Indo-European

Question: Has genetic evidence discredited the Anatolian hypothesis of the Proto-Indo-European expansion?
https://www.quora.com/Has-genetic-evidence-discredited-the-Anatolian-hypothesis-of-the-Proto-Indo-European-expansion/answer/Brian-Collins-56

Brian Collins

BA in Linguistics & Slavic Languages, University of Washington (Graduated 2014)*

6 years ago

There are a lot more problems with the Anatolian Hypothesis than genetics. All Indo-European languages except the Anatolian ones have cognates for the inventions from the Secondary products revolution around 3,000–4,000 BCE.

Words like wheel and axle that were invented after agriculture was pioneered in Anatolia, are cognates across almost all Indo-European languages except the Anatolian ones.

We would not expect this given that most of those inventions came from a wide diverse set of places unless one Proto-language borrowed words for those inventions before diverging. This puts PIE after the Anatolian Agricultural Revolution by a few thousand years.

But yes, genetic evidence is adding more weight to criticisms of the Anatolian Hypothesis.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Oct 7 2024

Genetic evidence has neither discredited Anatolian hypothesis, nor Sprachbund Hypothesis (with the original Sprachbund on the West Side of Anatolia to East Side of Balkan and Greece).

You see, we can see both genetic influx from Anatolia and genetic influx from the Yamna Culture.

Neither comes with written documents attached, so the palaeogenetics can’t tell us the Anatolian input was NOT Indo-European and cannot tell us the Yamna input was.

If you want my hunch, we are dealing with a series of Sprachbünder and the Yamnaya migrants became a superstrate. To different languages remaining different.

The argument from wheel and axle could favour those words belongin to the Yamna superstrate.

I LD after Epiphany

12.I.2025

Brian Collins

That’s not what a Sprachbund is. A Sprachbund is languages that don’t share many common words sharing common grammatical or phonological features due to contact. Since Indo-European languages share words following predictable sound changes they aren’t a Sprachbund or multiple Sprachbünde.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

You are not a specialist on Balkan linguistics, right?

“ A Sprachbund is languages that don’t share many common words sharing common grammatical or phonological features due to contact.”

Where does that “don’t share many common words” come in?

Contact will augment the number of shared words too, you know.

Greek and Albanian are “separate branches of” Indo-European, meaning they should share sth like 25~30 % of the words, like English and Russian, but in fact they share c. 50 % vocabulary. Because of the Balkan Sprachbund.

Brian Collins

How much shares lexicon do Albanian and Turkish, both also part of the Sprachbund, have? English and French are in different branches, share even more, but are only considered to be in the SAE Sprachbund along with many languages that share much less vocabulary (such as every language in Europe).

Most of the features of any Sprachbund are grammatical. Loanwords don’t make a Sprachbund on their own.

If you look at the academic definitions, the term was coined to exclude vocabulary.

Sprachbund - from Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund

“In a 1904 paper, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay emphasised the need to distinguish between language similarities arising from a genetic relationship (rodstvo) and those arising from convergence due to language contact (srodstvo).[2][3]

Nikolai Trubetzkoy introduced the Russian term языковой союз(yazykovoy soyuz 'language union') in a 1923 article.[4] In a paper presented to the first International Congress of Linguists in 1928, he used a German calque of this term, Sprachbund, defining it as a group of languages with similarities in syntax, morphological structure, cultural vocabulary and sound systems, but without systematic sound correspondences, shared basic morphology or shared basic vocabulary.[5][3]

Later workers, starting with Trubetzkoy's colleague Roman Jakobson,[6][7] have relaxed the requirement of similarities in all four of the areas stipulated by Trubetzkoy.[8][9][10]”

Octave of Epiphany

13.I.2025

I

Hans-Georg Lundahl

“Most of the features of any Sprachbund are grammatical. Loanwords don’t make a Sprachbund on their own.”

That I would actually agree to.

Nevertheless, my point is, Sprachbund situations, when prolonged have a tendency to make vocabulary shared too. For English and French, like for Greek and Albanian, a certain map** gives 56 % distance for each (i e 44 % similarity, one can suppose).

They have also been in a far closer Sprachbund (like languages of the British Isles) for centuries, up to St. Joan of Arc making French less popular and the plague making it less mastered in England. That’s way closer as a Sprachbund than SAE.

As to SAE, it is a Sprachbund of another type, having had for centuries Latin as a common élite language. Some might want to distinguish Sprachbund totally from superstrate, substrate, adstrate, I don’t.

Now, German to Latvian, Lithuania, of the Baltic and to Sorbian of the Slavic has a distance on the same map as 70 % or more. It’s distance to Greek is 86 %.

English to Welsh is 80 and French to Breton 72 %.

My point is, the expected lexical outcome of a Sprachbund (of the more close knit type) is more similarity than of having a common presumed root in PIE.

So, one point about your proof for common origin is the lexical similarity, and then arguing from this not being a necessary result of all and any Sprachbund that it cannot be the result of a Sprachbund.

Another one is the sound laws since, which certainly wouldn’t be lexical products of a recent Sprachbund. But I never said the Sprachbund or Sprachbünder were recent ones.

If pre-Celtic, pre-Latin, pre-Germanic share a word “cols-” meaning “neck” by Sprachbund or by common descent from PIE, somewhen in 1000 BC or earlier, either way it will be “collum” in Latin, “hals” in German and Swedish, I think Dutch too, and I think this is also the origin for Middle Irish “coll” which means “head” instead of neck.

When it comes to shared vocabulary with Turkish, in the Balkan Sprachbund, it may be noted that both Turkish and the languages of often Orthodox nations on the Balkan have since back then undergone a voluntary process called Purism. 1700 might have been a better time to check.

As to Trubetskoy:

Nikolai Trubetzkoy introduced the Russian term языковой союз (yazykovoy soyuz 'language union') in a 1923 article.[4] In a paper presented to the first International Congress of Linguists in 1928, he used a German calque of this term, Sprachbund, defining it as a group of languages with similarities in syntax, morphological structure, cultural vocabulary and sound systems, but without systematic sound correspondences, shared basic morphology or shared basic vocabulary.[5][3]

He could be meaning “or shared overall basic vocabulary” since otherwise his expectation would have been shown wrong.

14.I.2025

Brian Collins

Most of the features of SAE were missing in Latin from my understanding, but co-evolved in many Western European languages under influence from each other.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Including, not least, the development of Latin into Romance.

II

Hans-Georg Lundahl

Two links for the map I referred to and for 430 common words in Turkish, Albanian and Greek:

https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/lexical-distance-among-the-languages-of-europe-2-1-mid-size.png

https://www.richtmann.org/journal/index.php/jesr/article/view/2833/2795

* Note

Upvoted by:
Rich Alderson, BA, MA, doctoral research in Indo-European linguistics and
Giovanni Roversi, MA. Linguistics, University of Oslo (2017)

** Note

Click this link:

https://alternativetransport.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/lexical-distance-among-the-languages-of-europe-2-1-mid-size.png