like French ‘ovens’. It makes no sense). The ODS (edited 1936) gives a fully French pronunciation ([ply-]) as one option, but marked as “now unusable”.
Or maybe I initially encountered the word in reading and guessed the pronunciation, but nobody corrected me.
I don’t think anybody I might have occasion to mention plus-fours to would recognize a fully English pronunciation, however.
I had a boss around 2010 who used the name of his farm as his surname, which was legal. (Also his postal address was just the farm name plus the post code of the market town.)
“Snail-mail address: Helge K. Fauskanger, Lille Fauskanger, 5314 Kjerrgarden, Norway.”
(It’s followed by an extensive clarification that “Lille Fauskanger” is in fact a place and not a person.)
In Russian it is always “from” (which has two forms: iz “from within” s “from the surface of”)
Somewhat infamously, the latter was traditionally used for the Ukraine, but nowadays the Ukrainians are requesting the former. I hadn’t realized that there’s no difference in Ukrainian itself.
@J1M, yes, it is an interesting question. In my Russian
на “on (location)”, на “onto” corresponds to с “from”
в “in (location), в “into” corresponds to из “from”.
accordingly за “behind (location), за “behind (direction)” из-за “from behind”.
The correspondence is systematical. The preposition на is used with some islands like Cuba , with Ukraine, and with some regions in the SW of East Slavic area. Accodingly “from” is с.
But then there are
(1) dialects where с used in the sense of из – exactly South-West.
пить с горла (Luhansk) пить из горла (Moscow).
(2) dialects where people say с города “from the city” rather than literary из города.
Now, given that с-на is systematic in other Russian dialects, I wonder if speakers of (1) and (2) use в or на with names of their towns and regions.
пить с горла lit. “to drink from the neck” (more literally “throat”). The Luhansk version sounds as “off the neck” to Muscovites, and similarly “off the room” etc.
Lille Fauskanger seems to be a “locality” (tettsted) rather than a single farm. On this map you can see numbers on the houses; in Sweden at least, that number would be part of the postal address.
(About prepositions: Danes used to say på Island, but were politely requested to say i Island instead. [Icelandic itself uses á, I think, which is actually more like på than i, but the point is probably that Danish uses i with all other countries]).
We say v Islandii, Irlandii, Japonii but na Filippinakh.
Even if I accept (a) “in” for states, “on” for places (b) states are more important,
It sounds like a reason to use both.
A trip Moscow-Casablanca is place-to place, cultrue-to culture, little sun to a lot of sun, but not Putin to the king. No matter how Important are these, I simply don’t think of them.
Same in German (with in vs. auf).
Same in German (with in vs. auf).
Wenn in Rom, rede auf Lateinisch.
WP got it right:
Suggested languages: Авар, Адыгэбзэ, Башҡортса, Ирон, Коми, Лезги, Мокшень, Нохчийн, Олык марий, Русский, Саха тыла, Татарча/tatarça, Удмурт, Чӑвашла, Эрзянь, Հայերեն
We could have calqued it, actually. Else, -landia could trigger it and -ia for Japonia (does not work for German, so maybe because there is no island called “Japan” but there are 6852 islands instead).
maybe because there is no island called “Japan”
But AFAIK there is no island called “Philippines” either. I wonder if the plural form triggers it there.
But “Philippines” are morphologically plural, which is expected form for a name of an archipelago. “Japan” is singular and morphologically singular archipelago names are rare, therefore it is interpreted as a country name rather than island name.
Yes, I authomatically read any X-es as shorthand for “Xish islands” in Russian.
(Maldives=Мальдивские острова. To my surprise, both English and Russian WP don’t have an article for the archipelago:-/ Both go “Maldives, Dhivehi Raajje, officially the Republic of Maldives…”)
I can imagine the same (again, in Russian: we were speaking about German and I know nothing here) with Japan if it was “Japon” and not “Japonija” in Russian. Cf. once mentioned here na Múrmane “on the Murman (Norman) Coast”.
“Мурманский или русский берег, в арх. от Св. Носа до Норвегии. Мурман, мн. мурмана́, обитатель Норвежских берегов; происходит от сканднинавского названия норманнов (Шейн).”
Somewhat unexpected plural. And I assume “Russian coast” must be Norwegian:)
If мурман is from norðmann-, that’s good evidence that Old Norse short o remained [o], as opposed to [ɔ], for a pretty long time.
I think current official usage is to use i with countries, however defined, even if they are popularly known to be a single island, and på with islands that are not. (Provinces and counties and other named entities with land borders get i no matter what).
The problem is that most people have a vague grasp of which islands are actually independent nations. (And Haiti is popularly assumed to be an island, which doesn’t help).
In Russian it is (1) an island that hosts two republics, a francophone and hispanohablante one (2) one of those two republics.
In Russian it is (1) an island that hosts two republics, a francophone and hispanohablante one (2) one of those two republics.
…I checked and indeed the Russian Wikipedia article is under (the equivalent of) “Haiti (island)”. Technically the island is supposed to be named Hispaniola (Эспаньола in Russian) but this version of the name hardly ever shows up.
Looking at the Wikidata links, (most of the) languages of the former USSR and (some) Eastern Bloc countries call it Haiti (or a close variation of such), and everyone else (as far as I could tell) calls it Hispaniola (or a close variation of such), with three visible exceptions: Occitan (Haití), Quechua (Ayti), and Portuguese (taking the third option: “Ilha de São Domingos”).
The German article is called Hispaniola, but does have to clarify (in the “Origin of the names” section) that it’s using Haiti only for the western country (and Santo Domingo for the eastern one, Dominikanische Republik only applying later in its history).
There is an island Columbus named “Dominica,” but somehow the “Dominican” Republic ended up being on the island he named Hispaniola. (The countries’ demonyms are heteronyms.)
Dominica at LH.
“Technically” – @J1M, why so? (If you mean specifically Russian names)
“Онъ назвалъ островъ Испаньолой ; но это названіе не удержалось , и островъ теперь называется Гаити или Санъ – Доминго .” (1891)
“В конце 16 – начале 17 вв. между Испанией, Францией и Англией разгорелась борьба за обладание Эспаньолой. В конце 17 в. западная часть острова перешла к Франции и получила название Сан-Доминго; восточная часть под названием Санто-Доминго осталась у Испании.
….
1 января 1804 Дессалин провозгласил Декларацию независимости острова от Франции, восстановив его старое индейское название – Гаити.”
БСЭ 1971.
Interesting that it has the stress on the penultimate in Russian (Гаи́ти); usually when words are borrowed from French they have end-stress. Influence from Таи́ти ‘Tahiti’?
Yes, the trick with Russian is not confusing Gaíti and Taíti:)
The German article is called Hispaniola
but does have to clarify (in the “Origin of the names” section) that it’s using Haiti only for the western country
Yes, that article is a victory of pedantry over actual usage; many German-speakers use Haiti for the island as well, and you’ll find many Google hits for auf Haiti (implying island) besides in Haiti (implying country).
Yes, в Гаити can be interpreted as в республике Гаити.
But as I said, people don’t travel to administrative entities…
And honestly, I want to visit Ireland the island.
Or, conversely, when asked about immersive courses of Russian, I usually say that the asker should also consider Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
Not applicable to Haiti, but в still would refer to an administrative entity rather than a land that corresponds to it.
And “в Мальте’ still feels weird even when it is the form of government в Мальте.
That doesn’t explain why the stress is on the penultimate in German as well. I guess it just doesn’t look or sound French enough.
Or, conversely, when asked about immersive courses of Russian, I usually say that the asker should also consider Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan.
I recall reading a blog a few years back where the author had gone to Tajikistan to study Farsi because going to Iran as a US citizen was just too impossible.
(It was linked from LH at the time but I don’t recall much more of the context.)
[EDIT: previously on LH but by then (2018) I already didn’t recall the context.]
….should also consider Afghanistan… :)))
Actually, Tajikistan is a very interensting place in terms of archeology (and not only).
A friend of mine is currently working at the embassy in Iraq, having worked in Iran before. Says it’s not as bad as in Iran, but still has to have security every time he wants to get out of the embassy. As in two cars of bodyguards — one at the front, one at the back.
drasvi: Tajikistan is fascinating in with regards to archaeology.
In Russian it is always “from” (which has two forms: iz “from within” s “from the surface of”
Hungarian also has that mandatory distinction, except it’s expressed with noun suffixes. Generally, countries, cities and continents take the “within” suffix: Németországban ‘in(side) Germany’, Párizsban ‘in(side) Paris’. But Hungary itself and Hungarian cities take the “on (the surface of)” suffixes: Magyarországon ‘on Hungary’, Budapesten ‘on Budapest’. Also, islands take the “on” suffixes.
But naturally, there are finer points:
— Hungarian cities ending in -j, -m, -n, -ny, -i revert to the “inside” suffixes: Debrecenben.
— Countries whose name ends with föld ‘land’ switch to the “on” suffixes: Thaiföldön.
— Island countries … hmm. If the name ends with certain nouns such as köztársaság ‘republic’ or királyság ‘kingdom’ then it takes the “inside” suffixes; if it ends with sziget(ek) ‘island(s)’, the “on” suffixes. But if it’s neither, well, this grammar advice site recommends using the “inside” suffixes for the state and “on” for the geographic island, but I’m dubious that this distinction is really observed (or even necessarily possible) in practice, after checking Hungarian Wikipedia for countries such as Izland, Madagaszkár, Szingapúr, Srí Lanka, etc.
I wonder if any other language family encircles the globe in modern times the way IE does (in terms of native speakers, not world travelers or international English). You have to go way up to the Arctic to bridge the Atlantic and the Pacific, but it can be done (about 10% of Greenlanders speak Danish natively).
Perhaps the whole family should be renamed “Circumferential”.
apolitical undertaking
Very bad typo here: should be “a political undertaking”.
Also his postal address was just the farm name plus the post code of the market town
My brother’s address when he was in Ireland: “Anthony Cowan, <village name>, <postal town>, Co. Cork, Ireland.”
“there is a fiddler on the roof”
It represents the precariousness of the Jewish situation in the Russian Empire.
Villages, farm names, occupations — I would guess that apart from the frozen patronymics, those are most of the rest.
The remaining type of English surname is the hereditary nickname: Black, Young, Drinkwater (whose ancestor was a diabetic, cf. Boileau).
I have lived in two places in the United States where you would get your mail if addressed to <name> <zip code>, where <name> could even be the last name or first name alone, if distinct enough.
For many years I could be reached as Box 42, 12017 (but no longer).
Perfectly logical, because Hungary is flat.
(…But Budapest isn’t.)
Small villages in Austria don’t have street names and use the name of the village as the street name, with a number as usual. This often extends to isolated houses in walking distance of the villages in question.
Also Vodopivec.
Водопьянов.
And Bevilacqua.
I once received a letter in the post on which the entire address given was “David Eddyshaw, St Andrews.” AFAIK, I am the only David Eddyshaw there is, but even so, I was seriously impressed.
JRRT once got a letter addressed to “any professor of English Language”, asking which was right, “a number of walls are” or “a number of walls is”. He replied that you can say what you like.
The White House telephone operators used to be renowned for their ability to get anyone on the phone, even if a person had no phone or would normally be out of reach of normal communications. (The linked article includes an example in which they got ahold of Cokie Roberts’ dad while he was out fishing in the Gulf of Mexico.)
At one point in my life, I got my mail via a P.O. Box that had a unique-to-the-box 9-digit zip code. Most American correspondents who aren’t institutional junk-mailers don’t use the 9-instead-of-5-digit version of zip codes, but it was as if John Cowan could combine his two-component prior upstate mailing address into “12107-0042” and have that on an envelope suffice for accurate delivery. (I think when I experimented with this i did add a semi-gratuitous “U.S.A.” on the envelope.)
I used to list a thirteen-digit code that was sufficient to identify my house uniquely: ZIP + 4, then house number. It was 97306–16535656.
In point of fact “12017-0042” would have worked, because there are only a few hundred boxes at that zip code and each corresponds to a box.
I once received mail for my business addressed only to the name of the local river that was part of the business name, and the three digits of my house number, at a new address for the business, in a city of many millions. I was mightily impressed, even if it came three months late and the customer had sent a new check by then.
Kind of an intermediate user problem, it seems to me. If you do actually register and create an account, there will be quite detailed settings on email notifications and the site will in fact mostly honor turning them off. (Mostly; newly added settings may come in as being on-by-default and I think there have been cases where a setting was deleted, later re-added, and in consequence reverted to being on even for users who had previously set it as off.)
Ditto Finnish, and details are notoriously not very predictable. Out of unanalyzable placenames e.g. Helsingissä, Turussa, Oulussa, Kuopiossa with “in” cases, but Tampereella, Vantaalla, Imatralla with “on” cases; and if you thought e.g. the long-vowel stems of Tampere and Vantaa do anything here, nope, still Espoossa, Porvoossa, Hämeessä, Kainuussa. There’s a bunch of generally applicable rules for transparent names though (names ending in the name of a body of water take “on” cases, names ending in the toponymic suffix -la/-lä take “in” cases…) but smaller towns can have a preference diverging from these that may be as unknown to outsiders as the local pronunciations of British town names. As extra special snowflake treatment, the Tavastian parish of Kangasala is even in a small closed class of words taking the “short” Proto-Uralic local cases: Kangasalla, Kangasalta, Kangasalle.
All of which also come with interestingly divergent Finnish names: Luulaja, Piitime, Uumaja. The second surely proximately from its the Samic name *Piθāmë; the other two plausibly with -aja as a western dialectalism from Old Finnish *-aɣa, and thus maybe reflecting already Proto-Scandinavian *ahwō, though I’ve seen all sorts of other speculation.
What’s up with Tornio on the Finnish side?
In literature it has been proposed to be primarily Finnish with an only accidentally similar -io, from a dialect term attested as ‘hunting spear’ and also marking sharp promontories or steep hills in toponymy (Torneträsk at the headwaters is secondary, attested as Iretresk in the 16th century) … but yes I have suspicions too.
There was a long discussion, at J. Häkkinen’s forum about Finnish history, circa 10 years ago where I’ve seen interesting additional notes dug up, most promisingly maybe Old Norse tjörn < *tjǫrn < ? *ternō- ‘headwater lake’ (no wider IE / Germanic etymology known AFAIK). A *tjǫrn stage would be possible to substitute as torn- in medieval Finnish (in Sami though we’d expect **čoarn-). Would be good to check how many of the smaller Tornio- toponyms in Finland this same meaning fits to. At least a few could be, but do not seem to be particularly prominent as lakes (e.g. a small swampy headwater pond Tornionperse in Viitasaari in central Finland, maybe a former bay of a neighboring lake).
maybe Old Norse tjörn < *tjǫrn < ? *ternō- ‘headwater lake’ (no wider IE / Germanic etymology known AFAIK)
I didn’t know the meaning “headwater lake”. Norwegian tjern etc. are generally small and silent lakes or ponds, often headwaters of streams, but just as often along a stream. (My brother-in-law has written a book about fifty of them in Trondheim. The word tjønner was replaced in the title after suggestion from the editor.)
Bjorvand & Lindeman on the etymology (my translation):
The only word I know with the specific meaning “headwater lake” is Sw. träsk (as in Torne träsk, which I once learned originally meant “swamp” SAOB.knows both meanings but little of their etymology.
* Bjorvand (1994) is his book about the IE collective in Old Norse. There are many words with a countable neuter and a feminine collective/mass noun — or that show vestiges of this.
My brother-in-law has written a book about fifty of them in Trondheim.
You forgot the URL, so the link just goes to this thread. Let me know what it is and I’ll add it where it should go.
Here!
(Not that important. Just my usual babbling.)
Hey, we’re all babblers on this bus.
I should have thought of checking SAOB on tjärn as well.
In my own comment above I almost mentioned forest and highland, invisible in-/outlet, and bogs, but I dropped it because it’s more tendencies than defining traits and can be due to size.
The fact that a tjärn can be a group of ponds in the same bog would fit well with the originally collective meaning of the feminine.
(sometimes without visible in- or outlet)
I’d say the “without inlet” is the defining criterion for ‘tarn’ in English — from Old Norse. You might put a parenthetical “(visible)”.
What it gives is a self-contained eco-system that has to produce its own nutrients/they’re not getting washed in from stream flows. In NZ, it’s achieved by all sorts of interesting sedges and tussock to sponge up the water. I would point you to the one at the head of ‘Kelly’s Creek’/’Hunt’s Creek’/ near Carroll Hut/ Arthur’s Pass area — but too obscure for Google.
…eh… more like “feed on” (with von), as in “drawing from reserves”. Compare verzehren “consume completely”.
I suspect confusion with zerren “pull a lot”, “strain”; compare verzerren “distort”. Historically that’s probably the causative. (It has umlaut, as shown by the /a/ in Bavarian-Austrian dialects, where this verb is the basic dysphemism for all pulling motions.)
The confusion was entirely mine. B&L has tære på as in “drawing from reserves”. Norw. tære was borrowed from LG in that specific meaning. I imagined Eng. tear could have the same meaning of gradual wear and exhaustion in a physical sense as it does in the abstract.
Danish also has fortære = verzehren.
I’d say the “without inlet” is the defining criterion for ‘tarn’ in English
This does describe a prototypical tarn for me, but if we look at bodies of water with tarn in the name it doesn’t work – Little Langdale Tarn, Watendlath Tarn or Easedale Tarn in the Lake District, for example, all have not just visible inlets, but an easily identifiable main feeder.
I imagined Eng. tear could have the same meaning of gradual wear and exhaustion in a physical sense as it does in the abstract.
Indeed it does in the expression wear and tear. The OED would have it that these terms are opposed: wear ‘gradual destruction’ and tear ‘sudden destruction (as by tearing)’, but I think they are more likely synonymous, as the expression as a whole clearly means ‘gradual destruction’.