You've found Father McKenzie. But are you really looking for Eleanor Rigby?

Thursday, December 04, 2003

MOTHER OF ALL TONGUES? If you are an anorak, you will find this article extremely interesting: “Language tree rooted in Turkey: Evolutionary ideas give farmers credit for Indo-European tongues”, by John Whitfield, in Nature (27 November 2003). But even if you are a person of normal tastes, you may, like me, be especially intrigued to find that something you always thought was fictional actually has some basis in history:

[…] there is no consensus on where Indo-European languages came from. Some linguists believe that Kurgan horsemen carried them out of central Asia 6,000 years ago. [...]

Kurgans?!! That is way cool. I always suspected that "Me pardona Pater, vermis sum", "Haec nocte in averno dormis!" or "Terra sacra haec est, Caledoni!" or "Solus unus potest esse!" must have come from an older proto-linguistic source...

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