Indo-European Research Articles

SINGULUS & PLURES IN UKRAINIAN, TURKISH, GERMAN, CHINESE LANGUAGES: LEXICO-GRAMMATICAL FEATURES CATEGORIES OF NUMBERS

The work is devoted to the category of number in the Ukrainian language in a comparative-linguistic aspect with other Indo-European, Turkic and Sino-Tibetan languages. The purpose of the study is the comparative and analytical aspect of the number category in the Ukrainian, Turkish, German, and Chinese languages. The tasks of the work were to determine the comparative aspect of the number category in the German language compared to the Ukrainian language, to reveal the comparative aspect of the number category in the Turkish language compared to the Ukrainian language, to identify the definition of the comparative aspect of the number category in the Chinese language compared to the Ukrainian language. The object of the research is the number category in the Ukrainian, Turkish, German, and Chinese languages. The subject of the study is examples of singular and plural (singulus and plures) in Ukrainian, Turkish, German, and Chinese languages. The work uses comparative, historical, comparative and structural research methods. Scientific novelty is determined by the fact of the analysis of the category of the number of languages of different linguistic and historical groups. The theoretical and practical value of the obtained results lies in the application of the research material in working with foreign students for better and effective teaching of their Ukrainian language as a foreign language. The conclusions state that the number category is an interesting lexical-grammatical feature of language formation worthy of further research. When teaching students of foreign origin, it is advisable to take into account the complex grammar of their native language. The study of the category of number from the perspective of comparative linguistics provides a wide space for new research. Such studies have not only theoretical, but also practical/professional benefits for teachers of Ukrainian as a foreign language.

TERRITORIAL AND DEMOGRAPHIC TRADITIONS OF THE CHERNIHIV-SIVERSKYI REGION

Abstract. The article presents a generalized analysis of the published national historical and theoretical historiography of the process of establishing the territorial and demographic traditions of the Chernihiv-Siverskyi population as part of Kyivan Rus. The territory of their settlement, demographic composition, evolution of the life and lifestyle of the northerners, which have become common traditions of the Indo-European peoples, are determined. The research methodology is based on the heuristic method of systematization of classical and modern scientific thought, historical, geographical, artistic historiography and archaeological sources, which formed the cultural direction of systematization of the reconstruction of the holistic process of the problem. The main historiography to the topic was compiled by the editions of the classics of the historical school, which laid down the fundamental knowledge of social history and culture: from ancient times to medieval Ukraine-Rus, of which the Chernihiv-Siverskyi region was a component. An attempt is made to generalize the theory and historical practice of the transformation of the socio-cultural traditions of the Ukrainian population of the South-Eastern region on the basis of the created all-European and nationally original traditions of Ukraine-Rus. They laid common foundations for the life and livelihood of local tribes, the development of territories, agriculture, public organization, customary law, financial and trade relations, diplomacy, spiritual, cultural and artistic life. Because of the evolution of the development of the components of the Ukrainian nation, a historical transformation and socialization of the transmission of the main spiritual values from paganism to сhristianity took place. On these foundations, the national traditions of consolidating land allotment principalities – Kyiv, Chernihiv, Siver, etc. – have formed and entrenched; hereditary dynasties of the Riurykovych family, in particular the Chernihiv Olhovych, Davydovych; the corresponding composition of the population, characterized by the local climate, flora, fauna, which influenced the character and spirit of the people, proper names - ethnonyms, toponyms, hydronyms.

Armenian (Yerevan Eastern Armenian and Beirut Western Armenian)

Armenian (or , /hɑjeˈɾen/, ISO 639-1 hy) comprises an independent branch of the Indo-European language family.1 Its earliest attested ancestor is Classical Armenian in the fifth century CE (see Godel 1975; Thomson 1989; DeLisi 2015; Macak 2016). Modern Armenian is classified into two dialect families: Eastern Armenian (ISO 639-3 hye) and Western Armenian (ISO 639-3 hyw). Eastern Armenian is spoken in modern-day Armenia, and large speaker communities also exist in Georgia, Russia and Iran (shown in Figure 1). Western Armenian was historically spoken in the Ottoman Empire, but now includes varieties spoken throughout the Armenian diaspora in the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas (Donabédian 2018). There are substantial Western Armenian speaker communities in Turkey (Istanbul), Lebanon (Beirut), Syria (Aleppo, Damascus), California (Fresno, Los Angeles County), France (Marseilles), Australia (Sydney) and Argentina (Buenos Aires). There are also recent diaspora communities of Eastern Armenian speakers in California (Karapetian 2014), as well as communities of Western Armenian speakers in Armenia who escaped the Armenian genocide during World War I, who repatriated after World War II, or who fled the ongoing Syrian civil war. UNESCO lists Western Armenian as an endangered language in Turkey, and there are significant language promotion efforts in many diaspora communities that are intended to combat declining use by speaker generations born in the Americas and Europe (Al-Bataineh 2015; Chahinian & Bakalian 2016).

Locus of nonword repetition impairments in Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorder

Current theories of nonword repetition (NWR) impairments for children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are developed predominantly using data from Indo-European languages. Seldom have relevant theories been attested to the morph-syllabic language Mandarin Chinese. The present research aimed to explore the locus of NWR impairments for Mandarin children with DLD. 80 Mandarin-speaking children with typical development (TD) and 80 children with DLD were compared on nonword repetition accuracy and error types. It was a three-factor design with language groups (children with DLD vs. TD children) as the between-subjects factor, and components (onset, rhyme, and tone) and syllable numbers (one to four syllables) as the within-subjects factors. The analysis showed that both groups had less accuracy on the two phonological segments (onset and rhyme) relative to tone and showed more errors in multi-syllable nonwords. Children with DLD exhibited more noticeable errors in onsets and rhymes, although they did not display similar issues with tones compared to TD children. Repeated measures ANOVAs showed that children with DLD had pronounced errors in onsets, especially in repeating multi-syllable nonwords. Error type analysis revealed that children with DLD displayed more multiple than single errors in nonword repetition. The results support the “segment-to-frame association” theory, suggesting that Mandarin children with DLD are constrained in the concurrent mapping process between onsets, rhymes, and tones.

Cultural unit white – prototype terms

Abstract The article focuses on the Hebrew prototypes terms (PTs) of white in the Old Testament – light, milk, and snow. The aim is to explore the worldview of Hebrew to reveal the original messages of the Bible. The translation is an essential tool that shows which translation elements (the word and its root derivatives) are symmetrical, asymmetric, and dissymmetric to Hebrew due to the different worldviews of languages. The method is interdisciplinary and includes several theories and approaches. Original is Almalech’s methodology for tracking all verbal options to signify color: Basic color term (BCT), prototype term (PT), rival terms to prototype (RT), and terms for the basic feature of the prototype (TBFP). Semiotic osmosis is also an original element of Almalech’s methodology and has a place in the study of colors in the Bible. The phenomenon is observed when Hebrew PT is translated with the BCT, Hebrew TBFP is translated with BCT in the Indo-European language, e.g., darkness is translated with black, fresh is translated with green. In the case of light, semiotic osmosis is when a quality of light is perceived as synonymous with light, e.g., brilliance is synonymous with light in Hebrew, English, Bulgarian, and other languages. The importance of light in religious systems, regional culture, and natural features are taken into account. Almalech’s semiotic approach to color, i.e., treating them as a sign communication system, involves the insisting that a distinction must be made between verbal and visual color because of their different potential to have primary and secondary (figurative and cultural) meanings. The substance of the language sign (sound is a mechanical wave) is physically different from the visual sign (electromagnetic wave). Almalech considered prototypes to be the cognitive interface between verbal and visual colors. Therefore, semiotically understood, color is a cultural unit that contains verbal and visual colors, complemented by social, religious, and folkloric use of primary and secondary color meanings.

The "graphic design" for 旅 'troops' and 車 'chariot' in oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that there were in the minds of the creators of Chinese characters what we refer to as "graphic designs" (abbreviated as "GD"—for the other acronyms used hereinafter, see "Symbols and Abbreviations of the Frequently Used Terms and the Authors' Names" at the end of the paper). The GD is generally inseparable from the underlying lexeme, and this paper is a case study of the two, and other related, words, in connection specifically with their graphic representations. The GD for the OBI graphs [inline-graphic 01], [inline-graphic 02], and [inline-graphic 03], which appear to be pictographs, is as simple as the UM of the word chē 車 'chariot', namely, "chariot/wheel". Its presumed sound—*k-hla~*ka-hla—and the meaning may not have participated in any WF in Shāng Chinese because it was a loan word from an IE language and was not yet integrated in the contemporary lexicological system. A basis for this is that another reading jū , assumed as *ka~*kəlja, had not yet developed. The simplicity of the GD and UM of 車, however, is in contrast with the complexity of its origins and its uses: (1) what is the phonetic in lǚ [inline-graphic 204], [inline-graphic 205] and in BI graphs like [inline-graphic 04], [inline-graphic 05], [inline-graphic 06]? If all these write the word 旅, a question arises: which (pre-)OC form, chē /*k-hla~*ka-hla or jū /*ka~*kəlja, was original? We have suggested that the latter arose after the original, chē /*k-hla~*ka-hla, was sufficiently circulated and came into being as a result of the mono-syllabification of *ka-hla 車; (2) since many IE languages have the initial k- for 車 'wheel/chariot', reconstructing the pre-initial *k- for this Chinese loan word makes sense; (3) we have narrowed down the introduction of the chariot and its word into China to ca. 1200 BC, during the reign of King Wǔ Dīng 武丁 (ca. 1230–1171 BC); (4) we have also tried to answer the question: can we account for the frequent use in the late Shāng-early Zhōu BI of the 車 element, and its disappearance after early Western Zhōu? This question has taken us to examine the history of warfare, the ancient industry of chariot and wheel making, and the utilitarian and symbolic value of the chariot in ancient China. 摘要: 本文提出造字之初造字者已有所謂"造字設計"或者"古文字構形設計"(即 "graphic design"，以下簡稱為"GD"；文中所用英文縮寫皆見文末 "Symbols and Abbreviations of the Frequently Used Terms and the Authors' Names"附表)，而這種"GD"基本上是與原本的詞位不可分割的。本文將以(早期)上古漢語中"旅"與"車"兩詞為例探討兩者及與其相關諸詞的古文字構形問題。

Analyzing Indo-European Language Similarities Using Document Vectors

The evaluation of similarities between natural languages often relies on prior knowledge of the languages being studied. We describe three methods for building phylogenetic trees and clustering languages without the use of language-specific information. The input to our methods is a set of document vectors trained on a corpus of parallel translations of the Bible into 22 Indo-European languages, representing 4 language families: Indo-Iranian, Slavic, Germanic, and Romance. This text corpus consists of a set of 532,092 Bible verses, with 24,186 identical verses translated into each language. The methods are (A) hierarchical clustering using distance between language vector centroids, (B) hierarchical clustering using a network-derived distance measure, and (C) Deep Embedded Clustering (DEC) of language vectors. We evaluate our methods using a ground-truth tree and language families derived from said tree. All three achieve clustering F-scores above 0.9 on the Indo-Iranian and Slavic families; most confusion is between the Germanic and Romance families. The mean F-scores across all families are 0.864 (centroid clustering), 0.953 (network partitioning), and 0.763 (DEC). This shows that document vectors can be used to capture and compare linguistic features of multilingual texts, and thus could help extend language similarity and other translation studies research.

The Development of the Verb System in the Ontological Opposition of Space and time in the Indo-European Language Family.

The research investigates the system of the Indo-European verb through the lens of Gustave Guillaume's psycho-systematics theory. By employing "mental vision" and phenomenology, the linguistic concept was explored at multiple levels: the surface structure of language in speech and the deeper level within the Indo-European language system. The analysis of the tense system of the Indo-European verb starts with the ontologisation of a person in both the world and language. This perspective highlights the taxonomic relevance of philosophical factors that shape the development of the "image of time" from a prehistoric viewpoint within the Indo-European language family. The purpose of this research is to delve into the Indo-European verb system using Gustave Guillaume's psycho-systematics theory as the theoretical framework. To achieve this, the authors draw on examples from French, English, Ukrainian, and Russian languages. The study aims to examine the process of the Indo-European verb's development within the ontological opposition of space and time and the ontological status of the grammatical tense and mood categories in the Indo-European verb system. It was discovered that grammatical forms of verbs in the Indo-European language family provide insights into their formal essence. These forms represent the "positions" they occupy within the ontological dialectical relationship of space, time, language, and thinking. The research sheds light on the Indo-European verb system by applying Guillaume's psycho-systematics theory. By clarifying the relationship between space, time, language, and thinking, a deeper understanding of linguistic structures and how they reflect human cognition and conceptualization of action can be gained.

Interactions between enzyme preparations and trace element sources on growth performance and intestinal health of broiler chicks

This experiment was conducted to explore the interactions between enzyme preparations and trace element sources on growth performance and intestinal health of broilers chicks. A total of 480 one-day-old healthy male yellow-feather broilers with similar weight were randomly arranged in a 2×2 factorial design with 2 kinds of compound trace element sources (inorganic [I] and organic [O] trace element supplemented with 80, 8, 60, 40, 0.15 mg/kg of Fe, Cu, Mn, Zn, and Se, respectively) and 2 levels of enzyme preparations (0 and 200 mg/kg). The 4 groups named I, O, IE, and OE with 6 replicates and 20 birds per replicate. The trail lasted for 28 days. Results showed that the average weight (ABW), average daily gain (ADG) of broilers in IE and OE groups significantly increased while the F/G significantly decreased as compared with group I and O (P < 0.05). Enzyme preparation supplementation, regardless of the trace element sources, significantly increased the duodenal and jejunal endogenous enzyme (e.g., Try and AACT) activity, and improved the morphology and jejunal barrier function evidenced by the increased villus height and MUC-2 mRNA expression (P < 0.05). Sequencing data manifested that enzyme preparations favorably modulated the cecal microflora by increasing bacterial diversity and abundance of short-chain fatty acid (SCFA)-producing bacteria (e.g., Anaerostipes, Anaerofusis, and Pygmaioactor), while decreasing the abundance of harmful bacteria (e.g., Desulfovibrio). Factorial analysis indicated that there were no interactions between enzyme preparation and trace element sources on growth performance and intestinal health of broiler chicks. In conclusion, dietary supplementation with enzyme preparations, regardless of the trace element sources, could enhance endogenous enzyme activity, improve intestinal morphology and barrier functions, and favorably modulate the cecal microflora, thereby improving the intestinal health and growth performance of broiler chicks.

Origins of East Caucasus Gene Pool: Contributions of Autochthonous Bronze Age Populations and Migrations from West Asia Estimated from Y-Chromosome Data.

The gene pool of the East Caucasus, encompassing modern-day Azerbaijan and Dagestan populations, was studied alongside adjacent populations using 83 Y-chromosome SNP markers. The analysis of genetic distances among 18 populations (N = 2216) representing Nakh-Dagestani, Altaic, and Indo-European language families revealed the presence of three components (Steppe, Iranian, and Dagestani) that emerged in different historical periods. The Steppe component occurs only in Karanogais, indicating a recent medieval migration of Turkic-speaking nomads from the Eurasian steppe. The Iranian component is observed in Azerbaijanis, Dagestani Tabasarans, and all Iranian-speaking peoples of the Caucasus. The Dagestani component predominates in Dagestani-speaking populations, except for Tabasarans, and in Turkic-speaking Kumyks. Each component is associated with distinct Y-chromosome haplogroup complexes: the Steppe includes C-M217, N-LLY22g, R1b-M73, and R1a-M198; the Iranian includes J2-M172(×M67, M12) and R1b-M269; the Dagestani includes J1-Y3495 lineages. We propose J1-Y3495 haplogroup's most common lineage originated in an autochthonous ancestral population in central Dagestan and splits up ~6 kya into J1-ZS3114 (Dargins, Laks, Lezgi-speaking populations) and J1-CTS1460 (Avar-Andi-Tsez linguistic group). Based on the archeological finds and DNA data, the analysis of J1-Y3495 phylogeography suggests the growth of the population in the territory of modern-day Dagestan that started in the Bronze Age, its further dispersal, and the microevolution of the diverged population.

Einige Beobachtungen zur Übersetzungstechnik der altuigurischen Maitrisimit

Based on the materials scholars have examined so far, it can be stated that the Old Uyghur Maitrisimit nom bitig is apparently a rather faithful translation of the Tocharian A Maitreyasamitināṭaka. However, there are some significant discrepancies between the two versions. Both versions of this highly important text dedicated to the visionary biography of the future Buddha Maitreya provide an ideal starting point for comparative Tocharian-Old Uyghur studies. The two languages involved belong to two different language families and thus have divergent typological properties. Although shorter translations from Middle Iranian languages into Old Uyghur are known, the Old Uyghur Maitrisimit nom bitig is without any doubt the most important translation from an Indo-European language into a Turkic one in the period before the turn of the first millennium CE. The article discusses some peculiarities of this Old Uyghur translation.

Persian and Arabicized Expressions Al-I'itibar: An Analytical Studya

This paper aims at showing and studying Persian and Arabicized vocabulary items in Osama bin Munqith's Book Al-I'itibar which is one of this most important works. The paper is divided into two basic parts, the first is devoted to the scholars and linguists' opinions about the borrowed and Arabized utterances and expressions. It also tries to shed light on translation both linguistically and idiomatically depending on the traditional and modern linguists' opinions concerning this linguistic phenomenon and the borrowed vocabulary items in Arabic language, the methods used in translation and the benefits of translation and Arabization. The second part is devoted to the borrowed expressions, their origins meanings and they are classified into groups according to meaning depending on dictionaries and reliable source-books in both languages (Persian and Arabic).The paper concludes that Arabic language has borrowed from other languages such as Persian, Syriac and Indo-European languages. However, Persian it borrowed mostly from Persian due to many reasons such as neighbourhood, religion, commerce, geography and other factors. Corresponding Author: Mahdi

Reconstructing the population history of the Sinhalese, the major ethnic group in Śrī Laṅkā

The Sinhalese are the major ethnic group in Śrī Laṅkā, inhabiting nearly the whole length and breadth of the island. They speak an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian branch, which is held to originate in northwestern India, going back to at least the fifth century BC. Previous genetic studies on low-resolution markers failed to infer the genomic history of the Sinhalese population. Therefore, we have performed a high-resolution fine-grained genetic study of the Sinhalese population and, in the broader context, we attempted to reconstruct the genetic history of Śrī Laṅkā. Our allele-frequency-based analysis showed a tight cluster of Sinhalese and Tamil populations, suggesting strong gene flow beyond the boundary of ethnicity and language. Interestingly, the haplotype-based analysis preserved a trace of the North Indian affiliation to the Sinhalese population. Overall, in the South Asian context, Śrī Laṅkān ethnic groups are genetically more homogeneous than others.

예니세이어파 명사의 격체계 특성

The subject of this study is the case category system of Ket language, the only existing language of the Yeniseian languages. After examining the usage of each case and case marker, we analyzed the singular/plural category, male/non-male category, animate/inanimate binary confrontation structure, which are important standards for the classification of cases of Ket language.&#x0D; Ket nouns are first classified into singular and plural, and if singular, they are classified into male/non-male categories, and if plural, they are classified into animate/inanimate categories. The three gender categories for nouns, which are male, female, and neutral, cannot be seen as a morphological difference in nominatives. Gender categories only play a dominant role in genetive case and dative, ablative, benefactive and adessive cases, which are made in basis of genetive case.&#x0D; It was found that it is reasonable to view the dative, ablative, benefactive, and adessive, which have binary structure according to male/non-male and animate/inanimate, as a declinable case. Locative, instrumental, abessive and prosecutive have no distinction between male/non-male, animate/inanimate, and they do not change according to the number and gender, so the case markers for these nouns are similar to case suffixes or propositions. As for the vocative, it has a male/female binary structure in singular, but they don’t have any confrontation structure in plural, which is very different from other standards.&#x0D; As such, the Ket language system does not have a clear system that appears in Indo-European languages due to the correlation between the confrontational structure of the class, the hierarchy of the class, and the postposition. So the Yeniseian language case system should be viewed as a binary structure, which has a declinable group(nominative, genetive, dative, ablative, benefactive, adessive, vocative) and indeclinable group(locative, instumental, prosecutive, abessive).

Transcriptomic Profiling of Subcutaneous Backfat in Castrated and Intact Alentejano Pigs Finished Outdoors with Commercial and Fiber-Rich Diets.

In this work, we studied the backfat transcriptome of surgically castrated (C), intact (I) and intact fed an experimental diet (IE) outdoor-reared male Alentejano (AL) pigs. The experimental diet was a high-fiber diet with locally produced legumes and by-products associated with a boar taint reduction effect. At slaughter (~160 kg), backfat samples were collected for total RNA sequencing. Intact pigs presented leaner carcasses, more total collagen, and more unsaturated intramuscular fat content than C animals. A total of 2726 differentially expressed genes (DEGs, |log2 FC|> 0.58, q < 0.05) were identified between C and I with overexpressed genes related to muscular activity (MYH1, ACTA1) or collagen metabolism (COL1A1, COL1A2) in I pigs. Between C and IE, 1639 DEGs of genes involved in lipidic metabolism (LEP, ME1, FABP4, ELOVL6) were overexpressed in C. Finally, only 28 DEGs were determined between I and IE. Clustering results indicated a drastic influence of the testis in the transcriptome of subcutaneous fat of AL pigs, while the diet had a marginal effect. Diet can reduce stress by increasing satiety in animals, and could have induced an increase of skatole degradation due to the higher expression of the CYP2A19 gene in the IE group.

To predict L2 writing quality using lexical richness indices: An investigation of learners of Chinese as a Foreign Language

The majority of current lexical richness indices are based on Indo-European languages, especially English, with a lack of research that investigates their applicability to diverse language types. This study examines the applicability of 44 lexical richness indices, based on Indo-European languages, to Chinese, with a specific emphasis on investigating their predictive power for the writing quality of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) learners. The present study reveals that five indices (Number of Different Words, Uber Index, Corrected Verb Variation1, Lexical Frequency Profile, and Verb Sophistication1) assessing English as a second language (L2) can also effectively predict the writing quality of CFL learners, and six indices (Verb Variation, Verb Variation1, Function Words Ratio_ auxiliary, Function Words Ratio_ pronoun, Lexical Density1, and Lexical Density2) may be more suitable for measuring Chinese, but not English. Moreover, transformed indices demonstrate a better capacity to measure L2 Chinese compared to traditional indices. In conducting a preliminary exploration of effective indices for measuring the lexical richness of Chinese interlanguage, this study emphasizes their potential impact on L2 teaching and suggests directions for future research.

A Comparison of Chinese and French Language Structures

The comparative study of two languages can have many angles, such as phonetic comparison, lexical comparison, semantic comparison, grammatical comparison and so on. Chinese and French are commonly used languages in the United Nations. Among them, French belongs to the Latin language family and is an independent language of the Romance language family of the European Indo-European language family; Chinese belongs to the Sino-Tibetan language family and is one of the oldest scripts in the world with a history of more than 6,000 years. Among them, French belongs to phonograms, and Chinese belongs to ideograms, which means that there are big differences in the syntactic structure of the two languages. The author studied French systematically at the undergraduate level. When I first came into contact with the French language, the most intuitive feeling was the difference between pronunciation and vocabulary. This paper discusses the structural and phonetic differences between Chinese and French from five aspects: phonetics, inverse linearity and forward linearity, meaning and form, the concept of aspect, and subject and object.

Semantic and sentiment trajectories of literary masterpieces

The paper deals with semantic and sentiment trajectories of literary masterpieces (we used corpora of 12 languages of various language families), composed of individual embeddings or n-grams. We ascertain that, for all languages, semantic and sentiment trajectories are markedly chaotic: positive largest Lyapunov exponents; ‘entropy-complexity’ pairs belonging to the ‘chaotic’ area of the respective plane; the distinctive ‘chaotic’ drop of the number of false nearest neighbours at a particular value of an embedding dimension. The Russian language turns out to be more ‘chaotic’ than, for example, the English one; we attribute this fact to the free order of words. The Esperanto language, for various ‘approaches’ to different Indo-European languages. The results do not corroborate its claim to be equidistant from all languages. However, it seems to be equidistant from all Indo-European languages. These characteristics are utilised in order to develop a method to compare styles of an original masterpiece and its translations (to automatically assess translation quality). It appears that machine translations are still worse than human ones, however, for example, the Facebook translation is comparable with them.

Cortical Location of Language Function May Differ between Languages While White Matter Pathways Are Similar in Brain Lesion Patients.

The neural representation of language can be identified cortically using navigated repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation and subcortically using the fiber tracking of diffusion tensor imaging. We investigated how cortical locations of language and language-eloquent white matter pathways differ in 40 brain lesion patients speaking various languages. Error rates related to stimulations at single sites in the frontal and parietal lobe differed significantly between Balto-Slavic and Indo-European languages. Error rates related to stimulations at single sites in the temporal lobe differed significantly between bilingual individuals. No differences were found in the white matter language pathway volumes between Balto-Slavic and Indo-European languages nor between bilingual patients. These original and exploratory data indicate that the underlying subcortical structure might be similar across languages, with initially observed differences in the cortical location of language depending on the semantic processing, but these could not be confirmed using detailed statistical analyses pointing at a similar cortical and subcortical network.

Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages.

The origins of the Indo-European language family are hotly disputed.Bayesian phylogenetic analyses of corevocabulary haveproducedconflicting results,with some supporting a farmingexpansion out of Anatolia ~9000years before present (yr B.P.),while others support a spread withhorse-based pastoralism out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppe ~6000yr B.P.Here we present an extensive database of Indo-European core vocabulary that eliminates past inconsistencies in cognate coding. Ancestry-enabled phylogenetic analysis of this dataset indicates that few ancient languages are direct ancestors of modern clades and produces a root age of ~8120 yr B.P. for the family. Although this date is not consistent with the Steppe hypothesis, it does not rule out an initial homeland south of the Caucasus, with a subsequent branch northward onto the steppe and then across Europe. We reconcile this hybrid hypothesis with recently published ancientDNAevidence from the steppe and the northern Fertile Crescent.