It has been said, that all the languges started in Babylon.

Michael "Finalday"
In Memory Of WLB

All CIVILISED language came from the HIghlands of Scotland. Silly people.

Aye. 'Tis.

Great computer!
What kinda chip you got in there?
A dorito?

uh-uh, I'll go with that, fits in with other theories and evidence from related disciplines that "civilisation" is quite a few thousand years older than has generally been accepted.

While language is not necessarily a pre-requisite for "civilisation" it is absolutely necessary for a non-peripatetic lifestyle, so yes settled agricultural communities and literary/linguistic developemnts such as written records, tallies, land and riparian rights go hand-in-hand.

However a middle-eastern based development, while fitting many already extant facts and some new ones, does not solve the riddle of Aryan (Indo-European) racial types in North-Western China

@Taw

I think that if the mother tongue originated in Turkey around 9000 years ago, it wouldn't take too long for it then to spread into the Russian steppes some 3000 years later and thence to Northwestern China.

Are you referring to the red-headed ice mummies by any chance?

they found some blonde haired mummies near the silk road

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams

Makes sense to me. After all, Turkey is in a centralised location.

Indy - "Gray's analysis"? For a second I thought that you said "Gray's Anatomy"!

That was intended. Glad you noticed.

@Taw,

Also, why must language be glued to racial type in all cases?

Edited by - Indy11 on 3/16/2004 1:54:18 PM

@indy, yes I was referring to those, knew you'd spot that, Ed! Looking forward to my airborne invasion of New Dworkin, are you, btw? We'll see how your "shooper-heroes" stand up to facing the beating heart of Tawakalnism himself.

@Esq, in the past with far more limited communication between discrete geographical locations meant a low level of interaction and intermingling between racial groups, therefore language (and most other cultural attributes) tended to stay firmly in its indigenous racial genesis. This is particularly so when you go back beyond the period of great empires and kingdoms, for even in regions containing several diverse ethinc groups, the "ruling" racial strain would keep itself homogenous in the main from subservient/conquered peoples, who themselves usually maintained a distinct if less visible racial integrity, including the retention of their native language. So yeah, race and language generally go tegether, prior to quite recent times really. Hence a community of white-skinned red-haired Indo-Europeans (Gauls perhaps? part of their eastward retro-migration?) could survive for many generations in a remote region of China with little interference or dilution of racial stock from other ethnicities including the ruling Chinese.

Taw: Come on down! Things are looking positive. Sent you a note.

Taking the Chiness example, though, the language of the rulers appear to have become the language of the ruled at least in the last three or four dynasties, except the Mongols.

Mandarin, the language of the Manchu Liaos is the "official" language but it is not
native to China, proper, so to speak. It is not a language that the Han spoke.

A lot of language changes occur "organically" (I hate buzz-words!). For example, despite that fact that Italy and Spain are relatively close together, and were originally adapted from Latin (as I recall (I could be wrong)), they have a number of key differences. Is this due to biological factors? I would be tempted to say no, and perhaps attribute some of the variations to the influence of the Arabs.

you'll both note that I stated that this linguistic discreteness was the norm PRIOR to the period of great empires and kingdoms. Obviously as empires spread and covered large geographical areas and commerce etc increased, most especially under the Pax Romana, there was linguistic levelling and many pre-Roman tongues vanished never to return, or if they did survive it was in truncated forms. Also without the centralising homogeneity of Imperial rule, Latin itself divided into distinct branches which eventually became the Romance languages.

OK. Prior to the age of empires then.... but that too becomes a variable don't you think?

If the posit is that civilization reaches back farther than is in the archaeological evidence at hand, when did the age of empires begin, so to speak?

Also, a winning way to make a living can spread as if it were a polity in that the language of the society that attained material success is needed to best explain the method. The better farmer could have been the one who spoke the original farmer's language better, etc. Learning by rote, I think, is a very effective way to spread a language from one culture to another.

And, as for contact with nomadic tribes, the language still would be transferrable as notions of time, cycle, harvest, etc., are needed for the nomads to best work out their visits. There at least could be linguistic borrowings on a cross-fertilizing basis.

Agrarians counting by moon cycles, versus nomads counting by seasons, for example.

<Edit>

I just tried but failed to untangle an ethnic distribution map of the region between the Black and Caspian Seas. Ethnically, it is very diverse..... Trying to trace those "Red Headed Circassian Women" you may have read about. Anyway, clearly, Indo-Aryan peoples were in geographically close proximity to Central Turkey... but the topography was a little difficult.

Same area, today, is host to archaeological finds that push back the date on settlement and organized society.... as I think you may have meant earlier Taw so who knows. Maybe they are on to something.

Edited by - Indy11 on 3/17/2004 7:47:44 AM

Edited by - Indy11 on 3/17/2004 10:43:03 AM

Grand conquests aside, it would seem that a few certain sounds in particular will take up similar meanings world-wide. In particular the "ma" or "mur" sounds. Babies start of making mumbling noises and these become part of their first words, one of the simplest words and the first thing a baby will say is "ma" or "mama" and this comes to mean the most important thing in a baby's world at the time, it's mother. IIRC nearly every language uses a similar sound as it's word for mother (admittedly this is mostly based on random musings and very little factual knowledge ).