Autor: jeromor
martes, 11 de enero de 2005
Sección: Lenguas
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Origen de las lenguas indoeuropeas
Una noticia que nos viene de Italia.
Os mando el original y una traducción, espero que no demasiado mala.
La mamma delle lingue indoeuropee
Una lingua parlata novemila anni fa nell'attuale Turchia avrebbe
dato origine a tutte le lingue indoeuropee. Lo sostiene uno studio
pubblicato sull'ultimo numero di Nature, che contraddice la teoria
predominante secondo cui le lingue indoeuropee - che includono quasi
tutte quelle parlate nel Vecchio continente, in Asia centrale e in
india - avrebbero avuto origine nella regione siberiana, per poi
diffondersi in Europa, portate da popoli nomadi, seimila anni fa.
Russell Gray e Quentin Atkinson dell'Università di Auckland, in
Nuova Zelanda, hanno analizzato 87 lingue, dal gaelico all'afgano,
tutte considerate parte della famiglia linguistica indoeuropea. Per
prima cosa hanno compilato una lista di circa 200 parole, comuni a
tutte le culture, come "io", "cielo", "caccia". Quindi hanno
analizzato somiglianze e differenze di queste parole tra le diverse
lingue per costruire un albero evolutivo, simile a quelli creati dai
biologi in base alle differenze genetiche tra le specie viventi.
Infine, basandosi su un calcolo statistico della velocità con cui
cambiano le parole, hanno potuto datare le varie ramificazioni
dell'albero. In base a questo calcolo, tutte le lingue indoeuropee
deriverebbero dall'ittita, la lingua più antica tra quelle
analizzate, che avrebbe iniziato a differenziarsi in vari gruppi tra
i diecimila e gli ottomila anni fa. In quel periodo, secondo quanto
mostrato dai ritrovamenti archeologici, l'agricoltura iniziò a
diffondersi dalla regione dell'Anatolia verso l'Europa e l'Asia.
Potrebbero essere stati gli stessi agricoltori a muoversi da quella
regione, diffondendo il loro linguaggio; oppure altri popoli
potrebbero aver adottato elementi di quella lingua insieme alle
tecniche agricole. (n.n.)
La madre de las lenguas indoeuropeas
Una lengua hablada hace 9000 años en la actual Turquía habría dado origen a todas las lenguas indoeuropeas. Lo sostiene un estudio publicado en el último número de la revista Nature, que contradice la teoría predominante, según la cual las lenguas indoeuropeas, que incluyen casi todas las habladas en el Viejo Continente, en Asia Central y en la india, habrían tenido su origen en la región siberiana, para después difundirse por Europa, llevadas por pueblos nómadas, hace 6000 años. Russell Gray y Quentin Atkinson, de la Universidad de Auckand, en Nueva Zelanda, ha analizado 87 lenguas, del gaélico al afgano, todas ellas consideradas parte de la familia lingüística indoeuropea. En primer lugar han recopilado una lista de alrededor de 200 palabras, comunes a todas las culturas como “yo”, “cielo”, “caza”. Después han analizado las diferencias y semejanzas entre estas palabras para construir un árbol evolutivo, similar al creado por los biólogos en base a las diferencias genéticas entre las especies vivientes. Por último, basándose en un cálculo estadístico de la velocidad con la cual cambian las palabras, han podido datar las diversas ramificaciones del árbol. En base a estos cálculos, todas las lenguas indoeuropeas derivarían del hitita, la lengua más antigua de las analizadas, que habría comenzado a diferenciarse en varios grupos entre hace 10000 y 8000 años. En aquel periodo, según lo que muestran los yacimientos arqueológicos, la agricultura se empezó a difundir de la región de Anatolia hacia Europa y Asia. Podrían haber sido los mismos agricultores, al moverse desde aquella región, los que difundieran su lenguaje; o bien los otros pueblos podrían haber adoptado elementos de aquella lengua junto a las técnicas agrícolas.
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Ever since British jurist Sir William Jones noted in 1786 that there are marked similarities between diverse languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, and Celtic, linguists have assumed that most of the languages of Europe and the indian subcontinent derive from a single ancient tongue. But researchers have fiercely debated just when and where this mother tongue was first spoken.
Now a bold new study asserts that the common root of the 144 so-called Indo-European languages, which also include English and all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages, is very ancient indeed. In this week's issue of Nature, evolutionary biologist Russell Gray and his graduate student Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand combine state-of-the-art computational methods from evolutionary biology with an older technique for dating languages, called glottochronology. Their results suggest that a proto-Indo-European tongue was spoken more than 8000 years ago by Neolithic farmers in Anatolia, in central Turkey; these farmers then spread it far and wide as they migrated from their homeland.
"It is almost too good to be true," says Margalit Finkelberg, a classicist at Tel Aviv University in Israel who has long favored this so-called Anatolian hypothesis. But many linguists prefer a competing theory, which traces Indo-European languages to Kurgan horsemen in southern Russia about 6000 years ago. Some of these researchers challenge the new methodology as well as its conclusions. "I cannot possibly accept [their] results," says linguist Craig Melchert of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who adds that the paper "simply reconfirms the unreliability of any glottochronological model, no matter what improvements are made."
Glottochronology uses the percentage of "cognates"--words with shared roots--to determine how long ago different languages diverged. For example, the Sanskrit and Latin words for "fire," agnis and ignis, show clear evidence of a common origin. But the technique has long been out of favor, in part because of its flawed assumption that words change form steadily over time. Gray and Atkinson revived the method with powerful statistical techniques now used by biologists to determine the evolutionary trees of living organisms, such as Bayesian inference, maximum likelihood analysis, and a trick called "rate smoothing" that allows the rate of word change to vary (Science, 14 December 2001, p. 2310). The team members applied their method to a database previously compiled by Yale University linguist Isidore Dyen, comprising 2449 cognate sets from 87 Indo-European languages. They added Hittite, an extinct Anatolian language, and Tocharian A and B, once spoken in western China.
No matter how they varied parameters such as the rate of word change or the length of branches on parts of the tree, the answer came out pretty much the same: Indo- European languages initially diverged between 7800 and 9800 years ago, with the best guess being around 8700 years. "Try as we might, we just couldn't get [younger] dates," says Gray. Moreover, the analysis showed ancient Hittite to be closest to the root of the language tree, providing a slam dunk for the Anatolian hypothesis.
"The conclusions coincide in all essentials with those at which the adherents of the Anatolian theory ... have arrived on independent grounds," says Finkelberg. Others praise the ambitious new technique. "Computational methodologies of this kind can only be helpful for historical linguistics," says linguist April McMahon of the University of Sheffield, U.K.
Yet some researchers question the basic assumptions of the study. "The characteristics of languages and biomolecular sequences evolve in very different ways," says Tandy Warnow, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin. Gray and Atkinson "used techniques that are not appropriate for their data." Linguist Don Ringe of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia notes that the study relied entirely on the Dyen database, which tracks word changes but not grammar or construction changes. "[This is] the least reliable type of data" for building language trees, Ringe says.
As arguments over both method and results continue, Gray and Atkinson raise a possible compromise solution regarding the timing. They identified a rapid divergence about 6500 years ago that gave rise to the Romance, Celtic, and Balto-Slavic language families--very close to the time of the postulated Kurgan expansion. The Kurgan and Anatolian hypotheses, they write, "need not be mutually exclusive."
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