Friday, August 26, 2022

Endgame?.

Endgame?. Lazaridis says Armenians , Greeks and Albanians descend from Yamna. Also Tocharians. And the Southern Arc paper is out. The link below.

----
It is a remarkable accident of history that Anatolian speakers lasted long enough to leave their writings in cuneiform and later alphabetic writing. If the Anatolian speakers had lived anywhere else we would have no clue they even existed as a sister group of IE
The same for Tocharian speakers: they presumably lasted for >3000 years, long enough to record their languages, even briefly, in medieval times, before their languages went extinct. It's an accident of history that we have evidence for them at all.
And 99% of Indo-European speakers stem from Corded Ware ancestors. It is only three small groups: Greeks, Armenians, Albanians who go up to the Yamnaya not via Corded Ware intermediaries. Many others were wiped out linguistically, e.g. Tocharians and most Paleo-Balkan speakers
It's basically a series of unlikely events that make it possible for us to reconstruct the early history of Indo-Anatolian and Indo-European languages. And, presumably, other important languages were lost, but what survived is, I think, enough to recover the big picture.

No comments:

Post a Comment