Arpa Posted August 10, 2005 Report Share Posted August 10, 2005 (edited) Indo-Euro-Pee-On?? A short time ago I saw a C-Span book program where the said author, Nicholas Ostler was presenting his book, The Empires of the Word.. I cannot find a better review of it but the below will give us an idea. The author all but “pee-d” on the whole concept. He totally dismissed the original idea of the Indo-European family of languages as a figment of Sir Wm Jones’s imagination (see below), that there is no such thing, that there are two branches, Indian(Asian) and Greek (European) and that the similarity between the two may be a mere coincidence or, at best a retro construction after centuries of exposure (read loaning) of one to the other. And as to PIE (Proto Indo European) he totally dismissed it out of hand as “reconstruction after the fact”. He spoke about Chinese, German, Latin, Greek, Qechua and mentioned Turkish several times but not even hint about Armenian. In fact, all the maps that he displayed of the region Armenia was prominently absent. He concluded that the sword had very little to do with the spread of language as did the plow, so to speak. That Latin and Greek failed to become a universal language despite the swords of Julius Caesar and Alexander, and he cited the fact that Turkish spread, not only in Anatolia but all over Central Asia simply because the Turks were farmers as opposed to the Greeks and Byzantines. What??? Turks farmers??!! What has this guy been smoking!!! Even today the Turks are just barely maintaining the farms and orchards left behind by you-know-who. Forgive me for not completely sanitizing the articles below as we may find some of the references useful ========= http://psychcentral.com/psypsych/Indo-European_languages# Indo-European languages Indo-European Indo-European languages Albanian | Anatolian Armenian | Baltic | Celtic Germanic | Greek | Indo-Iranian Italic | Slavic | Tocharian Proto-Indo-European The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. Contemporary languages in this superfamily include Bengali, English, French, German, Hindi, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish (each with more than 100 million native speakers), as well as numerous smaller national or minority languages such as Armenian, Irish and Ossetian, for example. Contents 1 History 2 Subgroups 2.1 Satem and Centum languages 3 Non-Indo-European languages of Europe 4 Superfamily 5 References 6 See also 7 External links late medieval distribution (after Islamic, Hungarian and Turkic ex orange: countries with a majority of speakers of IE languages. yellow: countries with an IE language with official status See also: Proto-Indo-European, Historical linguistics, Glottochronology. The possibility of common origin for these disparate tongues was first proposed by Sir William Jones, who noticed similarities between four of the oldest languages known in his time, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian. Systematic comparison of these and other old languages conducted by Franz Bopp supported this theory. In the 19th century, scholars used to call the group "Indo-Germanic languages" or sometimes "Aryan". However when it became apparent that the connection is relevant to most of Europe's languages, the name was expanded to Indo-European. An example of this was the strong similarity discovered between Sanskrit and older spoken dialects of Lithuanian and Latvian. The common ancestral (reconstructed) language is called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). There is disagreement as to the original geographic location (the so-called "Urheimat" or "original homeland"), where it originated from. There are two main candidates today: 1. the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian (see Kurgan) and 2. Anatolia (see Colin Renfrew). Proponents of the Kurgan hypothesis tend to date the proto-language to ca. 4000 BC, while proponents of Anatolian origin usually date it several millennia earlier (see Indo-Hittite). [edit]# Subgroups The various subgroups of the Indo-European family include (in historical order of their first attestation): Anatolian languages — earliest attested branch, from the 18th century BC; extinct, most notable was the language of the Hittites. Indo-Iranian languages, descending from a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan, including Sanskrit, attested from the 2nd millennium BC Iranian languages, attested from roughy 1000 BC, including Avestan and Persian. Greek language — fragmentary records in Mycenaean from the 14th century BC; Homer dates to the 8th century BC. See History of the Greek language. Italic languages — including Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages, attested from the 1st millennium BC. Celtic languages — Gaulish inscriptions date as early as the 6th century BC; Old Irish texts from the 6th century AD. The Italic and Celtic branches were formerly postulated to be groupable together as the so-called "Italo-Celtic" branch, an idea that is no longer held by most Indo-Europeanists. Germanic languages (including English) — earliest testimonies in runic inscriptions from around the 2nd century, earliest coherent texts in Gothic, 4th century. Armenian language — attested from the 5th century. Tocharian languages — extinct tongues of the Tocharians, extant in two dialects, attested from roughly the 6th century. Balto-Slavic languages, believed by many Indo-Europeanists to derive from a common proto-language later than Proto-Indo-European, while others are sceptical and think that Baltic and Slavic are no more closely related than any other two branches of Indo-European. Slavic languages — attested from the 9th century, earliest texts in Old Church Slavonic. Baltic languages — attested from the 14th century, and, for languages attested that late, they retain unusually many archaic features attributed to Proto-Indo-European. Albanian language — attested from the 16th century; relations with Illyrian, Dacian, or Thracian proposed. In addition to the classical ten branches listed above, there are several extinct languages, about which very little is known: Illyrian languages — probably related to Messapian; relations to Albanian sometimes proposed. Venetic language — close to Italic. Messapian — language not deciphered. Phrygian language — language of ancient Phrygia. Paionian language Thracian language Dacian language — possibly related to Albanian. Ancient Macedonian language — probably related to Greek, others propose relation to Ilyrian, Thracian or Phrygian. There were no doubt other Indo-European languages which are now lost without a trace. [edit]# Satem and Centum languages The Indo-European sub-branches are often classified in a Satem and a Centum group. This is based on the varying treatments of the three original velar rows. Satem languages lost the distinction between labiovelar and pure velar sounds, and at the same time assibilated the palatal velars. The centum languages, on the other hand, lost the distinction between palatal velars and pure velars. In general, the "eastern" languages are Satem (Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic), and the "western" languages are Centum (Germanic, Italic, Celtic). The Satem-Centum isogloss runs right between the (otherwise closely related) Greek (Centum) and Armenian (Satem) languages, with Greek exhibiting some marginal Satem features. There may be some languages that classify neither as Satem nor as Centum (Anatolian, Tocharian, and possibly Albanian). In any case, the Centum-Satem dichotomy is considered paraphyletic, i.e. there never was a "proto-Centum" or a "proto-Satem", but the sound changes spread by areal contact among already distinct post-PIE languages (say, during the 3rd millennium BC). [edit]# Non-Indo-European languages of Europe Most spoken European languages belong to the Indo-European superfamily. There are, however, language families which do not. The Uralic language family, which includes Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish and the languages of the Sami, is an example. The Caucasian languages are another. The Basque language is unusual in that it does not appear to be related to any known living languages. Etruscan is also an isolated, non-Indo-European language which was spoken on the Italic peninsula but is now extinct. Maltese and Turkish are two examples of languages spoken in Europe which have definite non-European origins. Turkish is a Turkic language, and Maltese is largely derived from Arabic. [edit]# Superfamily Some linguists propose that Indo-European languages are part of a hypothetical Nostratic language superfamily, and attempt to relate Indo-European to other language families, such as Caucasian languages, Altaic languages, Uralic languages, Dravidian languages, Afro-Asiatic languages. This theory is controversial, as is the similar Eurasiatic theory of Joseph Greenberg. ====== http://www.theage.com.au/news/Reviews/Empi...7568312906.html Empires of the word Reviewer Andrew Rutherford June 4, 2005 Bureaucratic English arrived in India with the British Raj. Nicholas Ostler HarperCollins There is a certain vogue for ambitious global histories refracted through some interest: Jared Diamond's Collapse and his previous work, or monographs of the Codpiece: The Garment That Changed the World genre. Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World is about something vital - the agents of history, like ourselves, were framed by the languages they spoke - and something palpable: we have a reasonable record of the processes by which something as fundamental as language adoption has occurred, beneath our noses. General historians typically treat language issues as incidental and language history is not a central concern, even for linguists. Ostler points out that linguistic patriotism has often involved some knowledge of one's own language's history: The Story of English and Melvyn Bragg's recent rehash were big broadcasting events. In Empires, Ostler takes on the world, and it is a worthy popular history by an academic linguist of an underappreciated facet of things as they are. AdvertisementAdvertisement The book exudes the sensuousness of the subject matter, with alien scripts and carefully chosen transliterations abounding. Unlike some historians of everything, Ostler is true to the variety of his data and the lessons he draws are limited, few and hesitant. At the outset, he emphasises that he is practising history strictissimo sensu: recorded history. There are no stabs at how the linguistic make-up of Asia and Europe, which early civilisations confronted, came to be. No horse-rearing Indo-Europeans and the like. He is, however, dismissive of an assumption that animates much history of language: that conquest is the prime instrument of language adoption. The historical record indicates this is rarely simply the case. Empires of the Word is organised roughly chronologically according to the emergence of successful, expanding languages. The Middle East and Mesopotamia, in particular, is the first port of call. Here the story is involved and the linguistic examples provided are varied and profuse, not just because of the complexity of the record but because many phenomena are encountered for the first time. The use of a classical language, the way the West used Latin for liturgy and scholarship long after it ceased to be spoken, might seem a decadent outcome of literacy but the language (unrelated to any other) of the inventors of cuneiform, the Sumerians, was the basis of education for a thousand years after its general disappearance. It stands to reason that the British Raj would extend the use of English through existing bureaucracies but the civil service of the Assyrians remained a persistent body though using Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek and then Arabic as politics evolved. It was in the Middle East that languages are first known to have been protected by confessional allegiance, most successfully in the case of Hebrew but also Coptic, the descendant of Egyptian, and varieties of Aramaic spoken by Christians in Islamic societies. Though English is riding on cultural prestige, Sanskrit learning was so attractive that imitation Hindu or Buddhist kingdoms proliferated in South-East Asia, whose scholars contributed to general Sanskrit culture - all without the faintest whiff of force. Initially, Greek represented the complete package, strong culturally, commercially and militarily but its culture was strong enough for it to animate the Roman world after its power passed to Rome. Though Empires is expository rather than provocative, Ostler is not frightened of new theories. The reason the language of Germanic invaders took root in England as nowhere else in the Roman Empire was that Britannia had been depopulated by bubonic plague, an event remembered in the Arthurian Waste Land myth. When discussing the various fates of European languages outside Europe after Columbus et al (why is there no trace of Dutch in Indonesia but East Timor adopted Portuguese as an official language?), Ostler draws on his own research into South American language history. Against the received idea, he details the way the Catholic Church, for missionary and pastoral reasons, used local prestige languages such as Quechua, the language of the Incas, even extending them beyond their pre-Conquest spheres of influence. The eventual, destructive, Spanish-only policy was an Enlightenment idea, like the expulsion of the Jesuits, intensified by those other sons of the Enlightenment, the revolutionaries for independence. Though Ostler eschews grand theories, he is capable of suggestive, unusual comparisons: between Egyptian and Chinese; between the rapid spread of Arabic and English's expansion, with the US, across North America; between the conservative orthography of English and Chinese. As to the future, Ostler concedes that some aspects of English's success look unique, such as globalisation of communication, but finds echoes in earlier expansions, such as those of the Phoenicians or of maritime Europe. He stresses the groundwork of the British in establishing English in Asia and in diplomacy (so that English was a working language of the European Economic Community, as the EU was then called, even before Britain joined), rather than the standard emphasis on American power, hard and soft, NATO and MTV. Empires of the Word is a grand popularisation of a very accessible aspect of history. Edited August 10, 2005 by Arpa Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kakachik77 Posted August 10, 2005 Report Share Posted August 10, 2005 Ostler is just trying to use controversy to make a name for himself. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arpa Posted August 10, 2005 Author Report Share Posted August 10, 2005 Ostler is just trying to use controversy to make a name for himself. style_images/master/snapback.png Maybe so, but in so doing he spreading his manure all over the most prestigious fora. He was a hair's breadth away from declaring that non-existent language-Turkish the mother of all tongues. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gamavor Posted August 10, 2005 Report Share Posted August 10, 2005 (edited) Shame on you Arpa! Don't you know that the main ingredient for "sarma" - the grape leaves are best cultivated on a horseback! That is a revolutionary turkish style agriculture. Edited August 12, 2005 by gamavor Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arpa Posted August 10, 2005 Author Report Share Posted August 10, 2005 (edited) Shame on you Arpa! Don't you know that the main ingridient for "sarma" - the grape leafs are best cultivated on a horse back! That is a revolutionary turkish style agriculture. style_images/master/snapback.png Shame on me indeed! Shame on you too Don't you know that the best agricultural fertilizer, besides horse manure that they can spew through their mouths, is gavur blood and decaying gavur carcasses? Those SSO's* SSO stands for shunshanordi, շունշանորդի!!! Edited August 11, 2005 by Arpa Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zartonk Posted August 12, 2005 Report Share Posted August 12, 2005 Those SSO's* SSO stands for shunshanordi, շունշանորդի!!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ata Donme Posted September 22, 2005 Report Share Posted September 22, 2005 Shame on me indeed! Shame on you too Don't you know that from my mouth agricultural fertilizer spews forth, besides horse manure that they can spew from my nether regions, I like gavur blood and decaying gavur carcasses style_images/master/snapback.png Wow! Well we live and learn.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Exu Yangi Posted February 10, 2006 Report Share Posted February 10, 2006 What has this guy been smoking? Probably some kind of good Turkish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Takoush Posted February 14, 2006 Report Share Posted February 14, 2006 (edited) What has this guy been smoking? Probably some kind of good Turkish You know Exu Yangi, I meant to tell you the other day that you mustn't pay attention to the guy at the above post, Ata whatever. He was not a very positive talker and now he's not around anymore, so don't be bothered about it. Welcome. Edited February 14, 2006 by Anahid Takouhi Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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