It’s another outlet for the same research that I’ve posted in !linguistics@mander.xyz, so I’ll summarise it here.
There’s an archaeological culture called Yamnaya, dated from ~3000 BCE, found in the following region:
I’ll call that region “the steppes” here. To simplify it, the genetic pool of the people behind that culture is found all across Europe, Iran and northern India, in a way that you’d automatically associate it with Proto-Indo-European speakers, as the distribution seems to fit rather well the distribution of IE languages in Eurasia.
Well, there’s a problem with this Yamnaya = PIE speakers association. See, in central Anatolia there were also a bunch of Indo-European languages, nowadays extinct: Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, Lycian, etc. They’re called the “Anatolian” languages. (No, linguists are not a creative bunch.) If this association between the Yamnaya culture and PIE is correct, you’d expect to see at least some really old Yamnaya ancestry in that region, predating any Greek/Roman invasion… and you don’t. At least, not in meaningful amounts. Why is that?
Now let’s look at the article. They identified another group, that they’re calling the Caucasus Lower Volga (CLV). That group seems to have mixed with another group, generating the people behind the Yamnaya culture; and to have also migrated to central Anatolia.
But wait, which is the PIE speakers group then - the CLV or Yamnaya? Well… both. See, linguists have for a long time claimed that what we call “Proto-Indo-European” is at least two languages:
Late PIE - ancestor of the modern Indo-European languages. Russian? Hindi? English? Italian? Albanese? Greek? Yes.
Early PIE - ancestor of both Late PIE and the Anatolian languages.
That is mostly based on information that we have about Hittite, that seems to have diverged from other Indo-European languages early. For example, it conserves a bunch of really archaic features, such as a simple animate vs. inanimate gender system (Late PIE likely had a masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter gender system instead), and sounds only predicted to have existed in PIE (the “laryngeals”) before Hittite was discovered.
What’s more is that there was always some dispute on where Proto-Indo-European was originally spoken: Anatolia (near Hittite), the steppes (Yamnaya) or the Caucasus. Accordingly to this study, Early PIE was spoken near the Caucasus, and Late PIE in the steppes.
Personally I think that, while this is not outright revolutionary, it’ll have a big impact for Historical Linguistics.
For a start, it pretty much forces us to handle Early PIE and Late PIE separately; we need separated reconstructions for them. And we probably should stop calling them this way, and instead pick other names (like Proto-Indo-Celtic and Proto-Indo-Anatolian), or something like that.
Another matter is that, the more you try to fix PIE reconstruction oddities, the more it resembles the Northwest Caucasian languages - languages known for having a bazillion consonants, 2~3 vowels, and a mostly agglutinative grammar. Perhaps we should be looking more at Adyghe and its siblings when reconstructing Early PIE = Proto-Indo-Anatolian, for potential areal features.
A third matter are the laryngeals and the odd T D Dʰ stop system. Treating the laryngeals as consonants in Early PIE seems sensible; but in Late PIE, perhaps we should be treating them as ultrashort vowels instead; most descendants would get rid of them, and Greek would merge them into the short vowels. And it’s perfectly possible that Late PIE already had a Tʰ T D Dʰ system, like the one attested for Sanskrit.
It’s another outlet for the same research that I’ve posted in !linguistics@mander.xyz, so I’ll summarise it here.
There’s an archaeological culture called Yamnaya, dated from ~3000 BCE, found in the following region:
I’ll call that region “the steppes” here. To simplify it, the genetic pool of the people behind that culture is found all across Europe, Iran and northern India, in a way that you’d automatically associate it with Proto-Indo-European speakers, as the distribution seems to fit rather well the distribution of IE languages in Eurasia.
Well, there’s a problem with this Yamnaya = PIE speakers association. See, in central Anatolia there were also a bunch of Indo-European languages, nowadays extinct: Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, Lycian, etc. They’re called the “Anatolian” languages. (No, linguists are not a creative bunch.) If this association between the Yamnaya culture and PIE is correct, you’d expect to see at least some really old Yamnaya ancestry in that region, predating any Greek/Roman invasion… and you don’t. At least, not in meaningful amounts. Why is that?
Now let’s look at the article. They identified another group, that they’re calling the Caucasus Lower Volga (CLV). That group seems to have mixed with another group, generating the people behind the Yamnaya culture; and to have also migrated to central Anatolia.
But wait, which is the PIE speakers group then - the CLV or Yamnaya? Well… both. See, linguists have for a long time claimed that what we call “Proto-Indo-European” is at least two languages:
That is mostly based on information that we have about Hittite, that seems to have diverged from other Indo-European languages early. For example, it conserves a bunch of really archaic features, such as a simple animate vs. inanimate gender system (Late PIE likely had a masculine vs. feminine vs. neuter gender system instead), and sounds only predicted to have existed in PIE (the “laryngeals”) before Hittite was discovered.
What’s more is that there was always some dispute on where Proto-Indo-European was originally spoken: Anatolia (near Hittite), the steppes (Yamnaya) or the Caucasus. Accordingly to this study, Early PIE was spoken near the Caucasus, and Late PIE in the steppes.
Personally I think that, while this is not outright revolutionary, it’ll have a big impact for Historical Linguistics.
For a start, it pretty much forces us to handle Early PIE and Late PIE separately; we need separated reconstructions for them. And we probably should stop calling them this way, and instead pick other names (like Proto-Indo-Celtic and Proto-Indo-Anatolian), or something like that.
Another matter is that, the more you try to fix PIE reconstruction oddities, the more it resembles the Northwest Caucasian languages - languages known for having a bazillion consonants, 2~3 vowels, and a mostly agglutinative grammar. Perhaps we should be looking more at Adyghe and its siblings when reconstructing Early PIE = Proto-Indo-Anatolian, for potential areal features.
A third matter are the laryngeals and the odd T D Dʰ stop system. Treating the laryngeals as consonants in Early PIE seems sensible; but in Late PIE, perhaps we should be treating them as ultrashort vowels instead; most descendants would get rid of them, and Greek would merge them into the short vowels. And it’s perfectly possible that Late PIE already had a Tʰ T D Dʰ system, like the one attested for Sanskrit.