News Article on Wang Paper - PIE is Anatolian again?

O Neill said:
What of the Tengri horse warriors of the 7th to 10th century then ? They swept through an area the size of europe in a few hundred years.
Reaching Eastern Europe. Did they covert Europe and the near east to tengri ? Nope the dumped paganism and all adopted one of the other mainstream religions.
How do you know they didnt do the same thing the first time around dumping there language and religion and mixing in ?
What seems unlikely to your seems obvious to me.
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The same could be said for the Pagan Danes in Britain. Some Danish did leak into English ("eggs", for instance), but the Danes became "anglicized" over time. The nature and character of the society being overthrown does matter (even in 700 AD, Europe was much more densely populated, culturally cohesive, socially integrated, and economically developed than in the 3rd Millenium BC), as does the nature and character of the invading group.
 
Ygorcs said:
The hypothesis may hold some water, I don't know, but it is just a fact that PIE lacks virtually all the usual features we see in known pidgins and pidgin-derived creoles all around the world, involving the contact between several different language families. Virtually all of them end up showing similar features, like strong regularization, morphological and syntactic simplification, syntactic rigidity, tendency to reduce the phonological aspects of the language to "average/ordinary" levels (the idea is to make a "communication troubleshooter" that can be used and understood by people who speak languages with completely different phonology) and so on. PIE would have to be a very, very exceptional kind of pidgin unlike anything we've seen.
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It is difficult to abstract from modern historical pidgin/creole languages, which can't easily be separated from their colonial/exploitative contexts (a technologically advanced society dominating a primitive one). I think the hypothesis is that PIE might originally have had pidgin/creole-like characteristics. Speakers of a pidgin don't lose their original language. Speakers of a creole can either retain or adopt the dominate grammar and morphology, while mixing lexical terms. The "valley" cultures (of the Dniester, Dnieper, Don, and Volga) would have been the base from which a pastoral-nomadic element separated itself and, enabled by wheeled wagons, domesticated animals (horse, cattle, sheep, etc.), and the "secondary products revolution", peeled off and moved onto the steppes, at first only seasonally, then year-round. I don't think we can assume that the base for this movement was necessarily homogeneous, although it likely had a dominate element, stemming from the Yamnaya R1b clans (Yamnaya = Khvalynsk + CHG).
 
CrazyDonkey said:
The left (west) bank of the Dnieper Rapids was the high water mark of the Cucuteni-Tripolye culture, while the Khvalynsk-Yamnaya culture was on the east bank. Uralic foragers were to the north, Maykop/Caucasian traders to the south. It was a rich fishery (salmon). Whoever controlled the Dnieper Rapids, controlled north-south and east-west trade - I suspect that was Khvalynsk-Yamnaya tribes, with the creole/trading language becoming instituted as a lingua franca.
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Yes, the Steppe had various diverse populations, each with distinctive DNA profiles.

Perhaps you are right about the Dnieper Rapids, although I have doubts that a PIE lingua franca would have encompassed all of the populations living in the region. The bearers of the main IE yDNA lineages (R1b-L51 and R1a-M417) are predominantly EHG/Anatolian admixtures. If WHG-rich Dnieper populations and CHG-rich Caucasian populations had represented substantial parts of the PIE mix, I would have expected WHG and CHG to be more substantially and uniformly embedded into IE populations' DNA.

My analysis suggests that Yamnaya was too late and separated to have been a part of PIE's hypothesisied initial development as a composite Dnieper language. Khvalynsk/Suvorovo is a possible Dnieper controlling force, but it looks genetically very mixed itself (as I think you suggest, possibly a motley collection of outcasts), so I'm not sure it would have had a universal lingua franca, and feel it is more likely to have taken on the basic language of the Anatolian-like populations that it raided/traded with.
 
Pip said:
Perhaps PIE has elements of Pidgin, without being wholly Pidgin. After all, it appears to have been spoken by a mixed population, some of whom would have spoken the basic parent language, some of whom wouldn't.

As a cosmopolitan city, London English now has elements of Pidgin in it, despite the underlying language retaining its full, more complex structure.
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What exactly would make PIE have elements of pidgin? I strive to find some, but I just can't. Mixed populations can learn to speak the same language without necessarily "pidginizing" or "creolizing" it. It's happened multiple times in the past (e.g. the expansion of Russian in East Europe/North Asia, Turkic in Central Asia, etc.). One can't call any linguistic evolution caused by the expansion of a language outside of its original core a "pidgin". PIE seems to be a "full" language developed naturally, not through a conscientious effort to create a simple and understandable communication code between people who don't really speak the same language. It may have evolved in different ways under substrate and adstrate influences once it was learned by different populations who originally did not speak it, thus contributing to the formation of the dialect continuum that certainly existed in the past (PIE is kind of a fiction anyways, it was certainly a set of distinct but very closely related dialects, none of them exactly equal to reconstructed PIE, which is like an "average, levelled" version of all the dialects). But, honestly, I don't think there is anything "pidgin" about it, and since we don't know the languages that would've been at the core of that pidgin formation in my opinion it should be virtually impossible to say that PIE was once derived from a pidgin (if it did, it definitely happened way before the PIE stage in its linguistic evolution, because it had become way too complex, irregular and flexible to be remotely similar to a pidgin by then).
 
O Neill said:
What of the Tengri horse warriors of the 7th to 10th century then ? They swept through an area the size of europe in a few hundred years.
Reaching Eastern Europe. Did they covert Europe and the near east to tengri ? Nope the dumped paganism and all adopted one of the other mainstream religions.
How do you know they didnt do the same thing the first time around dumping there language and religion and mixing in ?
What seems unlikely to your seems obvious to me.
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Not a good example. You didn't think of the details of this narrative.
1) The Turkic genetic impact was much, much lower in most of Europe than that of the BA steppe people (steppe Turks were themselves highly mixed and mostly Turkified Scytho-Sarmatians).
2) The disparity of sociocultural levels between themselves and the civilized peoples they encountered was even bigger in the Middle Ages than in the Early BA Age.
3) Where the Turks did change their language (usually because they were just a tiny conqueror elite), they adopted several different languages spoken in each given place, not a common unified language across much of the continent, something unimaginable even in medieval Europe, let alone in Early BA Europe. It'd be a real miracle if all the IE warriors arrived at different parts of the continent and they just happened to find exactly the same PIE language and adopt it uniformly, without leaving traces of their own language (unlike Turks in Eastern Europe, whose languages are still there to be heard) and with a very unlikely linguistic homogeneity all across Europe.
4) The Turks arrived in lands that by the Early Middle Ages were already arguably much more populated developed than Europe in the Chalcolithic/Early BA 3500-4000 years earlier. The population of Europe increased tremendously in the Iron Age.
5) Finally, the Turkic warriors didn't dump their language, most kept speaking Turkic or Magyar in the areas they really settled the most in. They even managed to impose their Asian language onto the native majorities (classic example is Hungarian, but also arguably most of Ukraine and Southern Russia, which were Turkic-speaking until the Slavic expansion some centuries ago, which can also be clearly identified in the genetic record) In other places the Turks' genetic and cultural impact was tiny, so of course they were fully assimilated.
6) Changing one's religion and one's language are totally different matters. The profound influence of pre-IE peoples in the cultural aspects of the steppe-admixed BA and IA populations is very evident, but it does not necessarily mean they changed their language, too. Most Turks, where they really settled in significant numbers, kept their Turkic language regardless of their shifting to Christianity, Islam, Buddhism or whatever.


No, I don't think it's "obvious" at all, and the example of Turks in Eastern Europe reinforces my perceptions. We don't know anything for certain, but if a scenario is most unlikely, especially when we know the circumstances of that expansion (with a much bigger demographic and cultural impact), and we know that even the Turkic expansion, with a lower genetic impact and in much more "competitive" circumstances, left a linguistic and ethnic legacy in Eastern Europe still visible even after the subsequent and huge Slavic expansion, then we maybe shouldn't consider it much.
 
Pip said:
Yes, the Steppe had various diverse populations, each with distinctive DNA profiles.

Perhaps you are right about the Dnieper Rapids, although I have doubts that a PIE lingua franca would have encompassed all of the populations living in the region. The bearers of the main IE yDNA lineages (R1b-L51 and R1a-M417) are predominantly EHG/Anatolian admixtures. If WHG-rich Dnieper populations and CHG-rich Caucasian populations had represented substantial parts of the PIE mix, I would have expected WHG and CHG to be more substantially and uniformly embedded into IE populations' DNA.

My analysis suggests that Yamnaya was too late and separated to have been a part of PIE's hypothesisied initial development as a composite Dnieper language. Khvalynsk/Suvorovo is a possible Dnieper controlling force, but it looks genetically very mixed itself (as I think you suggest, possibly a motley collection of outcasts), so I'm not sure it would have had a universal lingua franca, and feel it is more likely to have taken on the basic language of the Anatolian-like populations that it raided/traded with.
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You've got Surski (6200-5800 BC), Dnieper-Donets (5800-5000 BC), and Sredny Stog (5000-3500 BC) cultures stacked up in the Dnieper Rapids, before the arrival of the Yamnaya culture (3500 BC). The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture expanded to the west bank of the Dnieper Rapids, where they ran into the Yamnaya pastoral nomads on the east bank. Both would have intermixed with the earlier cultural groups and ultimately with each other.

I read somewhere (in one of the Bell Beaker articles) that the Bell Beakers who invaded Britain lacked the Lactase Persistence gene, but that it was a later invasion, of Celtic/Brittonic-type folk, that carried that gene. If there were two waves, one partly pastoral (without persistence) and the other fully pastoral (with persistence), the first was likely overrun by the second. The first wave might have included the Suvorovo/Novodanilovka groups (early PIE), the second wave the Yamnaya (late PIE).
 
CrazyDonkey said:
It is difficult to abstract from modern historical pidgin/creole languages, which can't easily be separated from their colonial/exploitative contexts (a technologically advanced society dominating a primitive one). I think the hypothesis is that PIE might originally have had pidgin/creole-like characteristics. Speakers of a pidgin don't lose their original language. Speakers of a creole can either retain or adopt the dominate grammar and morphology, while mixing lexical terms. The "valley" cultures (of the Dniester, Dnieper, Don, and Volga) would have been the base from which a pastoral-nomadic element separated itself and, enabled by wheeled wagons, domesticated animals (horse, cattle, sheep, etc.), and the "secondary products revolution", peeled off and moved onto the steppes, at first only seasonally, then year-round. I don't think we can assume that the base for this movement was necessarily homogeneous, although it likely had a dominate element, stemming from the Yamnaya R1b clans (Yamnaya = Khvalynsk + CHG).
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Not all creoles and pidgins are like that. There is Sango, the main language of the Central African Republic. It still has the usual characteristics of creole languages, not developed from the context of European colonialism. Also, as far as I know speakers of a pidgin necessarily don't lose their original language. If they eventually do, then the pidgin tends to become more lexically and synctactically complex and becomes a creole. A creole by definition does not retain much of the dominant grammar and morphology. That is what I just can't see in PIE: an origin as a pidgin. It seems much more likely to me that it was simply a regional lingua franca in a multilingual environment (maybe most other languages were already Para-IE, that is, belonged to the same language family, easing the linguistic shift) that eventually became the native language of most people of the steppe horizon as it became more integrated culturally and economically. But a lingua franca is basically a dialect (sometimes a bit simplified and with some loanwords of other languages) of a certain "fully-formed" language, and not an improvised pidgin. In my opinion that final integration happened with the Yamnaya, but they spread a particular branch of LPIE dialects (in other words, Yamnaya was not the home of undivided, early PIE at all), not all of the dialect continuum, and probably not all peoples adopted that dialect instead of their own already spoken since much earlier, instead just "re-converging" their language a bit with the Yamnaya dialects (much like most Iberian Romance languages in Spain either lost to Castillian or became heavily Castillianized even if they lingered on).

If you want to know my "personal hypothesis", which I don't cling strongly to because I know it is utter speculation for fun (though I hope a well informed one): Pre-PIE or the earliest form of PIE was the language of Khvalynsk, a dialect of it, propably with some Sredny-Stog and EEF/Balkanic influence, was spread by Suvorovo-Novodanilovka, partially unifying the Pontic-Caspian steppe linguistically and re-converging the "Supra-PIE" dialect continuum there (and its expansion to the Balkans was somehow related to the separate development of Anatolian IE later). After that relative homogeneization, LPIE dialects gradually developed and diverged, but, much later, the Yamnaya horizon spread a new dominant dialect/dialect continuum (probably na "eastern" one), causing a new overriding of previous IE dialects and in other regions just a partial re-convergence with the Yamnaya dialect zone under its strong superstrate influence, but maintaining their distinct features. This hypothesis takes into account the very high likelihood that, at least since the later stages of Khvalynsk, PIE was not a single uniform language, but a continuum of closely related dialects that interacted with each other, sometimes diverging, sometimes converging, with some replacing the others, and so on.
 
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Pip said:
Perhaps PIE has elements of Pidgin, without being wholly Pidgin. After all, it appears to have been spoken by a mixed population, some of whom would have spoken the basic parent language, some of whom wouldn't.

As a cosmopolitan city, London English now has elements of Pidgin in it, despite the underlying language retaining its full, more complex structure.
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The Pigdin trait you are talking about, is about Vocabulary, not about the Morphology of the language itself. As we already discussed, PIE or IE languages shows a lot of Vocabulary in common with other languages from other families, it doesn't make it a Pigdin. Finnish have plenty of IE loanwords too, and has like 15 cases... We probably mingle intense interactions between Steppe and Caucasus, to the concept of Pigdin. Pigdin is generally the result when a Human Power is influencing a Local Group. Mixed population doesn't really change the equation about the Morphology of the language. It's all about concepts, words are concepts, if your inject a concept as a word into a population who is receptive to it, it then becomes a word/concept for that population, but the Morphology evolve without the human input, it's a complexe creation that comes to be without human having a notion of it. It's like a Natural Behavior, compared to a Concept. Take once again English as an exemple, the vocabulary of English is 70% of Roman Origin, but the Morphology is more Germanic. So then we have a Germanic language highly influenced by Roman Vocabulary / Concepts. There is no doubt that PIE, Semitic and some Caucasian Languages like Kartvelian have neighbored a common cultural appreciation of some particular concepts around the Caucasus. It doesn't mean that much in what direction it happened and by who, from where.
 
That is a very good scientific paper. And it also aligns with my belief that the Germanic languages are the product of a fusion of R1a Baltic dialects and R1b northern Proto-Italo-Celtic.
 
Ygorcs said:
What exactly would make PIE have elements of pidgin? I strive to find some, but I just can't. Mixed populations can learn to speak the same language without necessarily "pidginizing" or "creolizing" it. It's happened multiple times in the past (e.g. the expansion of Russian in East Europe/North Asia, Turkic in Central Asia, etc.). One can't call any linguistic evolution caused by the expansion of a language outside of its original core a "pidgin". PIE seems to be a "full" language developed naturally, not through a conscientious effort to create a simple and understandable communication code between people who don't really speak the same language. It may have evolved in different ways under substrate and adstrate influences once it was learned by different populations who originally did not speak it, thus contributing to the formation of the dialect continuum that certainly existed in the past (PIE is kind of a fiction anyways, it was certainly a set of distinct but very closely related dialects, none of them exactly equal to reconstructed PIE, which is like an "average, levelled" version of all the dialects). But, honestly, I don't think there is anything "pidgin" about it, and since we don't know the languages that would've been at the core of that pidgin formation in my opinion it should be virtually impossible to say that PIE was once derived from a pidgin (if it did, it definitely happened way before the PIE stage in its linguistic evolution, because it had become way too complex, irregular and flexible to be remotely similar to a pidgin by then).
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I take your word for it; I really don't know enough about linguistics.

In London, a very cosmopolitan city, we have mixes of pidgin-like English and full English, spoken alongside one another, and at the same time subtly influencing each other. In time, the pidgin will disappear, but will have altered the full language. I just wonder whether PIE may have arisen in a similar fashion, with say Steppe people's pidgin version of Anatolian languages significantly influencing their development and at the same time contributing to their re-coalescence, but with the grammatical structures common to these Anatolian languages reemerging across all sections of their mixed societies.
 
halfalp said:
Take once again English as an exemple, the vocabulary of English is 70% of Roman Origin, but the Morphology is more Germanic.
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Perhaps more Germanic, but not entirely Germanic, presumably due to the basic Germanic language being pidginised by the non-German speaking people who adopted it, leading to an evolution in the morphology of the Germanic people's language too.
 
CrazyDonkey said:
You've got Surski (6200-5800 BC), Dnieper-Donets (5800-5000 BC), and Sredny Stog (5000-3500 BC) cultures stacked up in the Dnieper Rapids, before the arrival of the Yamnaya culture (3500 BC). The Cucuteni-Tripolye culture expanded to the west bank of the Dnieper Rapids, where they ran into the Yamnaya pastoral nomads on the east bank. Both would have intermixed with the earlier cultural groups and ultimately with each other.

I read somewhere (in one of the Bell Beaker articles) that the Bell Beakers who invaded Britain lacked the Lactase Persistence gene, but that it was a later invasion, of Celtic/Brittonic-type folk, that carried that gene. If there were two waves, one partly pastoral (without persistence) and the other fully pastoral (with persistence), the first was likely overrun by the second. The first wave might have included the Suvorovo/Novodanilovka groups (early PIE), the second wave the Yamnaya (late PIE).
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Your posts are invariably insightful and thought-provoking.

I do not see any significant signs of Yamnaya in R1b Bell Beaker or R1a core Corded Ware, but am intrigued by your suggestion that there might have been Yamnayan input into a later wave. There certainly seems to have been Yamnayan input into the surviving (North Eastern) part of Corded Ware, so I suppose the same might be true of some of Bell Beaker's derivatives. I will look into this more closely.
 
Everyone needs to check out FrankN's posts, I've seen some of his old posts on here and they are beyond useful. Better than Wikipedia without a doubt. There was one post about metallurgy and the distinction between Central Euro/Balkan metallurgy and Iberian metallurgy and the BB question, but I can't find it anymore...
 
call me an idiot again,

The Tocharians,

genetically Andronovo
culturally BMAC

so at BMAC and Andronovo happened an exchange,

and the question,

IE past from BMAC to Andronovo?
or from Andronovo to BMAC?

considering the Tocharians knew BMAC culture,
for it is more obvious that IE passed from BMAC to Andronovo,
while Andronovo spread them,
 
Yetos said:
call me an idiot again,

The Tocharians,

genetically Andronovo
culturally BMAC

so at BMAC and Andronovo happened an exchange,

and the question,

IE past from BMAC to Andronovo?
or from Andronovo to BMAC?

considering the Tocharians knew BMAC culture,
for it is more obvious that IE passed from BMAC to Andronovo,
while Andronovo spread them,
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Andronovo can't possibly have spread most of the IE branches found in Europe and Asia, or at least there is no genetic and archaeological evidence for it. As for BMAC, I'm sure it's language would've been much more divergent in comparison with other PIE-derived branches if it happened to have come from na Early PIE (or rather pre-PIE) in the Iranian plateau or something like that. It wouldn't look like Indo-Iranian at all, which is arguably a "late IE" branch sharing many features with Hellenic, Armenian and Balto-Slavic. It makes more sense that Andronovo or Sintashta mixed with BMAC and lent them their language. There are many cases where steppe/desert uncouth tribes imposed their language successfully onto more civilized societies (Turkic in Central Asia and Turkey, Arabic in Egypt and Syria, Hungarian in Hungary, possibly Nahuatl in Aztec México, etc.).
 
Ygorcs said:
Andronovo can't possibly have spread most of the IE branches found in Europe and Asia, or at least there is no genetic and archaeological evidence for it. As for BMAC, I'm sure it's language would've been much more divergent in comparison with other PIE-derived branches if it happened to have come from na Early PIE (or rather pre-PIE) in the Iranian plateau or something like that. It wouldn't look like Indo-Iranian at all, which is arguably a "late IE" branch sharing many features with Hellenic, Armenian and Balto-Slavic. It makes more sense that Andronovo or Sintashta mixed with BMAC and lent them their language. There are many cases where steppe/desert uncouth tribes imposed their language successfully onto more civilized societies (Turkic in Central Asia and Turkey, Arabic in Egypt and Syria, Hungarian in Hungary, possibly Nahuatl in Aztec México, etc.).
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I doubt Tocharian comes from Andronovo though.
 
Pip said:
Perhaps more Germanic, but not entirely Germanic, presumably due to the basic Germanic language being pidginised by the non-German speaking people who adopted it, leading to an evolution in the morphology of the Germanic people's language too.
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In my opinion the bulk of the morphological changes in English had little to do with "pidginizing" by non-Germanic-speaking people. Old English - at least its formal dialect - kept its complex morphology and syntax as late as the Norman invasion, and most of the assimilation of Celts and Norse people had happened by then. Later the Normans were a small minority, if a powerful and influential one. In my opinion, it is clear that the main changes were triggered by a much more prosaic reason: "erosion" caused by phonetic changes (strong vowel reduction and big intensification of the stress-timing rhythm of English). That rendered most (say, 80%) of the inflected forms completely useless, because they now sounded exactly like the other forms of the nouns. Because of that loss of clear vowel distinction (and sometimes even dropping of entire last syllables caused by stronger initial stress), the whole "castle of declensions" crumbled and fell apart, therefore encouraging English speakers to rely more on rigid word order and prepositions to convey what they meant without any ambiguity or lack of clarity. And the rest was history: the way English morphology and syntax "worked" had to be refashioned to account for the new situation. That's in my opinion the least "fanciful" and more parsimonious explanation for what happened in English, especially because the bulk of the changes happened when Norse and Celtic people in England had already shifted to English generations earlier, mainly in the 1200s and 1300s.
 
Joey37 said:
That is a very good scientific paper. And it also aligns with my belief that the Germanic languages are the product of a fusion of R1a Baltic dialects and R1b northern Proto-Italo-Celtic.
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Yes, I have often wondered something like that, finally settling for this speculation: that Germanic is the result of a Western CWC dialect that missed the satem innovation of the "core LPIE" area (Northeastern Europe) and subsequently became heavily influenced by a BB early IE branch (not necessarily Italo-Celtic, which is a bit too late, but a sister branch derived from the same immediate proto-language as Italo-Celtic), or perhaps replaced by it, but remaining as a strong substrate in it. Germanic has had a somewhat difficult "placing" in the phylogenetic trees of IE, and that for me suggests that its origins were a bit more complex than that of other branches.
 
markod said:
I doubt Tocharian comes from Andronovo though.
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Yes, I, too. I think Tocharian is clearly pre-satemization, which in my opinion was a mid-late Yamnaya phonetic innovation that probably swept, in different degrees and ways, all lands that were in or near to the PIE core territory. I still think the association between Tocharian and Afanasevo may have sense. Anyway, I don't think it's right to say Tocharians were "genetically Andronovo" until we have probable early Tocharians (that will be hard to establish, as Indo-Iranian and Tocharian were presumably in close contact for a long time, the Tarim Basin also had lots of Iranic speakers).
 
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