Is Yiddish to Be Traced to Turkey?

Apr 29, 2016 by

Is Yiddish to Be Traced to Turkey?

[Thanks to Leni Silberman for originally drawing my attention to one of the media reports, and to Antonia Cavendish, Maria Soukhanova, Anna Dybo, Peter Shalen, Razib Khan, and Martin Lewis for helpful discussions.]   In the past few...

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Are Indo-Europeans “Untraceable”?—A Response to Jean-Paul Demoule...

Oct 25, 2015 by

Are Indo-Europeans “Untraceable”?—A Response to Jean-Paul Demoule

[Thanks to LanguagesOfTheWorld reader, Arjan, who drew my attention to the article discussed here.]   In a recent interview titled “Indo-Europeans, the untraceable people that racist fantasies are obsessed with”*, published in a...

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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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What is the Homeland Problem?

Feb 22, 2015 by

In my recent discussions with blog readers and students, it has become clear to me that before considering the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) homeland problem in more detail it might be beneficial to review what a linguistic homeland is...

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