Please eloborate – when appropriate!

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“The archaeological support for the Anatolian theory that you mentioned earlier comes from dates far preceding the attested dates for Hittite. It means those archaeological cultures that document the emergence of agriculture in Anatolia may not have been IE-speaking either. Again this is not a valid argument.”

The Hittites may have arrived with the agriculture to Anatolia. They spoke IE.
A major part of agriculturalization – such as domestication of animals – should definitly not be ascribed to the futile Crescent. The first animals of domistication were wolf, goat and sheep – which is a matter of arctic animals. The oldest cows and oxes are found in Denmark, where they dwelled 9500 years ago. The only demografic groups in the world where 90% can digest cowmilk are placed in the fertile Crescent from southern Holland – via Denmark and Skane – to Pomerania and Wizla in Polen. The further you come from this core-area the less lactose-persistance you will find. Anatolia hardly reach 50 % and are no more milk-drinkers than the Arabs, the Kenyans, Etiopians and Maroccoans.

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What is interesting about this repport is the span of 7.1000 – 9.800 year as the appearance of the IE language – along with the first palefaced Eurasians, the population of northern Euraisa, the domestication of plants and animals, the initiations of inter-regional production, travel and trade and the introduction of pastoralism, slash-burn-farming, cow-farming and various other forms of agriculture. Megalithic structures seems to have the same period of appearance – soon followed by monumental architecture and the rise of the old civilizations – in which the language was developed into ‘families’ – that would follow the demographic maps that differ between etnic groups such as Chineese, Indian, Persian, Arabian, Greek and Egyptian.

Perhaps we can come to some kind of basis for the comparision of languages if the range and variations of sounds used in various languages could be met and compared. Which language have the clear sounds (vocals) and how many do they have? Then, who have the widest range of con-sonances?!

The answers should be in some kind of alignmeent with the phonetic alphabets that do exist already. Unless there is such a reference-grid it will be futile to draw comparisions between languages in terms of defining their ages.

“Less sophisticated linguistic work will systemically miss phonemes, but is unlikely to find phonemes that aren’t there.” I would disagree – trained phoneticians can hear a myriad fine distinctions. This is the empirical data. Phonemes, however, are a bit like species in biology – the product of a process of analysis and classification. Take, for instance, the sound /t/ in English. This sounds slightly different in different contexts, e.g. before a vowel, between vowels, or word-finally – these allophones of /t/ are acoustically different.

The main criterion for isolating phonemes is that they distinguish one word from another, e.g. /t/ and /d/ are different phonemes in English because we can find minimal pairs like ‘toe’ and ‘doe’ where the difference between words depends solely on the difference between these two sounds.

There are many possible complications. For instance, a language might have a sound that only occurs at the beginning of words and another that never occurs at the beginning of words, so the minimal pair test can’t be applied. Whether they are treated as allophones of the same phoneme will be a subjective judgement based on how acoustically similar they are. (This might be modified by a knowledge of the language’s history and dialects, e.g. the glottal stop form of /t/ is pretty distant acoustically from the usual alveolar /t/, but we know how the sounds correspond between dialects.)

Sounds slide into each other, and it is again a subjective judgement whether we treat clusters as individual phonemes or as sequences of phonemes, e.g. English /st/ is treated as two phonemes, but the sound spelled ‘tch’ as one.

For languages that have been given an alphabetic written form, these judgements have already been made, generally in a maximally parsimonious way. So we would expect alphabetically written languages to be analysed into a smaller number of phonemes.

You can share with us your findings whenever you want. I would be glad to learn them.

So do I. I’m more interested in the Tocharian/Y-DNA R1a link right now. I’m also doing lots of etymological work in IE.

“But enough time had passed since the separation of the common ancestors of the speakers of the either languages to allow for such a big geographical separation when Tocharian was recorded (1st millennium CE).”

Sure, and some languages went extinct without a trace.

I see the language family tree as a supplementary, so “favors” is far from “proves”.

The archaeological support for the Anatolian theory that you mentioned earlier comes from dates far preceding the attested dates for Hittite. It means those archaeological cultures that document the emergence of agriculture in Anatolia may not have been IE-speaking either. Again this is not a valid argument.

Validity is in that the archaeological support for the Kurgan theory is as much suspect as the archaeological support for the Anatolian theory. That is why I refrain from sticking to either of the theories.

Because there are only two elements in this set – Tocharian and Hittite. And they are widely separated geographically.

But enough time had passed since the separation of the common ancestors of the speakers of the either languages to allow for such a big geographical separation when Tocharian was recorded (1st millennium CE).

Parsimony has nothing to do with this situation. Dienekes admits an ascertainment bias but calls it “parsimony.”

“They certainly had languages, but not necessarily the IE ones.”

The archaeological support for the Anatolian theory that you mentioned earlier comes from dates far preceding the attested dates for Hittite. It means those archaeological cultures that document the emergence of agriculture in Anatolia may not have been IE-speaking either. Again this is not a valid argument.

“Why is that so?”

Because there are only two elements in this set – Tocharian and Hittite. And they are widely separated geographically.

They certainly had languages, but not necessarily IE ones.

The extinct languages tree supports an Anatolian homeland just as much as it does a West China homeland.

As Dienekes stated, parsimony favors the former.

It’s not more valid. It’s just two different trees. And the extinct languages tree is not robust.

Why is that so?

It’s not more valid. It’s just two different trees. And the extinct languages tree is not robust.

“the Anatolian theory also has the language family tree in its support”

The extinct languages tree supports an Anatolian homeland just as much as it does a West China homeland.

“Both theories are based on archaeology, the difference is that the Anatolian theory also has the language family tree in its support”

The Kurgan theory can postulate an extinct Kurgan language and be square. We can be absolutely sure it existed. Or you think these archaeological cultures that are older than Hittite had no language?

By any logic, Onur, if your basal level only has 2 extinct languages and they show a wide geographic spread, which is not found in the extant languages, it’s hung jury, and all judgments on the geographic center of dispersal of this family on the basis of a set of extinct and extant languages are futile. They won’t satisfy a necessary condition for a testable theory and they won’t provide a sufficient alternative to the existing theory based on archaeology because archaeology can detect a culture whose language left no direct descendants.

I get that part, Onur. But this is where a flaw came in: you can’t rely on extinct languages to draw a radical conclusion on the homeland of a language family. It’s an open, infinite set. Especially if there are only 2 elements in this set and doubly so if the outcome is a judgment on geographic center of dispersal but those 2 elements occur in such widely separated geographic areas as Turkey and China.

The decision on the composition of a dataset should take into account the objectives of the research and the theoretical environment in which the research is taking place. The competing theory, namely the Kurgan theory, is based on archaeology into which linguistic data is retrofitted because all the original Pontic IE languages didn’t survive. Gray, Atkinson and Greenhill 2011 do nothing to undermine the Kurgan theory because they base their conclusion on half (Anatolian) of the known set of extinct languages.

They just used all the available languages – whether extant or extinct – for their work, and it is better than using only the extant ones, as the extant ones are more limited than the extant and extinct ones combined.

It’s yours truly who works with facts and evidence, you apparently have only numbers. But numbers don’t count. Gray, Atkinson & Greenhill 2011 lumped together a set of extant languages with a set of extinct languages. There’s an infinite number of possibly extinct languages that are as divergent and as IE as Hittite and Tocharian but weren’t recovered by archaeologists. One of them may have been spoken in the Pontic steppe where most archaeologists locate the homeland of Indo-European. Your basal level of IE is made up of 2 extinct language clusters – Hittite and Tocharian – which are as widely apart from each other geographically as Turkey and China. You can’t replicate Anatolian homeland with the closed set of extant languages, just because there’re no extant languages spoken in Anatolia, but then you base your homeland conclusion only on extinct languages of Anatolia. You just have too many logical flaws in your analysis (disjunctive set, circularity) to make anybody without an upfront partiality for numbers to believe you.

“It’s also been replicated by about five papers. There’s a great blog post on this here”

With 80 comments most of which are critical of the method and results from vastly different perspectives.

Simon