At the request of Yamnaya fans, herewith a new catchall everything-paleogenetic thread! Have at it, DNA lovers…
At the request of Yamnaya fans, herewith a new catchall everything-paleogenetic thread! Have at it, DNA lovers…
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All right then. From (the formidable) Guillaume Jacques and Chris Stevens, “Linguistic, archaeological and genetic evidence suggests multiple agriculture-driven migrations of Sino-Tibetan speakers from Northern China to the Indian subcontinent”, in Quaternary International, here (Open Access). VL, but WR.
OK, just not to leave it uncommented – here is a paper we didn’t discuss at LH:
10 thousand years of genetic continuity in old South Africa.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02532-3
The Khoe-San peoples today differ from their ancestors before the Iron Age migrations from the East, but it’s easy to see that they local ancestral DNA isn’t the same across the regions. There are significant differences in the old local DNA between the Northern, Central, and Southern Khoe-San.
The new paper adds ancient DNAs from the Southern region, as old as 10,000 years, and, much to everyone’s surprise, it’s very much the same as the Southern Khoe-San “local DNA component” today! Not much North-South or even Center-South population mixing.
In contrast, DNA from outside of the region start appearing in more recent centuries, first from Iron Age East African peoples ~1200 years ago, and then from the originally West African Bantu peoples ~800 years ago, with additional waves. And after the colonization, more DNA from even more far-flug regions, of course.
From the previous thread:
…Now that I think of it, I certainly expect /ʃ/ and /z/ from an Iranian language… together with absence of /ɬ/ and /rʲ/ or whatever it was… but the same holds for Samoyedic for example.
The MCh transcription simply uses a letter (or two or three) to represent each of the onsets, “nuclei”, medials and finals described in the contemporary rhyme books/tables and dictionaries (where the pronunciation of each character was given with two characters, of which one shared the onset and the other the rhyme). OCh, in contrast, is reconstructed (in part by the comparative method from MCh and the reconstructed Proto-Min, in part from the phonetic parts of the characters, the rhymes, various loans and so on).
Definitely no /z/ in Samoyedic…
The DNA samples for the upcoming Ghalichi et al paper “The rise and transformation of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Caucasus”, have been released on the European Nucleotide Archive. Hopefully the publication itself is soon to follow. The amateur genetics community has had a lot of fun playing with these already. https://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/browser/view/PRJEB73987
The work was previewed by Sabine Reinhold at the Budapest conference, which was also where the two upcoming papers led by the Harvard team (the Genetic Origins of the Indo-Europeans & A genomic history of the North Pontic Region from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age). Her talk is available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC5_h_qIDaU
And the paper (The rise and transformation of Bronze Age pastoralists in the Caucasus) itself is now out, in Open Access, in Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08113-5
Thanks. Dmitry linked to the same paper in the Son of Yamnaya thread a few days ago. I’m still working on it.
Ah, I haven’t been checking that thread since I thought this one was supposed to continue it. I must have misunderstood?
No, I think it’s more that people are used to posting in the old one and maybe forget this one exists.
Dmitry was the one asking for a new thread, but he chose to use the old one for Yamnaya-related news. That makes enough sense that I’ll follow up the discussion there (if I manage to form a coherent line of thought), but both the old threads and this new one will inevitably be confused.
This is probably where I link to the XKCD on new unifying standards.
A lot of Yamnaya / PIE ancient DNA discussions naturally continue what was being discussed on the old thread, and that’s why I opted to continue. Specifically, I often do a keywords google search with “site:language.com” to find out where we discussed something earlier, and then continue there.
This bone heap here isn’t dead, though. I will gladly add ancient DNA and archaeology discoveries here – just probably not the ones which directly relate to PIE.
How about the Pompeii story? The casts of the Pompeii dead, telling dramatic narratives about these victims’ deaths, were a major tourist attraction for over 150 years, but the liquid cement used to create these casts is not that durable, and occasional restoration work is need. A new round of restoration started in 2017 and turned up evidence of bones and bone fragments inside the casts. Surprisingly, it was possible to extract DNA from some of them, and to prove that the most famous narratives (“The family of the Golden Bracelet house”, “The embrace of the sisters”) were all wrong, perhaps misinterpreted, more likely made up by the early archaeologists who might have combined and modified the casts to create the stories the public wanted to hear.
https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)01361-7
(alas the paper is paywalled and I haven’t had any luck with procuring it yet; the linguistic / demographic aspect there is that most of the dead are genetically Levantine or Anatolian, mirroring the wave of Eastern Mediterranean immigration which swept Rome 2,000 years ago).
Amazing stuff — we’re all getting spoiled!
@Dmitry Pruss:
Here’s a link to the paper. I’m only a couple pages into it myself, but it is really interesting.
Thank you Brett. Interesting and more diverse than I imagined (the paper’s intro mentions that Pompeii was thought to be extremely ethnically diverse due to its proximity to a sea port, but anthropometric evaluations made more recent researchers conclude that it had a homogenous population).
Cast 52, the famous one with an exquisite golden bracelet, turned out to be a male of Levantine or North African ancestry, most similar to the known ancient genomes from Hellenistic Egypt but not *exactly* from there; the mtDNA and Y-DNA are compatible with the broader Levant from Egypt to Syria. Their analysis suggests that this man had dark skin and hair.
The previously studied DNA of cast f1R was also Levantine, closest by DNA to Lebanon.
The remaining 4 DNA sets implied Anatolian / Aegean ancestors. Cast 53 from the Golden Bracelet House may have had a grandparent from Punic-era Sardinia. Cast 25, the tall, lower-class security guy from the Villa of Mysteries, probably had an Anatolian father and a Central European mother, and grew up in a different part of Italy, according to his isotope analysis.
Oh. Maybe Oscan died out because the only language all these immigrants and the locals had in common was Latin…
A purely linguistic consequence of Greek immigration to Rome.
A study with lots of ancient genomes applies IBD methodology to systematically trace the spread of early IE peoples into Europe, Mediterranean, and Southern Caucasus.
They separate 3 major waves of expansion of the Steppe ancestry. The earliest one is directly descended from the Yamnaya groups, and spreads South on both sides of the Black Sea, reaching Greece, Anatolia and Armenia.
The next source is the Corded Ware groups, whose Steppe DNA comes pre-mixed with the DNA from Globular Amphora peoples. Originally confined to North-Central Europe, by 2,000 BCE it spreads South to the Balkans and Anatolia (partly displacing the earlier Yamnaya wave arrivals there and pushing the South to Greece, Cyprus and Levant) and further East to the steppes East of Volga.
Finally, additional mixing with local Northern European peoples yields Beaker groups which spread across France to Spain and Italy, undergoing much dilution along the way.
Cyprus appears to be a giant melting pot of local and Steppe-related peoples, and a trickle of migrations continues to arrive there from as far as Scandinavia. Lots of migrations towards the later part of the Bronze Age in Greece and Italy too is visible by strontium isotopes, sometimes with members of the same family being locals and migrants.
One Phrygian sample is added, with a relatively small fraction of Steppe ancestry which is the same in origin as in Balkan / Greek Late Bronze Age … not surprisingly given what we know about Phrygian culture and language.
Trialeti culture, a post Kura-Araxes (late III millennium BCE) phenomenon absorbing both Mycenean-like and Hattic/Hittite influences, appears to be an undeniable antecedent to Armenian. I am surprised that I haven’t heard much. It is actually slightly earlier than mature Mycenean. Interestingly, one Balkan ancient sample, “G23” from a previous publication, now appears to show blood ties with early Armenians. This comes just after another paper attempted to refute Herodotus about the Balkan roots of Armenians! (to be discussed separately).
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.02.626332v1.full.pdf
Wow. I can’t wait to read a book that gathers, correlates, and summarizes all the stuff they’re discovering. Ancient history is being completely rewritten!
Oh, yes, and the ancient R1b Y-chromosomes in the Bronze Age Armenia turned out to be rooted deeper in the Yamnaya past than most anywhere the world, all the way to 5th millennium BCE.
In the most basic linguistic terms, the new Yediay 2024 paper just confirms that Italo-Celtic and Greek-Armenian groupings are real…
The Hovhannisyan 2024 on ancient Armenians appeared just one week earlier
https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(24)00391-4
and concluded that there was much genetic continuity over millennia in Armenia, with the strongest inflow of genetic material from Levantine farmers in Early Bronze Age, but no discernible flow from the Balkans.
But they didn’t look into the gory detail of IBD, and may have been led astray by the fact that the strong local substrate of ancient Greece, which diluted the incoming Yamnaya Steppe DNA, was unique for Greece and very different from Southern Caucasus. So whatever migrated to Armenia did so either before mixing with local populations of the Balkans, or even along a different route around the Black sea…
Amazing. I’ve downloaded the preprint and might have time to read it in 2 weeks.
The linguistic evidence for Greek + Armenian has been falling apart, BTW; but Paleo-Balkan-Whatever + Armenian might still work, what with all those zetas in Thracian-and-stuff.
Another important history of linguistics tidbit to add, which feels strangely relevant to these recent studies, is that Colin Renfrew of the Anatolian Theory fame has died. In his younger days he helped bury the classic idea that everything cultural flowed from Ancient Greece….
I’ll be damned. Here’s a brief but informative obit (from Kathimerini).
The second author of the 3-waves preprint is Guus Kroonen, and there’s a .docx file called “Linguistic Supplementary”; I’ve downloaded it along with the “Archaeological Supplementary”.
The whole thing is formatted for Nature; no other journal has “Extended Data Figures”.
I’ve now read the Linguistic Supplementary Information. Reference numbers not edited out:
The linguistic evidence for Greek + Armenian has been falling apart, BTW; but Paleo-Balkan-Whatever + Armenian might still work, what with all those zetas in Thracian-and-stuff.
Yes, it looks like those isoglosses that Greek and Armenian share are shared retentions, not common developments.
On the other hand, Armenian clearly is a member of the Graeco-Aryan club, which developed innovations like the augment. But that must have been an areal group, not a genetic subfamily.
A classic archaeology paper without direct connection to languages, but touching on the mechanisms of great migration of Germanic peoples.
The authors argue that miniature spoons for snorting substances were a must-have part of the toolkit of Germanic warriors, and were attached to the warrior belts by lanyards just long enough to put the stimulants by the nose.
Some spoonlet styles were pan-Germanic, but stubby copper spoons were mostly Scandinavian, while flat-disk spatulas were typical for the early Gothic populations South-East of the Baltic
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/pz-2024-2017/html
The movie scenarios write themselves.
Pretty speculative, though. I see no actual evidence that they were used as spoons (although that may be a reasonable inference from the shape), and none that they had something to do with intake of hallucinogenic substances. Why couldn’t they have been used for adding luxury condiments like spices, or salt, or honey to bland military food?
I’ll read the genetics papers, but I don’t know when.
They use of the tiny spoons may be for anything which is respectable in a sacred context and needs to be used in the field. Spoons and kettles, for example, are just as important for food prep but aren’t found in similar contexts?
I wonder about the material. Everyday utensils were carved from wood or bone or soapstone. Wealth symbols were made of precious metals or ivory. Iron seems to suggest that the strength of the material was important, and so does the attachment of the “spoon” to the leather thong.
I also wonder why a warrior would have something like that dangling from their belt in a foot-long strap. It would be an annoyance at best, at worst a deadly trap. I’d look for a practical function that kept it tied up when in use. Could it have been for fastening some type of equipment, perhaps when riding?
and they mention that numerous other metal implements were commonly attached to the thongs threaded through belt buckles, citing the thorough typological classification of Madyda-Legutko 2011. I would assume that it makes sense to consider “spoons” not in isolation but within the broader variety of similar objects… The reference is a book on Przeworsk culture and its metal artifact published in Polish in Krakow, where Renata Madyda-Legutko is a university professor. The current paper’s authors are from a different university in Poland, in Lublin.
I’ve finally read the Yediay et al paper on the Eastern Mediterranean. Not much to say on the overall conclusions except that it’s yet another leap forward in methods.
I got hung up in the Bronze Age individual from Cyprus with Scandinavian ancestry and upbringing. From the paper:
I got particularly hung up by the coincidence that the specimen had been found by a Swedish expedition to Cyprus. Sometimes when things look too good to be true…
This is what the Archaeological Supplement has to say:
So it was not found by the Swedish Cyprus Expedition but by a joint effort by Cyprus Museum and the Naional Museum of France. The excavation report (Dunn-Vaturi et al 1933) identified the burial as female based on typical female grave goods.
The specimen was one of a number of skeletons from the French collection that were sent to professor Carl Magnus Fürst in Lund. Sweden, for examination. He died in 1935, before any investigations of the bones had been made.The osteological analyses were made by professor Carl-Herman Hjortsjö and published in 1947. The remains were also investigated by the archaeologist Peter M. Fischer, apparently for his habilitation thesis in 1986. The two disagree to some extent on the description of the specimen, but agree that it’s a younger male.
The DNA samples would obviously have been taken after Fischer’s investigations in the eighties.
As much as I want this to be true, there’s an obvious risk that there’s been a mixup of two skeletons in one of these transitions — one I would gladly have brushed away if it weren’t for the Swedish connection. So does a Mediterranean female show up in an unexpected context in Sweden?
If it isn’t an error, it’s extremely interesting also for understanding the forming of the Scandinavian population. He shows up exactly when the Y-haplogroup I1 wave enters Scandinavia and sets off the Nordic Bronze Age (or maybe even on the early side).
Maybe he personally brought the amber mentioned in that thread…
Yeah. I don’t mean to deny that goods from the Baltic reached the Mediterranean, and vice versa. Neither do I mean to deny that some people traveled very far. We’ve seen that in the Pre-Yamnaya Steppe, millennia earlier. Scandinavian Bronze Age imagery is full of chariots and ships. The I1 clan(s) as itinerant soldiers and/or merchants would make sense.
But that man isn’t just out of place. Add the archaeological uncertainties and the one big unpleasant coincidence, and I end up being skeptical. For now.
Population dynamics in Iron Age Xinjiang inferred from ancient genomes of the Zhagunluke site
Abstract: The Iron Age Zhagunluke culture in southern Xinjiang was characterized by cultural connections with surrounding regions and the coexistence of agriculture and livestock farming, which was suggested to represent the ancient Qiemo kingdom. However, the detailed population history of the ancient Qiemo kingdom and whether cultural exchanges were accompanied by population migration remain unclear. In this study, we report ancient genomes of two individuals from the Zhagunluke No.1 cemetery. Combined with published ancient genomic data, we observed an east-west admixture pattern in Zhagunluke people with varying proportions of diverse ancestries, corresponding to the diverse cultural elements in the Zhagunluke site. Moreover, we identified a genetic outlier with a dominant ancestry related to millet farmers of the Yellow River or West Liao River Basin, indicating the presence of immigrants from northern China to southern Xinjiang. Our findings suggest that population interactions significantly shaped the genetic profile of the Zhagunluke population.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-025-02186-7
Non paywall link here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/389701224_Population_dynamics_in_Iron_Age_Xinjiang_inferred_from_ancient_genomes_of_the_Zhagunluke_site
As with Kumar et al 2022, it seems like the steppe ancestry in the Tarim Basin comes in waves, including both Afanasievo and Andronovo related, which maps onto the presence of Tocharian and Indo-Iranian languages like Khotanese, Tumshuqese, Sogdian, Gandhari Prakrit etc
Zhagunluke
Anybody know the Turkic toponym of which this is a colonial adaptation?
Zaghunluq. I suppose ‘abundant in mustard’.
(With <gh> = /ʁ/.)
Hmm… زاغۇن зағун zaghun ‘mustard’ must be related to Wakhi and Sarikoli zarghun; see R.B. Shaw, “On the Ghalchah Languages” (Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. 45, Part 1 [1876]: 139-278), p. 234, fn: “Perhaps this is the origin of the Yarkandi word zàghun (by the elision of the r common in that dialect–rather than vice versâ).”
But I can’t find any further etymology (Wiktionary is weak on Uyghur and the Pamir languages).
And where did they get that antiquated term “Ghalchah languages” anyway? According to The Tarikh-i-rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia, p. 220, ghalcha means ‘ruffians’…
Surely akin to Persian شلغم šalğam ‘turnip’? The r and the u need explaining, though.
Hmm… زاغۇن зағун zaghun ‘mustard’ must be related to Wakhi and Sarikoli zarghun
They all look like Persian زرگون zargūn ‘gold-colored, yellow’ (zar + -gūn), perhaps filtered through the phonology of Turkic languages of the region (as Kyrgyz and Uyghur), where /g/ is typically [ʁ] in a back harmonic environment. The loss of postvocalic r is also typical of Uyghur in general.
If Persian zargūn is the correct etymon of our words zarghun, zaghun ‘mustard’, I expect that this designation originally made reference to the color of the seeds of Brassica juncea (brown mustard, widely grown as an oilseed), as opposed to the black seeds of Rhamphospermum nigrum (syn. Brassica nigra; black mustard, also an important oilseed crop). But maybe it makes reference to the vivid yellow of a mustard field in bloom?
(The -luq in Zaghunluq can also be specifically ‘field of’ here.)
postvocalic r
Rather, coda or syllable-final.
The Middle Persian antecedent ⟨zlgwnꞋ⟩ zargōn ‘golden’ is also often given as the ultimate etymon for the English word zircon. There are some more details here for LH readers who would like to know more than the Wiktionary offers. Perhaps the OED3 has some breakthrough on German Zirkon, English zircon that has appeared more recently? I am on the road, and when I try log in too far away from home, the OED denies me access, so I haven’t been able to consult the entry.
Thanks! As some recompense, here’s the etymology from the OED entry (revised 2021):
Unfortunately, the entry for jargon n.² dates back to 1900, so it’s not much help:
But maybe it makes reference to the vivid yellow of a mustard field in bloom?
That’s what I’d have guessed! Those colors are pretty vivid.
We have a lot of some kind of mustard in Karmiel (from a check of Wikipedia I’m guessing Sinapis arvensis*, a.k.a. “field mustard” and “charlock”) and in season (such as right now) it’s really coloring the streetsides yellow.
…the Wikipedia articles don’t have a lot of chronology and geography, so it’s hard to tell where would the Uyghurs (and Wakhis etc) have gotten their mustard from, in which millennium, and which species it would have been, but now I’m wondering whether the name had originally referred to charlock (which is apparently native to some nearby areas) and was then repurposed for closely related culinary mustard.
BTW, the linked Uyghur dictionary specifies “mustard (Brassica juncea)” (= brown mustard).
*) …now on Wikipedia as Rhamphospermum arvense, though the article for the genus Sinapis still lists it as one of the species!
And apparently Plants of the World Online [but seemingly not World Flora Online, confusingly enough] takes a third option: Mutarda arvensis, citing an article from 2022.
zlgʿn
Copy-paste error there in my comment. Should be Middle Persian zlgwnꞋ.
We have a lot of some kind of mustard in Karmiel (from a check of Wikipedia I’m guessing Sinapis arvensis*, a.k.a. “field mustard” and “charlock”)
Cherlock is a vigorous weed in my garden in Mardin, Turkey, too. I pull up the young plants and boil and eat the greens every day to try to keep ahead of it. My housemate is sick of it, but I love it.
Copy-paste error there in my comment.
Fixed.
How could five poor artless men withstand five stalwart ruffians [ghalcha]
(from the translation of the Tarikh-i Rashidi that Hat linked to)
Buddhist Sogdian already has γrcyk for ‘of the mountains, mountaineer, mountain dweller’ or the like. A region known as γαρσιγοστανο, identified with Garchistan, appears in Bactrian here. Pashto غر ġar and Yidgha γar are still ‘mountain’ (cf. Avestan gairi-, Vedic girí- ‘mountain’). Vasily Vladimirovich Bartold Собрание сочинений, II.1, p. 548f, has this to say on gharcha (boldface added):
Where is the -l- in the form غلچه ġalča from, if it is indeed a variant of غرچه ġarča, as seems likely? Incipient problems with coda -r- in a regional Turkic varieties? Also note for the deprecatory meaning of ġalča that Pashto غل ġal and Yidgha ɣal mean ‘robber, bandit, thief’ (with the lambdacism typical of some eastern Iranian languages; cf. Young Avestan gaδa-, Wakhi ɣ̌ūδ), and Persian -ča is a diminutive suffix.
Hippo: [Yang et al (2025) (preview): Population dynamics in Iron Age Xinjiang inferred from ancient genomes of the Zhagunluke site]
Thanks. Interesting, but I wish they had discussed the meaning of the diverging ancestry models. Of the six main cluster Zhaganluke IA specimens, two are modeled as Yellow River + Tarim EMBA + Afanasievo, while four comes out as BMAC+”Baikal”+Afanasievio, two of the latter alternatively as BMAC+”Baikal”+Saka. I’m pretty sure both that the Tarim EMBA and Afanasievo ancestries didn’t disappear, and that BMAC ancestry didn’t first appear in the Iron Age. Also, It would have been interesting to see the effect of Chemurchek as a separate ancestry.
Old Kingdom Egyptian DNA, at last!
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09195-5
It looks like an even mix of the Green Sahara herders and Fertile Crescent migrants (because the herders of the Green Sahara were themselves heavily Middle Eastern in ancestry, the net result is a predominantly Middle Eastern genome with a sizeable addition of pre-agricultural North African DNA).
Because of it, the authors couldn’t resolve the question about the ancestors of East African herders. Both Levantine and ancient Egyptian sources fit equally well, at the moment.
I just saw this in a Swedish science magazine. That article says that the wear on his skeleton would fit with a life working as a potter and speculates that he was one of the people who brought the potter’s wheel to Egypt at that very time.
Yes, the paper says that the wear on the pelvis and spine indicates long years spent sitting on a hard surface hunched, which is consistent with the craft of a potter. But the grave chamber is cut in rock and he’s buried in a giant jar which is more consistent with a very high social status not readily expect from a potter…
Ancient DNA reveals the prehistory of the Uralic and Yeniseian peoples by the Harvard group (including Lazaridis and Reich) and dozens of others, mostly from Russia:
We discussed the Altaic / Yeniseian paper almost two years ago when it first came out as a preprint
https://languagehat.com/son-of-yamnaya/#comment-4553103
and dozens messages after that
I haven’t yet figured out what changed in the peer-reviewed version. There may be some important minor changed details…
An impressive paper on the Western Scythians and peoples around them.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads8179
It comes from Russia’s best ancient DNA research lab of Evgeny Rogaev at Sirius University, a group hand-picked and lavishly financed by Putin himself with the explicit goal of proving continuity between the Scythian warriors and today’s Russians. Needless to say, I was fairly skeptical about the ability of the group to deliver unbiased results and to share the data. Similar state-funded, ideologically charged projects in Hungary and especially in India had a lot of issues. But the colleagues who knew Rogaev personally insisted that he will stick to the scientific truth no matter how inconvenient (and it was always clear, on the Russian continuity topic, that the Slavs may have had important ancestors or, more likely, relatives of the ancestors among the subjugated millet farmers of the Scythian societies, but not among the warrior classes of the Scythians).
The Scythians of the Pontic Steppes and Crimea turned out to be descended from the presumed proto-Iranian cultures of Southern Siberia such as Andronovo relatively early, before the Siberian groups intermixed with the local populations, giving rise to the disticnt ancestral makeup of the Eastern Scythians. All Western Scythians were a product of mixing with the local peoples, but they didn’t intermix much with one another, displacing rather than assimilating the Scythian groups which came before them. Some of them were not just endogamous but engaged in close-relative marriages. Eventually they were displaced by the Sarmatians, of Eastern ( = mixed ancient Siberian) Scythian stock.
Of the prominent genetic features of the Scythians, they frequently had the MC1R variant which makes hair red and skin, freckled, and which is so common in Ireland today (affirming Herodotus reports about red hairiness of the Scythians). Hemochromatosis mutations were common among them, and, due to their meat diet, many of them likely suffered from iron poisoning towards their mature age (including skin becoming ruddy, another observation recorded by Herodotus). They also had a common genetic intolerance of fructose, fatal in the extreme cases, so they likely avoided sweet foods and fruit.
Rogaev sampled some Scythian-affiliated people, some of whom might have suspected to be Para-Slavs, but none of them turned out to be Slavic-related. The Pyany Bor group had a heavy Siberian DNA influx. Perhaps the most interesting were the samples from Semiluk from Middle Don, thought to be Herodotus’ Budini, a very numerous people living up the Tanais from the Scythians. Budini are often thought to have been a people of Yukhnov Culture, a Baltic offshoot with the Scythian influences. And indeed, the Semiluk DNAs turned out to be Baltic in origin. Surprisingly, they carried Y-chromosomes R-Y2, which have never been identified in so old DNA (the one previously known ancient R-Y2 sample is a ~400 CE Tian Shan Saka samples from Kyrgyzstan), but which is common today across South Asia – and, occasionally, among Volga Tatars.
https://www.yfull.com/tree/R-Y2/
There may have been more Slavic-like DNAs of the Scythians neighbors or slaves further West in Ukraine, but, luckily, the Russian lab didn’t have access to them
The authors do show a trickle of Scythian-like ancestry in all present-day populations of Eastern Europe; perhaps this will suffice, politically. And, while the promised to share the data promptly, it wasn’t yet available……
Awesome.
Would fit the fact that the Slavic “millet” word is suspected of being a (non-Iranian) loan.
I’ve been slow to comment on this… I’ve read it twice and have more questions than answers (and I mean that as praise). I knew the history of the Pontic Steppe was complex, but not to this degree. Some scattered observations:
We see at least two large population turnovers that correspond to changes in material culture. When the Middle Bronze Age Catacomb Culture gave way to the Late Bronze Age Srubnaya Culture, and when the Srubnaya gave way to the Iron Age Scythians.
The Catacomb Culture was apparently the one that transmitted Caucasus metallurgical techniques to the Andronovo and eventually the Seima-Turbino in the Sayan mountains. In the PCA charts it looks markedly more eastern than the Srubnaya, close to Afanasievo, which I think is because it’s essentially Yamnaya with some Western admixture but without the Corded Ware admixture of Indo-Iranian. The people and their language(s) may have ended up in the Balkans or Pannonia, or south of the Caucasus, but the paper doesn’t go into that.
The Srubnaya people maps close to Andronovo and Sintashta people, which do carry the Corded Ware component. I think we can safely assume a language shift as well, from some archaic form of Indo-European to something close to Proto-Indo-Iranian. I would have said Proto-Iranian, but I’m not so sure about that anymore.
The Scythians were different again. Still, we know almost certainly that they were Iranian speakers. The most striking thing about the Scythians is how very different they are across their realm. It seems that they converted peoples to Scythianness on a scale that reminds me of the spread of the Roman Empire, or perhaps the Arab conquest, and that suggests a political entity with strong institutions, inbuilt economic incentives, and an ideological base. The paper says that the earliest Scythians may have been immigrants to the steppe from the south – “Anatolian” and even “Sinaian” are mentioned. That could perhaps be a southern people making themselves the ruling clan in a diverse steppe alliance that used “Sintashta Iranian” as a lingua franca, but I wonder if it could be an artefact that stem from the Armenian or Cimmerian migrations to the south.
The Scythians also introduced a small North Siberian component that I guess is from admixture between Andronovo or Sintashta and the Seima-Turbino Proto-Uralians. This component is stronger in the non-Scythian Iron Age Pyanoborskaya Culture on the Kama, which I take for granted that is Uralic maybe Proto-Permic.
The Crimeans have their own genetic makeup in the whole period, even when Crimea is culturally Scythian. I have no idea what that means linguistically before the Scythian conquest. There are some hints at a Balkan connection, but that might just be shared archaism.
Sintashta is surely too old for Iranian; probably a bit older than Proto-Indo-Iranian even.
Before I try to digest Trond’s response, I want to mention that sometimes the asides are even more fascinating than the wildly interesting main points, as with:
>Hemochromatosis mutations were common among them, and, due to their meat diet, many of them likely suffered from iron poisoning towards their mature age (including skin becoming ruddy, another observation recorded by Herodotus). They also had a common genetic intolerance of fructose, fatal in the extreme cases, so they likely avoided sweet foods and fruit.
I had never heard of either thing. It’s fascinating to find them both common in a population, especially the former in a population of herdsmen. Together, they leave one with a very narrow window for healthy eating.
As my own further aside, perhaps the hemochromatosis mutations were more common than fructose intolerance genes among their proto-Indo-Iranian cousins, who went south and at some point created (or inherited?) a significantly vegetarian culture.
Trond,
First, what you’ve written really starts to help me put things together that had been dangling separately or unrecognized in the open shafts and pilfered catacombs of my brain.
One question – trying to understand how you’re presenting the timeline:
>The Catacomb Culture was apparently the one that transmitted Caucasus metallurgical techniques to the Andronovo and eventually the Seima-Turbino in the Sayan mountains
Wiki gives dates for Seima-Turbino earlier than Andronovo. By eventually, did you mean more spatial than temporal? Or is there a different way to see S-T and Andronovo?
Ryan: sometimes the asides are even more fascinating than the wildly interesting main points
Indeed. And there were several interesting asides in thie paper. Sorting them out as asides and deciding to concentrate on the population turnovers on the Pontic Steppe took me days of procrastinating.
By eventually, did you mean more spatial than temporal? Or is there a different way to see S-T and Andronovo?
Nah, I lost sight of the of the terms as I struggled to formulate the point in a short and sufficiently handwavy way. I should probably have stuck to ‘Indo-Iranians’, which I decided against because it felt both too precise in the special context of transfer between Catacomb and Seima-Turbino and too ambiguous in the general context of steppe ethnographic history.
The strange “Sinaian” construct is doubtlessly an after-the-fact edit in the process of approval of the paper for publication, which removed some unpalatable (for the Russian authorities) geographical terms such as “Ukraine” and (in the case of Sinaian) probably Judea or Palestine.
Generally in Russia, they hardly ever speak of the Caucasus / Middle Eastern chapter of the Scythians, whose history is instead associated with the Great Steppe and Great Steppe alone.
However, the first mention of the Scythians is ways South, in Assyrian documents in 680 BCE. The Scythians’ homeland was then on the Araxes. Having allied themselves with Assyrians in 672 BCE, the Scythians expanded their rule west all the way to Halys river. But after Assyria imploded in internal conflicts after Assurbanipal’s death, the Scythians switched allegiance and participated, with the Medians, in the wars which finished off Assyria and elevated Media. A few years later, ascendant Media turned on the Scythians and most of them left, crossing the Caucasus to the North and expanding into the Pontic Steppes.
I read that even though the period of involvement of the Scythians into the Anatolian and Assyrian affairs lasted less than a century, it was very culturally and technologically important for the formation of the Pontic Scythians. Even that they didn’t know iron before coming to the Araxes plains!
One episode of Scythian raids during the downfall of Assyria must be what made the authors muse about “Sinai”. Supposedly in the 610s or 620s BCE, the Scythians advanced South through Levant, threatened Egypt but received Egyptian tribute and left, sacking some cities on the way back. How well is it documented, how far South did the Scythians actually advance, and where they took captives, I don’t really know. But I have no doubts that this is the episode the authors had in mind…
I was just writing a comment on how one “aside” is the relations between the Steppe and the lands south of the Caucasus. I’ll boil it down to mentioning that steppe people were present there long before the Cimmerian invasions in the mid-to-late 8th C BCE. Returning mercenaries with allies and families could be those early Scythians with southern connections.
Another just-published old bones paper touches on Cimmerians, by the way.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(25)00559-8
They are claimed to be an early branch of Sarmatians. The main Sarmatian wave originated from the South Ural Prokhorovka culture of IV-II c. BCE. In the first decades CE, Sarmatian Iazyges migrated to Pannonia from Meotia, and quickly mixed with the local populations. But their DNA retained IBD links with the ancestral Prokorovka, especially strong in the earliest generations.
The Cimmerian observation came as a surprise when the authors included into their analysis a couple of much earlier Iron Age (Cimmerian period) samples from Romania from the lower Danube plains. These Iron Age DNAs were not just quite similar to early Iazyges in overall composition but also had a strong IBD connection with an early Steppe Sarmatian from an earlier Damgaard 2018 publication. There was also an overall DNA composition similarity to a previously published Cimmerian genome from nearby Moldova (Krzewińska 2018).
Another surprise observation in the paper was that some “DNA Sarmatians” accompanied the Huns in IV c., suggesting that Steppe Sarmatians continued to exist somewhere East for centuries.
(Of course the ancient authors such as Pliny the Elder reported that the Sarmatians were descended from the Medians and also exiled North from Media; so perhaps not all of the Sarmatians came from the Urals)
…
Maybe that’s where the bizarrely strong selection for lactose tolerance comes from.
Admittedly, that was farther west, mostly, right?
I had no idea Cimmerians were identifiable.
Sorry, of course Moldova (near Romania) rather than Mongolia. I was editing the passage when you replied. As far as I understand, these remains are mostly assigned a Cimmerian label based on dates alone. At least Schütz 2025 does exactly that. What does a 2018 paper do, I haven’t checked.
Edited: in the Krzewińska 2018 ( https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/sciadv.aat4457 ), they note that there is no clear archaeological way to define Cimmerians so they categorize any pre-Scythian Iron age Western Steppe nomads as putative Cimmerians. These DNAs (there were 3 of them in the paper) are genetically heterogenous, with mostly Central and Eastern Asian mtDNAs (typical for Scythians and Sarmatians as well) and mostly R1b Y-chromosomes, although one of their putative Cimmerians had a very Eastern Q1 Y-chromosome.
Skourtanioti et al: The genetic history of the Southern Caucasus from the Bronze Age to the Early Middle Ages: 5,000 years of genetic continuity despite high mobility, Cell, 2025:
I don’t think this summary really sums up the paper. I’ll add a couple of snippets from the discussion:
Wow, this is amazing stuff.
It looks as if the Armenian language came from the steppe in the Middle Bronze Age with a population that left a stronger genetic imprint in (modern-day) Armenia than Georgia. The timing must mean that it came out of the Catacomb Culture. This doesn’t fit with my suggestion that the Catacomb Culture spoke an archaic form of IE, but it does fit the speculation that they may have ended up south of the Caucasus after being replaced by the Srubnaya.
The paper has intriguingly little to say about the “Cimmerian” and Scythian intrusions south of the Caucasus that were mentioned in the paper above. It’s as if they rode right through the region.
The Late Antique/Early Middle Age admixtures are effects of empire: Migration into the border regions both from more central provinces and from outside the borders. Trade, agricultural policy, and military deployment could all play a part.
Me (previously): “Sintashta Iranian”
I didn’t mean that – not even in scarequotes. I meant “Srubnaya”. And the scarequotes is because I don’t really know if that works.
Recent admixture event.
A link at Turtle Island led me back to the Nature paper on an Old Kingdom Egyptian genome which Dmitry surfaced this summer.
As interesting for me as the finding that the Nuwayrat genome could be modeled as roughly equal parts Green Sahara or ancient Moroccan and Fertile Crescent is that two genomes from the Third Intermediate period look to be two thirds Levantine and just one third Nuwayrat.
If that is representative then it reflects an extraordinary migration into Egypt that I don’t think was anticipated.
The 3rd IP genomes were from Abusir el Melek, well south of the Delta.
Is there anything in the development of the Egyptian language in the second millennium bce that reflects an influx from the Levant of 50%-plus of the population?
There are actually quite a lot of Semitic loanwords in Late Egyptian, i.e. from about 1350.
Percentages of new genes need not of course be straightforwardly reflected in the percentages of new vocabulary.
Thanks. And of course percentages need not. Also, the percentages in just two individuals from the 3rd Intermediate Period may not be an accurate depiction of the Egyptian population as a whole at that time.
But it is suggestive, so I wondered whether the linguistic picture matches. It sounds like it does in broad strokes.
The Nature article relates the gene flow to “Canaanite expansion starting in the late Middle Kingdom”.