Linguistics B(h)at Signal: Phylogenetics and PIE Again

Martin Rundkvist has told me that Russell Gray is writing about Proto-Indo-European using phylogenetics again (basically, trying to figure out when languages diverged from one another by seeing how many words they have in common). The last paper in Science on this topic using these methods was so poor from a linguistic point of view that a whole monograph from Cambridge University Press was needed to explain the problems. Like the last paper, this one is in Science, which is a good journal for some things but not competent to review papers on linguistics. I’m a philologist but not a linguist or a specialist in PIE. Can any of my gentle readers point me to where linguists are discussing it? I am sending out the <*b^hat> signal.

At first glance, I am extremely concerned that the references section does not acknowledge Pereltsvaig and Lewis’ monograph criticizing the previous paper. If its worth publishing a second paper using the same methods, clearly something about the previous paper could be improved. A fundamental principle of scholarly ethics is to acknowledge the best arguments against one’s own views. The new study leaves out Romani, and linguistics pointed out that because the Roma borrowed many foreign words as they migrated out of India around a thousand years ago, these methods give the impression that Romani diverged much earlier from other Indic languages than it actually did. If they agree with the linguists that Romani can not be studied with these methods, surely they should acknowledge them?

• Press release: “New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages,” 27 July 2023 https://phys.org/news/2023-07-insights-indo-european-languages.html
• Paper in Science: Paul Heggarty et al, “Language trees with sampled ancestors support a hybrid model for the origin of Indo-European languages,” Science (2023) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg0818
• Informal discussion of the 2012 paper on Language Log: “The place and time of Proto-Indo-European: Another round,” 24 August 2012 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4142
• Language Log thread on the new paper https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=59908
• Asya Pereltsvaig, Martin W. Lewis, The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2015)

Edit: Andrew Garrett of the University of California Berkeley likes their corpus of words and meanings in 161 Indo-European languages, but finds their phylogenetic analysis unconvincing; he thinks the corpus at https://iecor.clld.org/ will have lasting value (Globe and Mail quoted on Language Log, corporate social media; Garrett was fourth author of a 2015 paper which is cited in this paper) Linguist Sally Thomason also endorses the corpus while rejecting the way that Gray and colleagues use it.

Edit: Another blog post by an A. Oh-Willeke, which argues that:

The Anatolian languages look diverged from the other Indo-European languages, and hence look old, because of language contact effects with substrate languages very different from those present in the formative periods of the other Indo-European languages. (I think this is a reference to Oh-Willeke’s theory that the languages of Neolithic Anatolia were replaced by the language of migrants from the South Caucasus-Zagros region, whose languages were then marginalized by Indo-European after 2000 BCE).

Gray’s models too heavily emphasize a hypothetical random mutation rate and greatly underestimate how much language change is due to language contact. If you are Iceland with very little language contact, you can still read 10th century Iceland texts today. If you are a language experiencing lots of language contract, like England, anything you read before the 15th century is incomprehensible.

He agrees that the migration of farmers from Anatolia into Europe probably spread a language family, but thinks that this family was mostly erased by the arrival of Indo-European speakers and then by Greek and Roman imperialism which encouraged people all over the Mediterranean to speak and especially write Greek and Latin

Edit 2023-08-16: Language Hat has not yet covered this, but had a post from 2003 where Larry Trask the historical linguist attacked an early paper using phylogenetics to understand relationships between the Celtic languages https://languagehat.com/an-attempt-at-phylogenetics/ That paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and also put the breakup of Proto-Indo-European much earlier than most linguists at 8100 BCE.

Edit 2023-11-26: see now Guus Kroonen et al., “Archaeolinguistic anachronisms in the Indo-European phylogeny of Heggarty et al. 2023,” 17 November 2023 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg0818#elettersSection

(scheduled 28 July)