Science: a new theory of the origin of the Indo-European languages put forward
A research group of linguists and geneticists, led by employees of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (Germany), put forward a new theory of the origin of the Indo-European languages. Work results published in the journal Science.
Previous phylogenetic analyzes have had conflicting conclusions about the age of the family due to the large number of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the datasets used, as well as existing limitations in the way ancient languages are analyzed. To overcome these problems, the authors assembled an international team of scientists, consisting of more than 80 language specialists. They created a new core vocabulary dataset of 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 ancient languages. In addition, the researchers adhered to strict protocols for encoding lexical data.
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A specially designed analysis helped to understand whether the ancient written languages such as Latin and Vedic Sanskrit were the direct ancestors of the modern Romance and Indian languages, respectively. According to the analysis, the Indo-European family is approximately 8100 years old, while five main branches separated from it about 7000 years ago. DNA evidence has shown that the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European languages originated in or near the northern arc of the Fertile Crescent. This branch was the earliest ancestor of the Indo-European family. At the same time, there were also other early branches, which may also have spread directly from there.
Based on this, the authors proposed a new hybrid hypothesis of the origin of the Indo-European languages, connecting the previous theories. It consists in the primary formation of this family in the Fertile Crescent region, and the territory south of the Caucasus became the secondary homeland, from where the languages subsequently spread north to the steppe regions, after which they began to move to Europe.
Indo-European languages are spoken by the majority of the world’s population – about 2.5 billion people. The German, Italian, Polish, Iranian and Russian languages originated from this family. For the past two centuries, the origin of the Indo-European family has been the subject of many disputes, which consisted in determining the geographical zone of the appearance of the language, as well as in the time of its formation.
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