Map of Indo-European Languages (by Phonology)

[Cyrus]

wow. Curys, you're just as crazy as that turk who thought the viking runestones were written in proto-turkic. Your delusions would be entertaining, if it all wasn't a bit sad too.

It is really difficult to discuss with the people who are racist and biased, if there are enough reasons that runestones were written in proto-turkic, why we shouldn't believe it? Turks are subhuman?!

 

[markod]

Based on the latest research in archaeology and toponymy we can reasonably sure that the breakup of Germanic happened around ~500 B.C. in the Jastorf culture which emerges out of Urnfield in North-West Germany.

If the ancestor of Germanic arrived in Europe from West Asia as a differentiated language as for example Ivanov suggested we'd have to look for the influence there.

 

[Rizla]

It is really difficult to discuss with the people who are racist and biased, if there are enough reasons that runestones were written in proto-turkic, why should we believe it? Turks are subhuman?!

So now I'm racist for sticking to the historical facts, instead of what at it's best can be considered a kind of conspiracy theory? lol. You're completely far out.

To be honest, I'm not sure if you are t-rolling or being serious, but you're wasting your time. No one here is buying your nationalistic and half-assed pseudo-scientific babble.

 

[Cyrus]

Based on the latest research in archaeology and toponymy we can reasonably sure that the breakup of Germanic happened around ~500 B.C. in the Jastorf culture which emerges out of Urnfield in North-West Germany.

If the ancestor of Germanic arrived in Europe from West Asia as a differentiated language as for example Ivanov suggested we'd have to look for the influence there.

Let's assume that Germanic didn't arrive in Europe from West Asia, so where it was spoken before 500 BC?

In this thread: My proposed tree of Indo-European languages, I saw Celto-Germanic, I can't find this term even in Wikipedia, what does it mean? Do you mean Germanic and Celtic had a common origin? How is it possible? For example proto-IE *gʷ was changed to *kʷ in proto-Germanic with the process of spirantization but the same sound was labialized to b in proto-Celtic, compare English queen and Irish ben from proto-IE *gʷen- "woman". How there could be a common origin for them other than proto-Indo-European?

 

[Cyrus]

So now I'm racist for sticking to the historical facts, instead of what at it's best can be considered a kind of conspiracy theory? lol. You're completely far out.

To be honest, I'm not sure if you are t-rolling or being serious, but you're wasting your time. No one here is buying your nationalistic and half-assed pseudo-scientific babble.

What are these historical facts that you talk about them? Where Germanic was spoken before 500 BC? Real nationalists are those ones who believe their language originated in their own lands, like Iranians who say Iranian languages originated in Iran, or Germans, Turks, ... who say the same things.

 

[markod]

Let's assume that Germanic didn't arrive in Europe from West Asia, so where it was spoken before 500 BC?

In this thread: My proposed tree of Indo-European languages, I saw Celto-Germanic, I can't find this term even in Wikipedia, what does it mean? Do you mean Germanic and Celtic had a common origin? How is it possible? For example proto-IE *gʷ was changed to *kʷ in proto-Germanic with the process of spirantization but the same sound was labialized to b in proto-Celtic, compare English queen and Irish ben from proto-IE *gʷen- "woman". How there could be a common origin for them other than proto-Indo-European?

The assumption usually is that something like a North-West-Indo-European node had started to differentiate in the Bronze Age, which perhaps also included Italic. Únětice culture is often brought up as a hypothetical point of origin of those languages. I would also consider later Ottomany culture as perhaps an even more likely candidate. The latter was the first sword producing culture in temperate Europe.

 

[Cyrus]

The assumption usually is that something like a North-West-Indo-European node had started to differentiate in the Bronze Age, which perhaps also included Italic. Únětice culture is often brought up as a hypothetical point of origin of those languages. I would also consider later Ottomany culture as perhaps an even more likely candidate. The latter was the first sword producing culture in temperate Europe.

What is the difference between this North-West-Indo-European node and proto-Indo-European? If we want to consider different Italic, Celtic and Germanic sound changes, this node could be nothing but proto-Indo-European itself. Do you want to say a language almost the same as proto-Indo-European existed in Europe in 500 BC, at the same time that Persians and Medians couldn't speak with each other because they had very different languages but a very long time before it both of them spoke a Western Iranian language and a very very long time before it, they spoke Iranian language and a very very very long time before it, they spoke Indo-Iranian language, and a very very very very long time before it, they spoke the Satem branch of Indo-European language?!

What we see in proto-Germanic is a regular Chain shift (A → B → C) from the Proto-Indo-European language directly, is it true or not?

 

[Cyrus]

What do you think about this word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/برج

Borrowed from Classical Syriac ܒܘܪܓܐ‎ (burgāʾ), from burg in Middle Persian, or from Ancient Greek πύργος (púrgos) which may be an ancient borrowing from Proto-Germanic *burgz, from Proto-Indo-European *bʰerǵʰ- (“fortified elevation”), then the English words borough and burg, German Burg and Berg, Dutch burg and others. Ancient Greek πύργος (púrgos) is first attested in Homer's Iliad 7.206. (1260 BC), there is also Hurro-Urartian burgana "palace, fortress". We clearly see Germanic sound changes in a word which existed in the Middle East and Greece in the second millennium BC, how is it possible?

 

[markod]

What do you think about this word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/برج

Borrowed from Classical Syriac ܒܘܪܓܐ‎ (burgāʾ), from burg in Middle Persian, or from Ancient Greek πύργος (púrgos) which may be an ancient borrowing from Proto-Germanic *burgz, from Proto-Indo-European *bʰerǵʰ- (“fortified elevation”), then the English words borough and burg, German Burg and Berg, Dutch burg and others. Ancient Greek πύργος (púrgos) is first attested in Homer's Iliad 7.206. (1260 BC), there is also Hurro-Urartian burgana "palace, fortress". We clearly see Germanic sound changes in a word which existed in the Middle East and Greece in the second millennium BC, how is it possible?

Interesting, could it be explained by a common substrate? Perhaps Luwian?

 

[Cyrus]

Interesting, could it be explained by a common substrate? Perhaps Luwian?

Of course Anatolian languages had an important role in transferring words from the east of Anatolia to the western part, b>p sound change in Greek púrgos shows this role, another good example is Greek kámēlos from Semitic gamal "camel", it seems to be clear that g>k sound change happened in an Anatolian language, the interesting thing is that the proto-Germanic word for camel has an Anatolian origin, it is from Hittite hulpant "humpback", Gothic ulbandus, Old Norse úlfaldi, Old English olfend, Old High German olbento, Old Saxon olbundeo, ... are from this Germanic origin.

 

[Ygorcs]

What do you think about this word: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/برج

Borrowed from Classical Syriac ܒܘܪܓܐ‎ (burgāʾ), from burg in Middle Persian, or from Ancient Greek πύργος (púrgos) which may be an ancient borrowing from Proto-Germanic *burgz, from Proto-Indo-European *bʰerǵʰ- (“fortified elevation”), then the English words borough and burg, German Burg and Berg, Dutch burg and others. Ancient Greek πύργος (púrgos) is first attested in Homer's Iliad 7.206. (1260 BC), there is also Hurro-Urartian burgana "palace, fortress". We clearly see Germanic sound changes in a word which existed in the Middle East and Greece in the second millennium BC, how is it possible?

What Germanic sound changes do you refer about in that word? Burga in Syriac could be easily explained if it had come from Greek púrgos, because of historically attested strong relations between the two areas. I doubt púrgos could've come to Greek from (Pre-)Proto-Germanic, because there is no linguistic reason why a word with a /b/ would be borrowed by Greek shifting it to /p/ (or is there?). The púrgos form could be more easily explained if it had come from an Anatolian language (since PIE /bh/ really became a /p/ in Anatolian languages, unlike in Germanic languages). There is also the really likely possibility that the word may have come from languages that are simply not spoken any longer. There were certainly branches that were like lost IE links between Germanic and Greek (Albanian for one has lots of Germanic isoglosses as well as many isoglosses linking it to Greek and to Balto-Slavic, suggestive of a much, much older dialect continuum).

We also do not know how the Proto-Germanic *burgz would've sounded like in the second millennium BC. Remember that reconstruction is supposed to represent the way the words sounded around 400 BC - 100 AD, and especially considering how profoundly innovative Proto-Germanic was compared to PIE we should assume that its ancestor sounded very different a millennium earlier or even before that. To compare a 1260 BC word in Greek with a reconstructed word suposed to have been spoken roughly in 200 BC is a bit anachronic.

 

[Ygorcs]

Look at this map:

That blue area in the west of Iran is the ancient land of Gutians (Goths) who were mentioned as namrum (blonde people) in the Akkadian sources from the third Millennium BC, ancient Sumerians who lived in the east of Gutium called themselves uŋ-saŋ-gi-ga ("the black-headed people).
One of the famous people who was born in Gotvand in the west of Iran is Mohammad-Ali Ramin:

They are certainly a minority in Iran but there could be a different situation in the ancient times before the mass migrations of different Iranian, Turkic, Semitic and Mongol tribes to Iran. Of course in the same time Elamites in the south and Hurro-Urartian tribes in the north differed from them too.

What do you think about the existence of haplogroup I in the west of Iran?

I honestly think frequency of blonde hair or light eyes has nothing or very little to do with the presence of a supposed West Iranian influence on Germanic North Europe. Especially when we already know that blue eyes were very prevalent in Chalcolithic Israel with mostly Anatolian_Neolithic (+ some Levant_Neolithic) people, and the first real prevalence of blonde hair + blue eyes was found in the GAC Culture of Central Europe with overwhelmingly EEF (ANF + WHG) people. It is just no indication of an IE origin, far less a Germanic one. Such phenotypical characteristics are also much, much less reliable than the analysis of autosomal admixtures and the really specific (downstream) subclades of haplogroups present in two regions. There is very little genetic information to support a stronger connection between West Iran and Scandinavia (Germanic homeland) than between the former and other regions of Europe.

The I haplogroups most commonly found in the Near East are not subclades of I1 as in mostly Germanic lands. The vast majority of I haplogroup in Iran AFAIK is I2, which is just too old to allow us to establish any further relationship with European populations. Unfortunately I don't know about the specific subclades of I2 that are most common in West Iran and how close their distribution is to the I2 distribution and frequency in Northern Europe.

 

[Ygorcs]

According to this map, haplogroup I relates to the Germanic culture and R1b to the Celtic culture:

This map is just illustrative and very approximative. It is also too simplistic. In other words, it's certainly wrong, but I'm sure they didn't intend the map to be a true presentation of what happened in the past. The haplogroups did not get formed in the same broad region (the southern portion of Asia) and spread fully formed from there. The actual genetic history was most certainly not like that. Haplogroups spread and then diversified into new haplogroups in other places, people were moving all the time (for example, K2b > P > R > R1 > R1a & R1b was certainly a very complex process and it did not occure in just one region, booming and moving out of it just after the process was complete). The map is not scientific, scientists still have little evidence to be that sure about the original homeland and route of all these haplogroups.

Also, you're comparing extremely old haplogroups like R1b and I (more than 20,000 years old) with two Bronze Age populations, Celtic and Germanic, that even spoke originally dialects of the same language. That won't be a good source of enlightening for your hypothesis. There is a huge time gap and certainly Celtic and Germanic ethnogenesis have nothing to do with where the haplogroups R1b and I first appeared dozens of thousands of years earlier.

 

[Cyrus]

What Germanic sound changes do you refer about in that word? Burga in Syriac could be easily explained if it had come from Greek púrgos, because of historically attested strong relations between the two areas. I doubt púrgos could've come to Greek from (Pre-)Proto-Germanic, because there is no linguistic reason why a word with a /b/ would be borrowed by Greek shifting it to /p/ (or is there?). The púrgos form could be more easily explained if it had come from an Anatolian language (since PIE /bh/ really became a /p/ in Anatolian languages, unlike in Germanic languages). There is also the really likely possibility that the word may have come from languages that are simply not spoken any longer. There were certainly branches that were like lost IE links between Germanic and Greek (Albanian for one has lots of Germanic isoglosses as well as many isoglosses linking it to Greek and to Balto-Slavic, suggestive of a much, much older dialect continuum).

We also do not know how the Proto-Germanic *burgz would've sounded like in the second millennium BC. Remember that reconstruction is supposed to represent the way the words sounded around 400 BC - 100 AD, and especially considering how profoundly innovative Proto-Germanic was compared to PIE we should assume that its ancestor sounded very different a millennium earlier or even before that. To compare a 1260 BC word in Greek with a reconstructed word suposed to have been spoken roughly in 200 BC is a bit anachronic.

About this word the most important Germanic sound change is ǵʰ>g, the Hittite word from the same PIE origin is parkuš "high", as I said in my previous post, b>p sound change in Greek púrgos shows the role of an Anatolian language, like Hittite, because there was no /b/ sound in Hittite but /g/ existed, much older than Syriac burga, there are also Hurro-Urartian burgana "palace, fortress", Old Armenian burgn "pyramid" and Middle Persian burg "tower", the proto-Germanic word *burgz could be the source of all of them, we are talking about proto-Indo-European and sound changes from this language which certainly didn't exist in 400 BC - 100 AD. For example we know *gʷʰ just existed in PIE, what sound other than it could be changed to g/b/w/gʷ in proto-Germanic? Compare English bane from from proto-Germanic *banô from proto-Indo-European *gʷʰonō "to slay, kill", cognate with Armenian ǰnǰem, Slavic *žę̀ti, Latin offendō, Hittite kuaške, Greek theínō, Old Irish geguin, Sanskrit jaghā́na, ...

 

[Cyrus]

I honestly think frequency of blonde hair or light eyes has nothing or very little to do with the presence of a supposed West Iranian influence on Germanic North Europe. Especially when we already know that blue eyes were very prevalent in Chalcolithic Israel with mostly Anatolian_Neolithic (+ some Levant_Neolithic) people, and the first real prevalence of blonde hair + blue eyes was found in the GAC Culture of Central Europe with overwhelmingly EEF (ANF + WHG) people. It is just no indication of an IE origin, far less a Germanic one. Such phenotypical characteristics are also much, much less reliable than the analysis of autosomal admixtures and the really specific (downstream) subclades of haplogroups present in two regions. There is very little genetic information to support a stronger connection between West Iran and Scandinavia (Germanic homeland) than between the former and other regions of Europe.

The I haplogroups most commonly found in the Near East are not subclades of I1 as in mostly Germanic lands. The vast majority of I haplogroup in Iran AFAIK is I2, which is just too old to allow us to establish any further relationship with European populations. Unfortunately I don't know about the specific subclades of I2 that are most common in West Iran and how close their distribution is to the I2 distribution and frequency in Northern Europe.

The fact is the relation between genetics and language is a complicated issue, from the United States to Cameroon and Singapore, there are many different ethnic groups who speak English as their mother language, but when you see two blonde men from England and Australia speak English, it can be guessed that they relate to each other genetically too. It certainly doesn't mean that all blonde people speak English or all people who speak English are blonde.

Existence of haplogroup I/R1b or blond hair/blue eyes in the west of Iran show that there are relations (including linguistic relations) between the people of this region and other people who have these haplogroups or physical appearance, whether they live in Europe or any other part of the world, is it true or not?

 

[Cyrus]

This map is just illustrative and very approximative. It is also too simplistic. In other words, it's certainly wrong, but I'm sure they didn't intend the map to be a true presentation of what happened in the past. The haplogroups did not get formed in the same broad region (the southern portion of Asia) and spread fully formed from there. The actual genetic history was most certainly not like that. Haplogroups spread and then diversified into new haplogroups in other places, people were moving all the time (for example, K2b > P > R > R1 > R1a & R1b was certainly a very complex process and it did not occure in just one region, booming and moving out of it just after the process was complete). The map is not scientific, scientists still have little evidence to be that sure about the original homeland and route of all these haplogroups.

Also, you're comparing extremely old haplogroups like R1b and I (more than 20,000 years old) with two Bronze Age populations, Celtic and Germanic, that even spoke originally dialects of the same language. That won't be a good source of enlightening for your hypothesis. There is a huge time gap and certainly Celtic and Germanic ethnogenesis have nothing to do with where the haplogroups R1b and I first appeared dozens of thousands of years earlier.

I really don't know that map is accurate or not but about the time I think you are exaggerating, as you read here: Family Tree of Languages Has Roots in Anatolia, Biologists Say "the first Indo-European speakers were peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago", about the Celtic people I believe they were one of these Indo-European speakers who migrated to the east of Anatolia, in the region between the Caspian sea and Black sea which was known as Iberia, Albania and Chaldia/Keltia since the ancient times.

Now let's look at Haplogroup R-M269 (also known as R1b1a1a2): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R-M269

Possible time of origin: 4,500–9,000 BP

As you read about frequency distribution for haplogroup R-M269 after European countries where Celtic people lived, such as Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Spain, France, Portugal, ..., there are Armenia/Turkey (Ararat Valley), Turkey (Lake Van), Armenia (Gardman), Turkey (Central) and Iran (North).

Frequencies of the main Y-chromosome haplogroups in the whole Iranian population: https://www.researchgate.net/figure...whole-Iranian-population-inset_fig1_229427983

As you see there is an interesting difference between Gilaki and Mazandarani people in the north of Iran:

 

[markod]

Of course Anatolian languages had an important role in transferring words from the east of Anatolia to the western part, b>p sound change in Greek púrgos shows this role, another good example is Greek kámēlos from Semitic gamal "camel", it seems to be clear that g>k sound change happened in an Anatolian language, the interesting thing is that the proto-Germanic word for camel has an Anatolian origin, it is from Hittite hulpant "humpback", Gothic ulbandus, Old Norse úlfaldi, Old English olfend, Old High German olbento, Old Saxon olbundeo, ... are from this Germanic origin.

If I remember correctly, Ivanov & Gramkelidze mention several other Middle Eastern words of various provenances that are exclusive to Germanic. It might be worth looking into.

Gordon Whittaker contends that the ancient Euphratic substratum he believes to have found in southern Iraq had already undergone development in the direction of Western IE (Germanic-Celtic-Italic).

 

[Cyrus]

There are two options: either Proto-Germanic people lived in the east of Semitic lands in the west of Iran or there was another Indo-European language with almost the same sound changes of Proto-Germanic in this region from at least the third millennium BC, for example we know Akkadian ḫabālu, Arabic حبل (ḥabl), Amharic häbl, Maltese ħabel, Aramaic: חבלא‎ (ḥaḇlā), Syriac ܚܒܠܐ‎ (ḥaḇlā), Ge'ez ሐብል (ḥabl), Hebrew חֶבֶל‎ (ḥéḇel), Ugaritic ḥbl, ... (Ugaritic became extinct in the 12th century BC), are loanwords in the Semitic languages with the meaning of "thick rope, cable".

English cable is from Latin capulum, from capiō ("to take, seize"), from proto-IE *keh₂p "to grab", the proto-Germanic word from this PIE origin is *habjaną "to lift, heave" (k>x/h & p>f/b), there is also proto-Germanic *habilaz (*habjaną +‎ *-ilaz "instrumental suffix"), compare shovel, bridle, ...

 

[halfalp]

There are two options: either Proto-Germanic people lived in the east of Semitic lands in the west of Iran or there was another Indo-European language with almost the same sound changes of Proto-Germanic in this region from at least the third millennium BC, for example we know Akkadian ḫabālu, Arabic حبل (ḥabl), Amharic häbl, Maltese ħabel, Aramaic: חבלא‎ (ḥaḇlā), Syriac ܚܒܠܐ‎ (ḥaḇlā), Ge'ez ሐብል (ḥabl), Hebrew חֶבֶל‎ (ḥéḇel), Ugaritic ḥbl, ... (Ugaritic became extinct in the 12th century BC), are loanwords in the Semitic languages with the meaning of "thick rope, cable".

English cable is from Latin capulum, from capiō ("to take, seize"), from proto-IE *keh₂p "to grab", the proto-Germanic word from this PIE origin is *habjaną "to lift, heave" (k>x/h & p>f/b), there is also proto-Germanic *habilaz (*habjaną +‎ *-ilaz "instrumental suffix"), compare shovel, bridle, ...

Gutians-Goths?

 

[Cyrus]

Gutians-Goths?

Yes, also Getae in 700 BC. In fact Getae in the west of Black sea connects them to each other, Jacob Grimm, the discoverer of Grimm's law (the First Germanic Sound Shift), says that "If only six or eight of my interpretations be correct, and the remainder more or less probable, there needs no further proof that ancient Getae were a Germanic people".