Spread of Indo European video accuracy

[Otto Kretschmer]

https://youtu.be/sMdhcpjNHLk

How accurate is this? The odd split into Northern IE and Eastern IE which includes Indo Iranian and Daco Thracian with Balkan IE making the third subgroup seems odd to me.

Wouldn't having Southern IE splitting into Indo Iranian and Balkan IE (Greek, Phrygian, Illyrian) and Armenian make more sense?

[Pabappa]

I gave a on the video because it's very detailed and well put together ..... but there are sooooo many things going on there that he's just guessing at. it's not to say he's wrong .... if he was wrong, we wouldnt be seeing so many wild guesses.

the balkan/germanic connection is interesting .... i've seen it before, but it's definitely a minority view. interestingly enough, Y chromosomes in Germany and the Balkans are similar, .... it may be that they once formed a contiguous area (unlike what his map shows) but that they later got pushed apart by the Slavs, Huns, and Hungarians.

italo-celtic is out of fashion now but still has its defenders.

really though there are just too many things in the video that could be wrong, and other things depend on them. it's just guesswork.

[Otto Kretschmer]

I gave a on the video because it's very detailed and well put together ..... but there are sooooo many things going on there that he's just guessing at. it's not to say he's wrong .... if he was wrong, we wouldnt be seeing so many wild guesses.

the balkan/germanic connection is interesting .... i've seen it before, but it's definitely a minority view. interestingly enough, Y chromosomes in Germany and the Balkans are similar, .... it may be that they once formed a contiguous area (unlike what his map shows) but that they later got pushed apart by the Slavs, Huns, and Hungarians.

italo-celtic is out of fashion now but still has its defenders.

really though there are just too many things in the video that could be wrong, and other things depend on them. it's just guesswork.

I do not see any Balkan Germanic connection in this video : O

[WeepingElf]

Nice animation, and I do not see any glaring wrongnesses in it - just some things that are not as certain as it they are presented there. IMHO Armenian did not go to Anatolia across the Caucasus, Albanian is a descendant of Thracian, and I feel as if the chronology was slightly too deep.

[Otto Kretschmer]

Nice animation, and I do not see any glaring wrongnesses in it - just some things that are not as certain as it they are presented there. IMHO Armenian did not go to Anatolia across the Caucasus, Albanian is a descendant of Thracian, and I feel as if the chronology was slightly too deep.

Is the split into North, East (with Daco-Thracian being in the Eastern group with indo Iranian) and Balkan subgroup justified? Daco-Thracians on the steppe and France being majority IE by ~1500 BC also make me wonder.

I thought the split was as follows
- Anatolian
- Tocharian
- Northwestern IE (Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Italo-Celtic)
- Southern IE (Indo-Iranian and Armeno-Balkan which later split into Armenian and Paleo-Balkan which split into Greek, Phrygian, Illyrian and Daco-Thracian)

[Pabappa]

yeah, having re-watched the video now, i think i saw something that wasnt quite there. i'd assumed the unusual choice of showing two new branches in similar shades of blue was meant to imply that they were especially close to each other, but even if so, those branches divide into more than just Germanic & Albanian .... it's basically the whole of western centum IE.

[WeepingElf]

My ideas about the spread of IE are somewhat different, but I have to admit that there are lots of uncertainties. First, while I agree with the video that Anatolian came to Anatolia via the Bosporus, I think it has it too early, and that it belongs to the same wave of expansion that crawled up the Danube.

And here the most idiosyncratic point in my personal model of IE expansion comes into play: Anatolian is the only attested branch of a group I call "Southern IE", which once also was spoken along the Danube and encompassed the language(s) of the Bell Beaker culture, latter to be clobbered by "Northern IE" (=Non-Anatolian IE) languages such as Paleo-Balkan (about 2000 BC if not earlier), Italic, Celtic and Germanic (during the Urnfield and Nordic Bronze Age expansions about 1300 BC, later still in the British Isles). The main vector of "Northern IE" was the Corded Ware culture; Balto-Slavic would have been the closest relative of Germanic and Italo-Celtic which unlike the latter two was uninfluenced by the "Southern IE" substratum of the Bell Beaker culture.

Thus, the first division within "Northern IE" would indeed have been, as assumed by most IEists, between 1. Italo-Celtic/Germanic/Balto-Slavic, 2. Paleo-Balkan (including Proto-Hellenic) and Indo-Iranian, 3. Tocharian (the latter, unlike Anatolian, doesn't require a different proto-language, but it seems to have lost contact to the rest and developed in its very own direction early).

But as I said, "Southern IE" is hardly anything else than sheer speculation; the evidence is extremely tenuous (there are a few words in western IE languages that look as if they came from an unknown IE stratum, but this doesn't necessarily mean that this stratum is affiliated with Anatolian in such a way); it just seems likely to me that the earliest division in the spread of "Yamnaya" genes, that between the southern and the northern group, corresponds to the earliest division in the IE language chronology, that between Anatolian and the rest of IE. And my main motivation for this hypothesis, I openly admit, is my conlanging - I fancy Old Albic to be such a language

If I was to draw such a sequence of maps of the spread of IE, it wouldn't really look that different.

[Zju]

Never mind the speculation - why does it show that Romance languages were spoken in Scandinavia in historic times??

[WeepingElf]

Never mind the speculation - why does it show that Romance languages were spoken in Scandinavia in historic times??

I think that refers to the use of Latin as an official language in much of Medieval Europe.

[Zju]

Official language, yes, but was it used as vernacular? If not, I think it's somewhat disingenuous.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

It could also just be an error.

[Otto Kretschmer]

It could also just be an error.

It is not. This is also why India has stripes of Germanic

[Zju]

It could also just be an error.

It is not. This is also why India has stripes of Germanic

That's just English, though, innit?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

The colour was actually pretty unclear, but it looks like the lines represent a language that was "educated", so that's probably what it was (cf. the lined shading over most of Africa).

[WeepingElf]

Hatchings are used for two things in the video: namely uncertain boundaries, and bilingualism/diglossia, which includes foreign official and educated languages. For instance, large swaths of Africa have "Romance" and "Germanic" hatchings from about 1900 and about 1960 AD, when they were under European colonial rule. Or the whole Eastern Mediterranean, Egypt and Persia show "Greek" hatchings during the Hellenistic period.

[Otto Kretschmer]

It could also just be an error.

It is not. This is also why India has stripes of Germanic

That's just English, though, innit?

It represents the British rule under which English was the prestige language

[Nortaneous]

I'd follow Adams and Fellner and have a later split of Tocharian from somewhere around Germany or Poland with a Slavic-like rapid eastward expansion.

The Balkan thing is a little weird.

the balkan/germanic connection is interesting .... i've seen it before, but it's definitely a minority view. interestingly enough, Y chromosomes in Germany and the Balkans are similar, .... it may be that they once formed a contiguous area (unlike what his map shows) but that they later got pushed apart by the Slavs, Huns, and Hungarians.

Adams argued for contact influence in pre-Tocharian from pre-Greek, which only makes sense in something like this scenario, but is dubious enough that it probably shouldn't count for anything.

I thought the split was as follows
- Anatolian
- Tocharian
- Northwestern IE (Germanic, Balto-Slavic and Italo-Celtic)
- Southern IE (Indo-Iranian and Armeno-Balkan which later split into Armenian and Paleo-Balkan which split into Greek, Phrygian, Illyrian and Daco-Thracian)

Something like that sounds reasonable to me, modulo the placement of Tocharian - and of Albanian, which can go pretty much anywhere.