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Language as a Clue to Prehistory

 
 
 
Swammerdami said:
These examples suggest to me that macro-families like Eurasiatic or Dene-Caucasian (or even perhaps Borean) may have originated rather recently, as Mr. Bomb points out:
...
There is a HUGE amount of information available from Y-chromosome haplogroups. For example, although the C haplogroup may have moved through India and into East Asia 55,000 years ago (or thereabouts), the common agnatic ancestor of Genghis the Mongol Khan and Geronimo the Apache lived about 15,000 years ago. (In fact the languages of Mongols and Apaches are NOT related; I just mention this recency to depict the recency of some common ancestries.)
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That fits. If the Borean hypothesis holds up, it specifically implies the languages of Mongols and Apaches ARE related*, since it would classify Genghis Khan as a Nostratic speaker and Geronimo as Dene-Caucasian. That would make their common agnatic ancestor a good candidate for a speaker of proto-Borean; and proto-Borean being spoken 15,000 years ago seems more plausible than 50,000.

(* Of course all languages are related. We're here using "related" as a shorthand for something like "related through a specific suspected chain of descent".)
 
A well done video of the Bronze Age (probably pre-indoeuropean) Oxus civilization and it's decline when Indo-Euranian languages started to show up in West and South Asia, combining linguistic and archaeological evidence to find out when and where Iranian and Indian languages split, based among others on suspected loanwords from this Oxus civilization in the earliest records of those languages.

 
Hypotheses like Borean are almost impossibly speculative, so one ought to assess smaller-scale subgroupings before going into detail about such hypotheses.

One such smaller one may be called Core Eurasiatic: Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic / Transeurasian, and of the two, a hypothesized relation between IE and U is the Indo-Uralic hypothesis:  Indo-Uralic languages

A big problem there is a lot of borrowings from IE langs into U ones over the millennia, like a lot of Indo-Iranian ones like porsas "pig" (< PIE *porkos > Latin porcus > English pork, also > English farrow "litter of piglets") and more recent ones like Finnish kuningas "king" from Proto-Germanic *kuningaz. Titles of leaders are often borrowed, like English "emperor" from Old French, from Latin imperâtor. English has a lot of borrowed ones, and Spanish has one that's borrowed from English: líder ("leader").

Taking a look at  Uralic languages - there are nine subgroupings of them with no clear consensus on how they are related.

 Proto-Uralic language had only one voicing of stop consonants: voiceless unaspirated. However, it might also have had voiced ones as allophonic variants.

This causes a problem for comparison with Indo-European and Transeurasian / Altaic. PIE had three stop-consonant voicings, and the TE langs ancestrally had two. Basic vocabulary in the Transeurasian languages | Martine Robbeets - Academia.edu - Mongolian and Tungusic have two, Turkic has more complicated changes that correspond with these two, and Korean and Japanese are listed as only having one, though present-day Korean has three voicings and present-day Japanese two.

PU had a dual suffix -k- and a plural suffix -t that became -y- when suffixed. Among present-day Uralic langs, Finnish has that form of the plural, but no dual. Hungarian has -k for its plurals; was it the ancestral dual ending that someone decided to use as a plural ending?

One can reconstruct six cases for it: nominative, accusative *-m, genitive *-n, locative ("in") *-na, lative ("into") *-ng, ablative ("out of") *-ta. Finnish and Hungarian have several more cases, though they likely originated as suffixed postpositions, and had that origin separately. Drawing the line between postpositions and case endings can be difficult.

The  Proto-Uralic homeland was likely near the northern part of the Ural Mountains, though whether on the European or the Siberian side of those mountains is uncertain.
 
I've found On the Homelands of Indo-European and Eurasiatic: Geographic Aspects of a Lexicostatistical Classification by Alexander Kozintsev

Uses counts of putative cognates to find the positions of language families on a 2D space. Seems like  Multidimensional scaling

Of the langs that he looked at, they fell into three main clusters: Eurasiatic, Afroasiatic, and North Caucasian. Kartvelian was barely inside Eurasiatic and Dravidian a little outside of it, so one finds a cluster of all of Nostratic but AA.

Eurasiatic he finds to split into Broad Altaic (Transeurasian) and what he calls Indo-Siberian: Indo-European, Uralic, Yukaghir, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut.

Afroasiatic he finds to have a branch containing Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, and Chadic, with Egyptian and Berber forming a sub-branch. Also two other branches: Cushitic, and Omotic.

Kartvelian and Dravidian are only marginally closer to Eurasiatic than to the other major branches.

Then a lot of speculation on where the Eurasiatic homeland might be, something I find very unconvincing. My best guess would be somewhere in Central Asia and Siberia.
 
Rapid radiation of the inner Indo-European languages: an advanced approach to Indo-European lexicostatistics

They used the Samoyedic languages to root the tree, noting the commonly-proposed split of the Uralic langs into Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic. Finno-Ugric is named after Finnish and Hungarian.

The earliest-branching IE family is the Anatolian one, with Hittite: 5750 BP (3750 BCE).

The next one is Tocharian, at 5000 BP (3000 BCE).

The stay-at-homes spoke what is sometimes called Late PIE, though they split up around 4750 BP (2750 BCE). Their branches:
  • Albanian
  • Greek - Armenian: 4000 BP (2000 BCE)
  • Italic - Celtic - Germanic: 4000 BP (2000 BCE)
  • Balto-Slavic - Indo-Iranian: 4250 BP (2250 BCE)
With additional branchings:
  • Celtic: Goidelic (Gaelic) - Brythonic (Welsh): 2250 BP (250 BCE)
  • Balto-Slavic: Baltic - Slavic: 3250 BP (1250 BCE)
  • Indo-Iranian: Indic - Iranian: 3750 BP (1750 BCE)
These dates have big error bars: 250 - 500 years in each direction.

About this tree,
Indeed, the majority of Indo-Europeanists, if not all of them, agree with the outlier status of Anatolian and Tocharian and with the existence of recent clades such as Indo-Iranian or Balto-Slavic. But what is in the middle of the IE tree? Despite more than two hundred years of intense development of Indo-European studies, there is no consensus or mainstream opinion on what the early Inner IE branchings could look like. The lack of an evident solution in terms of a tree structure leads many Indo-Europeanists to reject the tree model altogether or to accept a total fan-like model for the disintegration of IE which does not make much sense from the historical point of view. This lack of consensus follows from the lack of reliable and consistent common innovations shared by some subset(s) of Inner IE branches that could help to reveal the early topology of this clade. In such a situation the multifurcation scenario suggested by our analysis is the most natural and likely solution.
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For instance, Don Ringe used grammatical features in addition to vocabulary, and he found a somewhat different tree.
  • PIE: (Anatolian, (Tocharian, LPIE))
  • LPIE: (Italo-Celtic, IE1)
  • IE1: ((Albanian, Germanic), IE11)
  • IE11: ((Greek, Armenian), IE111)
  • IE111: (Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian)
with Germanic getting a lot of vocabulary from Celtic.

Some decades ago, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov came up with:
  • PIE: (Anatolian, LPIE)
  • LPIE: (IE1, IE2)
  • IE1: (Italo-Celtic, Tocharian)
  • IE2: (IE21, IE22)
  • IE21: (Germanic, Balto-Slavic)
  • IE22: (Greek, (Armenian, Indo-Iranian))

Albanian is a difficult case, because much of its vocabulary is borrowed, making it hard to sort out native words.
 
(PDF) Bayesian phylolinguistics infers the internal structure and the time-depth of the Turkic language family - by Alexander Savelyev and Martine Robbeets

Finds splitoffs:
  • Bulgharic (Chuvash): 755 BCE - 66 BCE - 483 CE
  • North Siberian Turkic: 7 BCE - 474 CE - 809 CE
  • Old Turkic: 427 CE - 650 CE - 804 CE
 Old Turkic is the first written form of Turkic.

Most of the other relationships are in broad agreement with relationships proposed by others.

 Proto-Turkic language - has two voicings of stop consonants, among other features.
 
I'll now turn to the Semitic language family.

It was named after Noah's son Shem, legendary ancestor of Middle Easterners. Noah's other two sons, Ham and Japheth, were legendary ancestors of Africans and Northerners.

Hamitic is an old name for North African languages, and Semito-Hamitic and Hamito-Semitic are old names for Afro-Asiatic.

Japhetic was sometimes used for Indo-European.

English spelling pronunciations of Biblical names can be misleading. The initial j's of many of them was originally the "y" sound - the "dZ" sound value is a medieval-French sound shift. In present-day French, that sound became "Z". Modern Hebrew, however, keeps that sound, though it has some other sound changes.

Also, initial ia of Greek names was originally "ya".

Thus, Japheth was originally pronounced something like "Yapet", as in Yaphet Kotto's name. Much like the name of Iapetus from Greek mythology: "Yapetos".

Was one name borrowed from the other? Was Iapetus originally some legendary ancestor of some Greeks? Like some Greeks who settled on the coast of what's now Israel, with the people there picking up that name from them and then working it into their accounts of how humanity's ethnic groups came into being.
 
The Semitic family -  Semitic languages - has branching
  • East: Akkadian, Eblaite
  • West:
    • Central:
      • Northwest: Ugaritic, Canaanite (Hebrew), Aramaic
      • Arabic
    • South:
      • Western: Ethiopian Semitic, Old South Arabian
      • Eastern: Modern South Arabian
Reconstruction of Proto-Semitic has had some success, though I haven't seen anyone do any text in it like "The Sheep and the Horses".

PS obstruents (stops + fricatives + affricates: t, s, ts) had three kinds of voicing, voiceless, voiced, and "emphatic" -  Emphatic consonant

But PS vowels were simple: long and short diagram-vertex vowels - a, i, u, â, î, û - though some Semitic langs later got additional vowels.

PS had a dual number and three noun cases:
SingularDualPlural
Nominative-u-â-û
Genitive / Prepositional-i-ây-î
Accusative-a-ây-î

Or flipped, for the order that I will use for the pronouns and conjugations:
NominativeGenitive / Accusative
Singular-u-i / -a
Dual-â-ây
Plural-û-î
 
Now the pronouns and verb conjugations.

PersonIndep. NEnc. NEnc. G/APrefixSuffix
1s'ana, 'anâku-ku-i, -ya / -ni'a--ku
2sm'anta-ta-kata--ka, -ta
2sf'anti-ti-kita- -i-ki, -ti
3smSu'a-a-Suy--
3sfSi'a-at-Sa, -Sita--at
1d?-nuya ?-niya ? / -naya ?-kâya, -nâya
2d'antuma-tuma-kuma, -kumayta- -a-ka, -tana
3dSuma-a-Suma, -Sumayya- -a / ta- -a-a / -ata
1pnihhnu-nu-ni / -nani--na
2pm'antum-tum-kumta- -u-kan(u), -tanu
2pf'antin-tin-kinta- -a-kin(a), -tina
3pmSum, Sumu-u-Sumyi- -u-u
3pfSin, Sinna-a-Sinyi- -a-a

S = "sh" sound. Separate m and f for 3d are with a / . Final vowels often have long and short variants.

The second-person pronouns have gender, unlike in most Indo-European langs.

Indep. = independent, enc. = enclitic (attached). The genitive ones are used as possessive suffixes, and the accusative ones as verb objects.

"According to a hypothesis that has garnered wide support, the prefix conjugation was used with verbs that expressed actions, and the suffix conjugation was used with verbs that expressed states."

I couldn't find much on comparison of stem-vowel patterns.
 
I looked for patterns, and in most cases, the gender agreement was by vowel change: (m - f) u - a, a - i, u - i

Seems like the vowels go from most masculine to most feminine u - a - i

Pronoun stems are more difficult.

Duals seem much like plurals.

The third person has *S- alternating with the empty stem.

The second person seems to have *t- subject / independent and *k- object / attached.

The first person plural has *n-

The first person singular is hard to interpret. Some forms suggest *k- or *n- or *a- or *i- but it is difficult for me to go much further.
 
The Semitic family is in the  Afroasiatic languages family. But there is a problem with it: "There are two etymological dictionaries of Afroasiatic, one by Christopher Ehret, and one by Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova. The two dictionaries disagree on almost everything."

But they agree on pronouns and some vocabulary items. Like Semitic, AA had independent and bound (enclitic) personal pronouns, and also a prefixing conjugation: 1s *-, 2s: *t-, 3sm: *y-, 3sf: *t-, 1p: *n-

Pronouns: 1s-ind: *an-, *in-, 1s-bnd: *-i, *-yi /// 2s-ind: *ant-, *int-, 2s-bnd-m: *-ku, *-ka, 2s-bnd-f: *-ki /// 3s: *si, *isi /// 1p: *ann, *inn /// 2p: *kûna /// 3p: *su, *usu

Vocabulary: *ma, *mi "what", *sum-, *sim- "name", *dim-, *dam- "blood", *-mâw- "to die", ...

 Proto-Afroasiatic language and  Afroasiatic homeland
 
If Omotic is lumped into Afroasiatic, then Roger Blench is probably correct about the Afroasiatic Homeland:
Roger Blench has proposed southwestern Ethiopia, in or around the Omo Valley, [as the Afroasiatic Homeland] citing the high internal diversification of the Omotic branch and the lack of evidence that Omotic-speaking groups migrated to this region from elsewhere.
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Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of Semitic languages identifies an Early Bronze Age origin of Semitic in the Near East - PMC

Estimated divergence times:
  • Semitic: East (Akkadian), West: 5750 BP (3750 BCE)
  • West Semitic: Central, South: 5500 BP (3500 BCE)
  • Central Semitic: Arabic, Northwest Semitic: 4500 BP (2500 BCE)
  • Northwest Semitic: Ugaritic, H-A: 4000 BP (2000 BCE)
  • H-A: Hebrew, Aramaic: 3500 BP (1500 BCE)
  • South Semitic: South Arabic, Ethiosemitic: 4750 BP (2750 BCE)
  • South Arabic: 2000 BP (1 CE)
  • Ethiosemitic: 2750 BP (750 BCE)
Error bars ~ 1000 years each way

Their identified homeland: the Levant, the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea: Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Syria.

With the northeast-African hypothesis of the Afroasiatic homeland, it is evident that some AA speakers have gone full circle and arrived back in their old homeland.

That has also happened with the Indo-European family. The PIE homeland is roughly Ukraine - South European Russia - Kazakhstan, and the PIE speakers spread southward to Anatolia, eastward to the Tarim Basin, becoming Tocharian speakers, and northward to the northern European plain, becoming Late-PIE speakers, and creating the Corded Ware culture.

That was a long strip roughly from Brussels to Moscow, though much older than either city, and the easternmost Corded Ware people pushed further eastward, crossing the Ural Mountains and founding the Sintashta culutre, speaking Proto-Indo-Iranian. Some of them went south and then west, becoming Scythians and Sarmatians, going full circle.

There were also plenty of later IE-speaking returnees and almost returnees.

The region of Galicia in Ukraine has a name that suggests that Celts were once there, something not very farfetched, because Celts sacked Delphi, Greece in 279 BC, and settled in Anatolia, becoming the Galatians mentioned in the New Testament.

The Roman Empire got a little bit into the PIE homeland with conquering some of Crimea and getting close to its western end.

In the early Middle Ages, Germanic tribes spread out of their homeland in N Germany, Denmark, and S Sweden, overrunning much of Europe. In some places the people that they overran ended up speaking Germanic dialects, but in other places, they became assimilated enough to end up speaking the languages of the people that they conquered. Some of these Germanic wanderers ended up in Crimea, the Crimean Goths.

Some time later, Slavs spread out of their homeland near where Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus meet, going westward, southward, and eastward. As a result, the people of the PIE homeland now speak Eastern Slavic languages.
 
The most recent group of returnees was the Nazis of Germany, though they were beaten back and then conquered.

The Nazis themselves got their racial ideology from a notion of the PIE homeland that turned out to be rather mistaken. Around 1900, archeologist Gustav Kossinna proposed that the PIE homeland was in Germany. That was something that many German nationalists wanted to believe. In fairness to GK, northern Germany was part of the Corded Ware cultural horizon, a sort of secondary PIE homeland.

As to why the Nazis called themselves Aryans, that was from some early Indo-Europeanists' mistakes. The oldest recorded IE language was first thought to be Sanskrit, and as a result, early Indo-Europeanists thought that PIE was very Sanskrit-like. That's evident in August Schleicher's original version of "The Sheep and the Horses". For that reason, they also thought that the PIE speakers called themselves Aryans, from Ârya, a self-designation of people of India. I'm guessing that they also thought that PIE speakers had a visual symbol that their Indian successors used: the swastika.

Reality has an annoying way of not being what one might want to believe it is, and that also happened with the Nazis' racial theories.

The Nazis considered Eastern Europeans Untermenschen, subhuman people, to be conquered and made to work for them. Even though these were people that they were descended from.

Among the Untermenschen they identified was the Roma or "Gypsy" people. But they were refugees from the Muslim conquest of India, and they thus had good claim to the title "Aryan".

The Nazis thought of themselves as doing what their medieval predecessors did, spreading eastward and subjugating the local people. Their calling their regime the Third Reich (Das Dritte Reich) was also out of a sense of history. They considered themselves successors of the Holy Roman Empire (the First Reich) and the late 19th cy. German Empire (the Second Reich).
 
I must note that Proto-Semitic had feminine-gender markers *-at, *-t and *-ah, *-a.

In the Afroasiatic langs I checked on, adjectives are inflected like nouns, agreeing with their nouns in gender, number, and case. I checked on Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Akkadian, Egyptian, Kabyle (Berber), Hausa (Chadic), and Somali (Cushitic).

I then checked on whether adjectives can become nouns, something done a little bit in English, but often as "<adjective> one(s)". In most other Indo-European langs, it's much more common to turn adjectives into nouns, though it is hard for me to find much on that feature. For instance, I could find a lot on adjectives as nouns in Ancient Greek, but much less in Modern Greek, though the latter language seems to have that feature. I also found this feature in other Germanic langs, Latin and Romance langs, and Slavic langs.

 Nominalized adjective or "substantivized adjective".

Turning to the AA langs, I discovered that that is common in Hebrew, Arabic, Akkadian, and Egyptian, but it was often hard for me to find anything on that feature.

So adjectives are noun-like in both AA and IE.
 
lpetrich said:
... the Corded Ware culture ... was a long strip roughly from Brussels to Moscow, though much older than either city, and the easternmost Corded Ware people pushed further eastward, crossing the Ural Mountains and founding the Sintashta culutre, speaking Proto-Indo-Iranian. Some of them went south and then west, becoming Scythians and Sarmatians, going full circle.
Click to expand...

The Iranian branch of Indo-Iranian is divided into Western and Eastern subfamilies. Am I correct that, at the outset, the Western subfamily was to the East of Eastern, but that relationship reversed as the Iranians rotated clockwise around the Caspian Sea? :cool:

Y-chromosome haplogroups have much interesting to say about early migrations and languages.

Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian are almost pure R1a with almost no R1b and these two populations are very close agnatic cousins. Their haplogroup matches the Khvalynsk culture, predecessor of eastern Yamnaya. Celtic and Italic are almost pure R1b with no R1a; and these are very close agnatic cousins with skeletons from western Yamnaya and from the earlier Samara (Volga) culture (the first "Kurgan" culture?).

R1a and R1b separated from each other about 20,000 years ago. There are some R1a in Scandinavia IIUC that precedes the Balto-Slavics. For these reasons it may be best to avoid treating the vast Corded Ware horizon as homogeneous.

Even today I think there is a fairly crisp demarcation between R1a (Slavic speaking) and R1b (German speaking) populations near the Germany-Poland border..
 
 Afroasiatic homeland - the two main hypotheses are the Levant and North Africa.

The main scenario for a Levantine origin is spread by early farmers. That would make the AA ancestors the Natufian people of the Levant 15,000 to 11,500 BP, the beginning of the Holocene. They were sedentary, and they were gathering grains before they started growing them, being among the first to do so.

That is how Bantu and Austronesian speakers spread their languages, and that was proposed for Indo-European by archeologist Colin Renfrew. But that is now considered very implausible, meaning that the first farmers of Europe spread some other language family, like Euskaro-Caucasian.

But AA lang distribution supports a Northeastern African origin much better, since Semitic is an offshoot that is not especially deep in AA, and since the deepest branch is of Omotic, named after the Omo Valley of SW Ethiopia.

There is also some genetic evidence that is consistent with that scenario.

But then why did Proto-Semitic speakers succeed in conquering the Levant? The Proto-Indo-European speakers were helped by their horses and wheeled vehicles and the like, but the Proto-Semitic speakers?

I have a hypothesis. Another equid, the donkey, was what helped them.

Wild donkeys live in NE Africa, near the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. That makes them near the AA homeland in the NE-Africa theory. The genomic history and global expansion of domestic donkeys | Science - one domestication of them, in East Africa about 7,000 years ago. That's a little before the time of Proto-Semitic, just right for some NE Africans to invade the Middle East with them.

Not surprisingly, Proto-Semitic had words for the animal, *hhimâr- and for a female one *'atân-
 
lpetrich said:
But then why did Proto-Semitic speakers succeed in conquering the Levant? The Proto-Indo-European speakers were helped by their horses and wheeled vehicles and the like, but the Proto-Semitic speakers?

I have a hypothesis. Another equid, the donkey, was what helped them.

Wild donkeys live in NE Africa, near the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. That makes them near the AA homeland in the NE-Africa theory. The genomic history and global expansion of domestic donkeys | Science - one domestication of them, in East Africa about 7,000 years ago. That's a little before the time of Proto-Semitic, just right for some NE Africans to invade the Middle East with them.

Not surprisingly, Proto-Semitic had words for the animal, *hhimâr- and for a female one *'atân-
Click to expand...

Very interesting; I've not heard this before. Is there archeological support, e.g. the dating of donkey remains in Mesopotamia?

The link you give connects to a paywall. Do you have a subscription, or some other workaround?
 
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