Dmitry Pruss sent me this press release from Leiden University:
Five thousand years before the common era (BCE), Proto-Indo-European, the mother of many languages that are spoken today in Europe, Central Asia and South Asia, originated in eastern Europe. PhD candidate Axel Palmér has combined a 175-year-old hypothesis with new techniques to demonstrate how descendants of this proto-language ended up in Asia. […]
‘Proto-Indo-European was probably spoken five thousand years ago between the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea, north of the Caucasus,’ says Palmér, pointing to the blue area on the map. ‘We know it was subsequently also spoken in the area around the Ural Mountains, shown here in pink, and we suspected that it then spread further towards the south.’
This means that the languages would have made a large loop, instead of taking a more direct route through present-day Turkey. This hypothesis is partly based on DNA evidence. In 2015 researchers compared the DNA of people who lived along the route that Proto-Indo-European may have taken, with the DNA of human remains from the steppe where it first originated. ‘They also saw a pattern of people who did not go to Asia directly through Turkey, but first migrated towards the west and north,’ explains Palmér.
A problem with this DNA evidence, however, is that it doesn’t show which language the genetically related people actually spoke. Palmér therefore unearthed a different hypothesis, from 175 years ago. ‘The idea already existed that the Indo-Iranian language family was closely related to the Balto-Slavic language family, both descendants of Proto-Indo-European.’ A kinship of this kind between these language families would mean that there was indeed language contact between people living along the ‘loop’, which runs from the present-day Balkans to present-day India.
Palmér therefore scrutinised the vocabulary of both Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian and arrived at a list of 55 words that are only found in these families. […] Palmér also found another indication in favour of this hypothesis in the meaning of words. ‘In both Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic, I found words relating to agriculture,’ he says. ‘In the blue area you don’t find any evidence of agriculture.’ This would again suggest that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European migrated around the blue area in present-day Ukraine.
Dmitry is curious about Hatters’ thoughts on this, as am I. (The map referred to is at the link.)
The press release appears to have turned “five thousand years ago” into “five thousand years before the common era (BCE.)” This does not inspire confidence, thought it has no bearing on ths study itself, of course.
Oh, no it isn’t.
As I mentioned, it probably extends this paper from 2022
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9555676/
Palmér is, however, evidently an actual linguist:
https://axelpalmer.com/
I did wonder, given the apparently dismissive “you can always look at many other aspects of language, such as the formation of words and sound”, but that may well have been taken out of context by the writer of the press release, to whom two thousand years are but a mere rounding error.
The PR functionary, who, as is traditional, evidently does not understand the material they are presenting, says “a kinship of this kind between these language families would mean that there was indeed language contact”, confusing linguistic genetic relatedness with resemblances due to contact: but I dare say that the latter alone would actually suffice for Palmér’s purposes, so my initial dismissive comment was beside the point, really.
Also, Palmér has a beard, which encourages trust.
About postdoc at home:
I remembered a conversation between a math professor from MSU… and … is he a dean of HSE math faculty? no, not dean, another top administrative position. The professor complained that one of his students applied to a post doctoral position in HSE and locals said they will be happy to accept him but then the official response was that he can’t be accepted “for technical reasons”.
So the professor contacted people at HSE and they were just as surprised as he and assured him that the guy will be accepted, but then the next responce was the same. And the professor learned that HSE simply does not accept Russian citizens (or Muscovites).
I even know why (it cares about ratings a lot and foreign students are good for ratings. This is also why they have good dorms but not in Moscow – the quality affects ratings, distance does not).
What made it funny: the guy from HSE was Furious. “WHO!!!! Who told you that? No, it is true, but it is supposed to be a SECRET!!! WHO????”
Where is Anatolian in this?
(HSE is an economic school that tries to become our leading university. It IS ideal for students, much better than MSU. But they are absolutely comical in their snobbery)
I don’t understand what he is talking about.
Does he mean that there were two eastward migrations: one is the blue area and the other is north-then east-then south?
___
In principle a “western” source makes sense given the present distribution (west of Eurasia but not the east) and parallels like the word for bull shared with Semitic.
Where is Anatolian in this?
Come to that, where is Tocharian? The great Iranian influx into Asia was surely later than the Tocharian migration.
Also, the Iranian languages are similar enough to one another that the Iranian push into Central Asia surely can’t be all that ancient.
Like drasvi, I’m also not entirely clear about just what it is that Palmér is proposing.
Looks like this is based on Palmér’s just-finished PhD dissertation (under Kroonen and Lubotsky), which unfortunately is embargoed for another year.
Come to that, where is Tocharian?
That was my first thought.
I think what he’s implying is that the Iranian languages spread to their current location from East to West rather than West to East.
Obviously the Indic languages got to India from the north on any showing. But the Mitanni must have taken a sharp right turn to get to Mesopotamia by 1600 BCE (3600 BCE in the Leiden University Press Release Chronology.)
I think he is suggesting that the ancestral Indo-Iranian speakers spent some time in the forest zone north of the Steppe, rather than being pure pastoralists moving from the grasslands of Eastern Europe into Central Asia. When looking at genetics, most of the people buried in Sintashta and Andronovo cemeteries, who are often hypothesized to be Indo-Iranians, are not pure descendants of Yamnaya pastoralists (like e.g. Catacomb people) but rather have a large fraction of European farmer ancestry, and are closest to Corded Ware people, including Fatyanovo of the Volga forests.
As I read it, he’s saying that Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian share agricultural terms. This means that their shared history must have been in an agricultural community. Since there’s no evidence of agriculture in the blue area*, this supports the archaeological-genetic hypothesis that Indo-Iranian came to the central steppe after a detour through Corded Ware and the forests.
Anatolian and Tocharian just don’t come into the picture**. This is about how accepting Indo-Baltic(?) can add to the understanding of later Indo-European migrations.
Edit: It would be something of an achievement for Indo-Iranian to have kept so much of this terminology. There’s something like 25-30 generations between the IE expansion into Corded Ware and the formation of Sintashta/Andronovo on the central steppe, and another 20 before they became settled in India and Central Asia. Most of that time was spent doing animal husbandry.
* His words, not mine.
** … but they could perhaps explain the diverging ages in the press release.
Does an Indo-Iranian–Balto-Slavic node run into any difficulties with what is known about the historical morphology and phonology (“the formation of words and sounds”) of IE?
No, and there is a little bit of just such evidence for it, notably the satəm shift (also found in Armenian, Albanian and Luwic), the satəm merger (apparently not found elsewhere without restrictions), the ruKi phenomenon (with complications especially in Nuristani) and a future tense in *-sjé-/-sjo- (at most relictually attested in Slavic).
At the journal’s own website here in open access; it’s about where Proto-Indo-Tocharian was spoken – “western Yamnaya groups around or to the west of the Dnieper River”.
For some reason, I find it absolutely hilarious that the press release actually says “before the common era (BCE)”.
That’s not exactly a new idea… but it reminds me of the American legal fiction of “ceremonial Deism”.
I often use BCE, mostly out of symbolic respect to Judaism and to all those ancestors who were resisting coerced conversions at a great price. Anything wrong about it?
I don’t think George finds BCE hilarious in itself, just the spelled-out explanation.
Ceremonial deism
I often use BCE, mostly out of symbolic respect to Judaism and …
Dmitry: George Grady wrote that he found “before the common era (BCE)” hilarious. I take him to be referring to the identification of “common era” with “CE”. He doesn’t object to “BCE”, but to the implication that “the Christian era” is “the common era”.
You say you use “BCE” to stress that “the Christian era” is merely a Christian distinction in addition to others. So your use of “BCE”, and his objection to equating it with “the common era”, are equifinal scrupules.
“Before the Common Era” has the advantage of accuracy, through vageness quite apart from any anxieties about hegemonic Christianism. Nobody knows when exactly the birth of Christ was, but 1CE seems particularly unlikely.
Personally, I think we should go back to the good old system of counting from the Martyrdoms under Diocletian. If it ain’t broke …
“AD” is obviously objectionable if he’s not your Dominus.
I don’t think C is for Xian though. In my flavor of English it is for “common” (which corresponds to Russian нашей эры). That’s the first of the definitions Cambridge dictionary provides for BCE, too. Not the only one, but the first. I rather find an attempt to spell it out as “Christian era” hilarious. If the birth of Jesus is so paramount to your history timescale, then why stop halfway and not just use BC 😉 ?
Another sense of BC.
https://johnhartstudios.com/bcstrips/2008/april/bc0426d.gif
As Dmitry says, BCE does in fact mean “before the common era.” If you want to drag Christ into it, you just say BC.
I follow conventions: CE/BCE e.g. in Biblical studies, AD/BC e.g. in heathen archaeology. The etymolgies don’t bother me, and I know full well that “Common Era” (or in Orthodox Jewish parlance “by their reckoning”) is a euphemism, and is about none but the unmentionable Nazarene.
““AD” is obviously objectionable if he’s not your Dominus.”
Not obvious at all! I’m an atheist with no particular sympathies to Christianity, and find the papering over of a Christian dating system with new labels obnoxiously euphemistic. Either you actually care about the system’s Christian basis, in which case some other reckoning entirely should be adopted (I kind of like the so-called Human Era calendar — it is calibrated to the BC/AD system, but shifts the starting point 10k years back), or you don’t, in which case the older set of abbreviations that are basically never spelled out any more shouldn’t be an issue. Switching to BC/BCE is exceptionally obnoxious in speech, where the two terms are virtually indistinguishable at speed. If we absolutely must replace BC/AD while keeping the actual calendar intact, let’s at least use labels that aren’t actively worse.
“I don’t think C is for Xian though.”
made me spend a while trying to figure out how the Tang capital is related to our calendar:)))
Like everyone in Russia I’m accustomed to “before our era” and “our.GEN era.GEN”.
Then I learned BC and AD and am more comfortable with them than with BCE/CE – but if Dmitry dislikes them, then he dislikes them.
Then I learned AH and… comfortable with it as well.
“I don’t think George finds BCE hilarious in itself, just the spelled-out explanation.”
The explanation has the form of introducing an abbreviation for the first time in the text.
But BCE is not used below, and it actually can be
– as I think some imply a reminder of what BCE stands here for for those already familiar with BCE.
– a gloss for unfamiliar “common era”.
If she wrote “deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)”…
a Christian dating system with new labels obnoxiously euphemistic
I always need a double-take going in to Taiwan (where the dating of neither a Christian nor a Johnny-come-lately Roman or even Greek era would apply).
So upon entry your passport gets stamped with some year like 122. Official documents must carry that format. Mercifully most of them also give the Gregorian year. (And months/days numbering follows Gregorian.)
But … most public festivals and holidays are dated according to the lunar calendar. So getting your months disambiguated is crucial if you’re planning travelling for the upcoming
A dental hygienist informed me that a new meaning of BC is Before Covid.
Daid M.: At the journal’s own website here in open access; it’s about where Proto-Indo-Tocharian was spoken – “western Yamnaya groups around or to the west of the Dnieper River”.
At least that’s the most controversial result. They suggest that Tocharian was part of the Babyno Culture, which was a predecessor of Shrubnaya in the western forest steppe. I don’t know how that can be reconciled with previous suggestions that it harbored languages like Thracian or Phrygian. It would also mean that Afanasevo is a dead end, linguistically.
It does have the disadvantage that nothing in particular actually happened in 10000 BC. I would prefer sticking with the carbon-daters and living in the year 74 After Present. It’s funny, but no funnier than the German for AD, n. Chr. – nach Christus, “after Christ”, which implies he doesn’t even exist anymore.
(74, BTW, not 75. 1950 AD is Present.)
These also exist in German – (v.)u.Z.; (vor) unserer Zeit(rechnung), “before our.DAT.F.SG time( reckoning).SG” / “our.GEN.F.SG time( reckoning).SG”. Possibly they’re extinct now, but they were never entirely limited to the GDR.
…huh. Based just on time and space, I wonder if those people spoke straight-up Proto-Greek, or maybe Proto-Graeco-Phrygian if that’s a thing. As it happens, right now I’m about to read the paper…
If anybody’s wondering, Babyne (Babino) has the stress on the first syllable: Ба́бино. (Note that if you’re Ukrainizing it, it ends in -e: Бабине.)
UK Acts of Parliament were indexed by regnal year until 1963 (12 Eliz 2).
As a boy I thought that it’d be neat to start a World Calendar era with the invention of the Egyptian calendar, 4241 BCE. (Another possible date, saith mine old Britannica, is 2781 BCE, depending on when you believe the Pyramids were built. That, of course, would make the 2781 BCE date most likely in terms of present knowledge. On the other hand, we now know that calendars often predate writing, let alone giant tombs. So …?)
I write dates nowadays as eg 21 July 024 as short for 10024 AD counting (roughly) from the collapse of Lake Agassiz in the Younger Dryas; perhaps good enough for government work…
Illinois Public Acts are similarly numbered by legislative session, so PA 98-1 was the first bill in the 2-year session that began 195 years after statehood was achieved in 1818, so it was passed in 2013.
“”It does have the disadvantage that nothing in particular actually happened in 10000 BC.”
What do you mean “nothing”? it an (anti-?) anniversary of the birth of our lord Jesus!
All the prophets to be found around were dancing! They ate a MAMMOTH.
Well, not all. Only those who were good enough at math to predict the calendar.
I agree with DM, in that Nelson’s proposal has a significan weakness. It still has “Christian basis”:)
“…the older set of abbreviations that are basically never spelled out…”
Very true. Especially usages like “millenium AD”. Or….
Literally “millenium from the year of our Lord Jesus”. What is the referent of “year of our lord” – THIS year, or the year of his birth? If the latter, then millienium anno is fine. So how should we undesrtant the ablative here?
(I simply don’t understand, because… I don’t know. Should I also understand “the first apple” when said in Arabic as “firstest of an apple”?)
@DM, your “notably” link does not work anymore. Was it a paper or just this map?
When I search for Poulsen Olander I find a different couple* of Poulsen and Olander who write about Etlingera spp.:(
* not sure if “couple” can be used this way in English. I don’t mean a married couple or anything like this, I preferred it to “pair” for other reasons.
Illinois Public Acts
I believe you can be arrested for those.
mollymooly: UK Acts of Parliament were indexed by regnal year until 1963 (12 Eliz 2).
So this is why we speak of Victorian and Georgian etc. eras!
Hat: (Note that if you’re Ukrainizing it, it ends in -e: Бабине.)
I thought the final -o looked Ukrainian. That’s how much I know.
“It does have the disadvantage that nothing in particular actually happened in 10000 BC.”
Not sure how that’s a disadvantage, really. The whole thing is avowedly a compromise between wanting to move away from a purely “Christian” reckoning (on the, in my opinion mistaken, view that the current system is somehow inherent religious, and that it’s origins can’t be divorced from it’s current use), and a desire to avoid being too disruptive to the most widely used current current reckoning. Not sure how this is any worse than any other compromise.
The other aspect of the system, which becomes more apparent if you do get in the habit of thinking about ancient history using it, is that it really does simplify the reckoning for a lot of “BC” history. There’s no weird shifting in Augustus’s reign, the Han runs from 9799 to (nominally) 10220, and PIE might have been spoken c. 7000 (with some rather serious error bars), with the earliest surviving IE texts going back to more like 8400. I find this a rather refreshing wat of looking at the past, personally — and in practice, it really does decentre (to use an awful, bit in this case actually appropriate, term) the Christian focus on the period of Christ’s life, despite being ultimate based on a Christian reckoning. (I really do recommend playing around with thinking in the system a bit before dismissing it.)
the, in my opinion mistaken, view that the current system is somehow inherent religious, and that it’s origins can’t be divorced from it’s current use
Of course it’s mistaken — it’s wrong in exactly the same way that “etymology is destiny” is wrong. Virtually everybody uses the Common Era now, and to try to change it would be as foolish and frustrating as trying to make people use some invented unisex pronoun rather than “they.” If the world had somehow wound up using the Seleucid Era, would it be jettisoned because people decided Seleucus was a bad guy?
Oh, not as a literal ablative! The Latin “ablative” is a merger of ablative, locative and instrumental, and actual ablative meanings are quite rare. Think of anno as a locative-instrumental merger, either simply as “in the year” or as an ablativus absolutus – “while the year was going on”.
Oh. 🙁 It was a PowerPoint presentation. Maybe I should quote-to-summarize it here later, assuming it isn’t on academia.edu or ResearchGate.
The Latin “ablative” is a merger of ablative, locative and instrumental
By some usages, the Latin case would be called “Ablative”, the language-agnostic, semantically-specific one would be called “ablative”.
This is the sort of thing that gives Haspelmath indigestion.
I should maybe say that I’m not exactly an advocate for the HE system. I just like it, and occasionally use it personally. It would be nice for it to be used generally, but it won’t be.
back to the topic of the potential proto-Balto-Indic-specific words, I was reading an archaeology paper on Bronze Age wool dyeing which proved that the famous 3900 years-old specimen of a red textile from the Dead Sea caves was dyed by kermes, and I couldn’t help realizing that it’s from the proto-Indo-Iranian “kirmis” worm, and that in Lithuanian, the word for worm is the same “kirmis”. Of course Russian червь / червонный are also cognates, but not in nearly as impressive fashion…
The word goes beyond II-BS, but it’s complicated and irregular. It could do with the critical analysis of Axel Palmér!
*kʷŕ̥mis
At least Celtic seems to differ — and that’s before we add:
*wr̥mis
Could it have been borrowed several times? Could the connection to *wer- be a folk etymology?
i loathe “BCE/CE”.
if yoshke pandre / josh pantera’s birthday is the era-marker it’s a christian calendar, and slapping a disingenuous label on it doesn’t change that. it’s like calling 2024 “2 CE (Common Era)” instead of “2 Charles 3” while dating the era from charli3’s ascension – transparently dishonest: partisanship presented as neutrality, allegedly in the service of tolerance. if you want that era year, call it what it is, just like other calendars do: BH/AH is quite explicit, as is AUC. it’s a bit more complicated for reckonings from creation, like the jewish one, since they don’t formally admit of a pre-era period, but all they need is a minus sign to be workable.
i might like CE/BCE better if it were understood to be about the “Christian Era”, but let’s be real: i’d probably insist that then it should be dated from the Edict of Thessalonika.
More ambiguous phonological evidence for Indo-Slavic: the simplification of *-tst- to *-st-, shared with Greek (can’t remember if Armenian, too, but in any case not Albanian, Germanic or Italo-Celtic, all of which can be explained from the opposite simplification to *-ts-). When Indic acquired long consonants, it replaced all morphologically obvious occurrences by the new *-tt-, but there’s a paper somewhere out there showing that -st- survived in a few words that were no longer recognizable as *-T-T- compounds.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From the 2022 paper:
There is ambiguous evidence that used to be interpreted as occasional or otherwise limited agriculture (e.g. by part of the population in the river valleys perhaps);
So they investigated the previously proposed vocabulary:
…and found:
In many cases this means that they can’t be reconstructed to anywhere near PIE. “Strikingly, not a single word for millet can be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European.” Reference 10, from which the list is reproduced in table 1, is Mallory (2013): Twenty-first century clouds over Indo-European homelands. Journal of Language Relationship 9:145–154.
That was all Results! Here’s the Discussion:
Anatolian from the west doesn’t fit the genetics at all, though.
The bulk of the paper evaluates the proposed reconstructions of cereal-related IE words. I have comments. First, the list again:
Indo-Anatolian: *(H)ieu(H)-, perhaps *ǵʰ(e)rsd-, both ‘cereal’ in general or specific
Indo-Tocharian: *h₂erh₃- ‘plow’, *h₂erh₃-ur/n- ‘(arable) field’, *peis- ‘grind (grain)’, *se-sh₁-io- ‘a cereal’, *h₂ed-o(s)- ‘a (parched?) cereal’
*(H)ieu(H)-: at least a root cognate between Anatolian, Greek, Indic, Iranic and Baltic, throughout with meanings like ‘grain’, ‘corn’, one particular kind of cereal, and/or ‘porridge’. (It’s also, as I’ve learned elsewhere, present in Finnic in a form most easily explained as a loan from Baltic.) The authors don’t mention Pinault’s law, which deleted *h₂ and *h₃ within PIE when they were followed by *[j] in the same syllable, or Bozzone’s law, which turned *h₁j- into Greek h; from this and the Greek ζ it follows that there was no laryngeal at all at the beginning of this root (though it could be derived from one that had *h₂ or *h₃, e.g. *h₂ei-u- ‘(old) age’ through a verb ‘ripen, mature’ that is attested as yu- in Tocharian B as the authors mention).
*ǵʰ(e)rsd-: with *e in Germanic ‘barley’; with *o in Italic ‘barley’; with neither in, possibly, Albanian ‘cereals, grain’ and Anatolian ‘wheat, emmer’, the latter also lacking the *d, which may be regular. A Greek pair κρῖ n., κριθή f. ‘barley’ is also brought up (as an alternative cognate of the Albanian form); I wonder if it’s a loan from a Crotonian reflex of *ǵʰ(e)rsd- (Crotonian is not mentioned in the paper).
*h₂erh₃-:
– Anatolian “‘grind, crush, break up’, which predominantly occurs in non-agricultural contexts”
– *h₂erh₃-o- or something: Tocharian ‘dust, loose earth’
– *h₂erh₃-je-: Greek, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Italic, Celtic ‘plow’ (verb)
– *h₂érh₃-wr, h₂rh₃-wén-: Greek, Indic, Iranic, Armenian, Celtic, all ‘arable land’ and/or ‘grain’ more or less
– *h₂érh₃-tro-: Greek, Armenian, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Italic, Celtic ‘plow’ (noun); possibly Tocharian A ‘plow’, B ‘plowing’
…but the Tocharian forms, of both the first and the last derivative, are just āre, and even if the -e is the *o of *-tro in the ‘plow(ing)’ form, I wonder if ‘thing used to loosen the earth’ is an inner-Tocharian formation separate from the Indo-Actually-European one.
*peis- and various derivatives: Tocharian ‘chaff (of grain), husk’; Greek ‘grind, winnow’; Indic ‘crush, grind’; Iranic ‘crush, bruise’; Baltic: Lithuanian ‘beat (off) chaff from grain’, ‘mortar, pestle’, Latvian ‘pound or break flax’; Slavic ‘millet’, ‘peeled grain’ (and a derivative, not mentioned, ‘wheat’); Germanic ‘chaff’, ‘pestle’; Italic ‘crush, pound’; possibly cognate with Anatolian ‘rub, scrub’.
I’m not sure we can really go farther than Proto-Indo-Tocharian ‘pound repeatedly’, at most ‘grind’ – not necessarily done to cereals, let alone homegrown ones. The Tocharian and the Germanic ‘chaff’ words are different derivatives with different suffixes, and so are the Balto-Slavic and the Germanic ‘pestle’ words. Asserting Proto-Indo-Tocharian ‘grind cereals’ seems a bit too optimistic to me.
*se-sh₁-io-: Indic, Iranic ‘corn, grain’; Celtic ‘barley’
Also Catalan xeixa, Valencian seixa ‘white wheat’, but these require a Latin *sassia that can be explained neither through Italic nor through Celtic – neither *a nor *ss works in either! (I should check Crotonian, but in that case it would be very strange that a word that prehistoric Italic would have picked up in south-central Italy is only attested in the Iberian peninsula.) Anyway, no mention of Tocharian having either this derivative or even the basic *seh₁-, which means ‘sow’ in Indo-Actually-European but ‘impress, prick’ in Anatolian.
*h₂ed-o(s)- can be made to work for Armenian ‘grain’, Germanic ‘grainfield; seeds’ and Italic ‘sacral grain, (roasted) spelt’, as well as for an Old Irish gloss ad of really unknown but surely similar meaning; but again there’s no mention of Tocharian having either this derivative or even the basic *h₂ed- ‘dry, parch’.
So:
Indo-Anatolian: one or two words for ‘cereal’;
Indo-Tocharian: possibly ‘plow’, probably not ‘grind cereals’, and that’s it.
All other reconstructed agriculture-related words are, with agriculture-related meanings, either restricted to Indo-Actually-European or shared only among a few European branches, often neighboring ones.
I conclude grain was known (and quite possibly processed locally), but likely only as a trade item, and the conclusions about the origin of Tocharian are all unwarranted.
No, it fits the Balto-Slavic and the Indo-Iranian forms perfectly; it just has another outcome of syllabic r. About Albanian I have no idea.
Greek is not in the habit of letting a h drop from the heavens.
Entirely possible.
David M: Anatolian from the west doesn’t fit the genetics at all, though.
Indeed, but that wasn’t as clear when this paper was written.
I conclude grain was known (and quite possibly processed locally), but likely only as a trade item, and the conclusions about the origin of Tocharian are all unwarranted.
Great job. I agree.
Greek is not in the habit of letting a h drop from the heavens.
Yes. (The parenthesis is Wiktionary, not me.)
“I couldn’t help realizing that it’s from the proto-Indo-Iranian “kirmis” worm, and that in Lithuanian, the word for worm is the same “kirmis”. Of course Russian червь / червонный are also cognates, but not in nearly as impressive fashion…”
Indo-Russian similarities are often striking for native speakers.
I think most people here habitually dismiss them, but it is possible that if one examines such examples seriously, it will turn out that this subjective impression is due to the actual high amount of shared material (arealisms or whatever) and the naïve speaker is simply right.
In such situations I’m likely to be in disagreement with LH, we’re rooting for different teams (mine are boors with trophy wives and wives with trophy boors [a reference to some silly text that I quoted elsewhere]).
@DM, I just was hypnotised by how “a millenium FROM…” makes some sense:/
The only case not used in Russian for temporal meanings is nominative (and vocative)!
[winter].INSTR, [date].GEN, in day.ACC…. etc.
Regarding Y’s questions about problems with Balto-II.
I think the only possible problem for a node is another node.
Are there promicing BS-[something] or II-[something] isoglosses?
Internal reconstruction can present problems for specific correspondences, like “C1>C2 and C3>C4 in both, but it is a chance similarity because in one branch the first shift predates the second and in the other the second predates the first”.
But reasoning like this only means that the two branches diverged before the two shifts.
IF NOT other IE languages, the node BS-II would be most defintiely postulated.
And identicall with what we call IE.
we’re rooting for different teams
I’m not sure what you mean. My only team is plausible reconstructions; I don’t give a damn what modern nations are involved — what do nations have to do with protolanguages thousands of years ago? But perhaps you’re joking.
@LH, I always enjoy situations when people who lack education notice some scientific fact. Especially when they notice it, and scientists dismiss it …. until scientists themselves discover this fact. When I’m irritated with something, it is usually when scientists believe that something is a fact without a really good reason. I see no reason to be irritated with “ordinary people” when they believe in nonsense (unless it is a moral problem).
No, i did not speak about any nations. (and if you mean the war, I don’t think our positions can be described as “rooting for different teams”. I’m not rooting for anyone, it is not a game but there is no space for intrepreations as to who started it).
proto-Indo-Iranian “kirmis” worm
Welsh pryf “creepy-crawly.”
By chance this came at a moment when I am reading The Calendar (David Ewing Duncan), but I’m finding it far less gripping than the majority 5-star reviewers at Amazon claim. Lots of interesting information, strung together in an uninteresting way. I bought the book in 1999, but have no recollection of reading it then.
Me: Could it have been borrowed several times? Could the connection to *wer- be a folk etymology?
It’s not a word I’d think would be easily borrowed, at least not in so wide range of senses.
An idea: Could *kʷŕ̥mis be the result of reanalysis of compounds *-K+wr̥mis, i.e. with first elements ending in an unvoiced velar? This probably supposes a sandhi rule -VK.wr̥- > *-V.kʷr̥-. One such first element could be *denḱ- “bite, sting” In that case, reanalysis might also have been helped along by depalatalization. (Labializing sandhi could also have been more general, but could only be misparsed if and when the product merged phonetically with a labialized phoneme.)
@LH, I always enjoy situations when people who lack education notice some scientific fact. Especially when they notice it, and scientists dismiss it …. until scientists themselves discover this fact. When I’m irritated with something, it is usually when scientists believe that something is a fact without a really good reason. I see no reason to be irritated with “ordinary people” when they believe in nonsense (unless it is a moral problem).
It sounds to me like you don’t actually believe in science. I mean, you enjoy it, but it doesn’t form a basic part of your worldview. Well, you’ve got plenty of company.
@drasvi
Is there a Russian branch (or equivalent) of the Fortean Society?
The danger of having a mind too open is that your brains could fall out. What kind of nonsense are we talking about?
The scientific method consists of being systematically open to the evidence and being prepared to admit that you might be mistaken in your beliefs* in the face of the evidence. (White coats and test tubes are contingent ornaments, and not what science is.)
This is an ethical attitude, and not espousing it is unethical. As with any moral lapse, there may be many good reasons why a person might fall into such immorality, making their lapses all too forgiveable (and we should be wary of the beam in our own eye.) And there are much worse sins, certainly.
But none of that can make an unscientific attitude right. It’s not just an amusing personal quirk. It’s a sin (to use a Calvinist technical term.)
Properly conducted science has a moral claim on our belief. And it’s no accident that fascists hate real science and love pseudoscience.
* The English word is ambiguous (we did this topic to death here previously.) Here I specifically mean it in the sense “believing that something is the case”, rather than “trusting a person.” Attempting to apply the scientific method to your personal relationships tends to be stupid rather than moral.
I don’t get the sense that drasvi is anti-scientist or unscientific. When he describes his attitude, I think of those scientists who were still insisting on 6 feet and masks OUTDOORS in summer/fall 2020, when it was clear that outdoors was completely different, or closing playgrounds and taping it off, though it was clear that such transmission was limited if it happened at all. As drasvi says:
>when scientists believe that something is a fact without a really good reason.
I don’t think he’s anti-scientist or unscientific either, I just think he’s far more excited about scientists being wrong than right, and I think that’s an unfortunate attitude.
“It sounds to me like you don’t actually believe in science. I mean, you enjoy it, but it doesn’t form a basic part of your worldview. ”
LH, I don’t quite understand you. Sceince for me is the truth.
It is not what a particular scientist tells and not the consensus.
No, I’m not “excited about scientists being wrong“.
E.g. here:
“ I always enjoy situations when people who lack education notice some scientific fact. Especially when they notice it, and scientists dismiss it …. until scientists themselves discover this fact. ”
I enjoy how people without eduction notice the fact and NOT how “scientists dismiss it” which annoys me (As follows from “When I’m irritated with something, it is usually when scientists…“).
@ dravsi :
That seems sensible to me; my old classes in Marxism/Leninism make me suspicious of the Dialectic Process, but when there are many voices, action requires sorting things out (on the basis of one’s individual experience)…
I am happy BTW about recent advances in technology which seem to show that chatbots have trouble with math. I don’t know if this sheds any light on the Turning test though.
I enjoy how people without eduction notice the fact
Yeah, but this is pretty rare. Usually when people without education “notice” that scientists are wrong, they themselves are wrong, and they tend to be much better at spreading their bullshit than scientists are at spreading the truth. (Because scientists are not propagandists, they’re scientists.) That’s what annoys me.
@LH, rare as in
“a few occurences per a unit of time (say, a year)” or rare as in “a small portion of points of disagreement between unenducated people and uducated people/scientists”?
These are two different versions of “rare”. I think it happens all the time. But yes, it can be but a small portion, I just did not think about that. As I said, when people believe in bullshit it does not bother me as much as when science (here “science” means : most people in some sub-field) beleives in bullshit.
@jack, I’m not sure we’re speaking about the same thing. I’m speaking about my feelings. Once in a while the following happens: A certain (good) idea is known to less educated people, as a belief or as a practical observation. Either one scientist or scientists in general tend to dismiss it. Because they think it is a superstition or because they think it is uninteresting or just because they never bothered to check (as in WP article “Clitoris” which contained a line “rediscovered repeatedly over the centuries” until in February 2011 someone deprived of sense of humour found it silly:)).
The idea can be perfectly in line with scientific theories of the time (and considered “uninteresting” until stated in more scientific langauge by a bearded man to immediately achieve the status of an excpetionally deep and interesting idea as every idea of this man) – or it can contradict them (and considered a “superstition”) – or it can be in line with them but the scientists in question just never seriously think of it and don’t realise that it does not contradict the theory (again considered a “superstition”).
I’m not speaking of how I process ideas that anyone here find dubious. I’m speaking of ideas everyone here agrees with because they have already become “science” – but once were dismissed.
When such a thing happens I LIKE how the ordinary people can see it. And I’m angered at how scientists in question are dumb.
So I’m in a way “rooting for” the uneducated and express something like an anti-snobbery position.
As for how I process various present points of disagreement, that’s a different matter.
But scientists are just as capable of being (and often are) incredibly dumb as all other people. And science MUST be open to ideas, when it devolves into a tradition of transmission of a corpus of knowlege it ceases to be “science”.
@jack: recent advances in technology which seem to show that chatbots have trouble with math
Advances in technology are not needed to show that.
Many people have trouble with math, as anyone can verify by inspecting the texts of math questions and answers, say on stackoverflow and math.stackexchange. Chatbots compose and transform such texts, of which there are many more than texts published by mathematicians. It is thus reasonable to expect that chatbots too have trouble with math.
when there are many voices, action requires sorting things out (on the basis of one’s individual experience)
Humans perplex each other at every turn, so perplexity generated by chatbots (“hallucinations”) is only natural, since chatbots are APEs (automated plagiarism engines, as DE puts it). This has nothing to do with intelligence, but with communication and mutual observation. In line with what you say: to sort things out, turn off the radio and talk only with people who seem to be making sense. When that doesn’t pan out, take the dog for a walk.
Generative AI shows that “human intelligence” is indistinguishable from “machine intelligence”. The way I see it, there is no need to fear that “machines will become more intelligent than humans”, since intelligence is not at issue here. It’s merely a matter of which of the two can generate more text per second.
“Communication” is a self-propagating system: sequences of words/text exchanges, which “fit in” with, or diverge from each other as the sequence progresses. People are not part of communication, but on the outside for the ride.
The recent elegant proof of chatbots’ deep ignorance is that yes, they now can solve arithmetic problems — but only if they are in base 10.
Do you mean decimal base 10, or binary base 10 ?
@ Stu,
I approve your message and feels, as Lightnin Hopkins says to Sonny Terry, your sympafy.
@Stu: I mean wisenheimer base 10.
While I would happily endorse David Eddyshaw’s eulogy of science, I’m rather allergic to the notion of “believing in science”. There are a lot of ways that phrase can be read in principle, some very defensible, but in practice it all too often ends up meaning “accept without question, at second or third hand, a body of facts reported to you as authoritative”. Which is not only antithetical to the spirit of scientific investigation, but a standing temptation to fraud.
Yes, of course those are necessary qualifiers, but we live in an age when rejection of science is the far greater danger.
I’m not allergic to it, I tend to mechanically object to it.
Nevertheless I said myself that science is the truth. By this I define science of course, not the truth.
But science (the isntitution) very often is a very honest attempt to reach the truth.
It is presently limited to certain methods and of course it won’t with these methods approach ALL the truth accesible to us. But I don’t want to equate sceince with particular methodology.
Because: I’m not aware of any other human occupation which usually is honest to the very same extent.
I already told that the problem I see with religion (despite believeing in God) is that very often a religion is what some historican (who wrote about Vandals and Arianism) said: a group of people opposed to other groups of people. Scientists are often in peace when their countries are at war, it is the opposite with sects.
And for me it is a miracle (I mean that) that mathematicians basically always agree. Despite proofs can be presented in very different ways in different languages. Even unitelligible texts (and there are people who publish things others don’t quite understand) are sometimes recognised as “untinelligible because the author is smarter than me”.
Scientists are often in peace when their countries are at war, it is the opposite with sects
I think this is an unwarranted generalisation, based on a very small and highly unrepresentative subset of world “religions.”
Admittedly, a very popular subset. (Basically, Christianity and Islam, and a few other cases where “religion” has been adopted as a feature of modern Western-style ethnonationalism, as with Hindutva, the motivation of which is wholly based on Western concepts of “nationality.”)
The Kusaasi, whose outlook is far more representative of the historical human norm, couldn’t care less if people disagree with them about “religion.”
Moreover, ostensibly “religious” divisions, even in the Christian and Islamic worlds, have very often been coopted and deliberately exacerbated for political ends. Examples abound. (Henry VIII just wanted a divorce.)
in honor of james scott zts”l, i feel i should sound a little note of caution about how the fascinating paper DM summarized and commented on seems to depend to some extent on an outdated linear (if not strictly Stages of Civilization, though some of the excerpts seemed pretty close to that approach) model for the histories of grain cultivation. part of what’s so useful about scott’s Against the Grain is the way that by gathering and synthesizing a few decades of detailed research it’s able to give a complex but clear picture to replace the staged linear models that 19thC europe and its colonies loved so much. with grain cultivation, what he presents is an account of a set of processes that can move in multiple directions and operate very differently in different times and places, in a field which has entire continua between wild-gathering and monocrop fields, between occasional/opportunistic use and year-round dependence, and between ‘sedentary’ and ‘nomadic’. i hope that there will be a followup to the paper (perhaps there already is!) that gives the complex and far from linear material realities of the cultural/nutritional terrain as much subtle attention as it gives the lexicons and their semantic development. it seems like that would be helpful to the arguments it’s trying to make.
That would… only work in West IE. In PIE, *ḱw, *kw and *kʷ were three different things. They have three different outcomes in satem languages, and at least sometimes between vowels two different outcomes in Greek. Indo-Slavic *k is the outcome of PIE *kʷ, but not of *ḱw (or *kw).
The long prehistory of contact between Slavic and Iranian has many decades of research now. It shows up in Slavic vocabulary, Slavic phonology to some extent, and probably in Ossetic vocabulary – there are a few examples in the paper I talked about yesterday in this thread.
That’s not what the word means. Science is the method for discovering falsehoods (truth only by elimination, if at all).
That’s in the introduction, especially in the parts I didn’t quote that go deep into archeological detail.
“That’s not what the word means. Science is the method for discovering falsehoods (truth only by elimination, if at all).”
@DM, methods evolve.
IF there were two distinct schools who both tried to learn the truth (tried as honestly as possible), then one of them would be “science” and it would be not a method but a class of methods practiced by this school as opposed to that school.
But I simply can’t see anyone esle.
Well, all right, we can of course speak of art as another way of approaching the truth.
Or we can say the same about “the spiritual truth” and various people who honestly try to understand it.
But then what remains is not just a particular methods. Bascially what remains is all sorts of systematic study:/
Also when I define sceience this way, math is included and when we define science in the usual way, math is not, it is just people examining ideas and pictures found in their heads:)
I OF COURSE place math very high and if math is not a science it says nothing good about science.
I just don’t want to exclude others from the club:)
“The long prehistory of contact between Slavic and Iranian has many decades of research now. It shows up in Slavic vocabulary, Slavic phonology to some extent, and probably in Ossetic vocabulary – there are a few examples in the paper I talked about yesterday in this thread.”
I understand. But there are some examples that make Russians drop their jaws.
Like an Indian name similar to our Sveta (and of the same etymology).
Now the question is: if we examine all such examples, will we come to the conclusions that
“yes, Russians meet familiar words in Sanscrit exactly because close connections (possibly areal) between BS and II and if not those close connections they would drop their jaws much less often”
or
“no, it is just some (accidental) convergence”.
I don’t know. After all such examples can be found in Italian too. Occhi, Ostia (formerly a port town, now a part of Rome, the mouth of the Tiber) etc.
I don’t think “science” is tied to any particular method (at which point, of course, it is mandatory to recommend Paul Feyerabend’s deeply entertaining Against Method. Seriously.) It’s an attitude, not a method.
@DE yes, but Russia is vdery deep within this subset. I don’t really know much about other religions.
Say, I recognise that Christians and Muslims (and I guess Jews but I don’t know really well how Jews feel about such things. They for one thing, don’t proselitise) believe in the same God.
But what makes Kusaasi “religion” a “religion” in the same sense of the word as these? I don’t know. Because basically I know nothing and will know nothing even if I memorise their religious vocabulary.
PS. DE, wait! “Mandatory” or “entertaining”? Nothing mandatory can be entertaining:)
(Sure it stands in the same relation to manda “cunt” and FYLOSC pizdarija to pizda “cunt”)
PPS I know it is mandatory to recommend, and entertaining as reading🙂
But what makes Kusaasi “religion” a “religion” in the same sense of the word as these?
Good point: my scare quotes are there to flag up that “religion” is a culture-bound concept, not simply applicable as a human universal. As you were using the word in just that sense, I should concede your point.
However, not everything that is regarded by Westerners as a religion really is a religion in that sense; though the West’s cultural stranglehold on the world is so strong that many practioners of traditional “religions” now conceive of themselves in Western categories and regard themselves as adherents of religions (i.e. things like “Christianity” and “Islam.”) Thus with “Vaudun” and “Hinduism”, for example.
“but it doesn’t form …”
@LH, I think you are wrong here. My relations with science might be different from yours, but I doubt it is less important for me. A common situation. We have lots of shared interests – and yet we disagree often.
No, I think I usually formulate (for myself) my questions about the reality in scientific terms. And if I recognise it as the only honest institutionalised activity of humans, that is A LOT.
“…they tend to be much better at spreading their bullshit than scientists are at spreading the truth…”
I don’t know about “better” (because come on, we have school and it is mandatory). But they are definitely good at that, and when I say I’m not annoyed I do not mean that you’re “wrong” when you are.
I’m just not as annoyed.
However: “…when rejection of science is the far greater danger.” – I’m not confindent that this is not paranoid thinking (and people guided by paranoid thinking are a serious risk to become liars and lying in the name of science is fucking for virginity). And I’m not confident it is: at least you personally do NOT look like an example of that.
at which point, of course, it is mandatory to recommend Paul Feyerabend’s deeply entertaining Against Method.
They hardly make ’em like that nowadays (Doron Zeilberger is a prominent exception). In the 70s many Bildungsbürger were in transports of horror at that book, which I enjoyed immensely. By the way, the title of the German translation is more to the point: Wider den Methodenzwang.
Well, kids discussed it in my school. Younger kids.
We, older kids, were busy with more serious things (like rediscovering clitoris).
I don’t know about “better” (because come on, we have school and it is mandatory).
Do you seriously think most kids 1) absorb, 2) believe, and 3) remember all the stuff they are taught in school? Come on.
However: “…when rejection of science is the far greater danger.” – I’m not confindent that this is not paranoid thinking
You haven’t been paying attention during the last decade or two, I gather. Does the term “vaccine skeptic” ring a bell?
@LH, we can at least agree that unscientific nonsense is all over the place. You’re unnoyed, I’m not, and I do not think that you’re wrong, I just don’t feel this annoyoment.
But when you have such a compulsory institution you can’t claim that you’re a quiet whisper against their roaring storm.
Also a significan portion of everyone’s GPD goes to actual scientific research. Moroccan sorcerers so famous in the Arab world and elsewhere are hungry. (jinn are underpaid too:().
(Though Blake: …The Atoms of Democritus / And Newtons Particles of light / Are sands upon the Red sea shore / Where Israels tents do shine so bright)
You’re unnoyed
I would really love to be unannoyed
Going back to an earlier tangent, I recently learned about the Julian period used chiefly in astronomy. The current Julian period started on 1 January 4713 BC. According to Britannica:
“unnoyed”
Oh. I felt that something is wrong about what I typed, and checked the word a couple of times. But each time my eyes focused on the weird sequence -oye-:)
the weird sequence -oye-
buoyed or indeed buoyed-up in the foyer, overjoyed. Employed, deployed or merely ployed.
@drasvi: Blake was a weird and inconsistent guy. I feel like that poem totally misses the point of the story of Balaam, which (it seems to me) should be that no pronouncements can be made which are contrary to the divine plan. If the philosophes could forcefully advocate for humanism, that means that at that time and place, humanism was called for.
Weird, sure: but not inconsistent, surely? I’d say that he was strikingly consistent in his weirdness.
I don’t think the Balaam’s Ass story can bear that interpretation. It would imply that any sufficiently widespread practice or opinion was (temporarily) fine by God. This appears to be inconsistent with other passages that spring to mind. Unless you just mean that God permits evil to flourish, and we just have to trust that evenually we will see why. I believe it, but it’s one of the more disturbing doctrines, to say the least.
Balaam is a fascinating character. Bad man, true prophet.
in honor of james scott zts”l
As rozele implies, James C. Scott has died. Dammit. And what a terrible thing to have experienced:
@Brett, is there a specific reference to the story of Balaam in the poem which I didn’t notice?
“weird” – yes.
@David Eddyshaw, drasvi: The last line of “Mock On, Mock On, Voltaire, Rousseau”
definitely looks like a reference to Numbers 24:5 (an important Jewish prayer),
and I am certainly not the only person who has made the connection. Moreover, the story of Balaam’s blessings of Israel also includes an instance of the repeated metaphor that the children of Israel becoming as numerous and ubiquitous as the grains of sand (or dust); and the invocations the begin some of Balaam’s pronouncements have open eyes as a major theme:
The theme of Balaam that I was alluded to was his repeated claim that only what the Lord wishes to be said may be said.
By the Red Sea, both discordant with your reading, and unnecessary, makes me think this is not an allusion to the story of Balaam. The Numbers verse even continues with a geographical detail, placing the tents “like valleys, like gardens by a river”, which is what we would expect from Balaam, who looked at Israel from the perspective of Moab across the Jordan, not from Egypt.
> Are sands upon the Jordan’s bank
would have scanned just as well, offered alliteration (on b instead of sh), been as familiar to Blake’s audience, and not led discerning readers away from Balaam for no particular reason.
There is no thought of open eyes in Blake’s poem.
I don’t think that every reference to tents and eyes, even from someone learned in Biblical verse, is a reference to Balaam. It’s a fun thought, and I can’t say you’re wrong. But it feels like a stretch for me.
I always took Blake’s meaning to be that science was an obstacle to vision as the Red Sea was an obstacle to Israel.
“as numerous and ubiquitous as the grains of sand (or dust)” – Translated as “dust” in KJV and in all modern translations on Biblehub except “Aramaic Bible in Plain English” (which has “Who can count the troubles of Yaquuv and the number of the fourth of Israel?“. I don’t know if the diffrence is because of Peshitta or because of Plain English:)).
I see in modern Russian translations it is sand.
Well, technically I think עפר is what pictured in Hebrew Wiktionary. But i can be wrong. חול “sand” appears in Jeremiah 33:22 “As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, neither the sand of the sea measured: so will I multiply the seed of David my servant, and the Levites that minister unto me.”
A stupid quesiton: is sand found anywhere in the region apart of the sea shore?
The metaphor for me is that sand is something good (raw gems shining in Israel’s paths) misused with mocking intent. Whether there is a reference to Numbers, there is certainly a reference to Galatians, where the assurance that “God is not mocked” is immediately followed by reaping what you sow — the sands you throw, your mocking words, will come back to blind you. Most of the wordplay is around light and shininess and suggests that the triumphs of science do not mock God, but reflect his triumph.
“Israel’s Negev Desert is largely a rock desert, however one area contains sweeping sand dunes…” informs me Google, but it is still unclear how common it is and is “sea” the only association or it is “desert” as it is for us as well.
PS I also think Petra is carved from rose sandstone and that’s all I know:(
>A stupid quesiton: is sand found anywhere in the region apart of the sea shore?
It’s a good question, not least since the climate has changed since the time in question. But few are the rivers that have no sandy outwashes anywhere. A big part of the region is desert today and was certainly arid then. The hills above the Jordan’s flood plain on the Moab side look sandy in google maps.
And I think most of these places would have been understood as arid semi-desert, likely sandy, in Blake’s day; that farmers live in houses and cultivate watered land, while Bedouins and Israelites live in tents and roam the sands.
Also, sandy beaches are few and far between on some ocean shores.
is sand found anywhere in the region apart of the sea shore?
Well, “sand” is reconstructable to proto-Oti-Volta. And the Oti-Volta languages are all a long way from the sea.
>Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
Is it too much to think the term blowback, which apparently first appeared in print in a CIA history c. 1954 about the overthrow of Mossadeq, was invented with Blake’s poem in mind?
“a good question” – well, yes, but as a Russian, especially one interested in Semitic (but it is enough to be an educated Russian) I’m supposed to have travelled in the region.
“Also, sandy beaches are few and far between on some ocean shores.”
Yes, but cf. KJB, Deuteronomy 33:19 “… for they shall suck of the abundance of the seas, and of treasures hid in the sand.”,
Job 6:3: “For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea: therefore my words are swallowed up.”
and “sand of the sea” in Jeremiah 33:22 above.
So it seems there was a connection.
For modern Russians sand metaphors are mostly literary and the primary association is I think “desert” and also sunbathing/swimming – even though there are sandy places in European Russia (and also we see it in sandboxes and on beaches:)). Conversely “desert” for us is sand. The two most famous deserts of USSR are Karakum (“black sand” in Turkic) and Kyzylkum (“red sand”). The desert of all deserts is Sahara and then one thinks of Arabia.
But I can’t guess what the answer to “what images come to your mind when you hear “[sand, desert, sea, dust…]” was even for medieval Russians, what to say about Israelites.
Same for Blake.
Not all deserts are sandy after all, say, the Ḥarrah where Safaitic inscription were found is volcanic and looks like this (the word ḥarrah means exactly a landscape like this, as I understand, presumably related to ḥarr “heat”).
@Ryan, Roger C: I agree that the sands on the bottom of the Red Sea* making a path for the children of Israel is an equally plausible Biblical reference, although that wasn’t the one that jumped out at me. Blake might have intended either one, or perhaps a fugue of overlapping scriptural allusions.
* The Hebrew really means “sea of reeds,” but Blake would have been thinking of the Red Sea.
Well, Blake actually said “Red Sea.”
But poetry isn’t a one-to-one thing, and maybe Balaam is in there somewhere.
I don’t quite understand why (possible) Arabic cognates of ʿāp̄ār “dust” look like this:
– ḡabara, ḡubār
– ʕafar
“(perhaps borrowed from Aramaic)” says wiktionary in עפר and “(possibly borrowed from Ancient North Arabian)” in PS *ʕapar- about ʕafar.
All right, but ḡubār!?
Too bad for science then, and I say this as a scientist. Math is a generalization over how physical objects behave, just as logic is a generalization over how mathematical objects behave. It is complete in itself, without needing comparison to physical reality.
Fair enough, my use of “method” was too wide.
GDP? If only!
Research and development expenditure (% of GDP)
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GB.XPD.RSDV.GD.ZS
And no, 3.26% (Austria) is not Much. Also R&D is more than just scientific research.
But on the other hand it is GDP and not “state budget” or something like that.
Science works, so it is going to be funded of course. Basically, compulsory schooling has to do with this: children are compelled to study largely because it is good for economy.
@DM, mathematics is inspired of course by natural sceinces and human expereince in general (much of which is human experience with reality).
But natural sciences have to cut corners. You can’t really prove anything there.
Much of my occasional conflict with those is about cutting corners. One way to do it is taking uncritically something written in textbooks. Is that bad? Englineers need to believe (just beleive) scientists to be productive but to really understand a text you need to read it critically even when it does not contain bullshit.
The other way is treating something “very likely” as a fact (and in some sense nothing is a fact, because see above). But if I ask you if a certain mathematical statement is true you will first try to prove it (thus relying on its truth), then to disprove it (thus relying on its falsehood). Human mind totally can treat something as a fact while still remembering that it is not quite a fact (and can be wrong however small the likelyhood of that is). Remembering what corners you have cut does not seem to hinder thinking.
For this reason simply replacing all “high” probabilities with 1 at all levels of your thinking jsut for simplicity seems unnecessary to me.
And this is one scenario where ordinary people can be right and a scientist can be wrong: when she has cut a corner (a wrong corner to cut as it turns out) and refused to remember about it.
In this case she’s wrong because she’s unscientific.
____
There is one more, when scientists are uninterested in a fact (here just as a unit, not as something certain) that less educated people know “because it is not science” – and then some bearded man describes the very same fact and everyone is excited because now it is.
Nothing exotic about this situation. Anthropology is wholly about telling bearded men and no so bearded women in universities stories that every child (in the studied tribe) knows.
But transfer of facts from the corpus of popular knowlege to the corpus of “scientific knowlege” is a thing not only in anthropology. And then the author of the transfer can be praiced with a “discovery” when in reality it is more like thousands others scientists who ignored it when heard it as a part of the corpus of popular knowlege are incredibly dumb.
Just some thoughts:
1) If you define science as only what is achieved by using the modern scientific method, then one could argue that there basically was no science before ca. the 15th century. But there is also a definition of science as any organized system of knowledge, a definition which makes it possible to meaningfully speak about ancient Greek / Roman / Egyptian / Babylonian etc sience; this is a definition I personally know from Spengler but which seems to be implicit when people talk about science in pre-modern settings.
2) I remember seeing people argue that mathematics, as an abstract set of rules that cannot be falsified, is not a science but a scientific tool.
3) It’s occasionally the case that scientists come up with results that then are mocked as “ha ha ha, everybody knows that already, why did they need to spend time and money on that”. But there is a difference between something being commonly known and something having been rigorously checked. Often science tells us that what “everybody knows” is actually wrong, or at least not verifiably true, so I think it’s good and useful if common knowledge is sometimes proven right.
But transfer of facts from the corpus of popular knowlege to the corpus of “scientific knowlege” is a thing not only in anthropology.
Obviously a big issue in pharmacology or botany, but worth thinking about for linguistics. Multiple levels:
– text collections for minority languages;
– analysis copying – Panini to Bloomfield, say;
– formalisation of general knowledge, as in some kinds of sociolinguistics…
Thing is, though, in each case the transfer is more than just a transfer. It’s a translation into a very different paradigm, allowing users to make dense new discipline-internal connections while obscuring existing discipline-external ones – facilitating new insights but sometimes erasing old ones.
@Hans,
1) note that for me science is not a corpus of knowlege but asking questions. It is not that a science which is merely a tradition of transmission of knowlegefrom bearded men and not so bearded women to the young and inexperienced is worthless. But the difference between such a science and our science is very important.
This has to do with why I’m not irritated when people believe in wrong facts. I promote not the corpus, not answers but [the desire to ask] questions. It is this tradition I think which is the treasure presently at our disposal.
Systems of transmission and preservation of knowlege differ from ours.
Our students are expected to contribute into science, perhaps even find flaws in the theories they are taught. And there is simply no such a point where you are expected to stop learning “because you already know everything”.
Systems aimed at preservation can be much more hierarchical. As a student you’re expect to just listen attentively to what is said to you – to what is right, that is. Period. When you graduate you can tell others what is right.
Our education has traits of both systems, and popularisation of scientific knowlege too has traits of both traditions. When you demand from someone faith in a scientific fact, you basically encourage her to take it uncritically and ask no questions – and act from within that second system (that of preservation).
My relations with this system are ambigous because of course I think knowlege is a good thing*, but on the other hand there is something in the system I’m simply hostile to.
It is not the only ambiguous thing about our education. E.g. exams and certification in general (good for mass production, less so for unique people). Or about science:
– it is a collaborative effort not competetive. Yet competition can encourage people to ask new questions.
– money attract people who need money and are generally less impressive than enthusiasts who would do science for free. But without money and prestige many people will leave science.
*there is some ambiguity in my relationship with knowlege too. When I’m knowlegeable it is really difficult to think something original:) When I’m a tabula rasa it is difficult to invent anything:)
With evolution (around which one fo the most famous grand battles is fought for some reason) the problem I think is that you can’t prove it AND even to explain why the idea is attractive you need your student to learn A LOT.
The thing about evolution (in the “origin of species” sense) is not that it is not provable, but that it is not refutable. Properly speaking, nothing is scientifically provable.
The problem of not being even potentially refutable was addressed by Popper, who used this as a demarcation criterion between science and non-science, by describing the theory of evolution as a “metaphysical research program.” (This does not mean, as sometimes alleged by creationists, that he thought it was invalid.) The idea was subsequently refined and clarified a lot by (my hero) Imre Lakatos:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lakatos/#ImprPoppScie
All this is not the only way of addressing the issues, mind.
Whether mathematics is a “science” is really just a question of definition, I think (though Quine thought it actually was fundamentally just the same kind of animal as physics, say, not many philosophers of science seem to agree.)
@DE, why not refutable?
(anyway, I was not speaking about problems in the theory itself – rather about the problem of converting infidels into believers, which is the problem so many participants of the fight are concerned with).
What experiment can you devise that would show that the origin of current species was not due to evolution by natural selection? What potential observation would show that an explanation of the origin of species via natural selection was invalid?
(If I hypothesise that all swans are white, I can say that my hypothesis is invalid if someone finds a black swan. That makes the hypothesis “scientific” chez Popper. It’s falsifiable. You may object that this doesn’t really work as a demarcation line between science and non-science, and nowadays pretty much everyone would agree with you: however, it remains a key concept.)
[Converting infidels into believers by pushing creationism would be an incredibly ineffective tactic, but I don’t think that’s really what’s going on with US creationists: the whole creation science thing is more a combination of defensive cultural paranoia and offensive attempted cultural hegemony and suppression of internal and external dissent.]
I meant believers in evolution.
I think one side wants masses believe in evolution (to consider it real and true and NOT to be creationists) and the other wants masses not to believe in evolution.
It’s only a live issue at all because so many US Protestants have decided to make it a core cultural shibboleth (an attitude which is really quite recent, historically, and has zero real theological basis. What a stupid hill to pick to die on ….)
By contrast, traditionalist Muslims are, in principle, also “creationist”, but this has never been a core part of Muslim identity. Muslims have more important issues in mind when they self-define. US fundamentalist Christians could learn from them.
To be fair to my deluded Trumpodule cousins, this is at least in some part a reaction to nineteenth-century rationalist attacks on Christianity which attempted to weaponise the “Theory of Evolution” (as continued in our day by nineteenth-century rationalists like Dawkins); but there are rather better ways of responding to the attempted syllogism “the origin of species lies in natural selection: therefore there is no God” than furious denial of the premise. (Anybody whose faith really is is based on the argument from Paley’s Watch is going to have serious problems anyway; not that I’ve ever actually met one. Maybe they have them in America …)
Well, what I mean,
– the desired outcome for one group of fighters is that a certain Mary agrees that evolution is real.
– the desired outcome for the other group of fighters is that a certain Mary disagrees that evolution is real.
And I’m speaking of the problems of the first (evolutionist) group. As for the second group, I just don’t understand them, and as it is with you, my faith does not help.
DE, well, I think it contains components that are observable.
By evolution we mean a certain history of species and more narrowly selection as its explanation.
If we find that a mechanism very different from selection was necessary for all the complexity that we observe to arise, that will be a refutation I think. Though of course, science will interpret it as refinement of the theory* and creationists won’t accept the new theory unless this mechanism involves God.
Also if known history of species were different, the idea of evolution would not have looked attractive at all. If cats were not similar to tigers and so on.
* Actually for me every scientific theory is just a model. It is not “what and how actually happened”. The theory of evolution looks like the best model available to us – and such a mechanism won’t be a refutation of THIS.
And there is no place for debates: if a creationist believes that a better model is possible, she either should invent it or everyone will keep working with the model we have.
But the debate is all about “what and how actually happened”.
It’s the same as any other science that deals with long distances in time or space (like astrophysics): you can’t arrange experiments much bigger than this, so you have to make do with the evidence that already exists.
That evidence does let you make some rather dramatic parsimony arguments, though. For example, the similarity of life forms a tree – not, as some people actually thought in the 18th and early 19th centuries, in a ring or a tape or a fractal fivefold symmetry or whatever. Further, the dearth of “rabbits in the Precambrian” is getting worse every week.
What Popper seems to have overlooked is that “refutation” is parsimony anyway. You can always come up with some ridiculously munificent hypothesis that would circumvent your neat disproof.
BTW, there are or used to be a few pretty loud Muslim creationists online. The difference is that they’re all OEC: they don’t need to insist the universe is only 6000 (or rounded to 10000) years old because the Qur’an doesn’t contain enough genealogy to require YEC and doesn’t contain a creation story detailed enough to suggest day-age creationism.
Artist’s impression of Precambrian rabbit
The lost presentation by Poulsen & Olander (2022) on “Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic”.
The title slide contains the defunct URL.
Slide 2 says:
and shows a map from that paper: “The Impact of Yamnaya Steppe Pastoralists” on the genetic ancestry of people in the general IE-speaking area.
Slide 3:
Slide 4 is “Star phylogeny (1)”; Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic each have a direct straight line to “Indo-European”.
Slide 5:
The last reference is this open-access book chapter. “Promising innovations shared with Italic and with Balto-Slavic (and Tocharian?) are considered in particular, but the sustained productivity of nominal ablaut and the preterite-presents calls for the conclusion that Germanic split off from Proto-Indo-European relatively early, as these features are mostly lost in the non-Anatolian branches.” Meh. No further arguments are offered in the text.
Slide 6:
I’m not sure I understand the second premise.
Slide 7:
This is illustrated on the rest of slide 7 and on slide 8, “Premises (3)”.
Then follow IE trees from the literature. Slide 9 is “Schindler apud Matzinger 2012″, “material not specified”; Jasanoff (2004: 249) is quoted as saying “Germanic and Balto-Slavic began their post-IE history together”. The tree indeed has Germanic as the sister group of Balto-Slavic; Indo-Iranian is in an unresolved trichotomy with Armenian and Greek; these two large branches are sister groups, with Albanian freely floating between them with a question mark. Together, they’re the sister group of Italo-Celtic; on the outside follow Tocharian and then Anatolian.
Slide 10 is “Ringe et al. 2002; Nakhleh et al. 2005”, “based on shared innovations + lexical cognacy”. It has an Indo-Slavic clade next to Graeco-Armenian; together they’re in an unresolved trichotomy with Albanian and Germanic. The rest is as on slide 9.
Slide 11: “Exclusive shared roots in LIV²“. It’s a table to be read as e.g. “Anatolian shares 7.7% of its verbal roots EXCLUSIVELY with Indo-Iranian” (small caps in the original). Red background reproduced here as bold, green as italic:
Anatolian with Indo-Iranian: 7.7%; with Balto-Slavic: 2.4%
Tocharian: I-I 4.3%, B-S 2.1%
Italic: I-I 3.5%, B-S 4.1%
Celtic: I-I 3.8%, B-S 3.3%
Germanic: I-I 4.6%, B-S 13.6%
Greek: I-I 9.4%, B-S 4.9%
Armenian: I-I 1.9%, B-S 1.9% as well
Albanian: I-I 3.7%, B-S 2.5%
Indo-Iranian: B-S 5.0%
Balto-Slavic: I-I 6.4%
Slide 12: “Exclusive innovations”. A table; I’ll make a list out of it.
ruki change: shown as only B-S, which is of course a mistake for B-S and I-I
merger of *kʷ and *k: B-S, I-I, in parentheses also Armenian and Albanian
*k > *ḱ […something is wrong here…]: B-S, I-I, Armenian, Albanian
future in *-si̯e/o-: B-S, I-I; though absent only in Italo-Celtic and Greek, “?” in the other five branches
productive comparative in *-tero-: I-I, Greek
dat. pl. *-m- → *-bʰ-: Italo-Celtic, I-I; though absent only in Germanic and Balto-Slavic, “?” in the other five branches
instr. pl. *-bʰ- → *-m-: Germanic, B-S; though absent only in Italo-Celtic, Greek, Armenian and I-I, “?” in the other three branches
pers. pron. 1pl. nom. *u̯- → *m-: Armenian, B-S; unknown in Greek and Albanian
The old idea (Hirt 1895) that the dat. pl. originally had *m, the instr. pl. originally had *bʰ, and all branches that retain both cases have generalized one or the other seems less parsimonious to me than the phonological explanation that forms chapter 3 of this paper, but never mind.
Slide 13: “Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic: ruki change”
“*ḱ and *ʃ merge as *ḱ in Balto-Slavic” makes sense once you keep in mind that *ḱ had become *[ɕ] by Proto-Balto-Slavic. “*h̥” refers to the vowel that was inserted in I-I (or earlier) after every “laryngeal” that was between two other consonants.
Slide 14: “Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic: delabialisation of *Kʷ”
Slides 15–17 are dedicated to the supposed weirdness of the *Ḱ-K-Kʷ phenomenon and an attempt to reduce the three series to two. It’s neither fully worked out nor plausible nor relevant to the Indo-Slavic hypothesis, and I haven’t read the two references from 1973 and 1978 that evidently haven’t caught on in fifty years, so I’m skipping it.
Slide 18: “Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic: morphology and lexicon”
Some of these have root cognates elsewhere in IE, but these seem to be intended as strict forms. For example, cold is from *ḱl̥H-tó-; the *o-grade of the “potential” Indo-Slavic version is unexpected and should therefore indeed be an innovation.
(…and the fact that Verner’s law applied in cold ought to mean that the *H was *h₃, but I digress.)
Slide 19: “Indo-Iranian and Greek?”
(I do wonder if “*meh₁” was *mē the whole time, an interjection exempt from the restrictions on roots of content words, but I digress again.)
Slide 20: “Indo-Iranian and Italo-Celtic?”
As mentioned on slide 12, these are the two branches that have *bʰ both in the dat./abl. pl. and the instr. pl.; Balto-Slavic and (with a parenthesis around the dat./abl.) Germanic have *m in both; Greek and Armenian have *bʰ in the instr. pl., but the dat./abl. pl. is marked “–”. This is called an independent change.
Slide 21: “Balto-Slavic and Germanic?”
Same table, same conclusion: “parallel change” to *m in both. However, also:
Slide 22: “Balto-Slavic and Armenian?”
The German case is different, though. It seems to have happened after the 1pl. ending had shrunk from -mes to -n: -n w- became [mː], which was reinterpreted as -n m-. In resolutely pro-drop languages this isn’t likely to happen.
Slide 23: “The position of Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic”
“based on shared innovations”. A tree. Let’s see…
Indo-European
Anatolian
Indo-Tocharian
Indo-Celtic
Italo-Celtic
Italic
Celtic
Indo-Germanic
Germanic
Indo-Greek
Greek
Satəm IE
Armenian
Albanian
Indo-Slavic
Indo-Iranian
Indic
Iranian
Balto-Slavic
Baltic
Slavic
There’s an unexplained ellipse around Greek, Armenian and Albanian. “Satəm IE” is marked as characterized by what I’ve called the satm shift, Indo-Slavic by what I’ve called the satəm merger and by ruki.
FWIW, I’d put Germanic next to Italo-Celtic, forming a “West IE” branch that I’d put next to Albanian.
Slide 24, “Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic: genes and languages”, consists only of the figure from Narasimhan et al. (2019) that was already shown, smaller, on slide 2.
Slide 25, “Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic: archaeology”, consists only of a figure from Nordqvist & Heyd (2020), which shows a map and cultures arranged in a loop:
Slide 26: “Questions for the geneticists – and a reply”
On 24 August 2022, the authors asked, apparently on Twitter:
Iosif Lazaridis answered on Twitter the following day:
Therefore:
Slide 27: “Conclusions”
Slide 28 is a somewhat comical attempt to put numbers to the probabilities. It’s called “Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic: Bayesian approach”.
Slides 29–32 are references, slide 33 consists only of its headline “Bonus slides”; those are a “Relative chronology of changes”, but only the parts of satəm and ruKi, on slide 34 (lots of arrows, not very clear), “Slavic and Baltic: shared innovations” (35, 36), arguments against “The uvular scenario” for *Ḱ-K-Kʷ (37), and interesting lists:
Slide 38 is “IIr. + BSl. exclusive shared roots in LIV²“. There are 25 without and 3 with a question mark. Off the top of my head, though, there seem to be a few problems. *ḱu̯ei̯t- ‘hell aufleuchten’ [shine up brightly] is for example where white comes from (*ḱu̯ei̯t-nó-); three roots are claimed to begin with *kʷ, which is impossible to distinguish from *k if they don’t occur outside Indo-Slavic (and indeed, three roots are given with “*gʷ/g” and one with “*gʷʰ/gʰ”); and *pleth₂- ‘breit werden, sich ausbreiten’ [become wide, spread (intr.)] would seem to occur as flat in Germanic (…*ploth₂-nó-, I guess) and platy- in Greek (*pl̥th₂-u-), and I just saw three more… probably the list is intended as roots that form verbs directly in Indo-Slavic but are attested elsewhere only in derivatives.
Slide 39 is “IIr. + Gk. exclusive shared roots in LIV²“. There are 41 without and 3 with a question mark.
Slide 40 is “BSl. + Gmc. exclusive shared roots in LIV²“. There are 20 without and 30 with a question mark – quite a contrast to the preceding two slides.
Slide 41 is Schleicher’s (1861) tree, slide 42 is that of Trager & Smith (1950, “based on phonological innovations”), slide 43 that of Holm (2008, “based on lexical cognacy (verbal roots)”. All three have Germanic next to Balto-Slavic.
Slide 44 is the tree of Hamp (2013), “based on: not specified”. Balto-Slavic is next to Albanian; together they’re next to Tocharian and Germanic. Mair would probably love it.
Slide 45 is “Bouckaert et al. 2013; Change et al. 2015”, “based on lexical cognacy”. Balto-Slavic next to West IE.
Slide 46 is “Kassian et al. 2021”, likewise “based on lexical cognacy”. Indo-Slavic!
The 47th and last slide presents a “Simplified scenario for the spread of Indo-European”:
I think 3a, 3b and 6c are the same event, and pre-Albanian was spoken in the Danube valley in Roman times before it spread southwest without a lot of population movement – the Albanian nationalists who’ve been identifying themselves with the Illyrians for the last 200 years could actually have a point…
Almost cute, but the face is on the wrong side… we’re looking at the back of the trilobite. 🙁
As I ponted before, 6000BP is perfectly compatible with modern science.
Before 6000BP everything was evolving in God’s imagination. He was designing everything.
Then everything was evolving in God’s world.
(Post below written before I came to the timeline at the bottom of DM’s long, interesting post.)
This is fascinating, but muddled. I at least hadn’t been aware of it. Maybe it was obvious to anyone who paid closer attention to y-chromosome data.:
>99% of Indo-European speakers stem from Corded Ware ancestors. It is only three small groups: Greeks, Armenians, Albanians who go up to the Yamnaya not via Corded Ware intermediaries. Many others were wiped out linguistically, e.g. Tocharians and most Paleo-Balkan speakers.
The 99% figure is just weird. 99% of current speakers? The 41 million African American in the US alone are more than 1% of IE speakers, with millions of others of African descent in European countries (and some number of people in Africa as well, not to mention Spanish speakers of South and Central American native ancestry, and of course, Greeks, Albanians and Armenians), so that doesn’t make sense. But how would he arrive at a percentage of ancient speakers? Maybe he just means some large majority of those ancient speakers known to us. Does the last phrase mean that Tocharians and Paleo-Balkan speakers stem from Yamnaya but no longer exist? Or that they’ve not been sufficiently genetically tested to be sure?
Anyway, it’s the separate line of descent for Greek, Armenian and Albanian that is interesting to me. David, you segue into centum/satem. There was already a line of thinking that Albanian and Armenian were not actually satem, maybe developing similarity to satem languages via a different path. Does the genetic evidence strengthen that idea?
This also seems to add credence to the idea being discussed above in relation to agricultural terms, that most IE expansion may have taken place north of the Yamnaya. This suggests the Yamnaya themselves and their dialect moved one way or another around the Black Sea, separately from the ancestors of all other IE speakers, who descend from Corded Ware.
1% is a curiously good approximation of the relative share of Greek, Albanian and Armenian speakers (WP: 13.5, 7.5, 5.3 millions 26.3 overall) among IE speakers (3.2 billion – says WP adding that it is “46%” of the world – did they stuck in the year 2011 when it was 7 billion?).
Well, all right, if you are an ethnically Kazakh Russian speaker, you learned your Indo-European dialect from us Corded Ware
potters* speakers an not them Armenians!*here we usually call it Battle Axe, not Corded Ware.
4 Pre-Greek spreads south.
5 Satəmisation takes place in pre-Satəm
6a Pre-Armenian spreads south.
6b Pre-Albanian spreads south.
6c Pre-Indo-Slavic spreads west, and the speakers pick up CW-related ancestry.
7a Pre-Indo-Iranian spreads east.
7b Pre-Greek, pre-Armenian and pre-Albanian go through a phase of close contact..
Putting the 7b close phase of contact after the 4-6b sequence of southward spreads doesn’t make sense to me. South from where? The Yamnaya were pretty much on the Black Sea. If Armenian, Albanian and Greek were spreading south, wouldn’t the former be spreading in a different direction around the Black Sea from the others. How/where would they go through a phase of close contact after that dispersal? And why posit that, rather than just assuming they were more closely related?
Which is basically what David implies when he suggests that the 6c/7a movement of Indo Slavic and then I-I speakers that intervenes was actually the same Corded Ware-related movement that this timeline puts in 3a/3b, before the southward move of the G/A/A peoples.
Yes, Would be interesting to know based on what they
(a) expect Greek, Albanian and Armenian to be independent from CW
(b) speak of their contact
(c) place their southward spread in this particular order.
Regarding a and b, it is not that I am not aware of isoglosses (Graeco-Armenian is an old idea) I just don’t know which considerations were improtant for them.
Regarding c the situation is opposite. You can’t so easily date movement based on just linguistics (and Greek speakers came to Greece much later). Also what about pre-Scythian Pontic nomads?
Apparently they are trying to explain satem shift (like ‘everyone shifted once greeks moved’), but making everything hinge on one isogloss is not a very good idea.
I’m assuming they’re basing the Greek, Albanian and Armenian independence from CW primarily on the genetic information they got from Lazarides, that David quoted and then I highlighted, showing that G, A and A had ancestries that could be linked to Yamnaya but not CW.
I meant, what made their ask Lazarides precisely this question about precisely A, A, G?
(This was supposed to be in the comment above in parentheses after (a), but somehow it is not there:()
It sounds as if Lazarides is confirming what they already thought…
The Lazaridis Tweet, which is here, doesn’t seem to have been in direct response to Poulsen and Olander. Instead, it comes in the middle of a tweet thread mostly about the serendipity by which we have any evidence for Anatolian and Tocharian.
A search of Twitter for corded ware greek turns up the Lazaridis tweet, but shows nothing at all for 8/24/22. Maybe they asked slightly differently, but those words were not in a tweet on 8/24/22. Or it’s possible whichever author posted has since deleted their account, since there are replies that could be related in a similar range of dates for which the tweets they reply to no longer exist.
But Lazaridis was not replying to anyone.
There are gems by the Teeming Humanity in that Twitter thread:
“What about Anatolia, you know very well that Anatolia does not exist, it is the Armenian plateau, the Armenians are natives there, it is the cradle of Armenians”
“Anatolia was created in the 11th century in ME Syria,Iraq and some parts of Northern Persia, where do you get ancient Anatolia! Anatolians migrated in 1822 to Pelazgia formed their own state by oppressing the Pelazgians through church and calling it Greece! Why such confusion!”
“Yes, Anatolian speakers exist
and prove your #Yamnaya fables
to be invented garbage.”
“Some Pelo-Balkans “Pelazgia/Peloponnesus/Some in Greece, Dardania/Kosova,NMacedonia still speak the oldest language in the world “Gheg” . What I don’t understand is why is the need to have people confuse continents! Where in south east we are finding things that predate all!”
“You can’t fool us anymore, Iran is the homeland of Indo-Europeans, not eastern Europe, we Iranian have always lived in our country.”
Everyone came from Iran but Gheg is the oldest?
Is it that school where every people is most something people in the world?
Yes it is, and Anatolia exists and also Anatolia does not exist. It’s all very quantumy.
Schrödinger’s Anatolia.
So are Graeco-Italic cultural isoglosses all regional?
Speaking about the region, suprisingly little (in whole history – I mean European history) originates from Spain. I was absolutely impressed by the civilisation ruined by invasions in the 3d millenium (what did the invaders speak if they were pre-Celtic Indo-Europeans?*). Not “civilisation”, just their copper age castles and surrounding forts. And not maybe ruined in terms of stone constructions, but total replacement of local Y-chromosome lineages gives a horrible picture.
Then interesting things seemed to happen there in pre-Roman times (and apart of them thriving Phoenician colonies). And still somehow it looks like “the periphery” in history courses.
*presumably Corded Ware guys too? Or Bell Beakers guys are independed of Corded Ware IE speakers and their Steppe component is not a part of the all the migrations spoken about here?
Exceedingly unparsimonious.
In Europe maybe? Or just a figure of speech? It’s just a tweet…
It seems to mean they’re descended directly from Yamnaya people, not through Corded Ware (as we already knew for the Tocharians), and that their languages aren’t spoken anymore. The descendants of the Tocharians basically speak Uyghur now; descendants of Paleo-Balkan speakers should be well represented among modern-day speakers of Slavic, Romance, Greek, Albanian and/or Hungarian, but the Balkan peninsula lowlands may be too mixed to show much of a signal nowadays, and I’m not aware of ancient genomes (at least not before the study that came out more recently than the tweet and doesn’t have a lot of pre-Roman material either, IIRC); it does not help that we have so few inscriptions in Paleo-Balkan languages, or hints in ancient literature, that we don’t know well where they were actually spoken.
Much less than the authors did 🙂
That’s what they’re saying in pointing out A & A may lack the satem merger and putting them outside Indo-Slavic in their tree.
Corded Ware, too, descends from Yamnaya.
…and all the way into Hungary along the Danube.
I can come up with multiple migration scenarios that don’t seem particularly likely but are currently hard to rule out.
Because evidence that they’re related is so scarce, I suppose. Here’s a paper from 2018 trashing the evidence for Graeco-Armenian without proposing a clear alternative (even the abstract meanders on this question).
Ah. I overinterpreted slide 26, which gives the tweet without context (upper left: the questions from 24 August; right: “Lazaridis et al. 2022a, Lazaridis et al. 2022b (25 August 2022)” on top of a screenshot of the tweet (with its timestamp, which says 25 August 2022); lower left: the conclusion I quoted).
YouTube-comment-level nationalism. (I can’t find the video I had in mind, it’s been years, but check out the last few comments here if you dare.)
That’s the idea.
Pre-Lusitanian. Lusitanian looks like a third (or fourth or fifth…) branch of Italo-Celtic; for the full weight of details of every inscription, look for Blanca María Prósper on Academia.
Yes.
The formation (and composition) of Bell Beaker is still not well understood. The defining cultural marker, the bell-shaped beakers, seems to have originated in Iberia, and they may have been spread by a cult or a guild. Maybe Iberian metalworking was in demand. At some point, the features got adopted by advancing Yamnaya-related peoples, both Corded Ware (north of the Carpathians) and Baden (along the Danube). Whatever happened, the resulting group spread explosively, and when the dust settled, R1b-something male ancestry and probably (Para-)Italo-Celtic languges were all over Western Europe, from Iberia to Scandinavia. Except where they weren’t. We’ve discussed the conspicuous case of the Basque.
“Exceedingly unparsimonious.”
Because it means: the model is meant to reconcile our data and the literal account of creation, but does not confirm the account based on the data. Which I think creationists know.
The point is that as long as you don’t know God’s way of thinking the difference between any theory of evolution and creation can be purely terminological. Just rename everything before year 6000BP into “God’s thoughs” and everything after into “reality”.
Perhaps, that is exactly the problem for creationists: they can’t find a confirmation of the Bible in modern science, but want it – assuming that when enough effort is invested in studying the world, confirmations will accumulate soon.
I don’t know. For me just as for DE creationists (I mean the specific crowd who made the word famous) are strange. Literal faith is understandable. But not all those popularisers of creationist theories.
___
Also, I beleive (it is faith) in you, DE etc. And I work under the assumption that we share a reality or illusion or whatever it is: that is we (a) can communicate for real (b) observe same data (c) can discuss it. Now how does it behave in absence of observers? Is it “undefined’ there (as an illusion would be) or it is observed by tghe divine observer and thus REAL?
For me it is an abstract question which I don’t need to ask.
But whatever is the answer, one thing is clear: I understand this reality very superficially. Even sceince of future will certainly surprise us a lot, what to say of thinks inaccessible to us and our understanidng or things thatwon’t be accessible even if they could.
For me just as for DE creationists (I mean the specific crowd who made the word famous) are strange
I don’t find them strange (at least, not on those grounds), and I understand their motivation; I just think they’re wrong (theologically, as well as scientifically.) And I think that the motivation, at least of some of the more vocal, is not exactly what they profess (maybe not exactly what they they themselves imagine, come to that.)
unparsimonious
I’m not sure that “parsimony” can really do the work expected of it in discriminating among competing theories.
Firstly, it’s impossible to measure: saying one theory is more parsimonious than another is essentially an aesthetic judgment (I’m all for aesthetic judgements, and I like my theories simple too, but there is surely no objective common metric for such things. Moreover, simplicity in one aspect of a theory has a distinct tendency to lead to complexity in other parts. Circles are simpler than ellipses, after all …)
Secondly, it seems to assume that the (unattainable) Truth is better approximated by parsimony than by complexity; that may be so, but there seems to be no a priori reason to think so. (“The truth is rarely pure, and never simple”, as Algernon rightly reminds us.)
So what I”m trying to say:
I approach scientific theories from somewhat different direction than a faith (and I beleive any answer to the above question about reality and collective illusions would be a matter of faith) in any reality. From that of mathematical models.
I have data, I have a model. If it works and if it is best, we can work with it… or loook for better ones IF such a quest is interesting (and hopefully productive). But how closely does this model matches the Reality?
Probably not very close, see above about superficial.
So what I can’t understand about arguments above evolution (both sides of it) is why they are conducted NOT in terms of models and their usefulness.
It seems faith in the reality is fundamental to both sides a good scientific theory for them is a veracious and nearly complete image of the reality, penetrating and capturing all its (unknown to me) levels (“levels” as in: molecules and atoms, and “levels” as in : processes we don’t notice). And they are fighting over whether the theory of evolution is such an image.
(sorry. i’m repeating myself)
@DE, strange is the marriage of religion and something наукообразного “science-oid”, of something reminiscent of mediocre science fiction.
Believers who want the Bible to be taught in school? I know such people. But say, an attemtp to build a consistent creationist model of biology with the goal ofwriting a textbook from this position? Looks like a hobby rather than religion.
No, building a model is a decent occupation. Why not try and see if it can work. I wrote it above myself: you can always try to offer a better model. But then when promotion is added to it and all of it allies itself with religion, the chimera is strange. Or is it the “promotion” component which I don’t get? I don’t understand “Christian” bestselers by authors radiating success either.
(“The truth is rarely pure, and never simple”, as Algernon rightly reminds us.)
Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and genetic linguistics a complete impossibility!
“(along the Danube). Whatever happened, the resulting group spread explosively,”
@Trond, in a tweet mentioned in the presentation Lazarides links all modern IE speakers apart of G, A, A to Corded Ware (a confusing choice of name, because Corded Ware is an archaeological culture).
You’re speaking of two paths of migration, one linked to Corded Ware the other not (confusion: I don’t understand if you’re speaking of cultural traits or what). Do you mean that they further mixed up with each other to achieve the situation described by Lazarides above?
I mean it’s complicated, which is why I said that the formation (and composition) is not well understood. but it seems that two different streams of Yamnaya ancestry may have gone into the mix. Or at last it did last time I tried to understand it.
(Away and on my phone, so unfortunately no thoroughly researched answer.)
Too tired this evening to really follow, but:
In my field, it turned out that the assumptions are outright countable – computers can deal with them. It took a few decades for people to come to terms with this; they’d been doing the field as an art and didn’t expect it could be a science.
Oh no. It only assumes that it’s better to start simple and add complexities as really needed than to start complex and not notice it’s far more complex than needed.
Or, as a colleague put it 30 years ago: it doesn’t assume the minimization of homoplasy, it minimizes the assumption of homoplasy.
The conclusion of the article David linked on Greco-Armenian isn’t quite as dismissive as I expected. He seems to want to add Indo-Iranian to the group with Greek, Armenian and Proto-Balkan in a dialect continuum.
He seems to believe that the speakers of proto-Armenian were “north and west of the Black Sea.”
I whether similarities with Indo-Iranian could be answered as easily by a situation in which Armenian separated around the east rather than the west of the Black Sea, and were in contact with the Indo-Iranians as they moved after they moved from Corded Ware.
But I don’t know the archaeology. Maybe there is good reason to think (proto?) Armenians were moving down the west side and then along the southern shore of the Black Sea.
@Trond thanks. So one more direction for exploration….
Ryan: But I don’t know the archaeology. Maybe there is good reason to think (proto?) Armenians were moving down the west side and then along the southern shore of the Black Sea.
I don’t know either. Since Armenian is supposed to have been near the BS-II languages, I have wanted to identify them with the Cimmerians. OTOH, some say they’re close to the Phrygians who certainly came across the Bosphorus.
What I do know is that when the Anatolian split is moved back in time and out of the Balkans, it leaves a lot of time and space for other branches to form. They don’t all have to be late arrivals from the steppe. OTOH, with the latest dating of horse domestication, we don’t really know how they came or what they came for.
If I can make a stab at how it will turn out, I’ll say that the Balkan peoples and languages we meet at the beginning of Classic Antiquity were formed more or less where we meet them. The local genetic substrate seems to be stronger (and less one-sided) than in Corded Ware, so it’s not a wild guess that also the linguistic substrates are stronger, maybe even to the point of defining language communities after the language shift.
It only assumes that it’s better to start simple and add complexities as really needed than to start complex and not notice it’s far more complex than needed.
In programming practice it’s even more better to start with a little of both. Start simple, but keep in mind the kind of things down the road that you have experienced.
Cluelessness starts too simple. Smart-assedness starts with too much complexity. No matter how you start and proceed, it must be and remain intelligible to those you’re working with – and to the maintainers to come.
If you work with people who just don’t get it, find another project. Lernresistenz will prevail unless you hire and fire, or have the ear of one who can.
” I have wanted to identify them with the Cimmerians*.”
It seems in the pontic steppe frequently works as a pump – except that if it is where the spread of II began it was not a pump but rather a source of innovations.
Or. Hm. We usually don’t describe Scandinavia and Mongolia and other places where people come from as cradles of innovations, so perhaps it can be not innovativenes but social organisation adapted to successful warfare. Still if it is tech (like wheel but not limeted to the wheel) – why not if say, the Caucasus was where metallurgy concentrated (did it?).
However the time came where it became a pump: a people wanders there and then another (better armed?) people comes from the east and your Pontic people goes west or south. Like Alans to Europe and Caucasus (and up to Tunisia and as WP informs me, in Mongol times they appear in Yunnan:))
So one can ask when this pump began to operate and if it predates Scythians (Scythians definitely invaded the steppe form the east, if we identify eastern archaeological complexes with proto-Iranians), then who did Scythians and other II people pushed west from the Pontic (-Caspian) steppe?
*The Armenian suffix in Conan’s name?
I mean, Сonan Barbarián, like Lena Chamamyan, Charles Aznavourian, Alexandra Elbakian and other Armenians?
(Schwartzenegger must be Armenian too. Only an Armenian can play such a hero)
Start simple, but keep in mind the kind of things down the road that you have experienced
Similarly, the kind of hypothesis to be preferred (if possible) is one which makes a lot of testable predictions. This is not necessarily the simplest one which accounts for the existing data.
The Poulsen Olander slide show wants to identify Armenians (and Greeks and Albanians) with the Catacomb culture. My point is that that would be consistent with pre proto Armenians living northeast, not northwest, of the Black Sea, and dispersing east then south when others go west. And this in turn seems more consistent with a reacquaintance of Armenians with I-I groups who werent in contact with proto Balkan or proto Greek speakers.
I agree that substrate effects ought to be greater when steppe peoples merge with rather than largely replacing the locals
Start simple, but keep in mind the kind of things down the road that you have experienced
Yeah. If I had a dollar for every time the people in the business vehemently asserted so-and-so could never happen; and then it did … You kinda get a nose for those perfectly possible ‘impossible’ happenings. Never the less, something’s going to trip you up.
So as @DE says, test first for whether the theory (application) stands up to some out-of-left-field scenario, before putting effort into all of the run-of-the-mill behaviour really just any theory would cope with. (Relativity predicting the precession of Mercury differing from the Newtonian prediction.)
Day saved.
Doubtless a variant of Berberian (for which I wish they’d provided an etymology).
If you click on the Armenian script, you get “a surname originating as an occupation”, but it doesn’t say which one! The cited source is here, and Perperyan is at the bottom of the left column, but… it’s in Armenian, I can’t read it.
I suppose < Turkish berber ‘barber’.
WP says Gael descend from Conan, not Armenians or Berbers.
Though Gaels too are ребята плотные.
Gael descend from Conan
Conn?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conn_of_the_Hundred_Battles
It’s my lot who descend from Conan:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynan_Garwyn
We are much more barbarianous than the Woodsmen.
Oops. Gaels.
DE, if only Gaels descend from Conan, that adds antiquity to proto-Welsh…
Conan the Hairdresser would be an entirely different movie.
(You laugh, but he is not afraid to run with scissors.)
https://english.alarabiya.net/variety/2014/08/03/Meet-Islam-Yaken-a-cosmopolitan-Egyptian-who-turned-into-ISIS-fighter-
Though there IS something to the idea of moving from Egypt to ISIS because in conservative Egypt men can’t grow long hair (not it is not his reason, just something you can think when looking at the before-after photograph if you – like me – have heard complaints about hair from young Egyptians).
It also answers the question I once asked here: is there any symbolic meaning in long hair among Taliban fighters. They wear it often now.
Forgive me if I’m missing anything because I jumped past the last good chunk of comments, but I just wanted to address something drasvi said about science. The latter half of my undergraduate coursework and most of my graduate coursework was not “memorizing what bearded men and not so bearded women said” but actively trying to shred the arguments of said people.
Read this paper, look into the papers it cites, then let’s sit down for 2 hours and tear it to shreds. Did they prove their point? How did they fail? What would you have done to prove the point? Has anyone else done a better job in the meantime?
The idea that science is just a new kind of inherited knowledge i# fundamentally flawed and, at least to me, smells of science journalism as opposed to the real thing.
I’m a biologist/bioinformatician/what have you. Linguistics is an armchair hobby for me.
But at least in my field, the idea that we’re just blindly building on received “knowledge” strikes me as quite ridiculous.
Edit: I mean this all in the spirit of debate, forgive me if I’m coming off as rude or aggressive, I’ve gotten that feedback before and I assure you that’s not my intent.
@Luke:
Quite right. And it ought to apply in linguistics, too: where it doesn’t, that is because the discipline has lapsed into pseudoscience.
Leaving aside the obvious Noam elephant, I remember being disagreeably affected by a remark of Roger Blench’s about the supposed membership of Mande in “Niger-Congo”: he made it very clear that he thought that Greenberg’s opinion was authoritative, and that the onus was therefore on sceptics to prove the lack of a genetic relationship. Makes you want to shake him …
the idea that we’re just blindly building on received “knowledge” strikes me as quite ridiculous.
Very true. But many people have not made the practical transition to that way of thinking. They really do expect to “accumulate” knowledge. Then either they run out of shelf space, or their heads explode – usually both when the knowledge has been memorized.
I remember decades ago thinking suddenly: wait, I am a leaf in the wind, I know nothing. It’s been plain sailing since then.
Of course a little self-confidence is needed to sail into the winds without a rudder. I have plenty of that – as do know-nothings who shoot their mouths off at every opportunity. At any given moment you can’t be certain about who you’re dealing with. But who needs certainty when you’re flush with confidence!
@Luke: The latter half of my undergraduate coursework and most of my graduate coursework is a key qualifier there. For those who have reached that stage, science is experienced very differently from how it is experienced by the vast majority of the population – including even scientists specialised in other fields. Imagine science from the point of view of someone with a non-academic day job trying to find out what a healthy diet is…
That probably looks like this.
I don’t know why the sneering “science journalism”.
Come on, journalists are not scientists, and even when they’re well-informed and doing their best (which is not always), you wouldn’t want to trust them rather than an actual scientific book or article. It’s not a matter of sneering, just the facts of life.
I don’t know, I tried putting on the shoes of a science journalist or at least journalists’ go-to talking head during Covid, and it didn’t feel much different from my modus operandi as a scientist/ skeptic / statistician. The dividing line is not between science vs science journalism. It’s between skepticism and attention to uncomfortable detail on the one hand, and poorly justified enthusiasm and desire to feed the public whatever satisfies its familiarity bias on the other.
I get what you’re saying Hat. But conversely, there’s a science journal replication crisis*, but that wouldn’t justify me sneering “it smacks of science journal writing” as if that were an insult.
* I don’t know whether that term is loaded for some people. But at any rate, there’s a replication issue, which is more acute in some fields IIUC.
that wouldn’t justify me sneering “it smacks of science journal writing” as if that were an insult.
But that’s not what was said: “science journalism” is not “science journal writing.” Nature is a science journal; the phrase “science journalism” makes me think of (e.g.) BBC Science, which is well-meaning but hardly trustworthy. And again, you’re loading the dice with “sneering”; I don’t see that, just the drawing of a necessary distinction.
>But that’s not what was said: “science journalism” is not “science journal writing.”
Exactly! You’ve gotten part of my point.
But the fact that there is a replication crisis in science journals, making them less trustworthy, doesn’t justify my using “science journal writing” as a sneering insult.
If he’d written “smacks of the worst kind of science journalism” that would have been entirely different.
Ah, I see, and I agree on both counts, except I would substitute “better” for “entirely different.”
Yes, that’s probably more accurate.