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...

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Ancient DNA and the Indo-European Question, Yet Again

Jun 17, 2015 by

Ancient DNA and the Indo-European Question, Yet Again

In a recent blog post on Diversity Linguistics blog entitled “Ancient DNA and the Indo-European Question”, Paul Heggarty of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (Leipzig) reviews two genetics articles, just...

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Paleolithic Continuity Theory: Assumptions and Problems

Apr 2, 2015 by

Paleolithic Continuity Theory: Assumptions and Problems

As I have discussed in my earlier posts, the Steppe (Kurgan) and Anatolian hypotheses of Indo-European homeland remain the strongest contenders (the Balkano-Carpathian theory is another stronger candidate, to which I am hoping to...

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Disentangling “The Tangled Roots of English”

Feb 28, 2015 by

Disentangling “The Tangled Roots of English”

[I am deeply grateful to Martin W. Lewis for the inspiring discussions of, and extensive collaboration on, the issues examined here.] Several articles, written by historical linguists, geneticists and archeologists, have been...

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Is “massive migration from the steppe … a source for Indo-European lan...

Feb 18, 2015 by

Is “massive migration from the steppe … a source for Indo-European languages in Europe”?

[I am deeply grateful to Martin W. Lewis for the inspiring discussions of, and extensive collaboration on, the issues examined here, as well as for editing the draft of this post.] The Biorxiv online has recently published an article...

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What is Old Church Slavonic?

Jan 3, 2015 by

What is Old Church Slavonic?

[Note to readers: This post is the first in a mini-series dedicated to Old Church Slavonic and written in conjunction with the class I am teaching this quarter.] Old Church Slavonic (OCS) is the language of the oldest Slavic...

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