Tangled Roots of English & 2 Class Definitions Flashcards
(36 cards)
Iranian & European languages are largely descended from an ancient language known as
proto-Indo-European
Two theories concerning how languages were spread: one by the …., the other by the …
sword; plow
historical linguists can …. many words of proto-Indo-European from their .. ..
reconstruct; descendants
reconstructed vocab led to notion that proto-Indo-European speakers were …., familiar with … and ….
pastoralists; sheep; wheeled vehicles
pastoralists: a … or …
sheep; cattle farmer
wheeled vehicles emerged around …., which suggests that proto-Indo-European speakers began to flourish … years ago on the …. grasslands above the … and … seas
4000 B.C.; 6500; steppe; Black; Caspian
Steppe theory stipulates that the proto-indo-european speakers spread their language to …, … and …. through either … or the appeal of their ….
Europe; India; western China; conquest; pastoral economy
Colin Renfrew: Cambridge … who proposed in 1987 that languages were spread by the … farmers who brought …. to Europe
archaeologist; Neolithic; agriculture
based on Renfrew’s proposition, the homeland of proto-Indo-European was in …., now …, and its speakers started migrating some … to … years ago
Anatolia; Turkey; 8000; 9500
Renfrew’s theory was important because … is an accepted mechanism of …, and the migration of Neolithic farmers in Europe is ….
expansion of farming; language spread; well documented archaeologically
linguists objected to Renfrew’s theory due to the fact that the wheel wasn’t invented so long ago, but Renfrew argued that after their dispersal, these languages could all have …. along with the ….itself
borrowed the word for wheel; invention
Renfrew’s theory is known as the … theory
Anatolian
Two New Zealand biologists, … and … of University of Auckland, devised a new method of constructing … trees of ….
Russell Gray; Quentin Atkinson; datable; language descent
historical linguists had drawn up trees of how proto-indo-european had split into its … based on sets of … known as …
daughter languages; similar words; cognates
linguists tried and failed to date trees by comparing …. languages shared
how many cognates
Gray and Atkinson realized that statistical methods developed by .. for tracking the evolution of … and … addressed man o the problems that exist in reconstructing trees of ….
biologists; genes; proteins; language descent
gray and atkinson represented each indo-european language as a string of … and …, depending on whether it shared … for a list of words known to …
1s; 0s; cognates; resist change
after the representations of the languages, gray and atkinson computed the likeliest of the many possible trees that would give rise to the ….. Their preferred tree’s lower branches could be dated from ….. As such, they were able to date the root
observed data; historical events;
according to gray and atkinson, proto-indo-european was spoken …. to … years ago
7800; 9800
gray and atkinson’s study supported the … theory
anatolian
gray and atkinson, with remco bouckaert and others, applied to the dispersal of proto-indo-european a statistical model developed to track the geographical spread of …. which showed support for an … origin
viruses; anatolian
gray and atkinson’s … approach was significant
computational
Linguist … from U. of California, worked with …, linguist skilled in computational stuff noticed that in bouckaert’s article, their were 8 cases where an ancient language was the widely assumed ancestor of a modern language, but the modern language would be shown as being descended from a …. of the …
Andrew Garrett; Will Chang; hypothetical cousin; ancient language
garrett and chang figured it would be more realistic for tree to adopt …. ancestries, despite the fact that it overlooked ….
generally accepted language; probability calculations
