Thread

1. TFNA · 1789708775 · focus · HN ↗

   The title is super-clickbaity, as no Indo-Europeanist working today believes in a single Pre-Greek language; this was the idée fixe of the scholar Robert Beekes well over a decade ago now, and very flawed research as Beekes was succumbing to dementia then. In fact, within the field "Pre-Greek!" has become something of an inside joke.

   The article does eventually mention the current state-of-the-art, but only after perpetuating the misconception for some paragraphs, and that is poor form for a pop-sci article.

   1. metalman · 1789734389 · focus · HN ↗

      Ya, barrrrmp! disagree, the main thesus is lingustic evolution as sort of hereditary characteristics whose exact origins are difficult to elucidate, kind of like apples and horses, that also share the same general geographic origins. Various lists of words show conclusivly how many words are conserved over very broad geographic, temporal, and cultural ranges, so it will always be a (low stakes) game of reverse engineering how words and full languages moved around. perhaps of interest was an early study of austrailian languages, where over time local languages became incomrehensable to distant tribes, but the ancestral origin songs, were recognisable from there melodic and rythmic structure, and the actaul storys were essentialy identical, so language drift, but cultural continuity, which is aparently what you get after 50 millenia hanging out with marsupials.

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.