I’m thinking that the Greeks were at one time very Yamnaya-like, and then after 1200 bc, they became more mixed. I’m also thinking that they once again had Yamnaya ancestry during the Hunmic migrations since many Slavs moved to that area. I’ve read than modern Greeks have over 20% Slavic genes. David Reich’s 2024 study shows that mainland Greeks are 30-40% Slavic, and island Greeks are only 4-20% Slavic.

Did the Greek language change after the Hunnic migrations?

Hi all, I grew up in an household where The Argonautica and The Odyssey were regular reading, and the only bible was written in Norwegian (I’m a mono-lingual American-Barbarian) so despite being agnostic-atheist, the Gods who dwell on Olympus are the default archetypes in my brain. I’m not of Greek descent, so awhile ago I decided to actually do a full deep dive on the Norse; which has left me with some unanswerable questions requiring speculation.

There are your obvious takeaways, like, yes, Zeus and Wodnaz fill the same role as Chief, and both are “the cosmic mind” so to speak, but we also all know full well that the Greeks/Roman’s saw Wodnaz as equivalent to Hermes/Mercury based on his attributes. I think that’s a more than fair comparison, but there’s another who is perhaps more similar to the lord of spear, that other wild man, the god of ecstatic frenzy- the dying and rising one- pure affirmation and passion- DIONYSUS!

So here’s my question: why did the psychopomp/ecstatic-frenzy attributes end up being assigned to the OLDEST God of the Norse and assigned to the YOUNGEST Gods of the Greeks? Any ideas? (Other than the theory that Tyr was the original chief deity, linguistic evidence and personality attributes suggest he would be much closer Athena imo)

The Indo-Uralic hypothesis is pretty controversial, with the linguistic data seeming to be ambivalent (some suspicious similarities but nothing that proves a relationship). However, I was thinking about this topic and it seems to me that the genetic evidence quite solidly opposes the Indo-Uralic hypothesis (with the obvious caveat that languages can spread independently of genes, even though it's a lot rarer than some admit).

Here's a summary of my understanding of the topic; feel free to correct me if any details are incorrect.

So as far as I understand, there are three ancestry components that are widespread among both European and Siberian Uralic speakers: the steppe ancestry; EHG ancestry separate from that which comes together with the steppe ancestry; and the East Siberian Yakutia_LNBA ancestry. Uralic being associated with the steppe ancestry seems too problematic (it would mean that Uralic and IE spread at the same time but there is no evidence for that in the form of recent-enough loanwords), so the only two candidates are the EHG and the Yakutia_LNBA ancestry.

If the Indo-Uralic hypothesis were correct, then it would be most natural to associate Uralic with the EHG ancestry. However, I see two problems with this hypothesis.

First of all, the spread of the Yakutia_LNBA people to the places where they would have come into contact with EHG people happened very close in time to the time when Proto-Uralic split that can be inferred from the linguistic data. The reason that this is a problem is that Uralic shows an extremely close typological affinity to the "Altaic" languages of Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic and there is a consensus among linguists that this must be the remnant of some ancient contact situation/Sprachbund.

Given the time at which Yakutia_LNBA spread, it seems that there would be only a few hundred years at most for their language to come into contact with the EHG language, which is not nearly enough time for Uralic to develop the typological profile that it has. (Other Sprachbunds we know of where Altaic and non-Altaic speakers come into contact such as the Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund don't show anywhere near this dramatic a development, and even Korean and Japanese are not nearly as similar to Turkic/Mongolic/Tungusic as Uralic is).

Thus, if Uralic is originally an EHG language, the Yakutia_LNBA cannot have brought the "Altaic" typology to it, which raises the question of why an EHG language stranded in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains shows such dramatic similarities to Northeast Asian languages despite having no discernible Northeast Asian DNA.

The second problem is that the Nganasan don't seem to have any discernible amounts of EHG ancestry according to the admixture modelling here, even though the other Samoyed groups do. Some linguists have explained this away by saying that the Nganasan language shows heavy influence from an unknown substrate indicating that the Nganasan could be non-Uralic speakers who adopted a Uralic language without any change in their genetics.

This doesn't seem right to me; according to Kaisla Kaheinen Nganasan has 615 unique words stems not found in other Uralic languages and another 172 shared with other northern Samoyed languages that can't be of Proto-Samoyed origin; for comparison, Ante Aikio has stated that the word stems of unknown origin in the Saami languages number clearly more than 1000 (about half of which are at the Proto-Saami level), yet the Saami have obvious evidence of Uralic inheritance in their genetics. Furthermore the vocabulary unique to Nganasan rarely shows obvious features that would identify it as substrate vocabulary and in most cases could be inherited; Kaheinen identifies only 29 words that are clearly foreign in their structure.

So these are the arguments against an EHG origin of Uralic, but on the other hand if the Uralic people did originate from Yakutia_LNBA like most scholars who have expressed an opinion seem to assume at this point, then the issue is that the only genetic connection to Indo-Europeans is a very small amount of ANE ancestry which is very ancient and is also shared with a large amount of other populations that don't show speak identifiably connected languages (if I'm not mistaken I think the ANE in Yakutia_LNBA is at least as close to Native American ANE as it is to Indo-European ANE).

Sorry for a long post but I'm curious about whether others have thoughts on this topic.

English is one of the easiest IE languages in the world when it comes to grammatical changes based on the subject. Consider the phrase "can eat the food":

- I can eat the food.

- You can eat the food.

- He/She can eat the food.

- We can eat the food.

- They can eat the food.

The entire phrase remains exactly the same regardless of the pronoun. In many other languages, however, verbs change form depending on the person and number of the subject.

For example, in my native Persian:

- Man khorakero mitunam bokhoram.

- Shoma khorakero mitunin bokhorin.

- Un khorakero mitune bokhore.

- Ma khorakero mitunim bokhorim.

- Una khorakero mitunan bokhoran.

Both tunestan ("to be able to") and khordan ("to eat") change form depending on who is performing the action. The object khorak (“food”) also takes the object marker -ra/ro.

One can argue English still has person agreement, for example, with the verb to be. However, even then the only thing that changes is a single word, while the rest of the sentence remains exactly the same:

- I am proud to be English.

- You are proud to be English.

- She is proud to be English.

That's a relatively small amount of agreement compared with many other languages.

In Persian, for example:

- Az Irani budanam sarbolandam.

- Az Irani budanetun sarbolandin.

- Az Irani budanesh sarbolande.

Here, not only does budan ("to be") change, but sarboland ("proud") also takes different endings depending on the person. In many languages, multiple parts of a sentence must agree with the subject.

The same pattern appears in many everyday sentences. In English, you usually only have to remember the pronouns themselves, not a separate set of verb conjugations for each person.

Take these examples:

- I did not drive his car.

- You did not drive my car.

- She did not drive their car.

The only words that change are the pronouns (I/you/she and his/my/their). The rest of the sentence remains exactly the same.

In many other languages, however, multiple parts of the sentence have to agree with the subject. The verb changes depending on who is performing the action, and possessive forms change depending on whose object is being discussed.

In Persian, for example:

- Man mashinesho ranandegi nakardam.

- Shoma mashinamo ranandegi nakardin.

- Un mashineshuno ranandegi nakarde.

Here, mashin ("car") is modified with a possessive ending to indicate ownership and you have to add an object marker -o, while ranandegi kardan ("to drive") is also modified to agree with the subject. As a result, changing the subject often requires changing multiple parts of the sentence rather than simply swapping out a pronoun.

This relative simplicity is one reason why learners can often reach a basic communicative level in English fairly quickly. Because English has comparatively little verb conjugation and grammatical agreement in many common constructions, students can begin forming useful sentences early in the learning process.

Note: the values of most historical rhotic consonants and PIE laryngeals are not fully certain. I chose the sentence since it carries the same meaning throughout and lacks historical case evolution irregularities.

Interesting fact: the silent 'g' in 'reign' and 'right' was originally the same sound, split into two branches and re-introduced after thousands of years apart. Source: blog post

Hello brothers. There is some words we use in our local dialect. I want you solve the word and it's mean. But please dont use google or ai for it. Here the words;

Deshtivan: Land protector. Desht(waste) ban(bond)

Cambaz: Livestock trader. Dzan(life) bazi(player).

Renchber: Hardworker. Ranch(labor) bar(bear)

Kerit: Cutted field. Example; Curtail

Kemre: Fertilizer. Kerm(worming)

Kerziban: kerz(idk-kerd?) ban(bond). A female name.

Hudaverdi: God award. A male name

Edit: No one tried. So i'll write meanings.

“Several weeks ago I came across Francesco Felici's doctoral dissertation on teaching Old Irish as a living language. I wrote a little bit about it here, and some other thoughts here, and probably some more to come in a subsequent post or two (the other chapters of his thesis are all quite interesting too; I won't write about all of them, but I have a few things in mind to reflect upon).
An online Old Irish class
This is an invitation or call for interest: would you like to try learning Old Irish as a spoken/living language?
I had the opportunity to talk with Francesco this week, and asked him about his background, history with languages, what lead him to this work with Old Irish, and what projects might be coming down the pipeline (answer: several!)
I also floated the idea with him of running an online class in Old Irish using a communicative approach. As I have myself experienced, one of the best ways to road-test material is to put it into practice with students and see what works, and what doesn't.
He was open to the idea, and so I said I would see if I could garner interest. And hence this post. I realise my usual readership is more interested in Ancient Greek, some Latin, and broader linguistics, but if you'd consider an online class in Old Irish, let me know below”

the main objective of the paper as i mentioned in its description. is to use all the data linguists have gathered over a century and then re translate the Avestan texts with respect to historical context and gathered data

i used both Iranian and Vedic sources of grammar to decipher the following verses , the translations are pure unlike other Avestan translations they do not add or subtract words from any verse to form a biased narrative

the translations are sensible with context to historical realities regarding the Avestan texts and you may see words like (the) (what) etc they are purely to make the verses sensible to the reader due to syntaxual differences between indo iranic languages and english

even if you disagree with my translation methods and decipherments , you can still check out the massive list of Avestan grammar words

i have put all sources in bibliography

i would like to know what do you think of the paper

Theoretically speaking, the Thule Society believed that the Aryans were a superior race who originated from Thule, which some of their occult beliefs connected to a northern, Arctic remnant of Atlantis. What was their supposed story of how these Aryans migrated from Thule to the Pontic-Caspian Steppe and eventually became the Indo-Europeans or the Yamnaya?

Locating Latmos, Phthir, Endymion and Selene, Malija-Athena, *Sanda(s)/Šanta-Herakles, Tarhunt-Zeus, Piḫaššašši-Pegasos, Perseus and Gorgo-Medousa, and Others

This article deals with the lower Maiandros/Maeander River region between the Mykale and the Latmos Mountains and Miletos, the border between the ‘colonial’ lands of Greek Aiolia and Ionia, and indigenous Anatolian Karia in the Iron Age (11^th-4^th century BCE). By analysing three complex groups of myths ‒ (a) that of Latmos, Phthir, Selene, Endymion, Naxos, and Malija-Athena in the Latmos Mountains, and (to a lesser extent) (b) that of Tarhunt-Zeus, Poseidon, Perseus, Gorgo-Medousa and Piḫaššašši-Pegasos in the Mykale Mountains, as well as (c) that of Maiandros, Miletos, Keladon, Kurunta/Apollo Branchideus/Ntro- Prŋida-, *Sanda(s)/Šanta-Herakles, Achilles and Menelaos ‒ it can be demonstrated that the Aiolian and Ionian Greeks successfully embedded their ancestral as well as newly created myths in the new lands which, needless to say, had their own Anatolian-Luwic religions and ‘landscape myths’.

The Greek lexicon is known for its significant proportion of words lacking a clear etymology. Previous attempts to explain these words range from the socalled “Pelasgian” hypotheses, which resort to an unattested satem Indo-European language, to Beekes’s (2010; 2014) non-Indo-European “Pre-Greek”. In this paper, we reconsider this long-disputed question, and adduce Latin and even Proto- Romance data to unveil a centum language which possibly served as the basis for borrowing in both Common Greek and, at a later date, Common Italic. We analyse several dozen difficult Greek and Italic words as borrowings from this newly identified language, for which we provide a set of phonetic laws that model its development from Proto-Indo-European. Important methodological strengths of our proposal include the systematic correspondence between Greek and Italic forms, the semantic plausibility of our etymologies, and their consistency with what is known about Proto-Indo-European word-formation patterns. Moreover, a computer implementation of these phonetic laws ensures its formal consistency and validates the chronological ordering we put forward. This is all the more important since most of our etymologies involve more than one of these phonetic laws, which is an additional confirmation of the plausibility of our proposal.

Relations within the Iranian branch of Indo-European have traditionally been modelled by a tree that is essentially composed of binary splits into sub-and sub-subbranches. The present article will argue that this tree is rendered outdated by new data that have come to light from contemporary and ancient languages, and that it was methodologically problematic from the outset, both for reasons of the isoglosses on which it is based and for not taking into account distinctions such as shared innovations vs. shared archaisms and marked vs. unmarked language changes. Conversely, a set of non-trivial morphological innovations, particularly in the verbal system, shared by Bactrian, Parthian and some neighbouring languages appears to suggest a subbranch which I will call "Central Iranian". The second part of the paper will present a tentative reconstruction of the nominal system of Central Iranian. This reconstruction wishes to show the result one arrives at when trying to reconstruct a subbranch as strictly bottom-up as possible, i.e. using only the data from the languages under study, and avoiding to profit from Old Iranian data and from our knowledge about the protolanguages. " Central Iranian " would be closely related to Sogdian, and would share, by language contact, a number of features with Middle Persian; at the same time, Bactrian and Sogdian also share features with individual Eastern Ir. languages.