English is descended from a language that emerged in Turkey 8,000 and 9,500 years ago, new research has suggested.
Scientists traced the origin of all Indo-European languages to Anatolia, an ancient region of western Asia which covers most of modern Turkey.
Indo-European languages span a wide linguistic spectrum including English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Persian, Hindi and ancient Greek.
All evolved from a common ancestor, scientists believe.
Experts think Indo-European languages spread out from the Middle East along with agriculture.
Scientists led by Remco Bouckaert, from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, traced the origins of Indo-European languages using a method borrowed from evolutionary biologists.
Instead of comparing DNA from different species, the researchers looked at “cognates” which are words with a common origin. One example is “mother”, “mutter” (German) and “madre” (Spanish).
Such similar words could not plausibly have occurred by chance. By modelling the evolution of hundreds of such words through time, the researchers were able to pinpoint their birthplace in what is now modern Turkey.
The research is published in the journal Science.
It is very much possible. The Anatolian languages are some of the oldest languages dating back to 19th century BC. It was gradually replaced by the Hellenic languages like ancient Greek. The Greek influence spanned across Turkey in those days. When a new language is classified, it does not appear out of nowhere. It gradually replaces a pre-existing languages by absorbing its grammatical structures and borrowing loan-words and evolves over the centuries to such a point that it becomes a completely new language. The fall of Greek civilization saw the rise of the Roman republic and guess what Constantinople was the capital of the Eastern Roman and Latin Empire. So Latin was influenced by ancient greek which was in turn influenced by the ancient Anatolian languages.
The Proto-Indo_European languages which was the ancestor of the Indo-Iranian languages was estimated by scholars to be a single language spoken by people before divergence began around 3700 BC. Otherwise how do you explain the existence and usage of sanskritic words and vedic deities in the Mitanni treaty ? The Mitanni spanned NE Syria and Southern Anatolia.
Indra , a vedic deity that appears in the vedas and the Mitanni treaty was the son of Dayus which some scholars believe to be Zeus. Aspects of Indra itself is a cognate of other deities like Thor, Perun and Dionysus. So there is definitely a connection.
