NZ study cracks origin of English language

By ANGELA GREGORY

Auckland University researchers have stunned academics worldwide by tracing the origins of the English language to Turkish farmers.

Using a novel approach to develop an Indo-European language tree, the researchers say they have evidence that the roots of the English language go back about 9000 years to Turkey.

Associate Professor Russell Gray and PhD student Quentin Atkinson published their research in the British journal Nature.

Their findings on the long-debated origins of the language have quickly spread.

The origin of the Indo-European language family has been the most intensively studied problem of historical linguistics, but numerous genetic studies have produced inconclusive results.

For almost two centuries linguists and archaeologists debated two theories on the origins of the language family, whose members ranged from Greek and Hindi to German and English.

It was thought the language was spread either by rampaging Kurgan horsemen who swept down into Europe and the Near East from the steppes of Russia 6000 years ago, or by farmers from Anatolia (modern Turkey) who had tilled their way westwards several millenniums earlier.

Professor Gray, an evolutionary biologist in the university's psychology department, said yesterday that his results showed only the latter theory could be correct.

He had used methods derived from evolutionary biology to study the problem for the past five years.

He accepted his approach to build an evolutionary tree of the Indo-European languages was controversial and subject to criticism.

But Professor Gray said he thought it was a valid technique that had clearly shown the origins of the English language went back further than had been thought, excluding the Kurgan horsemen theory.

It appeared that Indo-European languages had expanded with the spread of agriculture from Anatolia 7800 to 9800 years ago.

Professor Gray and Mr Atkinson had analysed thousands of words from 87 languages to find out when the various branches of the Indo-European family tree started diverging.

"We looked at words from different languages that were clearly related and grouped them in sets."

Professor Gray said a simple example was that five was cinq in French and cinque in Italian.

"We built matrices of all our information, gleaned from the internet and every obscure etymological dictionary we could find."

The researchers then used sophisticated computer programs to do the analysis and build language trees.

The length of the resulting branches and their various offshoots showed when each language diverged from its predecessors and developed a separate identity.

Professor Gray said Hittite (an extinct Anatolian language) was the first major language group to branch from the Indo-European trunk.

Over subsequent millenniums the same trunk sprouted Tocharian, Armenian, Greek, Albanian, Iranian, Indic, Slavic, Baltic, Germanic, French/Iberian, Italic and Celtic language groups.

A Marsden Fund grant from the Government and a James Cook Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand helped to pay for the research, which included the equivalent of three solid years of computer time.