Talking Neolithic: Proceedings of the workshop on Indo-European origins held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, December 2-3, 2013, 2018
This paper charts how ancient DNA has revolutionised the Indo-European question. Early findings ... more This paper charts how ancient DNA has revolutionised the Indo-European question. Early findings pointed to the Pontic-Caspian Steppe as an immediate source for “at least some” branches of Indo-European “in Europe”. But for the rest of the family, too, ancient DNA coverage has fast filled out through time and space, across the Balkans, Mycenaean Greece, Anatolia, the Fertile Crescent and now northernmost South Asia. The results dovetail fully with neither the farming nor the pastoralist hypothesis, but do fit with some components of both scenarios. This is explored here also with regard to how food production itself arose, changed and spread in multiple different directions and phases.
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Recent by Paul Heggarty
The origins of the Indo-European language family are hotly disputed. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of core vocabulary have produced conflicting results, with some supporting a farming expansion out of Anatolia ~9000 years before present (yr B.P.), while others support a spread with horse-based pastoralism out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe ~6000 yr B.P. Here we present an extensive database of Indo-European core vocabulary that eliminates past inconsistencies in cognate coding. Ancestry-enabled phylogenetic analysis of this dataset indicates that few ancient languages are direct ancestors of modern clades and produces a root age of ~8120 yr B.P. for the family. Although this date is not consistent with the Steppe hypothesis, it does not rule out an initial homeland south of the Caucasus, with a subsequent branch northward onto the steppe and then across Europe. We reconcile this hybrid hypothesis with recently published ancient DNA evidence from the steppe and the northern Fertile Crescent.
Where a mass migration largely replaces the population in a given region, it can be expected to replace language with it. But where an incoming ancestry makes up just a fraction of any one generation, especially if it builds up only incrementally over centuries, there is no default expectation of language replacement.
Past aDNA papers do not support multiple “massive migrations from the steppe”, but only one. The scale of population replacement in Corded Ware (8) is not remotely reproduced elsewhere (16, 34). And Corded Ware ancestry itself can be traced to sources other than Yamnaya alone (22).
The steppe hypothesis always saw all Indo‑European, Anatolian included, originating on the steppe (46). Conveniently redefining Indo-European now to exclude Anatolian does not change the fact of their common origin, nor that the real root of this language lineage does not lie in the Yamnaya EHG-CHG mix (red-blue). Rather, hiding in plain sight in the pie charts is a component not just ubiquitous across Indo‑European (Anatolian included), but ubiquitous at markedly higher proportions: CHG alone (blue).
So beyond Anatolian, which other branches might also be better explained not by their limited doses of the Yamnaya mix, but by higher, retained proportions of the original CHG? Prospects for solving the Indo‑European enigma are brighter now, free from the outdated preconception that the Steppe must have been its earliest, original source.
Our languages are a rich source of data on our origins. This chapter explores how historical linguistics can contribute to — but also learn from — the very different and complementary perspectives of genetics, history, and especially archaeology. It starts from how these disciplines relate to each other at all, through a basic cause and effect relationship. Our panorama of the world’s languages, how they relate to and have influenced each other, is the work of the powerful forces that have impacted through (pre)history on the people who spoke them. This chapter assesses, also from an archaeologist’s perspective, the strengths and weaknesses of the models and methods that use language data to help understand those real-world contexts: the when, where and why of language prehistory. In particular, how can linguistics put dates on a language family’s expansion, identify the homeland it began from, and explain how and why it spread at the expense of other languages? How valid is the family tree as a model of how languages diverge, when their speaker populations need not live in neat branching relationships? Today’s contest and ‘shake-out’ between traditional qualitative and interpretative methods, and newer evolutionary and phylogenetic analyses, promises much progress in understanding our linguistic prehistory.
Keywords: Indo-European, language prehistory, Bayesian analysis, phylogenetics, farming/language dispersals
Rethinking the Andes–Amazonia Divide brings together archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians and historians to explore both correlations and contrasts in how the various disciplines see the relationship between the Andes and Amazonia, from deepest prehistory up to the European colonial period. The volume emerges from an innovative programme of conferences and symposia conceived explicitly to foster awareness, discussion and co-operation across the divides between disciplines. Underway since 2008, this programme has already yielded major publications on the Andean past, including History and Language in the Andes (2011) and Archaeology and Language in the Andes (2012).
The origins of the Indo-European language family are hotly disputed. Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of core vocabulary have produced conflicting results, with some supporting a farming expansion out of Anatolia ~9000 years before present (yr B.P.), while others support a spread with horse-based pastoralism out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe ~6000 yr B.P. Here we present an extensive database of Indo-European core vocabulary that eliminates past inconsistencies in cognate coding. Ancestry-enabled phylogenetic analysis of this dataset indicates that few ancient languages are direct ancestors of modern clades and produces a root age of ~8120 yr B.P. for the family. Although this date is not consistent with the Steppe hypothesis, it does not rule out an initial homeland south of the Caucasus, with a subsequent branch northward onto the steppe and then across Europe. We reconcile this hybrid hypothesis with recently published ancient DNA evidence from the steppe and the northern Fertile Crescent.
Where a mass migration largely replaces the population in a given region, it can be expected to replace language with it. But where an incoming ancestry makes up just a fraction of any one generation, especially if it builds up only incrementally over centuries, there is no default expectation of language replacement.
Past aDNA papers do not support multiple “massive migrations from the steppe”, but only one. The scale of population replacement in Corded Ware (8) is not remotely reproduced elsewhere (16, 34). And Corded Ware ancestry itself can be traced to sources other than Yamnaya alone (22).
The steppe hypothesis always saw all Indo‑European, Anatolian included, originating on the steppe (46). Conveniently redefining Indo-European now to exclude Anatolian does not change the fact of their common origin, nor that the real root of this language lineage does not lie in the Yamnaya EHG-CHG mix (red-blue). Rather, hiding in plain sight in the pie charts is a component not just ubiquitous across Indo‑European (Anatolian included), but ubiquitous at markedly higher proportions: CHG alone (blue).
So beyond Anatolian, which other branches might also be better explained not by their limited doses of the Yamnaya mix, but by higher, retained proportions of the original CHG? Prospects for solving the Indo‑European enigma are brighter now, free from the outdated preconception that the Steppe must have been its earliest, original source.
Our languages are a rich source of data on our origins. This chapter explores how historical linguistics can contribute to — but also learn from — the very different and complementary perspectives of genetics, history, and especially archaeology. It starts from how these disciplines relate to each other at all, through a basic cause and effect relationship. Our panorama of the world’s languages, how they relate to and have influenced each other, is the work of the powerful forces that have impacted through (pre)history on the people who spoke them. This chapter assesses, also from an archaeologist’s perspective, the strengths and weaknesses of the models and methods that use language data to help understand those real-world contexts: the when, where and why of language prehistory. In particular, how can linguistics put dates on a language family’s expansion, identify the homeland it began from, and explain how and why it spread at the expense of other languages? How valid is the family tree as a model of how languages diverge, when their speaker populations need not live in neat branching relationships? Today’s contest and ‘shake-out’ between traditional qualitative and interpretative methods, and newer evolutionary and phylogenetic analyses, promises much progress in understanding our linguistic prehistory.
Keywords: Indo-European, language prehistory, Bayesian analysis, phylogenetics, farming/language dispersals
Rethinking the Andes–Amazonia Divide brings together archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians and historians to explore both correlations and contrasts in how the various disciplines see the relationship between the Andes and Amazonia, from deepest prehistory up to the European colonial period. The volume emerges from an innovative programme of conferences and symposia conceived explicitly to foster awareness, discussion and co-operation across the divides between disciplines. Underway since 2008, this programme has already yielded major publications on the Andean past, including History and Language in the Andes (2011) and Archaeology and Language in the Andes (2012).
- Comprehensive in scope: all key aspects of archaeological and linguistic prehistory in the Andes
- Sets the Andean case into the broader context of how to correlate archaeology and linguistics worldwide
The Andes are of unquestioned significance to the human story: a cradle of agriculture and of 'pristine' civilisation with a pedigree of millennia. The Incas were but the culmination of a succession of civilisations that rose and fell to leave one of the richest archaeological records on Earth. By no coincidence, the Andes are home also to our greatest surviving link to the speech of the New World before European conquest: the Quechua language family. For linguists, the native tongues of the Andes make for another rich seam of data on origins, expansions and reversals throughout prehistory. Historians and anthropologists, meanwhile, negotiate many pitfalls to interpret the conflicting mytho-histories of the Andes, recorded for us only through the distorting prism of the conquistadors' world-view.
Each of these disciplines opens up its own partial window on the past: very different perspectives, to be sure, but all the more complementary for it. Frustratingly though, specialists in each field have all too long proceeded largely in ignorance of great strides being taken in the others. This book is a long overdue meeting of minds, bringing together a worldwide cast of pre-eminent scholars from each discipline. Here they at last converge their disparate perspectives into a true cross-disciplinary focus, to weave together a more coherent account of what was, after all, one and the same prehistory.
The result, instructive also far beyond the Andes, is a rich case-study in the pursuit of a more holistic vision of the human past.
Readership: archaeologists, linguists, others interested in the prehistory of the Andes, particularly anthropologists, geneticists, historians.
CONTENTS
0. Introduction: History, Linguistics, and the Andean Past: A Much-Needed Conversation
- Adrian J. Pearce and Paul Heggarty
Part I: The Colonial Era
1. Language and Society in Early Colonial Peru
- Gabriela Ramos
2. A Visit to the Children of Chaupi Ñamca: From Myth to Andean History via Onomastics and Demography
- Frank Salomon and Sue Grosboll
3. What Was the 'Lengua General' of Colonial Peru?
- César Itier
4. 'Mining the Data' on the Huancayo-Huancavelica Quechua Frontier
- Adrian J. Pearce and Paul Heggarty
Part II: Reform, Independence, & The Early Republic
5. The Bourbon Reforms, Independence, and the Spread of Quechua and Aymara
- Kenneth J. Andrien
6. Reindigenisation and Native Languages in Peru's Long Nineteenth Century (1795-1940)
- Adrian J. Pearce
7, Quechua Political Literature in Early Republican Peru (1810-1876)
- Alan Durston
Part III: Towards Present and Future
8. The Quechua Language in the Andes Today: Between Statistics, the State, and Daily Life
- Rosaleen Howard
9. 'Ya no podemos regresar al quechua': Modernity, Identity, and Language Choice among Migrants in Urban Peru
- Tim Marr""
Here we look to this region’s little-known linguistic prehistory, particularly the initial expansions of its two major indigenous language families, Quechua and Aymara. We then set these scenarios alongside archaeological evidence on where, when and how agriculture originated there. The different time-depths of these processes appear to preclude any simplistic cause-and-effect relationship between the two.
Yet we go on to identify significant idiosyncrasies in the origins and development of food production in the Andes, which call for a number of refinements to the basic agriculture—language dispersals hypothesis. These are framed within a generalising principle able to reconcile the appealing explanatory power of the hypothesis at great time-depths with a reining-in of any claims to unique and universal applicability in more recent times. The Andean case ends up transformed — an exception that more proves the rule than refutes it.
Just as ‘cultures’ and ‘peoples’ have fallen from grace in archaeological theory, so too have simplistic attempts to associate them uniquely with any particular language — witness the furore surrounding ‘The Celts’. Rightly so; but equally, we should beware of throwing out with this bathwater the great potential of language prehistory to inform other disciplines of the human past, not least our own. Archaeology can only be the poorer for passing over the impressive degree of certainty that linguistic data and methodology can so often provide on one core component of human ‘cultural’ make-up across time and space. Properly understood, language relationships can make for incontrovertibly clear evidence of provenience, continuity, and complex social interactions.
Above all, languages do not diverge into great families at whim. On the contrary, they do so only for very good reasons in the real-world context in which their speakers lived. The very existence of language families with vast geographical distributions is no historical accident. Indeed, they *demand* to be accounted for, and can be only in terms of whatever powerful, expansive forces lie behind them. These, of course, are the same driving forces that archaeology seeks to uncover and explain through its own, independent material culture record.
So it is not a question of *whether* any particular expansive forces in the archaeological record might have driven language expansions, provided we can find a perfect match — and if we cannot then safely pretending that they never happened. Linguistics establishes without question that they did. For us to shy away from this linguistic reality is nothing less than an abnegation of our duty as prehistorians. The task, rather, is to identify *which* of the forces that archaeologists can detect provide that explanation *most plausibly* — and indeed to work out a methodology for how to judge that plausibility.
In this article, then, we propose a new, principled methodology by which to converge archaeologists’ and linguists’ independent scenarios into a coherent cross-disciplinary tale of the human past. We discard facile associations between ‘culture’ and ‘language’, but instead seek to link archaeological and linguistic data through *commensurate driving forces*. We illustrate this new methodology by a case-study in one of humanity’s rare hearths of pristine civilisation development, but where precious little inter-disciplinary progress has been made hitherto: the Central Andes. The scenario that emerges turns on its head the traditional thinking on associations between the archaeology and languages of the region. And it duly offers archaeologists a new strand of independent data to contribute to their interpretation of precisely what the ‘cultural’ Horizons they identify in the region really were.
ABSTRACT (IN ENGLISH)
This book emerges from the conference 'Lenguas y sociedades en el antiguo Perú: hacia un enfoque interdisciplinario', a gathering of linguists, archaeologists and anthropologists at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in August 2009. This chapter sets out first the raison d’être of our enterprise: why it seemed so important to foster a meeting of minds between these disciplines, to converge their disparate but complementary perspectives into a more coherent Andean prehistory.
Next, it is asked how linguistics can inform us about prehistory at all, exploring some general methodological principles and how they might be applied specifically in the case of the Andes. The ‘traditional model’ for associating the linguistic and archaeological records in the Andes is then reviewed — but pointing also to various inherent infelicities, which duly call for a far reaching, interdisciplinary reconsideration of the Andean past.
Here, therefore, we attempt to sum up the new state of the cross-disciplinary art in Andean prehistory, as collectively represented by the papers that emerged both from the Lima conference and from the symposium that preceded it, held at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge in September 2008. Progress and new perspectives are explored first on key individual questions. Who, for instance, were the Incas, and whence and when did they come to Cuzco? How and when did Quechua, too, reach Cuzco, as well as its furthest flung outposts in north-west Argentina, Ecuador and northern Peru?
Finally, the scope is broadened to overall scenarios for how the main Andean language families might correlate in time and space with the archaeological horizons that in principle might best account for their dispersals. Four basic hypotheses have emerged, whose respective strengths and weaknesses are assessed in turn: a traditional ‘Wari as Aymara’ model, revised and defended; alternative proposals of ‘Wari as both Aymara and Quechua’, a suggestion of ‘both Chavín and Wari as Quechua’; and the most radical new departure, ‘Wari as Quechua, Chavín as Aymara’."
RESUMEN (EN CASTELLANO)
Arqueología, lenguas y el pasado andino: principios, metodología y el nuevo estado de la cuestión
El presente volumen resulta del simposio «Lenguas y sociedades en el antiguo Perú: hacia un enfoque interdisciplinario», una reunión de lingüistas, arqueólogos y antropólogos realizada en la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú en agosto de 2009. La presente contribución expone primero la razón de ser de nuestra iniciativa: el por qué nos parecía tan importante promover un encuentro entre estas disciplinas, con el objeto de hacer converger sus perspectivas dispares —pero, por lo tanto, complementarias— para avanzar hacia una prehistoria andina más coherente.
Seguidamente, preguntamos cómo es que la lingüística está en condiciones de proveernos datos sobre la prehistoria. Primero examinamos algunos principios metodológicos generales a tal fin, antes de examinar cómo estos se dejan aplicar mejor en el caso específico de los Andes. A continuación, pasamos revista al «modelo tradicional» de las supuestas asociaciones entre los registros lingüísticos y arqueológicos en la región, señalando al paso varios desaciertos inherentes, los mismos que claman por una reconsideración profunda e interdisciplinaria del pasado andino.
Por lo tanto, este artículo prosigue con el propósito de resumir el nuevo estado interdisciplinario de la cuestión de la prehistoria andina, tal como lo representan los artículos que resultaron tanto del encuentro de Lima como del simposio que le precedió, llevado a cabo en el McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research de la University of Cambridge en septiembre de 2008. Se analizan, en primer lugar, los avances y nuevas perspectivas sobre algunos temas específicos, entre ellos: ¿quiénes fueron los incas, de dónde procedían y cuándo llegaron al Cuzco?, ¿cómo y cuándo alcanzó el quechua el Cuzco, así como sus más alejados puestos de avanzada en el noroeste de Argentina, Ecuador y el norte del Perú?
Por último, ampliamos nuestro alcance a escenarios generales que buscan correlacionar, en el tiempo y el espacio, las principales familias lingüísticas de los Andes con los horizontes arqueológicos que, en principio, mejor podrían explicar sus dispersiones. Han surgido cuatro hipótesis básicas, cuyos respectivos puntos fuertes y débiles pasamos a evaluar: el modelo tradicional, ahora revisado y defendido, de «Wari como aimara»; y propuestas alternativas de «Wari como aimara y quechua a la vez», «Chavín y Wari como quechua», y —más radical aún respecto al modelo tradicional— «Wari como quechua, Chavín como aimara».
ABSTRACT (IN ENGLISH)
This chapter sets out a new proposal for a coherent interdisciplinary prehistory of the Andes, based firstly on a long overdue reexamination of the relationships between the various regional ‘dialects’ within the Quechua language family; and secondly on the search for a far more satisfactory correlation with the archaeological record.
Our founding principle is that language expansions do not ‘just happen’. Rather, they happen only for those very same reasons of socio-cultural change that archaeology seeks to describe through its own, independent data. Here is the true link between our disciplines, so we discard outdated, facile equations of ‘language equals culture equals genes’, in favour of the real correlation: that language families necessarily reflect past expansive processes, whose traces should also be clear in the material culture record. This principle is one that we can make use of to identify and assess correspondences between archaeological and linguistic patterns, on three levels: chronology, geography, and above all, causation. Or in other words: when, where and why did particular language expansions occur?
In the Andes, in principle this entails that we should look to the Horizons, not the Intermediate Periods, as offering the most natural explanations for the major Quechua and Aymara dispersals. With the Incas too late to account for the time-depth of either family, the most plausible candidate for the first major expansion of Quechua turns out in our view to be the Wari Middle Horizon, with the Chavín Early Horizon more tentatively suggested as behind the earlier spread of the Aymara family. This effectively both upturns the traditional Torero hypothesis, and bears clear implications for the long debate in archaeology as to the nature, duration and extent of ‘Horizons’.
RESUMEN (EN CASTELLANO)
Ampliando nuestros horizontes: hacia una prehistoria interdisciplinaria de los Andes
Este artículo propone una nueva visión de la prehistoria andina, que busca tejer un conjunto más coherente entre las varias disciplinas que intentan entender el pasado precolombino. Se fundamenta, en primer lugar, en una reexaminación, pendiente ya desde décadas, de la clasificación tradicional de las relaciones entre los diversos «dialectos» regionales al interior de la familia lingüística quechua; y, en segundo lugar, en la búsqueda de una correlación mucho más satisfactoria con el registro arqueológico.
El nuevo enfoque que aquí proponemos se enraíza en el principio fundamental que si algunas lenguas mayores han logrado dispersarse de manera espectacular, esto no pudo haber ocurrido sin ningún motivo. Más bien, tales expansiones lingüísticas se deben a las mismas razones —es decir, los mismos cambios socioculturales— que la arqueología también busca describir por medio de sus propios datos independientes. Allí radica el auténtico vínculo entre nuestras disciplinas, de manera que podemos descartar las ecuaciones simplistas y obsoletas del estilo «lengua=cultura=genes», en favor de la correlación verdadera: las familias de lenguas reflejan procesos expansivos pasados, cuyos indicios deberían quedar claros también en el registro de la cultura material. Este principio se aprovecha para identificar y evaluar las correspondencias entre los patrones arqueológicos y lingüísticos, y así en tres niveles: la cronología, la geografía y, sobre todo, la causalidad. En otras palabras: ¿cuándo, dónde y porqué se difundieron determinadas lenguas?
En los Andes esto implica que en principio debemos ver a los horizontes, y no a los períodos intermedios, como los que ofrecen las explicaciones más naturales para las dispersiones mayores del quechua y el aimara. Ya que el Imperio incaico remonta a una época demasiado tardía las explicaciones de la profundidad temporal de cada familia, es más bien el Horizonte Medio Wari el que se vuelve el candidato más verosímil para haber vehiculizado la primera gran expansión del quechua, según nuestro parecer. Asimismo, aunque de manera más tentativa, se sugiere que el Horizonte Temprano Chavín pudo haber impulsado la dispersión más temprana de la familia aimara. Esto, en efecto, trastoca la hipótesis tradicional de Torero, además de conllevar claras implicancias para el largo debate arqueológico acerca de la naturaleza, duración y extensión de los «horizontes».
The Titicaca basin was the cradle of some of the major complex societies of pre-Columbian South America and is today home to three surviving native languages: Quechua, Aymara, and Uro. This study seeks to contribute to reconstructing the population prehistory of the region, by providing a first genetic profile of its inhabitants, set also into the wider context of South American genetic background.
METHODS
We report the first mitochondrial DNA first hypervariable segment sequences of native populations of the environs of Lake Titicaca: speakers of Aymara and Quechua, and the “Uros” of the Lake's floating islands. We sampled Aymara speakers from a locality where the Uro language was formerly documented, to check for possible language shift patterns. These data are compared with those for other Amerindian populations, collated from already published sources.
RESULTS
Our results uncover the genetic distinctiveness of our formerly Uro but now Aymara-speaking sample, in contrast with a relative homogeneity for all the other Central Andean samples.
CONCLUSIONS
The genetic affinities that characterize Central Andean populations are highly consistent with the succession of expansive polities in the region, culminating with the Incas. In the environs of Lake Titicaca, however, one subset of the present day Aymara-speaking population exhibits a peculiar position: perhaps a genetic correlate to their original Uro linguistic lineage (now extinct in the area), tallying with ethnohistorical claims for the distinctiveness of the Uro population. Our results emphasize the need for genetic descriptions to consider the widespread phenomenon of language shift.
We consider linguists’ fundamental concerns as to how non linguists go about using language data; especially whether (and if so, how) one can meaningfully use such phylogenetic analyses on language data, interpret their results, and attempt to put dates on particular nodes in the trees. We look into certain aspects of the very nature of language that it is crucial to bear in mind in order to handle language data appropriately for these purposes, but which many linguists feel are not truly appreciated by non linguists. These aspects include: language’s inherent susceptibility to powerful external forces which vary tremendously through history; the nature of language data and what this means for how they can meaningfully be compared and measured; and the nature of language change and historical development, with important consequences for the interpretation of those data, not least for dating.
It emerges, moreover, that these same characteristics of language change also challenge linguists’ own ‘established’ dating of Proto Indo European by the so called ‘linguistic palaeontology’, and how that question is in truth much more open than Indo Europeanist linguists generally admit.
Dialects, like related languages, share both a degree of synchronic similarity, and a common but divergent history: one might therefore expect classificatory tools developed for language families to generalize naturally to dialectology. Yet the conventional family tree typically ignores dialects; and even if we attempted to draw dialect trees, we lack any method operating at the required level of detail. Standard techniques of comparison by word-list, based on lexical meaning, can quantify only by the all-or-nothing fact of ‘cognate’ or ‘not cognate’. Developed for comparisons across families, this criterion is too blunt to be of practical use in quantifying degree of linguistic distance at the much finer level of dialects, which typically share far ‘too many’ cognates, even though their phonetic forms may differ quite starkly.
In this paper we outline one possible finer-grained method that is not limited to such binary 1 versus 0 judgements. Some computational linguists, notably Nerbonne and Heeringa, have proposed ‘dialectometries’ that attempt to measure an amalgam of phonetic and lexical distance. Yet their computationally-focused approach of calculating simple ‘Levenshtein distances’ remains insensitive and unweighted by any phonetic principles, as we demonstrate by comparison with our own quite different method, which sets out to produce truly *weighted* comparisons of articulatory *phonetic* distances. Most importantly, despite what might appear to be occasional superficial similarities, our technique very deliberately does *not* measure similarity in terms of Levenshtein distance (also known as ‘edit distance’ or ‘sequence distance’), but proposes a quite different method, built into which is a highly detailed analysis of the nature of the actual phonetic differences we aim to put figures on. We illustrate our calculations for a series of Romance dialects, using a 100-word list of known cognates. For each cognate word, a purely formulaic representation of the projected ancestral form is used as a template through which the slots in the different daughter forms can be identified and matched up, so that they can be compared against each other appropriately. Quantifications of relative phonetic similarity can then be produced for varieties which differ by region, sociolinguistic level, or – where we have reliable knowledge of their phonetics – over time. These figures for relative similarity can then be passed through biological tree-drawing and statistical packages, allowing the degree of similarity between dialects to be illustrated graphically. Comparisons of dialects against their common ancestor language can also indicate which of them show most or least change over time, and perhaps even what type of change this may be. Synchronic similarity can thus be ascertained, quantified, and represented at the dialectal level, and through this so can certain aspects of common and divergent history.
This article presents results from a completely new broad comparative study of twenty varieties of the Andean languages, from the Quechua, Aymara and Uru-Chipaya families, based on new data collected mostly in my own recent fieldwork.
My research seeks to provide measures of similarity between these languages both in phonetics and in lexical semantics, which I produce using not the traditional and widely criticised techniques such as lexicostatistics, but new and more sensitive methods I have developed. To my quantifications I then apply also the latest phylogenetic analysis programmes developed in the biological sciences, and which offer powerful new ways of representing and interpreting what signals exist in the comparative data that can be informative about the relationships between and the historical development of those language families – and by extension, the (pre)histories of the populations who spoke them.
My phonetic comparisons will be presented in a later article; this one is limited to results from my lexical study, which sheds new and different light on the key unresolved questions in the origins and relationships of the Quechua and Aymara families. The most fundamental of these is the long-running ‘Quechumara’ question, as to whether the Aymara and Quechua families are ultimately related to each other.
Studies of language change have begun to contribute to answering several pressing questions in cognitive sciences, including the origins of human language capacity, the social construction of cognition and the mechanisms underlying culture change in general. Here, we describe recent advances within a new emerging framework for the study of language change, one that models such change as an evolutionary process among competing linguistic variants. We argue that a crucial and unifying element of this framework is the use of probabilistic, data-driven models both to infer change and to compare competing claims about social and cognitive influences on language change.
How fusional is the morphosyntax of Latin, indeed how complex in general, compared to that of English? How similar are the sounds in German <drei> and its English counterpart <three>?
This Ph.D. explores how to ‘put figures on’ such aspects of language structure, to quantify both difference between languages, and single languages against abstract principles of structure such as fusion, isolation, or general morphological or phonological complexity. This research thus stands at the intersection of two fields: language typology and universals, and comparative/historical linguistics.
Existing quantification methodologies such as lexicostatistics are generally considered rather unreliable, unrefined and very limited in scope. This thesis breaks with their traditional focus on form-to-meaning correspondences in the lexicon in favour of language structure, a data type which indeed proves inherently more amenable to quantification, enabling considerable advances in objectivity, detail and sensitivity.
Two key problems are addressed, firstly in abstract terms: that of comparison, how to ensure cross-linguistic compatibility and balance; and that of quantification proper, how to put meaningful figures on language structures. In response to each, a set of methodological design principles is proposed, initially in general terms to be as widely applicable as possible. These principles are applied in practice to structure the databases and data processing programmes for two quantification methodologies, each for a different field of language structure and using a different solution to the cross-linguistic problem (universals, and a common ancestor language). The databases are in Microsoft Access and Excel 97; the programming in Microsoft Visual Basic.
The first methodology, for basic noun morphosyntax, measures indices of morphological typology (isolation, fusion, invariance), and of how far a language grammaticalises distinctions on given categories (number, animacy, definiteness, etc.). Analysis follows not a generative framework, but a theory neutral, typologist’s approach to such categories. A second methodology measures phonetic similarity between cognates; and detailed proposals are presented for a third, for comparing whole phonological and phonotactic systems.
Results are given for a range of languages, mostly Indo-European (including an Iberian dialect study) plus Chinese and Quechua. At the current stage of development, however, the value of these results remains principally illustrative of the proposed methodological design principles for quantification."
http://revistas.pucp.edu.pe/boletindearqueologia/es/numero-14
El nuevo enfoque que aquí proponemos se enraíza en el principio fundamental que si algunas lenguas mayores han logrado dispersarse de manera espectacular, esto no pudo haber ocurrido sin ningún motivo. Más bien, tales expansiones lingüísticas se deben a las mismas razones —es decir, los mismos cambios socioculturales— que la arqueología también busca describir por medio de sus propios datos independientes. Allí radica el auténtico vínculo entre nuestras disciplinas, de manera que podemos descartar las ecuaciones simplistas y obsoletas del estilo «lengua=cultura=genes», en favor de la correlación verdadera: las familias de lenguas reflejan procesos expansivos pasados, cuyos indicios deberían quedar claros también en el registro de la cultura material. Este principio se aprovecha para identificar y evaluar las correspondencias entre los patrones arqueológicos y lingüísticos, y así en tres niveles: la cronología, la geografía y, sobre todo, la causalidad. En otras palabras: ¿cuándo, dónde y porqué se difundieron determinadas lenguas?
En los Andes esto implica que en principio debemos ver a los horizontes, y no a los períodos intermedios, como los que ofrecen las explicaciones más naturales para las dispersiones mayores del quechua y el aimara. Ya que el Imperio incaico remonta a una época demasiado tardía las explicaciones de la profundidad temporal de cada familia, es más bien el Horizonte Medio Wari el que se vuelve el candidato más verosímil para haber vehiculizado la primera gran expansión del quechua, según nuestro parecer. Asimismo, aunque de manera más tentativa, se sugiere que el Horizonte Temprano Chavín pudo haber impulsado la dispersión más temprana de la familia aimara. Esto, en efecto, trastoca la hipótesis tradicional de Torero, además de conllevar claras implicancias para el largo debate arqueológico acerca de la naturaleza, duración y extensión de los «horizontes».
Palabras clave: quechua, aimara, Andes, Wari, horizonte, Chavín, familias lingüísticas, divergencia lingüística