Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geogra...

Oct 1, 2015 by

Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geography (Part 2)

In the previous post, I began to analyze Svetlana Burlak’s critique of Longobardi et al. (2015), posted on Генофонд.рф website. As I pointed out, the idea that grammar is a better indicator of language relatedness finds new support...

read more

Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geogra...

Sep 29, 2015 by

Meeting Darwin’s Last Challenge: Matching Genes, Languages, and Geography (Part 1)

[Note: this is the first post of a three-part mini-series on this issue of genes, languages, and geography.] In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin conjectured that “the cultural transmission and differentiation of languages over...

read more

On the Basques, Their Genes, Their Language, and What They Mean for th...

Sep 18, 2015 by

On the Basques, Their Genes, Their Language, and What They Mean for the Indo-European Debate

On September 7, 2015, Michael Balter published an article in the Science Magazine discussing the recent research into the genetic heritage and language of the Basque people, particularly the study by a team of geneticists led by...

read more

Slavs and Their Languages—Reconciling Genetics and Linguistic Findings...

Sep 8, 2015 by

Slavs and Their Languages—Reconciling Genetics and Linguistic Findings

[Thanks to Martin Lewis for helpful discussions, for crafting the passages from our book cited below, and for excellent editorial comments on earlier drafts of this post.]   A recent article by a team of scholars led by Oleg...

read more

Dante Alighieri and the Italian Language

Jul 15, 2015 by

Dante Alighieri and the Italian Language

My recent trip to Italy has taken me to several places associated with the country’s leading cultural hero—Dante Alighieri. I have visited Florence, where he was born and spent his early years, and Verona, where he stayed for some...

read more

Is Geordie “the closest dialect to Anglo-Saxon”?

May 20, 2015 by

Is Geordie “the closest dialect to Anglo-Saxon”?

To continue with the Geordie theme, I was asked today whether Geordie is indeed “the closest dialect to Anglo-Saxon”—and the answers is “both yes and no”. I will use this forum to explain. Since Anglo-Saxon is the ancestral form of...

read more