Jhangora

Indo-European Language Family has the highest number of speakers in the world today. There are various views regarding where the Proto Indo-European speakers lived, what they looked like, which genetic markers should be associated with them, what is the relationship of Indo-European Languages with other languages and language families, when they began to disperse, and whether they spread their language(s) peacefully or violently.

I am no expert in history, linguistics, genetics, or anthropology - however, I think this topic is an interesting one.

Some links :

Indo European Languages

IE Langauges : Centum and Satem

Indo-European Origins in Southeast Europe

The neolithic Turkish origin of Indo-European languages

Did Indo-European Languages spread before farming?

Indo-European Languages

The Spread of the Indo Europeans

Paleolinguistics – early spread of Indo-European language group

The Evolution of the Indo-European Languages

"Knowing" Words in Indo-European Languages

INDO-EUROPEAN ETYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY

Bismarck

The 1st year linguistics course I did was one of the most enjoyable courses I ever did, and we studied the migration of the Indo-European language but I cant for the life of me remember definitively where it orginated - somewhere around the Caspian Sea perhaps?

Lord_of_Gauda

IMO, the origin of Indo-European languages is a mystery.
The theory that it originates around the black sea-caspian sea region is supported through 'linguistic center of gravity' idea.
The idea is this:
The origin area of a language would have the oldest type of the said language and also the most diverse dialects and related languages in the immediate vicinity due to the differentiation of a language over time.
Ie, if Mandarin originates in North-West china, it is because this region shows the oldest stratum of Mandarin language as well as the most dialectical and linguistic variety in the Sino-Tibetan language tree.

This idea is fine by itself but IMO it is highly flawed because it overlooks political history: A nomadic group like many of the Indo-European tribes or the Turkic tribes would make this invalid,since linguistic stratum and dialectial differentiation requires a settled civilization evolving linguistically for a long period.
It also overlooks political dynamics- whether a region has been united for a long period of time as an empire with an official language or not, which would again, skew the concept.
So IMO, the origin point of Indo-European languages is a bit of a mystery.

corrocamino

Sanskrit is the oldest attested Indo-European language. Uninformed people jump to the conclusion that all other attested IE languages evolved from Sanskrit; however, the consensus of linguists is that Sanskrit and the others all came from a proto-IE language, Sanskrit itself having evolved from a proto-Indo-Iranian stem of PIE. I find it very interesting that of all European languages Lithuanian is considered closest to Sanskrit (least diverged from common origin).

Since the origins of Indo-European language apparently must be traced to the prehistory of end of the last Ice Age, much is necessarily left to linguistic inferrences and associative archaeological evidence.

Frank81

I favour the Anatolian Hypothesis, it help me a lot understanding a lot of historical procces. In fact, i prefer the Indo-Anatolian hypothesis.

The most conservative branch of the indoeuropean languages is the Anatolian one, Hitite, Luwite and a lot more languages now lost. I think the born place was central-southern Anatolia, because east from these regions it seem that hurrian languages are older; certainly minoan Crete and the pelasgians from Greece spoke languages of the anatolian branch, they were very close related to other people of that peninsula. People from Anatolia spreaded to the northwest and colonized the Balkans all along the Danube and afluents, this is the second borning place, with almost all the indoeuropean branch spreading from some point around this region. Germanic, Celtic, Illyrian, Italian all they should born in a relativelly small region along the lower and central Danube. The western regions of Europe was the last to be reached. Indo-Iranians, or their ancestors, should be people influenced by the spread of the neolithic from the Balkans to the northern shore of the Black Sea, from there they colonized the eurasian steppe and then entered India.


In this sense, i support the Indo-Anatolian hypothesis, which split the older Anatolian languages to one side, and to the other side the new languages developed time after in the Balkans, the true indoeuropean languages.



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Achaeans greeks should be a group of Balkan people closely related to traco-illyrians, who migrated to Greece and who settled over the original anatolian peoples there.
Laterly other people related with they, frigians-armenians migrated into Anatolia from the Balkans.
Etruscans were an anatolian people who migrated to Italy by that time.

Iolo

Frank81 - I agree. It seems to me fairly convincing that the language spread with farming (cuts out all the conquest bits - those prepared to take up agriculture, like the Basques, just stayed and farmed, and it took so long the others just moved). One big problem, it seems to me, is how it got through some very unpropitious territory to Iran and India - in which case, probably, you need to see it moving - as in the more traditional picture - by way of pastoralists in the Ukraine.

corrocamino

Well, a book I read on the subject several years ago asserted that the progressive introgression of IE languages into Anatolia from the west was well established. The inferred path was the Pontic > Balkans > Anatolia.

Frank81

Yes that's the kurgan hypothesis (and most accepted) point of view.

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Sure it should be so, although the transition from agriculture to pastoralism tradition seem to be very complex; the original culture from western Ukraine was the Bug-Dniester culture active around 6500 BC, people in a mesolithic stage who were advancing toward the neolitic, but in some moment they were heavilly influenced by the true neolitic culture of Linear Pottery from the Danube and integrated in the highly developed Cucuteni-Tripolie culture, an agriculture-cattle breeding human group (since 5500 BC). The eastern ukrainian culture was the Surska and then the Dnieper-Donets, hunters and fishers, the last one began to adopt neolithic economy but i don't know if this was related to Tripolie culture although they had some ties.
In some moment appear the Sredny Stog culture, between the Dnieper and the Don and related with cultures around the Volga (not neolithic), who fully domesticated the horse by first time in history. I don't know how deep were the relations with the previous cultures from western Ukraine, but certainly those old cultures of the Volga had some connections with the Dnieper-Donets culture.
Anyway, from Sredny Stog developed the Yamna culture, the supposed original indoeuropean culture, and from there the Andronovo culture tha spreaded all across central Asia... and from there to India.

My hypothesis is that the indoeuropeans were the linear pottery peoples and the Cucuteni-Tripolie culture, whose influenced expanded over the eastern peoples of Ukraine...

sylla1

The same as Bis, I still favor the Kurgan hypothesis:




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Satuf

Wasn't Elamite an Indo-Euro language? If so, then it's the oldest one and originates in Persia.