Goga
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"Indo-European languages first emerged in modern-day Turkey, and spread through the world along with agriculture, a new study suggests. The findings support one of two hotly debated scenarios for the origins of this language family. The Indo-European language family is one of the largest in the world and includes Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages. Some researchers have proposed that Anatolia was the source of this language family, beginning 8,000 to 9,500 years ago. The other hypothesis places the origin north of the Caspian Sea in the Russian steppes, where it was first disseminated by a semi-nomadic, horse-riding people known as the Kurgan, starting about 6,000 years ago. To test both of these scenarios, Remco Bouckaert and colleagues adapted a statistical method used by evolutionary biologists to work out how species -- for example, the influenza virus -- are related in a family tree, based on similarities and differences in their DNA. Instead of comparing species, the authors compared Indo-European languages, and instead of DNA, they looked for shared cognates, which are words that have a common origin, such as "mother," "mutter" and "madre.” The authors used the family tree, together with information about the present-day locations of the languages in their study, to infer the location and age of the family’s origins. The results are consistent with the Anatolian scenario, the researchers report."
http://chinese.eurekalert.org/en/pub_releases/2012-08/aaft-tit082012.php
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6097/957.abstract
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6097/957.figures-only
http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/linguistics/article00546.html
http://chinese.eurekalert.org/en/pub_releases/2012-08/aaft-tit082012.php
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6097/957.abstract
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6097/957.figures-only
http://www.sci-news.com/othersciences/linguistics/article00546.html