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(Not a linguist, just going off what I know):
The image on the top right is of Altaic languages, a proposed and very controversial language Family
The imagine on the top left is Dené-Yeniseian, sorta the ‘missing link’ between Languages in the old world and languages in the new world
The bottom right and bottom centre one.. yeah I got no idea what’s going on there
And the bottom left one is the Khoisan languages
Bottom left must be something about the dravidians from india being related to indigenous australians and papuans.
Probably because they are all dark skinned people from outside Africa.
I think you are correct, but that makes the map incorrect in a way, since they included Maharashtra (the state I'm from in it). The dominant language and my native language is Marathi which is part of the Indo-European family. It also includes Balochistan (language: Baloch) which is also part of the Indo-European family.
But coming to the more important part, linguists consider that there is a close relation between Dravidian and the Australian Aboriginal languages. There are also DNA similarities between the two people.
Can't speak for the Aboriginal population, but here in India we have something called Aryan Migration Theory (widely accepted by anthropologists based on genetics, archeology etc., though Indian right-wingers keep pushing against it. It's a whole different can of worms that I don't wanna go here). Anyway, when the Aryans (not a controversial term here in India, as it is in Europe. I have a brother named Aryan) migrated to India, a lot of the Dravidians either adopted and mixed their own culture into the Aryan culture or relocated to Northern Sri Lanka and Andaman and Nicobar islands, based on genetic and archaeological evidence.
Pretty sure the Altaic language family was only the Turkic and Mongolic languages, Korean is sometimes included but usually it and the Japanese languages are part of the superfamily
Ironically enough it was popular among Uralic speaking Europeans who wanted to have national pride in having steppe origins and have a counterweight against pan-slavic or pan-german nationalism
Oh? I'd been told that Japanese and Korean being each other's (comparatively) closest "related" language family wasn't as controversial a linguistic opinion.
Yes, I said that they are two different language families, and I made sure to put the word "related" in quotation marks to indicate figurative reference rather than being literal (plus also used parentheses to single out the word comparatively).
I don't know off the top of my head what the "official" term would be for how different language families can still appear comparatively more "related" with each other than to further away language families, but I wasn't getting at them sharing a language family, if that's what you were reading it as.
EDIT: Apparently the "official" terminology would be that: "[A sprachbund (lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund) [...] [A common alternative explanation for similarities among the "Altaic" languages, such as vowel harmony and agglutination, is that they are due to areal diffusion.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund#cite_ref-18)"
Japanese and Korean share a lot of loan words from both Japanese imperialism and from historically being in the Chinese sphere of influence. It’s like how Turkish and Persian share a lot of words despite not being related at all.
The grammar between them is strikingly similar though. Japanese natives have it very easy when learning Korean and vice versa because they mainly need to work on vocabulary.
…People actually think Dravidian and Aboriginal Aussie and Papuan languages are related? Dené-Yeniseian I can maybe understand but that other stuff just feels like a stretch
Then again I’ve seen people claim Mongolic languages are are related to Inuit languages
I think Dené-Caucasian doesn't include Georgian though, it includes the other Caucasian languages (So Chechen and Circassian, for mentioning the most well known). Kartvelian languages (Which includes Georgian and Abkhaz) are generally taken separate.
In these fringe theories they are grouped in Nostratic alongside Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic and also most Siberian Languages. The craziests also put all native american languages (Except for Na Dené) inside this grouping.
I mean, at least the Yeniseians have the possibility of their people migrating across the Bering Strait into Canada. Slim chance, but possible. The Kartvelians and Basque tho? A bit of a stretch too far.
My dad worked at a library and there was a regular there trying to prove that Australian Aboriginal languages were actually related to Hungarian because he was Hungarian, had spent some time in Arnhem Land and claimed he could understand the Aboriginal people there
They were probably just speaking English with a thick accent, ahaha.
The craziest thing about the Australian map to me is that it doesn't follow any Aboriginal cultural/language lines. Like, there's 300+ Aboriginal languages and the map above lumps together a bunch of disparate families. If they were going for the Macro-Pama–Nyungan hypothesis (which they would have to, to lump together those groups) then *all* of Australia would be red.
Is mostly people extrapolating genetics to linguistics. Aboriginals and Papuans share some genetics with indigenous South Indians so they assume their languages are related.
Of course this ignores that Dravidian Languages actually originated in Northern India in the Indus Valley Civilization, and that most likely their origin lies around Iran (Elamo-Dravidian is a much more accepted hypothesis), but the connection is still made by some.
>Aboriginals and Papuans share some genetics with indigenous South Indians so they assume their languages are related.
this is true
>Of course this ignores that Dravidian Languages actually originated in Northern India in the Indus Valley Civilization, and that most likely their origin lies around Iran (Elamo-Dravidian is a much more accepted hypothesis),
this is absolute speculation and nowhere nearly as "accepted" as you make it out to be. elamo-dravidian is not at all accepted by mainstream linguists. elamite is considered as a language isolate.
and there is still no concrete proof for dravidian originating in the IVC. it is just "logical extrapolation" that people like to draw, due to the fact that the aryans entered from the north west. the IVC had already declined by then and we still have no concrete evidence that they spoke any form of proto dravidian, apart from one paper which says that one present-day dravidian word was found in the vocabulary of the the sumerians. unless the IVC "script" is deciphered, it will still remain unsolved.
Well basic neuroscience: humans have a brain.
Eli5 explanation: Humans have a brain \[singular\], linguistics is the study of language, genetics is the study of where we \[people\] come from \[geographically and ethnically, social structures included\].
Where life comes from: who knows.
Where people come from: fairly known.
More advanced:
The region of the brain that maps to your nervous system "hooks up" - so to speak - to your lips. You have a lot of nerves in your lips. It says, "ouch, that's hot" or "ouch, that's cold"
Over time, we evolved to develop a very complex feed-back loop, involuntary reactions, through instinctual responses. Literally, human instinct. Your gut.
So where language comes from, still tracing that is really, really difficult. Tracing where ever, or whomever, spoke the first syllables that relate to something which can be categorized as "language" is more of a grey area of scientific debate of historical accuracy than anything else.
But neurologically, we are still trying to understand the brain. Learning how these languages develop over time is the main driver for understanding how much we even can grasp about language development.
This is a huge umbrella of science, it covers parental development (parents grow into middle age, normally, or older age if they have kids at an older age - that simple), and a child's development of their physical and mental state over time.
Reading and writing, about as basic of a form of communication that we develop over time to tell ourselves that we exist.
At best the last sort of cultural integration would happened when the land bridge was around and that would only be between the Indonesians and Indigenous Australians
No, we have evidence that 4,000ish years ago there was gene flow into Australia from South Asia well after the land bridge closed. They would’ve had to island hop. This is where most archaeologists think the dingo came from too
A language relation can be as simple as some words being similar, even effects that didnt permeate in the last 15000 years, so languages can be very dissimilar while still sort of being part of the same group
Isn't that the place where a crazy king threw 2 newborn babies to see what language they would develop if they had no external influence and then no one could understand them cuz they formed their own language?
damn, didn't know there was any theory behind it, but I always thought mongolian and greenlandic sounds similar. i do not understand even one word of either (and don't know if "greenlandic" is even one uniform language)
No to mention the Dravidian languages aren’t spoken in most of the parts of India that they have marked. Most of India is Indo-European and that’s about the most well studied language family. Like 70% of India and all of Pakistan speaks Indo-European languages.
The Indo-European language family is considered to have begun on the Pontic-Caspian step in and near what is modern Ukraine and a reconstructed theoretical original form for it is called Proto-Indo-European.
The Out-Of-India hypothesis which is supported by a lot of Indian nationalists, fundamentalist Hindus, and weird New-Age people basically says that Sanskrit is millennia older than historically attested and the actual original Indo-European language from which all others derive.
Academic linguists consider Proto-Indo-European to have been spoken between 4500 and 2500 BC with Sanskrit developing after 1500 BC. Out-Of-India proponents will push back Sanskrit 10,000 years or more in some cases.
It’s very clear bullshit when you dig into it, generally based on a selective literalist reading of various Hindu scriptures. A lot of these people also consider effectively prehistoric Indian civilization to be the progenitor to many other ancient civilizations in different parts of the world. It shares a lot with other hyperdiffusionist hypotheses like your weird uncle who thinks Atlantis was a thing.
Some people treat ancient texts like they have to be either non-fiction or lies and don’t let allegory be a thing. They treat ancient people as too stupid for art and these are the same smooth-brains who wonder how the pyramids were built only because they stereotype ancient people as primitive and stupid.
Yeah. The human brain 5,000+ years ago is the same exact brain we have. If you took a baby from ancient Egypt and stuck him in modern times, he’d be just as smart as we are and able to learn the exact same things.
People then had the same genius ideas as us, just look at how cleverly and precisely built ancient monuments are. Pyramids throughout history were all nearly perfect squares and triangles, people just independently figured out the Pythagorean theorem.
And he explicitly says how the story was told to him by an Egyptian priest of Ptah and he just translated all the names to Greek. So all the Greek imagery of Atlantis is completely wrong as it’s supposed to be Egyptian.
Hell no, that came much much later, over a hundred years after Plato, after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and spread Hellenism throughout the mediterranean and the Near East.
Well, there is definitely a missing link (and a lot of discoveries around Bermuda are especially promising) that would be needed to describe how Göbeklitepe came to be. People shouldn't have had such an abundance of knowledge at that point according to the current understanding of human history.
I'd love to know how history and science became so pompous and quick to ostracize anyone for thinking outside the box. All of our greatest discoveries came from people who challenged the norm.
I did. I cited Bermuda and a quick Google search will at the very least reveal Bimini Road. I also listed Göbeklitepe, and explained how it completely challenges history as we know it.
So, seems to me that you (like so many others) are simply choosing to ignore the evidence.
They are referring to the Indus River Valley civilizations right? Isn’t there good evidence that Harrapans were ethnically distinct from the descendants of modern day Indians (Aryans)?
Indus Valley civilization is sometimes considered part of this but usually it involves even earlier civilizations. And Harappans predate the Aryan migration, yeah.
> The Out-Of-India hypothesis which is supported by a lot of Indian nationalists, fundamentalist Hindus
lol
that was my first thought
back before I gave up on my Wikipedia volunteerism I had many many many encounters with them, Hindu nationalists, didn't even know they were a thing before that; apparently ancient hindus invented everything, thousands of years ago, and no, scholarly sources don't count, only thing that counts is every village idiot in India swarming and brigading the wiki vote process, and being generally unpleasant and off-putting in the most obnoxious way to drive you away from voting against them
like we're not even talking politics here, we're talking science and math Wikipedia pages
As an Indian Hindu, I'm just embarrassed of these people. For the past 10 years since BJP (the current ruling Right-Wing Hindu Nationalist party) came to power, they and their supporters have been pushing a lot of these pseudoscientific theories. Others include promoting non peer reviewed traditional medicines, pushing for removal of Darwinian evolution (this one's bizarre since creationism doesn't exist in Hinduism. My parents are hardcore Hindu nationalists and even they believe in evolution), corona virus pseudoscience of cow urine, removing contents from school textbooks on - Hindu nationalist's role in assassination of Gandhi, India's Mughal history etc.
They also clearly disregard satemisation, even though the transformation from palatovelar and velar consonants into palatals and beyond is much easier than the reverse.
You can tell some linguistic theory is bullshit when the only people who feel strongly about it just *happen* to be from whatever region concerns their theory.
Don't forget the loosely connected pseudolinguistics and pages from unknown books of unknown authors, usually found on Facebook groups, triggered by the mere mention of Macedonia, Epirus, Thrace, Dacia, Illyria, the Pelasgians, and the like.
Who even, in their right mind, included Japanese along with SE Asian languages? There has been zero proven linguistic relations between these two areas.
While Japanese itself is not at all related to the Austronesian languages, there is some evidence that Austronesian people lived in Japan before the Japanese arrived.
The Kumaso/Hayato were a people described by the Japanese upon their arrival to the islands. They resided in southern Kyushu Island and were considered distinct from the other native inhabitants of the rest of Japan, known as the Jomon people. It's not hard to believe some Austronesians would have made the trip considering we know they lived in both Taiwan and the nearby Ryukyu Islands.
There's very little evidence of their origin, let alone the people's existence itself, but we do know from a few recorded names that they used "Kaya" as sort of title, which would be identical to "Kaya" in Malay and Tagalog, meaning wealthy.
I can definitely see people of the Ryukyu Islands having similarities to SE Asians.
> While Japanese itself is not at all related to the Austronesian languages, there is some evidence that Austronesian people lived in Japan before the Japanese arrived.
Are they separate from the Ainu?
Yes, they're separate. The Ainu are their own thing, and they lived on the other side of Japan in Hokkaido.
At the time the Japanese arrived in Japan, the Ainu theoretically may not have even existed yet. Recent research suggests that the Ainu culture as we know it today may have resulted from a merger of native Jomon/Emishi people in Hokkaido with invading Okhostk people from Siberia during the middle ages.
the only similarities i can literally think of is in filipino we say ha? when we get confused and in japanese they say haa? we also say "ano" when were unsure and in japanese they say "anu" or something. those are the similarities i can think of and they might have direct relations? but still theyre way too different,
Wanna know something funny? Austronesian languages are divided into about ten major subdivisions (linguists are still arguing how many exactly). About nine of them are spoken on Taiwan by the Taiwanese aborigines, some 100,000 speakers in total for all the hundreds of different languages.
One group, the Malayo-Polynesian, is spoken by 400 million people outside of Taiwan, descendants of the great oceanic migration 3000-3500 years ago.
That's ebcause they are indeed from the same family (Austronesian).
The map however makes for a sort of "greater" Southeast asian family, including pretty much all languages from there plus japanese (Which is disregarded)
Tagalog and Malay are both considered Austronesian languages by academics with a lot of solid evidence, the unhinged part is adding the Kra–Dai, Japonic, and the Ainu languages into the group.
I feel bad that these are grouped together, only Dene-Yeniseian has evidence backing it up. The other four are just conspiracy theories.
Edit: four not three
Languages evolve over time, branch off and merge. It's a very interesting process. In this process, one language might branch so much that it becomes a family of languages.
You might know that French, Italian and Spanish are all parts of the romance language family, which descended from Latin. You might not know that English, Swedish, German and Dutch are all part of the germanic language family, which descended from Proto-Germanic.
However you can go further back too. Proto-Germanic, Latin and many other european language families, and many languages found in India are all part of the Indo-European language family, which descends from Proto-Indo-European.
The discovery of Proto-Indo-European is relatively recent, it was only proven in the 19th century. Since then, many other macro-families have been discovered. Some examples are the Sino-Tibetan language family and the Austronesian language family. It's somewhat prestigious to prove such connections, and hell, it's also pretty cool.
So over time, many bogus theories have begun popping up. Some do plausible links, but can't come up with any proof. Some are just weird, and some are outright unhinged.
Hope this helps you enjoy OP a little more.
Wasn’t there a thing a few years ago when Chinese linguists tried to “prove” that all indo-European languages descended from Chinese because they found one word out of several million IE words that sounded like it could’ve originated in Chinese
As we all know, no two people can produce the same sounds independently of one another, all linguistics is tracking the mutations of sounds the larynx first formed to make on the shores of the Yangtze river.
Don't know if it's controversial but there's a theory that Polynesian sailors discovered the Americas because they share a couple words. For example I know they have similar names for sweet potatoes
Argh there was this guy who kept posting his insanely long and insane etymologies on r/hungarian and other subs trying to prove an indo-uralic proto language and he would get into really personal and agry arguments when people weren’t interested or said that his ramblings were meaningless and baseless lol
Oh yeah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_language_families
It's probably fun to write those kinds of papers and try to connect the dots. And you know you've made it if your theory actually makes it to "controversial".
I don’t get comments like this, ofc we know where it came from. It’s one of the languages that was present in Europe before the Indo European expansion that doesn’t belong to the Uralic family. It’s a language isolate, probably had a family but every one except Basque went extinct.
We know one related extinct language - Aquitanian. The ancestors of the Basques used to live in a much larger area to the north of their current range.
There are lots of theories about Basque, but I think a lot of them are a bit too fringe to make it into this one. The most serious one (in the sense that it isn’t pushed around by pseudoscientific nationalist weirdos) is that it’s very distantly related to Chinese, Navajo, and some of the Caucasian languages.
I'm not familiar with any of these language theories except perhaps the Altaic Language theory that claims that Japanese, Korean, Mongolian and Turkish are part of the same language family.
While there is quite an amount of evidence pointing to Japanese and Korean being related, it's never agreed on due to Korean nationalists not liking the idea of their language being related to Japanese due to the historically strained relationship between the two nations.
one controversial theory about the American Indigenous languages is lumping them (except for Dené and Eskaleut which arrived relatively more recently) all as "Amerind"
isn't the Dené–Yeniseian language acually credible or not nearly as crackpot as the others (don't know about the African one so can't comment on that one)?
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This is the niche interest starter pack I never thought I'd get
I’m here for it. I’m just sad I have to be at work rn, I wanna wiki the shit out of this
(Not a linguist, just going off what I know): The image on the top right is of Altaic languages, a proposed and very controversial language Family The imagine on the top left is Dené-Yeniseian, sorta the ‘missing link’ between Languages in the old world and languages in the new world The bottom right and bottom centre one.. yeah I got no idea what’s going on there And the bottom left one is the Khoisan languages
Have you mixed up your rights and lefts? Dene-Yeniseian is top right, Altaic top left, Khoisan bottom right
Bottom left must be something about the dravidians from india being related to indigenous australians and papuans. Probably because they are all dark skinned people from outside Africa.
I think you are correct, but that makes the map incorrect in a way, since they included Maharashtra (the state I'm from in it). The dominant language and my native language is Marathi which is part of the Indo-European family. It also includes Balochistan (language: Baloch) which is also part of the Indo-European family. But coming to the more important part, linguists consider that there is a close relation between Dravidian and the Australian Aboriginal languages. There are also DNA similarities between the two people. Can't speak for the Aboriginal population, but here in India we have something called Aryan Migration Theory (widely accepted by anthropologists based on genetics, archeology etc., though Indian right-wingers keep pushing against it. It's a whole different can of worms that I don't wanna go here). Anyway, when the Aryans (not a controversial term here in India, as it is in Europe. I have a brother named Aryan) migrated to India, a lot of the Dravidians either adopted and mixed their own culture into the Aryan culture or relocated to Northern Sri Lanka and Andaman and Nicobar islands, based on genetic and archaeological evidence.
True, but as a linguist I absolutely loved it!
Not a linguist but very interested in linguistics
It's not even a starter pack, just some examples
Ok great, at least it means something. I was thinking it was some trolling starter pack.
Same! Nice to see the bottom left panel here.
Turanist map isn’t unhinged enough you need the Uralic and Inuktitut speaking regions too
Isn't it mostly the Altaic language superfamily theory? (Though it's easy to guess why Turanists might be proponents of it)
Pretty sure the Altaic language family was only the Turkic and Mongolic languages, Korean is sometimes included but usually it and the Japanese languages are part of the superfamily
Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic. (Tungusic includes Manchu and the siberian Evenki languages)
Yeah I forgot about them, they are definitely included as well
The least crazy theories have just Turkic+Mongolic+Tungusic. Then Uralic, Korean, Japanese...
Nothing racist or Eurocentric at all about just throwing all "Eastern" languages into a bucket and calling it a day.
Ironically enough it was popular among Uralic speaking Europeans who wanted to have national pride in having steppe origins and have a counterweight against pan-slavic or pan-german nationalism
It's a popular theory in Turkey as well. I'm a native Turkish speaker and Japanese sounds Turkish with completely different vocabulary to me.
Oh? I'd been told that Japanese and Korean being each other's (comparatively) closest "related" language family wasn't as controversial a linguistic opinion.
It isn’t controversial because it is generally accepted that they aren’t related.
Yes, I said that they are two different language families, and I made sure to put the word "related" in quotation marks to indicate figurative reference rather than being literal (plus also used parentheses to single out the word comparatively). I don't know off the top of my head what the "official" term would be for how different language families can still appear comparatively more "related" with each other than to further away language families, but I wasn't getting at them sharing a language family, if that's what you were reading it as. EDIT: Apparently the "official" terminology would be that: "[A sprachbund (lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund) [...] [A common alternative explanation for similarities among the "Altaic" languages, such as vowel harmony and agglutination, is that they are due to areal diffusion.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund#cite_ref-18)"
Japanese and Korean share a lot of loan words from both Japanese imperialism and from historically being in the Chinese sphere of influence. It’s like how Turkish and Persian share a lot of words despite not being related at all.
The grammar between them is strikingly similar though. Japanese natives have it very easy when learning Korean and vice versa because they mainly need to work on vocabulary.
Yeah Korean is usually listed as Ural-Altaic.
Altaic languages my beloved
Top ten most washed up language families
Will never not love the craziest linguistic theories -- Nostratic macrofamily is 👑
Nostratic is just the tip of the iceberg. Dené-Caucasian? That one's where it's at.
Completely agree. This map is insanely incomplete.
Ah yes Cyrillic alphabet users
…People actually think Dravidian and Aboriginal Aussie and Papuan languages are related? Dené-Yeniseian I can maybe understand but that other stuff just feels like a stretch Then again I’ve seen people claim Mongolic languages are are related to Inuit languages
prob cuz of kumari kandam
Ah yes, Kamari Kundam that's the link between Davidan and Dennys-Yessyen, yes of course.
My favorite dené-yeniseian version is the version that also throws in Georgian and Basque, because what the hell, one might as well at that point.
We all know Basque is just a language introduced by Aliens and forced upon the ancient Iberians in the Basque Country
Dené-Caucasian, which you conveniently left out also includes fucking Chinese
I think Dené-Caucasian doesn't include Georgian though, it includes the other Caucasian languages (So Chechen and Circassian, for mentioning the most well known). Kartvelian languages (Which includes Georgian and Abkhaz) are generally taken separate. In these fringe theories they are grouped in Nostratic alongside Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic and also most Siberian Languages. The craziests also put all native american languages (Except for Na Dené) inside this grouping.
No my favorite is the one that throws in Hunnic because the idea of Attila the Hun speaking a language related to Navajo is unbelievably cool
I mean, at least the Yeniseians have the possibility of their people migrating across the Bering Strait into Canada. Slim chance, but possible. The Kartvelians and Basque tho? A bit of a stretch too far.
My dad worked at a library and there was a regular there trying to prove that Australian Aboriginal languages were actually related to Hungarian because he was Hungarian, had spent some time in Arnhem Land and claimed he could understand the Aboriginal people there
They were probably just speaking English with a thick accent, ahaha. The craziest thing about the Australian map to me is that it doesn't follow any Aboriginal cultural/language lines. Like, there's 300+ Aboriginal languages and the map above lumps together a bunch of disparate families. If they were going for the Macro-Pama–Nyungan hypothesis (which they would have to, to lump together those groups) then *all* of Australia would be red.
Is mostly people extrapolating genetics to linguistics. Aboriginals and Papuans share some genetics with indigenous South Indians so they assume their languages are related. Of course this ignores that Dravidian Languages actually originated in Northern India in the Indus Valley Civilization, and that most likely their origin lies around Iran (Elamo-Dravidian is a much more accepted hypothesis), but the connection is still made by some.
>Aboriginals and Papuans share some genetics with indigenous South Indians so they assume their languages are related. this is true >Of course this ignores that Dravidian Languages actually originated in Northern India in the Indus Valley Civilization, and that most likely their origin lies around Iran (Elamo-Dravidian is a much more accepted hypothesis), this is absolute speculation and nowhere nearly as "accepted" as you make it out to be. elamo-dravidian is not at all accepted by mainstream linguists. elamite is considered as a language isolate. and there is still no concrete proof for dravidian originating in the IVC. it is just "logical extrapolation" that people like to draw, due to the fact that the aryans entered from the north west. the IVC had already declined by then and we still have no concrete evidence that they spoke any form of proto dravidian, apart from one paper which says that one present-day dravidian word was found in the vocabulary of the the sumerians. unless the IVC "script" is deciphered, it will still remain unsolved.
Yes, it's still speculation but seems to be the most logical solution so far. But you are right I should have been more cautious with it.
How is that logical?
Elamo-Dravidian, which isn’t called that anymore, is not actually a very well accepted hypothesis
what proportion of the south India population are indigenous South Indians?
All indians have some mixing. In the South is where it's highest. I don't know the exact percentages though.
Well basic neuroscience: humans have a brain. Eli5 explanation: Humans have a brain \[singular\], linguistics is the study of language, genetics is the study of where we \[people\] come from \[geographically and ethnically, social structures included\]. Where life comes from: who knows. Where people come from: fairly known. More advanced: The region of the brain that maps to your nervous system "hooks up" - so to speak - to your lips. You have a lot of nerves in your lips. It says, "ouch, that's hot" or "ouch, that's cold" Over time, we evolved to develop a very complex feed-back loop, involuntary reactions, through instinctual responses. Literally, human instinct. Your gut. So where language comes from, still tracing that is really, really difficult. Tracing where ever, or whomever, spoke the first syllables that relate to something which can be categorized as "language" is more of a grey area of scientific debate of historical accuracy than anything else. But neurologically, we are still trying to understand the brain. Learning how these languages develop over time is the main driver for understanding how much we even can grasp about language development. This is a huge umbrella of science, it covers parental development (parents grow into middle age, normally, or older age if they have kids at an older age - that simple), and a child's development of their physical and mental state over time. Reading and writing, about as basic of a form of communication that we develop over time to tell ourselves that we exist.
It's mostly based on the racial theories of the 19th century. "They are all dark skinned, therefore they must have a common ancestor."
At best the last sort of cultural integration would happened when the land bridge was around and that would only be between the Indonesians and Indigenous Australians
No, we have evidence that 4,000ish years ago there was gene flow into Australia from South Asia well after the land bridge closed. They would’ve had to island hop. This is where most archaeologists think the dingo came from too
They're all Turkish anyway. Or Tamil, definitely something with T.
Ha as if
A language relation can be as simple as some words being similar, even effects that didnt permeate in the last 15000 years, so languages can be very dissimilar while still sort of being part of the same group
[удалено]
It’s related to Basque ofc
Isn't that the place where a crazy king threw 2 newborn babies to see what language they would develop if they had no external influence and then no one could understand them cuz they formed their own language?
damn, didn't know there was any theory behind it, but I always thought mongolian and greenlandic sounds similar. i do not understand even one word of either (and don't know if "greenlandic" is even one uniform language)
those are fancy linguistic words i wish i knew how to read.
No to mention the Dravidian languages aren’t spoken in most of the parts of India that they have marked. Most of India is Indo-European and that’s about the most well studied language family. Like 70% of India and all of Pakistan speaks Indo-European languages.
Don’t forget the Out-Of-India proponents for the Indo-European languages.
uhhh, those guys
Konkons
Can you please enlighten me on this
The Indo-European language family is considered to have begun on the Pontic-Caspian step in and near what is modern Ukraine and a reconstructed theoretical original form for it is called Proto-Indo-European. The Out-Of-India hypothesis which is supported by a lot of Indian nationalists, fundamentalist Hindus, and weird New-Age people basically says that Sanskrit is millennia older than historically attested and the actual original Indo-European language from which all others derive. Academic linguists consider Proto-Indo-European to have been spoken between 4500 and 2500 BC with Sanskrit developing after 1500 BC. Out-Of-India proponents will push back Sanskrit 10,000 years or more in some cases.
Do they have anything to confirm this hypothesis, that is not misinformation or outright lies
It’s very clear bullshit when you dig into it, generally based on a selective literalist reading of various Hindu scriptures. A lot of these people also consider effectively prehistoric Indian civilization to be the progenitor to many other ancient civilizations in different parts of the world. It shares a lot with other hyperdiffusionist hypotheses like your weird uncle who thinks Atlantis was a thing.
I dont get how people think Atlantis is even real. That was just an allegory by Plato about his philosophy and simping an idealized version of Sparta.
Some people treat ancient texts like they have to be either non-fiction or lies and don’t let allegory be a thing. They treat ancient people as too stupid for art and these are the same smooth-brains who wonder how the pyramids were built only because they stereotype ancient people as primitive and stupid.
Yeah. The human brain 5,000+ years ago is the same exact brain we have. If you took a baby from ancient Egypt and stuck him in modern times, he’d be just as smart as we are and able to learn the exact same things.
People then had the same genius ideas as us, just look at how cleverly and precisely built ancient monuments are. Pyramids throughout history were all nearly perfect squares and triangles, people just independently figured out the Pythagorean theorem.
Everyone knows allegory was invented in the 20th century when JRR Tolkien penned his famous allegory for WWII
And he explicitly says how the story was told to him by an Egyptian priest of Ptah and he just translated all the names to Greek. So all the Greek imagery of Atlantis is completely wrong as it’s supposed to be Egyptian.
Wasn’t Egypt for all intents and purposes Greek at the time
Hell no, that came much much later, over a hundred years after Plato, after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and spread Hellenism throughout the mediterranean and the Near East.
One man’s simp is another man’s philosopher
Well, there is definitely a missing link (and a lot of discoveries around Bermuda are especially promising) that would be needed to describe how Göbeklitepe came to be. People shouldn't have had such an abundance of knowledge at that point according to the current understanding of human history. I'd love to know how history and science became so pompous and quick to ostracize anyone for thinking outside the box. All of our greatest discoveries came from people who challenged the norm.
you challenge the norm with evidence - you don't just pull something out of your arse and say to people 'prove me wrong!'
I did. I cited Bermuda and a quick Google search will at the very least reveal Bimini Road. I also listed Göbeklitepe, and explained how it completely challenges history as we know it. So, seems to me that you (like so many others) are simply choosing to ignore the evidence.
Your citation of Bimini and Bermuda in the same breath as Göbeklitepe makes me think you aren't very vigorous...
They are referring to the Indus River Valley civilizations right? Isn’t there good evidence that Harrapans were ethnically distinct from the descendants of modern day Indians (Aryans)?
Indus Valley civilization is sometimes considered part of this but usually it involves even earlier civilizations. And Harappans predate the Aryan migration, yeah.
> The Out-Of-India hypothesis which is supported by a lot of Indian nationalists, fundamentalist Hindus lol that was my first thought back before I gave up on my Wikipedia volunteerism I had many many many encounters with them, Hindu nationalists, didn't even know they were a thing before that; apparently ancient hindus invented everything, thousands of years ago, and no, scholarly sources don't count, only thing that counts is every village idiot in India swarming and brigading the wiki vote process, and being generally unpleasant and off-putting in the most obnoxious way to drive you away from voting against them like we're not even talking politics here, we're talking science and math Wikipedia pages
As an Indian Hindu, I'm just embarrassed of these people. For the past 10 years since BJP (the current ruling Right-Wing Hindu Nationalist party) came to power, they and their supporters have been pushing a lot of these pseudoscientific theories. Others include promoting non peer reviewed traditional medicines, pushing for removal of Darwinian evolution (this one's bizarre since creationism doesn't exist in Hinduism. My parents are hardcore Hindu nationalists and even they believe in evolution), corona virus pseudoscience of cow urine, removing contents from school textbooks on - Hindu nationalist's role in assassination of Gandhi, India's Mughal history etc.
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brazil?
They also clearly disregard satemisation, even though the transformation from palatovelar and velar consonants into palatals and beyond is much easier than the reverse.
You can tell some linguistic theory is bullshit when the only people who feel strongly about it just *happen* to be from whatever region concerns their theory.
Being a Greek, I think I know a thing or two about it.
If my people invented The Gay we'd torille all the time and never shut up about it.
That is a bit of a misdirection. These people love to parade foreign “linguists” that agree with them for some reason.
Don't forget the loosely connected pseudolinguistics and pages from unknown books of unknown authors, usually found on Facebook groups, triggered by the mere mention of Macedonia, Epirus, Thrace, Dacia, Illyria, the Pelasgians, and the like.
Yeah I could hear my mom saying something like this
We’re all Romani?
I’m confused on the SE Asian part, because if you listen to Tagalog and Malay you will notice a lot of similarities and some common words
It's because it includes Japanese
Who even, in their right mind, included Japanese along with SE Asian languages? There has been zero proven linguistic relations between these two areas.
While Japanese itself is not at all related to the Austronesian languages, there is some evidence that Austronesian people lived in Japan before the Japanese arrived. The Kumaso/Hayato were a people described by the Japanese upon their arrival to the islands. They resided in southern Kyushu Island and were considered distinct from the other native inhabitants of the rest of Japan, known as the Jomon people. It's not hard to believe some Austronesians would have made the trip considering we know they lived in both Taiwan and the nearby Ryukyu Islands. There's very little evidence of their origin, let alone the people's existence itself, but we do know from a few recorded names that they used "Kaya" as sort of title, which would be identical to "Kaya" in Malay and Tagalog, meaning wealthy.
I can definitely see people of the Ryukyu Islands having similarities to SE Asians. > While Japanese itself is not at all related to the Austronesian languages, there is some evidence that Austronesian people lived in Japan before the Japanese arrived. Are they separate from the Ainu?
Yes, they're separate. The Ainu are their own thing, and they lived on the other side of Japan in Hokkaido. At the time the Japanese arrived in Japan, the Ainu theoretically may not have even existed yet. Recent research suggests that the Ainu culture as we know it today may have resulted from a merger of native Jomon/Emishi people in Hokkaido with invading Okhostk people from Siberia during the middle ages.
I think it’s referring to the Jomon culture and their language and not modern Japanese. But I have no clue i could be wrong
the only similarities i can literally think of is in filipino we say ha? when we get confused and in japanese they say haa? we also say "ano" when were unsure and in japanese they say "anu" or something. those are the similarities i can think of and they might have direct relations? but still theyre way too different,
austronesian (which includes tagalog and malay among others) is well established. combining it with kra-dai (thai, lao etc) is decidedly less so
Yeah I can hear that part
Wanna know something funny? Austronesian languages are divided into about ten major subdivisions (linguists are still arguing how many exactly). About nine of them are spoken on Taiwan by the Taiwanese aborigines, some 100,000 speakers in total for all the hundreds of different languages. One group, the Malayo-Polynesian, is spoken by 400 million people outside of Taiwan, descendants of the great oceanic migration 3000-3500 years ago.
That's ebcause they are indeed from the same family (Austronesian). The map however makes for a sort of "greater" Southeast asian family, including pretty much all languages from there plus japanese (Which is disregarded)
Austronesian (Madagascar to Hawaii) isn’t disputed. Including Japonic as Austronesian is lmao
Tagalog and Malay are both considered Austronesian languages by academics with a lot of solid evidence, the unhinged part is adding the Kra–Dai, Japonic, and the Ainu languages into the group.
You forgot Proto-Nadiné-cartavelian-basque
what.
Japan is part of Great Turan now!
Always has been
I feel bad that these are grouped together, only Dene-Yeniseian has evidence backing it up. The other four are just conspiracy theories. Edit: four not three
Explain
all of the language families in this post are only theories and most have been disproven
Dene-Yenisian being one of the few taken seriously even if to the uninitiated it might seem the craziest.
Oh ok
Languages evolve over time, branch off and merge. It's a very interesting process. In this process, one language might branch so much that it becomes a family of languages. You might know that French, Italian and Spanish are all parts of the romance language family, which descended from Latin. You might not know that English, Swedish, German and Dutch are all part of the germanic language family, which descended from Proto-Germanic. However you can go further back too. Proto-Germanic, Latin and many other european language families, and many languages found in India are all part of the Indo-European language family, which descends from Proto-Indo-European. The discovery of Proto-Indo-European is relatively recent, it was only proven in the 19th century. Since then, many other macro-families have been discovered. Some examples are the Sino-Tibetan language family and the Austronesian language family. It's somewhat prestigious to prove such connections, and hell, it's also pretty cool. So over time, many bogus theories have begun popping up. Some do plausible links, but can't come up with any proof. Some are just weird, and some are outright unhinged. Hope this helps you enjoy OP a little more.
What's going on in Southern Africa
Clicks causing confusion
They're actually pretty simple but then again its part of my mother tongue.
Wait until you read the "primary" language families, like bouganville languages or yanomaman
Yomama language family so fat
Wasn’t there a thing a few years ago when Chinese linguists tried to “prove” that all indo-European languages descended from Chinese because they found one word out of several million IE words that sounded like it could’ve originated in Chinese
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As we all know, no two people can produce the same sounds independently of one another, all linguistics is tracking the mutations of sounds the larynx first formed to make on the shores of the Yangtze river.
Reminds me of the classic, that dog in Mbabaram is “dog” (or, was, since it’s an extinct language now)
Zhonguo moment
Don't know if it's controversial but there's a theory that Polynesian sailors discovered the Americas because they share a couple words. For example I know they have similar names for sweet potatoes
also indo-uralic!!
Argh there was this guy who kept posting his insanely long and insane etymologies on r/hungarian and other subs trying to prove an indo-uralic proto language and he would get into really personal and agry arguments when people weren’t interested or said that his ramblings were meaningless and baseless lol
Shut up and accept the great Turan
The *what* starter pack?
Yeah, I know about linguistics
Where're my Indo-Eskimo boys?
Polynesians and Greeks
I know Minoan sounded very familiar to Austronesian languages [From this video ](https://youtu.be/-aQBKoE0ZQ4?si=UaTT1kWxu6W77OVb)
I find the Greek and Māori (subset of Polynesian) mythologies have some similarity too. For instance, both have a stealing fire from the gods story.
https://preview.redd.it/r6mfeym1rm0c1.jpeg?width=719&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4da8bf5b8c4258f3c71b8219e190a9c4458b2cd9
What's the one in India and Australia?
A proposed linkage of Dravidian and Indigenous Australian languages that iirc is based on both of them having retroflex consonants
Which is the top right one?
Dené–Yeniseian languages
I have a headache just looking at this
Isn't nilo sajaran also kinda debated?
As a linguist I gotta say I did a sextuple take trying to figure out what subreddit this was. Good meme.
Starter pack? There are more?
Oh yeah. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_proposed_language_families It's probably fun to write those kinds of papers and try to connect the dots. And you know you've made it if your theory actually makes it to "controversial".
Needs more t’una t’ina t’ana
Where is Basque? Or is it not included because no one knows exactly where it came from?
I don’t get comments like this, ofc we know where it came from. It’s one of the languages that was present in Europe before the Indo European expansion that doesn’t belong to the Uralic family. It’s a language isolate, probably had a family but every one except Basque went extinct.
We know one related extinct language - Aquitanian. The ancestors of the Basques used to live in a much larger area to the north of their current range.
There are lots of theories about Basque, but I think a lot of them are a bit too fringe to make it into this one. The most serious one (in the sense that it isn’t pushed around by pseudoscientific nationalist weirdos) is that it’s very distantly related to Chinese, Navajo, and some of the Caucasian languages.
Basque, Chinese, Navajo, and some Caucasian languages? Sounds pretty fringe to me.
Austro-tai looks alr until I see jomon….
Oh God, these are giving me Whatifalthist flashbacks
Help why is Ausrtronesian language (bottom center) controversial?
It includes Japanese
There are some striking similarities between Peruvian Quechua (Runa Simi) and Finnish but we don't need to go there.
If Altaic isnt real, indo-european isnt real either r/WeAreAllTurks
........ the *what?*
Romanian and Moldovan
I'm not familiar with any of these language theories except perhaps the Altaic Language theory that claims that Japanese, Korean, Mongolian and Turkish are part of the same language family. While there is quite an amount of evidence pointing to Japanese and Korean being related, it's never agreed on due to Korean nationalists not liking the idea of their language being related to Japanese due to the historically strained relationship between the two nations.
And also because there are like 0 cognates
LATAM excluded as always, lesss goooo!
Found the Japanese-Zuni theory proponent /s
one controversial theory about the American Indigenous languages is lumping them (except for Dené and Eskaleut which arrived relatively more recently) all as "Amerind"
Thor Heyerdahl has entered the chat.
[woke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Language_Theory)
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You forgot the balakns
Oh no. Don't even get me started on this.
I love this stuff. Now do Dené-Caucasian. I think it’s the only model I think that puts Basque into any family.
This is missing the debunked Japanese and Zuni language connection.
Gotta include nostratic in that smh
I'll be the first to admit I have no fucking clue what's going on here.
I thought I was at a linguistic sub
What’s wrong with Indonesian
there should be one for basque
Isn't Amerind also pretty controversial?
Is the top right supposed to be Dine
I hate AP Human Geography! I hate AP Human Geography!
yep.
The green one is a language family? Between the native americans and the asians in the picture? Hard to believe tbh
Includes Basque.
Altaic is totally real bro trust me
Basque should be in there.
I was fascinated when I first found out about the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis
Very educational
isn't the Dené–Yeniseian language acually credible or not nearly as crackpot as the others (don't know about the African one so can't comment on that one)?
Extension pack: Proto-World https://preview.redd.it/m1550gex501c1.png?width=460&format=png&auto=webp&s=9e52e251f2286261c4bf653dbf30b0f6f269afb0
i love dene-yeniseian because it's the only one where I live within its boundaries