Angela
Elite member
- Messages
- 21,823
- Reaction score
- 12,329
- Points
- 113
- Ethnic group
- Italian
Let's hear it for persistence.
See: http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/07/05/gbe.evw162.long
He and his co-authors did themselves no favor by trying to support their theory with absurd claims about Yiddish being a Slavic language.
Anyway,
"In a recent interdisciplinary study, Das and co-authors have attempted to trace the homeland ofAshkenazi Jews and of their historical language, Yiddish (Das et al. 2016. LocalizingAshkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz. GenomeBiology and Evolution). Das and co-authors applied the geographic population structure (GPS)method to autosomal genotyping data and inferred geographic coordinates of populationssupposedly ancestral to Ashkenazi Jews, placing them in Eastern Turkey. They argued that thisunexpected genetic result goes against the widely accepted notion of Ashkenazi origin in theLevant, and speculated that Yiddish was originally a Slavic language strongly influenced byIranian and Turkic languages, and later remodeled completely under Germanic influence. In ourview, there are major conceptual problems with both the genetic and linguistic parts of the work.We argue that GPS is a provenancing tool suited to inferring the geographic region where amodern and recently unadmixed genome is most likely to arise, but is hardly suitable foradmixed populations and for tracing ancestry up to 1000 years before present, as its authors havepreviously claimed. Moreover, all methods of historical linguistics concur that Yiddish is aGermanic language, with no reliable evidence for Slavic, Iranian, or Turkic substrata."
See: http://gbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2016/07/05/gbe.evw162.long
He and his co-authors did themselves no favor by trying to support their theory with absurd claims about Yiddish being a Slavic language.
Anyway,
"In a recent interdisciplinary study, Das and co-authors have attempted to trace the homeland ofAshkenazi Jews and of their historical language, Yiddish (Das et al. 2016. LocalizingAshkenazic Jews to Primeval Villages in the Ancient Iranian Lands of Ashkenaz. GenomeBiology and Evolution). Das and co-authors applied the geographic population structure (GPS)method to autosomal genotyping data and inferred geographic coordinates of populationssupposedly ancestral to Ashkenazi Jews, placing them in Eastern Turkey. They argued that thisunexpected genetic result goes against the widely accepted notion of Ashkenazi origin in theLevant, and speculated that Yiddish was originally a Slavic language strongly influenced byIranian and Turkic languages, and later remodeled completely under Germanic influence. In ourview, there are major conceptual problems with both the genetic and linguistic parts of the work.We argue that GPS is a provenancing tool suited to inferring the geographic region where amodern and recently unadmixed genome is most likely to arise, but is hardly suitable foradmixed populations and for tracing ancestry up to 1000 years before present, as its authors havepreviously claimed. Moreover, all methods of historical linguistics concur that Yiddish is aGermanic language, with no reliable evidence for Slavic, Iranian, or Turkic substrata."