Poll: What language did I1-bearing peoples speak most frequently before IE?

[RobertColumbia]

What language did Haplogroup I1-bearing peoples speak most frequently before Indo-European? I am looking for your own opinion and/or speculation based on what you know of the research. Nobody is going to be called out on the correctness of their answer.

If you believe that I1 peoples spoke dialects of one of the answers below that were sufficiently divergent to be considered separate but related languages, pick the category anyway. No nitpicking please, thanks!

[LeBrok]

What language did Haplogroup I1-bearing peoples speak most frequently before Indo-European? I am looking for your own opinion and/or speculation based on what you know of the research. Nobody is going to be called out on the correctness of their answer.

If you believe that I1 peoples spoke dialects of one of the answers below that were sufficiently divergent to be considered separate but related languages, pick the category anyway. No nitpicking please, thanks!

In south central Europe they spoke farmer language. I1 was found in Hungary in late neolithic in agricultural setting, IIRC. In Scandinavia they spoke one or many hunter-gatherer languages, I guess. Either one is unknown and lost forever.

[arvistro]

I put Basque as proxy for farmer languages.

Before that they spoke now dead language.

[Alan]

I put Basque as proxy for farmer languages.

Before that they spoke now dead language.

Me too, there was always supposed connection between Basque and West Caucasian languages (both have ergativity) but could never been proven by genetics because people thought most of their ancestry is paleolithic European and therefore thrown away. Now we know that most of it is definitely Neolithic farmer ancestry + Western H&G. Therefore I see Basque as some kind of farmer languages.

[Fluffy]

Went with Basque or something related to Basque.

[Rethel]

I vote for euskara.
The poll is to big.
Half of options is bizzare.
Second half is about languages, about which we
dont know very much, so hipothezizing about this
possibilites is to risky, if not total fantazy.

In south central Europe they spoke farmer language.

It is LeBrok unproofable statement.
You schould first define, what it is farmer language.
If not - this is fantasy.

they spoke one or many hunter-gatherer languages, I guess. Either one is unknown and lost forever.

The same as above.
do you think that they were totaly different
families or where connecting to each other?


I guess, that every one who vote for example for basks, has in mind
probably many dialects of different languages related to him. As I too.
But at the beginning was one, wich we called today baskian...

[gyms]

http://www.eupedia.com/forum/threads...olithic-Sweden


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitted_Ware_culture
Language

As the language left no records, its linguistic affiliations are uncertain. It has been suggested that its people spoke a language related to the Uralic languages and provided the unique linguistic features discussed in the Germanic substrate hypothesis.

[EAB]

It is a very fun question to delve into. First off, humans as we know weren't alone in Europe when they arrived, Neanderthals were there. We don't know how they communicated, but they must have had some way, even if intuitive. However, for modern humans, I would imagine it wasn't so simple as one language, bearing in mind the size of Europe and distances involved between finds. For example, there would be a high risk of children being left with dead parents. High risk of death in childbirth plus high risk of death in hunting. This may well have brought a phenomenon of some people not speaking any language at all, and a massive regression. In small groups, it wouldn't be uncommon for them to make codes of some description. Essentially even if people were of the same race, it doesn't mean they liked each other when competing in similar areas. In fact, in a hunter gatherer society perhaps your brother is the biggest problem you have. Talking a similar language could have been the worst thing to do. There are many reason for codes, but one example of a current day code is in Listerland in Southern Sweden where they have different counting systems in a small area, made for fisherman to duck the former royal quota back in the old days. It meant you could talk at the dock and not have your neighbour tell on you. The utility of this is clear, and how often can this be developed? Twins often make their own language. Whistling, bird noises etc have all been used to communicate when reduced to a hunter gatherer paradigm. Aboriginies had over 200 languages when the English came to Australia, when the population was under 100,000. In a similar paridigm of life style, perhaps there were so many languages.

The grammar in some extinct Aboriginal languages was so strange and different from the English way of thinking, it is hard to say if we ever understood how they thought, regardless of what language they spoke. This is demonstrated to a lesser extent by a tribe in Brazil of about 300 people. A linguist was sent over (helpfully) to learn their language, and translate it into the bible. You'd have expected these hunter gatherers to be more grateful for this unsolicited gift of confusing fairy tales. The biggest problem was this culture didn't have writing, and didn't have a concept of the past. It brought the conversation down to this level, "Jesus is great and died for you." "Did you meet him?" "No." "Then stop telling us about him or we will kill you." The linguist wanted to reach the tribe on an emotional and spiritual level, which they didn't have, by explaining to them why he loved Jesus so much. His story went as follows, "When my auntie was very sad, she killed herself. The trauma of this..." "Wait, what did you say?" "My auntie killed herself." *laughter* "Why are you laughing, this was very sad for me?" "Why did she kill herself? That is the stupidest thing we ever heard."

These people were almost never depressed and couldn't understand why someone could kill themselves because their lives were so busy and focused in the moment. They had wild animals or other tribes try to kill them, but kill themselves? Ridiculous.

Perhaps the languages of the original people who came to Europe might not have made sense to us because their way of life was so different. They likely would have navigated by the stars, and thus much of their explanatory language may have been about star locations. Their beliefs were probably quite different too, if they had certain ones.

An example of this is Druidism. This belief, similar to modern scientology, is that the soul can pass into infinite bodies and lifetimes. There can be more than one soul in a body at the same time, and when the body dies you don't die. By this virtue, why did human sacrifice matter? In fact, why did dying yourself matter?

With these concepts of life and death, would all people have talked in a way we understood even if we could translate it?

In Plato's story of Atlantis, he states that people had to start again, as if like orphaned children. Whilst there is no proof of Atlantis, it is a useful philosophical tool to imagine not having something you once had, and not knowing what that was. It is a bit like putting paint on your hands and trying not to get it on your face, you realise how often we do things that we don't need to do unconsciously. Perhaps the meme of modern language is something we believe we need to achieve certain tasks, when in fact there are 100 other ways of communicating. Elephants, Prairie Dogs and other animals have interesting languages which are nothing like Human constructs of what a language should be. A prairie dog can communicate a person is coming, how big they are, what colour clothes they wear and if they have seem them before in one sound. What if humans once could do something like this? Elephants communicate up to five miles away by low noises we cannot hear. What if we did something similar with a percussive sound like a drum, afterall the Native Americans put their ear to the ground to hear a stampede.

If we can communicate in morse code, touch (braille, death dumb and blind people...) in sign language, with drums, in light, in smoke, in harmonics, in whistles etc, perhaps languages could have been like this. Maybe that is why there is no paper trail, because people explored other ways of communicating where writing was simply an abstraction.

[LeBrok]

The grammar in some extinct Aboriginal languages was so strange and different from the English way of thinking, it is hard to say if we ever understood how they thought, regardless of what language they spoke. This is demonstrated to a lesser extent by a tribe in Brazil of about 300 people. A linguist was sent over (helpfully) to learn their language, and translate it into the bible. You'd have expected these hunter gatherers to be more grateful for this unsolicited gift of confusing fairy tales. The biggest problem was this culture didn't have writing, and didn't have a concept of the past. It brought the conversation down to this level, "Jesus is great and died for you." "Did you meet him?" "No." "Then stop telling us about him or we will kill you." The linguist wanted to reach the tribe on an emotional and spiritual level, which they didn't have, by explaining to them why he loved Jesus so much. His story went as follows, "When my auntie was very sad, she killed herself. The trauma of this..." "Wait, what did you say?" "My auntie killed herself." *laughter* "Why are you laughing, this was very sad for me?" "Why did she kill herself? That is the stupidest thing we ever heard."

These people were almost never depressed and couldn't understand why someone could kill themselves because their lives were so busy and focused in the moment. They had wild animals or other tribes try to kill them, but kill themselves? Ridiculous.

.

Actually there is a documented and still existent Amazon Jungle tribe whose members commit suicide. Around age of 35 they are getting bored of life and have growing desire to join their ancestors in afterlife. There are no old people in the village. They also practice infanticide of infirm kids.

[EAB]

Actually there is a documented and still existent Amazon Jungle tribe whose members commit suicide. Around age of 35 they are getting bored of life and have growing desire to join their ancestors in afterlife. There are no old people in the village. They also practice infanticide of infirm kids.

Yes, one geographical country has tribes which we assume are only separated by a few thousand years of presumably the same Y chromosome, that do completely different things. It must have been similar to this in Europe.

[gyms]

Kenneth Nordtvedt wrote (Fri,2 Oct 2015.): Seems today the BigY for an extremely early L161 branch is reported out?
And interesting place of origin--- Turkey!

[The_Lyonnist]

I1 always speak IE.

[Angela]

I1 always speak IE.

That's not possible given that an I1 autosomally EEF sample has been found. Those people would have been speaking a "farmer" language

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/09/03/008664

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2014/09...-of-early.html

http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_I1_Y-DNA.shtml

[PIER1A]

why "Nostratic" language is not metioned? There is research trying to reconstruct this hypothetical language by connecting PIE, Basque, Ugrofinnic, Dravidan and Kartvelian languages

[bicicleur]

That's not possible given that an I1 autosomally EEF sample has been found. Those people would have been speaking a "farmer" language

http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2014/09/03/008664

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/2014/09...-of-early.html

http://www.eupedia.com/europe/Haplogroup_I1_Y-DNA.shtml

that depends on which I1 you mean
I1 was born 27000 years ago and expanded only 4700 years ago
that means all I1 tribes between 27000 and 4700 years ago went extinct, but one
4700 years ago this single I1 tribe may allready have joined corded ware people and adapted its language

Acording to Genetiker Stora Forvar 11 was also I1. He published the Y-calls and I tend to believe him.
I think it is still more likely that the surviving I1 descended from the Hungarian EEF.
But there may even be other I1 branches as a candidate for the surviving one.

[Rethel]

.......................................

[Apsurdistan]

I think they probably just growled really scary. I'm I1 and I can make really cool death metal screams, it freaks people out they think I'm possessed by a demon.

[K_Sacana_Blomqvist]

I chose an unknown language that has been lost. Unfortunately Basque seems to be the only non I.E. language that survived. An interesting issue is how the I.E. languages were affected by the original idioms that were around from time immemorial.

[davef]

I think they probably just growled really scary. I'm I1 and I can make really cool death metal screams, it freaks people out they think I'm possessed by a demon.

One upvote from me apsurdistan, brotha!

[Zvrk9]

I think it is still more likely that the surviving I1 descended from the Hungarian EEF.
But there may even be other I1 branches as a candidate for the surviving one.

That seems very likely to me too. In that relatively short time of I1 revival and branching out, we see different branches of I1-M253 leaving traces of movement on the west and east side of Europe, going south in some areas and far East in others. It is in so many locations following different paths or in some cases seemingly no path. Even looking down to some later haplotypes like Z58+Z63+ the distribution is difficult to explain with the movement of just one tribe like Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Anglo Saxons ...

So, how could we assign only one language to all of them?

The bigger mystery is what happened for 22000 years?

[Mark]

Something like a proto-Dagestanian?

[Tutkun Arnaut]

What language did Haplogroup I1-bearing peoples speak most frequently before Indo-European? I am looking for your own opinion and/or speculation based on what you know of the research. Nobody is going to be called out on the correctness of their answer.

If you believe that I1 peoples spoke dialects of one of the answers below that were sufficiently divergent to be considered separate but related languages, pick the category anyway. No nitpicking please, thanks!

I would say they spoke Gibberish

[Mark]

I would say they spoke Gibberish

Am I to presume you would know given your fluency?