Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

(...)
https://www.academia.edu/36689289/Invas ... der_Steppe
https://indo-european.eu/2018/05/copenh ... -caucasus/ (...)
Linguists, geneticists and archaeologists have reconstructed how a people of simple shepherds changed the world - a dramatic tale from the Bronze Age about migrations, wars of conquest, epidemics and the emergence of primitive Europeans.

Interesting stuff - and actually smack in the middle of the theme I'm going to talk about in Bratislava, namely migration patterns and languages in prehistoric Europe. I would have commented in Kraut's thread, but since the theme is so relevant for my own log -(and the comment grew to monstrous proportions) I have placed it here instead and just commented briefly in the thread "Invasion from the steppe (Indo-European expansion)".

Developments in this field go fast, and a couple of new things since my speech last year about the history (and prehistory) of the Germanic languages is that the proto-Indoeuropean speakers in Asia Minor (including the forebears of the Hittites) apparently weren't closely generically related to those on the steppes. One point in Kraut's German article is that the Kurgan cultures (including the late Yamnay) may have learnt about horses from another people, the extinct Botai from Kazakhstan, but according to the genetic evidence the Botai didn't intermarry with the Kurgans so it must be a case of learning by looking. Actually the horses of the Botai are now said to be the ancestors of the Przwalski horses, which everyone so far have considered to be the last truly wild horses. This would then mean that there aren't any truly wild horses alive today, but at least the Przewalskis only did a short stint as domesticated animals since the Botai must have had access to truly wild horses, so the Przwalskis are still the closest thing to the wild ones. But this leaves one lingering question: if the horses of everyone except the Botai aren't based on the same extinct wild horses as those domesticated by the Botai, what then? The tarpan?

But since the Botai didn't mingle with the Kurgans there is no compelling reason to believe that they played a role in the formation of the ProtoIndoeuropean language(s). As for the history of proto-Germanic I was already last year bothered by two things: 1) there is a time lapse of almost 1000 years between the end of the Megalithic stone age in Denmark and the beginning of the Bronze age - did the Yamnaya invasion or whatever it was happen gradually during this time or right at the beginning?, and 2) that people in Southern and Western Europe don't represent the same haplogroup as the one which apparently is connected with the Yamnaic speakers of what later became Proto-Germanic - so there must have been several invasions and several ways to transfer Proto-European skills to people in Europe. With the Pre-Germanic people the history seems to be that the Yamnaya invaded Eastern Europe, which gave rise to the establishment of the socalled Battle Ax culture (also characterized by single graves and band ceramics), and a later influx of new technology later added the chariot and bronze to the mixture. It is hard to see where the Indoeuropean languages should have come from if not through this invasion, but it is theoretically possible that these languages came to Northern Europe with the introduction of the chariot and bronze instead. And then the Yamnaya may have spoken some kind of ProtoIndoeuropean, but the representatives of the battle ax culture could in principle have spoken something else.

As for the rest of Europe .. well, I'm still reading, but it is by no means certain that the Yamnaya were in any way responsible for the formation of the Proto-Celtic/Italic language(s) - other tribes from the steppes who spoke related languages could have brought them to Central Europe, and then they could possible have spread through mixed cultures with other genes. As for the Balkan Peninsula it's almost certain that the ancestors of the Albanians (possible the Illyrians) didn't belong to the same wave as the ancestors of the Greeks. One reason is that Albanian represents a somewhat atypical kind of 'satemisation' - but still something different from the centum-ism of ProtoGermanic and ProtoItalic/Celtic - while Greek is a Centum language.

Explanation: the division of Indoeuropean languages into Centum and Satem languages (named after the Latin and Sanskrit words for 100) is still somewhat controversial, but basically the point is that the offspring of the postulated common Proto-Indoeuropean language did different things to the originally three (or maybe only two) series of dorsal consonants. The Indo-Iranian languages, Armenian and Albanian (with some reservations) and the Baltic/Slavic languages are Satem languages, whereas Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek and the (sadly) extinct Tocharian A & B from Central Asia are Centum languages. The theory now is that the 'satemization' process took place after some groups had left the central territory somewhere on the steppes North of the Black Sea - and if so, then we would definitely have evidence of a multistep process rather than a single Kurgan explosion which in one fell swoop would have introduced a single ProtoIndoeuropean language to almost the whole of Europe and much of Asia.

Centum_Satem-3rows.jpg

[Iversen]

Invasion from the steppe
https://www.wissenschaft.de/geschichte- ... er-steppe/
Linguists, geneticists and archaeologists have reconstructed how a people of simple shepherds changed the world - a dramatic tale from the Bronze Age about migrations, wars of conquest, epidemics and the emergence of primitive Europeans. (...)

I had just finished the synopsis for my speech in Bratislava. And then Kraut quoted a link in his thread about the steppe dwellers which solved a problem for me: what weapons did the Yamnaya have that made it possible for them to conquer most of Europe and spread their genes all over the place? I have had trouble finding an answer, and the cause seems to be that they only put small daggers of copper or a copper-arsenic alloy in their graves - in fact you would be more likely to find a fullsize fourwheeled oxcart there than a sword. They did have horses, but the combat chariot was only invented later - and not by them. As for Bronze it was invented, but the knowledge about it wasn't known in their home territory - but definitely in Asia minor, and from there the knowledge spread slowly through Europe until it reached us in Denmark around 1800 BC.

Sometimes it is an advantage to be somewhat outside the malstroem. When the mysterious sea people crushed the Myceneans and the Hittittes and just about anything except the Egypt of Ramesses the third around 1200 BC we hardly noticed up here in Denmark - the bronze age had started late here, but it continued unabated until around 500 BC, where the climate changed for the worse and the supply of bronze dried out. Then we had to switch to homemade iron.

DA: .. og så var det ellers slut med at sidde på de hensvundne slægters gravhøje og trutte i de der flotte bronzelurer!

Cuivre_Wikimedia.jpg

SLK: Ale ja som nielen uvoľnene s trochou francúzskeho jazyka a prehistorickými haplo-skupinami. Včera ja som študoval článok o Bratislave v slovenčine ...

EO: ... kaj ĉi-matene mi legis la programon de la venonta kunveno, kaj tio enhavis ege multajn lingvojn reprezentitajn en la priskriboj de la prelegoj, inkluzive priskriboj en esperanto. Bone iris legi ĉi-tiujn tekstojn, sed mi ne scias, ĉu mi ankaŭ povos kompreni la prelegojn kiam mi estos tie kiel aŭskultanto. Mi ĵus ricevis la revuon Esperanto, kiu inkludis biografion de Saussure ... ne, ne tiu Saussure, sed lia frato! Ĝi estas bona pretaĵo por Bratislavo, kie Esperanto probable estos la dua plej grava lingvo post Anglolingvo - malgraŭ la entuziasmo de la organizantoj, mi ne pensas ke la lingvo Slovakio povos konkurenci.

Team_2017.jpg

[Kraut]

@ Iversen
Sometimes it is an advantage to be somewhat outside the malstroem. When the mysterious sea people crushed the Myceneans and the Hittittes and just about anything except the Egypt of Ramesses the third around 1200 BC we hardly noticed up here in Denmark - the bronze age had started late here, but it continued unabated until around 500 BC, where the climate changed for the worse and the supply of bronze dried out. Then we had to switch to homemade iron.

They now know more about a major battle not so far from Denmark fought at the same time as the Ramses battle: the battle of the Tollense valley with about 4000 warriors clashing.

https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot ... WHxKv78.97

@ Iversen
I had just finished the synopsis for my speech in Bratislava. And then Kraut quoted a link in his thread about the steppe dwellers which solved a problem for me: what weapons did the Yamnaya have that made it possible for them to conquer most of Europe and spread their genes all over the place?

Very likely the weapon was kinship. I read that one of the haplogroups of the steppe is shared by about 200 million men, which means they all have a common "Urvater". The women were picked up when the steppe herders spread in all directions.

The Bell Beaker culture has a high proportion of sampled males (81%) from a large geographical area (Iberia to Hungary) who belong to an identical Y-chromosomal haplogroup (R1b-S116), implying common descent from a kin group that existed quite recently. Some groups of males share even more recent descent, on the order of ten generations or fewer [64]. Such recent common descent may even be retained in cultural memory via oral genealogies, such as among descent groups in Northern and Western Africa, whose members can trace descent relationships up to three to four centuries before the generation currently living [40]. Likewise, from Germany to Estonia, the Y-chromosomes of all Corded Ware individuals sampled, except one, belong to a single clade within haplogroup R1a (R1a-M417) and appear to coalesce shortly before sample deposition.
http://eurogenes.blogspot.de
Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups may have led to the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck (Zeng et al. 2018)

[Iversen]

Since yesterday I have not read anything about history or ancient migrations or Yamnayas or Proto-Indoeuropean or ceramics shaped in any form (including funnelnecks, cords and bells) or anything else related to a certain event in some other country whose name I have forgotten.

Instead I have looked at an Excel sheet listing the pictures and languages I have used in this thread, and it was painfully obvious that several languages hadn't received the attention they deserved - like for instance Dutch, Latin, Albanian, Romanian and Portuguese. So I looked through my heap of Lusophone sci mags and found "Super Interessante" no. 169 from May 2012. With a title like that you might be sceptical, but actually it really is what it says it is - one of the most interesting sci mags I have read. And I can buy one or two new issues during the upcoming UEA congress, but of course it also has a homepage.

SP: Antes de hablar de la revista, me gustaría mencionar que en mi televisión hay en este momento un programa sobre un viaje de tren desde Pantanal no Brasil a través de Bolivia hasta la costa de Chile. El protagonista ha visitado el Salar de Uyuni, que excepcionalmente estaba cubierto de agua. Pero dijeron que hay allí litio por un trillión de dólares. A pesar de que se trata de pequeños trillones estadounidenses y no grandes y gordos trillones europeos, ¡esto es mucho litio! La notícia es buena para los maníaco-depresivas, y nosotros también podemos esperar que las baterías recargables no desaparezcan del mercado en el futuro próximo.

POR: Eu não re-li todos os artigos ainda porque eu farei o trem amanhã. Mas aqui estão alguns exemplos. O primeiro artigo é sobre Marina Bay Sands em Singapura, que é um complexo de três arranha-céus ... e então alguém esqueceu um barco no topo. Eu só vi a construção da fora, porque custa 18 dólares para vê-lo de dentro. Isso é mais tecnologia do que ciência, mas na mesma página há um artigo que pergunta se a misteriosa matéria escura no universo seja fria, morna ou quente. Nenhuma pessoa sabia resposta em 2012, e ainda hoje não se sabe - mas, entretanto, os detentores do anelo de CERN afirmam que acharam o bósão de Higgs, mencionado como uma possibilidade teórica em outro artigo.

Outro artigo fala sobre fragrâncias com efeitos psicológicos através do cérebro ('Neurónios cheirosos"). Na legenda do imagem anexado se pôde ler: "Segunda investigações recentes (...) ha fragrâncias (como a dos citrinos ou da menta) que agradam a todas a pessoas." Vero? Se fosse assim, por que você não pode comprar xarope concentrado com gusto de menta na Dinamarca? Super interessante ficam tambem o reino das ilusões, tratado em outro artigo, e uma história de horror do reino da biologia: o surgimento de vespas assassinas na França, de onde progressaram por Espanha a Portugal. O camaleão abaixo também foi dado o seu próprio artigo.

Camaleao.jpg

DU: En nu moet ik gaan pakken.

[reineke]

Iguanamon should totally switch his profile picture with this one.

[Iversen]

Except that it isn't an iguana, it's a chameleon..

The one below is an iguana - but it doesn't look as thoughtful and distinguished as the chameleon above:

Iguana_SantoDomingo.jpg

Iguanamon's present image is also an iguana , so maybe he should stick to it

[Iversen]

This year′s polyglot gathering has ended, and I′ m going to write a few things here over the next couple of days, including short comments to those of the lectures I have witnessed. But there was also something going on between the lectures, and I can with glee notice that I now have had my first comversation i Lallans Scots, or at least ...

SC: ...ah maid ain sairiee travesty on that glorious leed. Forby that a′ ve had cantations wi speakers o French, Spainish, Italian, Dutch, Deens, Germain, Sweedish, Esperanto and ... did ah misglim ane? Oh yes, English! Ya cannae evite English, not even at a polyglot gatherin ... the beast will seep in onywhaur whatsemiver ya micht try to prevent it...

EO: Esperanto ankaŭ estis neebla eviti, fizike ĉar estis permanenta libereco kaj dediĉita ĉambro por ĝi (kaj vivogranda modelo de Zamenhof). Estis ankaŭ malevitanda en la kapo ĉar ĉiuj centraj gehomoj ŝajnas esti fluaj esperantistoj kaj amas paroli ĝin. Mia propra Esperanto sufiĉas por tia evento, sed ĝi neniam estos perfekta. Unu ekzemplo: dum parolado la unuan tagon mi simple ne povis memori la esperantan vorton por "morgaŭ" - nur poste mi suddente memoris ĝin kiel unu el la vortoj pruntitaj el la germana: morgaŭ.

EN: Apart from the aforementioned languages I also uttered a few fragmented messages in Portuguese, Latin, Greek, Romanian, Russian and Icelandic ... well, even I even said something in Slovakian if you accept single words - but you probably shouldn′t. It is far too easy to learn to say "dobrý deň" and "ďakujem" so at least these two shouldn′t count.

FR: Mon seul discours officiel à la conférence était en français et avait le titre"La géographie et histoire des langues européennes" - et ceux qui ont lu les messages dans ce fil savent alors déjà de quoi il s′agit.

IT: Ma durante la prima sessione di discorsi di cinque minuti la situazione totalmente inaspettata occorse che non ci fossero abbastenze colloqui preannunciati per riempire il tempo - e allora ho contribuito all'intrattenimento con una improvvisazione in italiano sul tema delle mie capacità di pensare e parlare in tre lingue romaniche: l′italiano, il spagnolo e il francese. Ho detto questo:

Ho imparato l'italiano e lo spagnolo lavorando con libri di testo e dovevo intuire la pronuncia soltanto dalle descrizioni nei libri . Quando arrivai a Milano la prima volta una mattinata grigia e nebbiosa del 1972, non avevo quasi mai sentito un vero italiano parlare (forse ad eccezione dei film con Don Camillo) - internet non era ancora stato inventato. D′altra parte, ho imparato il francese prima al liceo, poi all'università. Qui ho anche potuto seguire lezioni in italiano senza essere correttamente inscritto, ma nel spagnuolo no era possibile - nel settore spagnuolo si aveva già troppo studenti (per lo più comunisti rossi che volevano rimboccare la vita e le idee di Che Guevara e Fidel Castro e forse andare in America Latina per contribuire alla rivoluzione). Forse era il meglio per tutti che non dovevamo essere nella stessa stanza. Ma il risultato fu che quando io lasciai l'università, parlava abbastanza bene il francese, a malapena l′italiano e realmente non particolarmente bene lo spagnolo. Poi sono seguiti 25 anni senza studi linguistici, ma con molto turismo, e qui arriva il punto centrale: oggi penso e parlo le tre lingue con la stessa rapidità, lo stesso livello (troppo alto) di errori e lo stesso pronunzia non troppo buona. Gli anni dove ho studiato il francese mi hanno imparato molte cose, e sempre penso grammatica in ogni lingua usando le categorie che io ho imparato per il francese ... ma le mie abilità pratiche nelle tre lingue non riflettono il fatto che ho una laurea in uno, poche ore per settimana durante due, tre anni nel secondo e nessun corso affatto nella mia vita nel terzo. Ciò che conta al mio livello ora è quanto ho usato ognuna delle tre lingue.

Two small things more:
1) I had a discussion with a native Irish speaker about her language, and afterwards I succombed to the temptation and bought Assimil′s small Irish language guide (in French) so that could revisit the weird Celtic fairyland of words that are inflected at both ends, verbs tied to the start of sentences, inflected prepositions etc. etc., and now I have not only read most of the book, but also made a new skeleton for writing my own green grammar sheets. I just have to confer with the larger grammars I already have at home, then it is job done. Btw: it is also interesting to see the pronunciation of Irish through the eyes (or ears) of a French speaker instead one of the ubiquitous Anglophones.

2) Mr. Kupka graciously donated me his book about language learning. The only problem is that it is in Czech, and if I haven′t studied Slovak for more than roughly three weeks now that is still fully three weeks more than I have studied Czech. Nevertheless I have tried to read it to see how much I understood. It went better than expected: I am now at page 70, and I ain′t dead yet. Several years of seemingless resultless studies of other Slavic languages must have left some kind of trace ...

[Iversen]

There was one new thing about the talks this year: a whole auditorium had been reserved for non-English talks, and there were more of these also in other rooms. That's fine with me - even though I had to renounce on listening to the talks in Slovak there were enough other talks left. And I do feel that it is necessary to do a special effort to promote a more multilingual community. It is a silly and harmful idea that everybody has the right to understand everything as long as there are tons of alternatives to go to.

Due to a runny tummy I had to drop the fun and games of Wednesday, but I did get my bag of goodies. Thursday the first speech was already at 9:00, otherwise they started at 10"00, then there was a pause from 13 to 15 and more talks until 18. And each talk including questions had to end at xxs:45 - a rule that was strictly enforced (with good reason, when you remember the chaos between some of the lectures in the preceding years.

One thing more before I comment on the talks I listened to: during the final ceremony there was a referendum on whether Bratislava should host the next event too - and apparently a small majority wanted to try a new location. Personally I think the Ekonomická univerzita v Bratislave has been an almost ideal location for us with its large common spaces and ginormous auditoriums (and the cosy little Tesco just across the road), and at its current size the event could definitely not have continued in the AO hostel where it was hosted the first three years, so it will be a real challenge to find something equally good elsewhere. There is also a question concerning the team: Lydia Machova will step down as chief organizer, and even though Peter Balász continues it will be an added problem if a new location has to be found at the same time as a new team of volunteers and co-organizers. But let's see what happens - the gatherings now has such a momentum that it would be hard to imagine that they just fizzled out beause of a decision to relocate.

[jeff_lindqvist]

One thing more before I comment on the talks I listened to: during the final ceremony there was a referendum on whether Bratislava should host the next event too - and apparently a small majority wanted to try a new location. Personally I think the Economical Univerzity in Bratisolava has been an almost ideal location with its large common spaces and ginormous auditoriums (and the cosy little Tesco just across the road), and at its current size the event could definitely not have continued in the AO hostel where it was hosted the first three years, so it will be a real challenge to find something equally good elsewhere.

I saw a group photo on the FB page - apparently 597 participants this year. What's next? I think it was crowded enough a few years ago. I like the format with four differently themed auditoriums, though. Anyway, I didn't go this year, and probably have no right to complain.

[Iversen]

As I mentioned above the first day started early at 9:00, and the first speaker was Judith Meyer, who started the whole gathering thing, but also is known for her ability to learn languages fast - and that was exactly what she spoke above. Not really anything new, but a good and solid talk with wise councils to likeminded learners. Then I could have learnt about Warlpiri (the favorite language of the late Kenneth Hale or being told that speaking from day one really is a good idea, but I went to room 2 to hear M.Długosz' talk (in German) about the German Schlesian dialect (it seems there also is a Polish Schlesian dialect), mostly from the sociological side. And then me....

FR:: Eh bien, je pense que j'ai réussi à dire ce que je voulais sans commettre trop de gaffes. Au début j'avait un problème avec l'ordree de mes images. Je les amène toujours sur une clé USB et ils ont toujours des noms qui commencent par un numéro. Mais ici, il semble que ils ont été montrés dans l'ordre chronologique, ce qui était un peu inquiétant pour moi. Le problème a été resolu, et depuis lors tout est allé selon le plan. Vous connaissez dejà le contenu, donc je ne vais pas le répéter ici.

RU: Затем Р. Кокорин рассказал, как полиглоты учают языков. Он говорил по-русски, а поэтому я понял только половину. Я не слушал достаточно, и это ошибка, которую действительно хорошие полиглоты не совершают,

EN: After lunch I could have stayed in room two, but my oral Polish is way below A1, and I could have watched David James and Lydia Machova demonstrated the goldlist method - but as you may be aware I have my own wordlist method, so I listened to a lecture about the Bengali language instead, and then I went back to room two to hear something about extensive reading, which seems to be reading where you deliberately avoid loooking words up.

SP: Para estar cómodo para usted, este método siguiendo a Joanna van Schalk (Tarvos) no debería usarse con un idioma situado al livel en menos de un buen B2 o C1 o C2, pero yo supongo esto solo se aplica si realmente quieres entender todo el texto. He yá mencionado que estoy leyendo un libro checo en el cual conozco al máximo la mitad de las palabras, y puedo adivinar quizá la mitad del resto. Tengo evidenemente que repasar el libro de vuelta a casa, pero la primera lectura no es una pérdida de tiempo. Este ejercicio fortalece mi capacidad para sobrevivir en una cámara de tortura checa.

EN: And finally the secret missions of RDearman and his audience. The idea is that you have to do something extra to find conversation partners in a strange and maybe not too friendly world. One person in the auditorium proposed that you could walk into a porn shop pretending to be a person suffering from the fortunately quite rare giraffe fetichism, another to avoid paying your bus tickets to get some nice and long talks with the controllers ... however I have been riding Slovakian city busses for a week now without seeing any of those control guys so the method may not be that efficient. The general problem with most of the methods that were proposed was that you would end up paying for things you might not need, and that is contrary to my principles. The same obviously apply to incommodating poor innocent giraffes.