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Homepage, Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, University of Oxford - http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/#

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" The project: the origin and purpose of LGPN. Publications: details of published volumes including name lists and statistics; forthcoming volumes, associated works. LGPN online: Online facilities: Name Search over 35,000 published names; indexes and bibliographies of LGPN I-VA; LGPN IIA: addenda, corrigenda, name indexes and statistics from revised LGPN II (version April 2007). LGPN Database Search: conversion project using TEI-compliant XML. LGPN Website Search Ancient Greek names: an introduction, including their formation and development, and our sources for them. We also have a little information about modern Greek names. Announcements: new additions to the site, developments, news and events. Anatolian Society: a joint conference, July 11-12, 2011 Contact details: staff and the Advisory Committee." - maitani - -

"The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN) was established to collect and publish all ancient Greek personal names, drawing on the full range of written sources from the 8th century B.C. down to the late Roman Empire." - maitani - -

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Literary guide to India - Telegraph - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture...

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"It goes without saying that it’s not possible to find one book that has everything about India. The work that comes closest is the Mahabharata – but it’s hard to get an excellent contemporary translation in English. Besides, its plethora of characters might “bamboozle” (to invoke the word that the Lonely Planet uses to describe the country’s initial impact) you on a first reading. Better to begin with a slight but charming book called In Search of the Mahabharata by Jean-Claude Carrière, who wrote the script of Peter Brook’s version of the epic. The book is a skeletal but magical account of travels through India, of interviewing and watching performers for whom the epic is their bread and butter, these excursions necessitated by the knowledge that no new adaptation could be possible without lived experience: “We knew the poem, we wanted to see the country.”" - maitani - -

"For writing on modern India, it’s de rigueur to first check out fiction set in Bombay; there’s much to choose from, given it’s the one Indian city in which English has been the dominant middle-class language. And so it’s worth reading what at least some members of that class consider their defining epic, Rushdie’s vivacious masterpiece, Midnight’s Children, as well as Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, a non-fiction account of Bombay’s amoral transition towards free-market energy." - maitani - -

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The Archaeobotanist: The eastern fertile crescent returns - http://archaeobotanist.blogspot.de/2013...

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"What this what we/ I suspected? Yes. I am one of a number of scholars who have been arguing for a multicentric process of parallel starts to cultivation and parallel, and protracted, domestication processes around the Fertile Crescent, i.e. De-centering the Fertile Crescent. Mostly we have argued this on contrasts between the Southwest and the north/central fertile crescent and the contrasts between morphological diversity in archaeological samples and that in modern germplasm. As the authors here note with their triticoids, they are dealing with a wild wheat type not well represented in modern collections; this is equally true of early domesticated wheats in Syria/Anatolia and even in Neolithic Europe. In the Neolithic there are extinct genetic lineages, that are morphologically distinct, that are not found in modern landraces. In other words there are several lost crops of early agriculture." - maitani - -

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Language Log » Potosi miners' language - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"The Potosí Miners’ Language was created in the silver mines of Potosí (central Bolivian highlands) in the 16th century. The extremely rich Cerro Rico silver mines ‘discovered’ by the Spanish in 1546 (there had been earlier exploitation by the Incas in the region) attracted an enormous number of Indian workers, forced or voluntary, from a wide area; these workers spoke different languages, three of which we know: Aymara, Quechua, and Uru. Potosí came to be one of the largest cities in the western hemisphere. Each ethnicity living in the city had different tasks in the mines, and lived in separate compounds, but of course in the mines they had to communicate closely, and some had dealings with the Spanish owners and overseers as well. Now the Potosí Cerro Rico mines are officially closed, but cooperatives of miners continue to work in the mines ‘informally’, and mining language has spread to many other mines in Bolivia." - maitani - -

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"Astonishingly there is a dictionary of the mining language already composed by Garcia de Llanos (1609-10), titled Diccionario y maneras de hablar que se usan en las minas y sus labores de ingenios y beneficios de metales [Dictionary and ways of speaking that are used in the mines and their engineering works and ore dressings]. The last written source I have found so far is a mining language course published in 1989 by a miner’s labor union. I also have some of my own field notes from 1991; at that time it was easy to gather the material, but I was not yet focused on the topic and should have paid more attention." - maitani - -

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Franciscan Archeological Institute in Jordan - KASTRON MEFAA - UMM AL-RASAS - http://198.62.75.1/www1...

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"The ruins of Umm er-Rasas, lie 30 km south-east of Madaba on the edge of the steppe and the sown (237 101 Palestinian Grid) halfway between Dhiban on the king's Highway and the Desert Road. The ruins consist of a walled area forming a fortified camp (158 m east west by 139 m north south), and an open quarter of roughly the same size to the north. About 1300 m to the north of the fort is still standing a 14 m high tower beside ruins of some edifices, stone quarries and water cisterns hewn in the rock." - maitani - -

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"The toponym was already known to the Roman and Arabic sources and to the Bible. Eusebius knows a unit of the Roman army stationed on the edge of the desert at Mephaat (Onomasticon 128, 21), a locality which the historian identifies with the Levitical city of refuge of Mepha'at in the territory of the tribe of Reuben on the mishor Moab (Joshua 13, 21; 21, 37; Jeremiah 48, 21). The Notitia Dignitatum records that equites promoti indigenae, auxiliary troops of the Roman army, were stationed in the camp of Mefaa under the command of the Dux Arabiae. The Arabic historian al-Bakry knows Maypha'ah as a village of the Belqa' of Syria." - maitani - -

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The Negative Canon | Caxton - http://caxton1485.wordpress.com/2013...

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"A prominent characteristic of the negative canon is that it consists of a relatively small number of features which come up time and again, and are often of the kind that Geoffrey Pullum has called ‘the most intellectually trivial details of standard written English’. As an example, Bessel has listed the following salient features of Afro-American Vernacular English:" - maitani - -

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"A fellow contributor to the LinkedIn group Grammar Geeks, Bessel Dekker, has suggested the term negative canon for those features of English that are frequently the object of the attention of those in various Facebook groups and elsewhere who seek to tell us how to use our own language. They complain about current developments in the language, oblivious to the fact that such developments are sometimes far from new, and that English contains features that have come about through the type of changes in the past that they condemn in the present. We are asked to accept what they say because that’s their opinion or what they’ve always been taught." - maitani - -

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Driving the Lowari Pass - http://kottke.org/13...

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That's crazy. Like trying to drive the Kalalau trail with a bus while stoned. - maitani - -

"On one of the world's most dangerous roads, Pakistani drivers deliver supplies 150 miles into northwestern Pakistan. In 2011, Al Jazeera English made this 25-minute documentary that followed one of the trucks across the Lowari Pass." - maitani - -

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Recovering Submerged Worlds by Peter Brown | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/article...

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"These three books, each in its different way, deal with the centuries in which a very ancient world suddenly and unexpectedly turned upside down. In Empires in Collision and The Throne of Adulis, Glen Bowersock takes us far to the south of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean—to Yemen, Axum (the capital of the nascent empire of Ethiopia), and to the dangerous waters between the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa, better known to Somali pirates than to classical scholars. Patricia Crone’s Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran takes us further east—in a huge sweep of diverse, little-known landscapes from Mesopotamia across the Iranian plateau as far as Central Asia." - maitani - -

"Both Bowersock and Crone are supremely accomplished scholars. Each deals with the dramatic sequence of events that preceded and followed the unforeseen emergence of Islam in a corner of the world to which the ancients had paid little or no attention." - maitani - -

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MINDFUL PLEASURES: Marking Marcel Proust's 142nd Birthday - http://mindfulpleasures.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Today is the 142nd anniversary of the birth of the creator of Odette, Swann, Albertine, and the Baron de Charlus, among many, many others. His most impressive feat of imaginative characterization, however, was his invention of 'Marcel,' the purely fictional narrator who is usually incorrectly assumed to be a veiled self-portrait. The great interest of William Carter's biography of Proust lies in its revelation of the life of bourgeois banality that Proust transformed into unadulterated aesthetic gold. Nabokov was probably making a juvenile, mildly homophobic pun when he called the Recherche a "fairy tale," but he also made a solid point: Proust's roman fleuve is as much a work of the imagination as The Master and Margarita (or, for that matter, A Game of Thrones). Celebrate Proust's birthday with a tea-soaked madeleine, an evening at the opera, and a visit to Chez Jupien." - maitani - -

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anladim. haklisin. beckett bazen manasiz geliyor derken ornegin murphy'i okurken hissettigim bogulma halini animsadim. o karaktere ne belirli bir mesafede durup ironik unsuru saptayabildim ne de bir yakinlik kurabildim. manasiz/futile/gereksiz acimasiz bir yargi olabilir dogru ama iste ben bu adamlarin metinleri ile boyle organik mi demeli bir bag kuramadigim gibi analitik/politik bir iliskiye de giremedim. boyle bisi hissettigim sanirim - maitani - -

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Flutes and flatterers | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2013...

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"A few curious things can be said about flute (which, of course, has nothing to do with lute). Unlike fiddle, this word is certainly of Romance descent. Vowels in it differed and still differ from language to language (see the display at the end of this post), but fl and t remain constant, and it is fl- that deserves our attention. In numerous Indo-European languages, especially in Germanic and Romance, initial fl-, bl-, and pl- have a sound symbolic or a sound imitative value and are connected with words for flying, flowing, floating, and blowing. Hence many puzzles. For example, fluent is a participle of Latin fluere “to flow.” At first sight, flow and fluere are congeners. Yet they cannot belong together, because the Latin consonant corresponding to Engl. f happens to be p, as in father ~ pater, not f, and, to be sure, we find Latin pluere “to rain,” a perfect cognate of flow as regards sound and sense. What then should we do with fluere in its relation to flow, a verb rhyming with pluere and belonging to the same semantic sphere? What is the origin of this confusion? No one has a definite answer. In any case, the often-repeated explanation that fluere should be kept apart from flow, which has modified its sense under the influence of the Latin verb, does not rest on any evidence. It is wishful thinking, for how can one demonstrate influence? The other explanation refers to the sound symbolism common to Latin and Germanic (the “fluiditiy” of fl-), but, although sound symbolism unquestionably exists, when it comes to concrete cases, adducing proof constitutes a problem." - maitani - -

"The names of musical instruments constitute one of the most intriguing chapters in the science and pseudoscience of etymology. Many such names travel from land to land, and we are surprised when a word with romantic overtones reveals a prosaic origin. For example, lute is from Arabic (al’ud: the definite article followed by a word for “wood, timber”). The haunting lines by Duncan Campbell Scott (“I have done. Put by the lute”) don’t make us think of “the wood.” In everyday life it is usually preferable not to know the derivation of the words we use. Harp and fiddle fare no better than lute. Both are, in my opinion, Germanic. The verb harp as in harping on one note supplies a clue to the etymology of the noun harp (also think about harpoons) and phrases like fiddling with something or fiddle away shed light on how fiddle began its career. (Dictionaries assert that fiddle is a borrowing of Romance vitula, but vitula is, more likely, a borrowing from Germanic.) Harp and fiddle are unpretentious, homey words. They convey the idea of plucking the strings or moving the bow (just call it fiddlestick) over them." - maitani - -

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Language Evolution: Global Water for the Last Time - http://langevo.blogspot.de/2013...

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"I analysed the Indo-European evidence in some detail to highlight the fact that, although Latin aqua has cognates here and there in Indo-European, its attestation is too weak to treat the word as reconstructible all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. It’s a regional word with uncertain affinities, and surely not the PIE ‘water’ word (there are better candidates for that status). Its story contains a moral: sheer similarity, even within an uncontroversial family, doesn’t mean anything by itself. There is an inherited verb root meaning ‘drink’ which looks tantalisingly similar to aqua (and was once regarded as related to it), but which has to be separated from it, given what we know today. Our improved understanding of some of the languages of the past (such as Hittite and the rest of the Anatolian clade) has forced us to abandon quite a few superficially promising etymologies. And it’s a good thing: it shows that etymologies are in principle falsifiable. All you need is a good model within which they can be evaluated." - maitani - -

" Of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It may conceivably happen that a word present in a protolanguage survives only in one language descended from it, or in a small cluster of related languages. In such cases, outgroup comparison may still enable us to recognise the word as inherited. We only need some secure external cognates and a consistent pattern of correspondences. We can’t, however, trust conclusions drawn only from the existence of vaguely similar words scattered across several families, especially if there is no pattern they could fit into because the researchers feel free to avoid real reconstructive work. If you look at Bengtson & Ruhlen (B&R)’s data, you will find many clear examples of “reaching down” (selecting isolated lookalikes and pretending they represent the families in question)." - maitani - -

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: Βυζαντινά Μνημεία της Αττικής - Byzantine Monuments of Attica - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Athens, symbol of the classical civilization, changed its course during the Byzantine period. During late Antiquity it constituted a great intellectual and cultural center in the Empire. However, the following period was characterized both by the prohibition of the teaching of philosophers in the School of Plato under Justinian and by the conversion of the Parthenon into a Christian church. The veneration of a pagan virgin goddess gave its place to the veneration of the Virgin Mary. These two initiatives of the Byzantine Government sealed the end of the national cultural tradition of the Mediterranean identified with Athens. Gradual demographic and building decline followed indicative of the period after the 6th century in Greece. The overthrow of the traditional economic life after certain northern raids (the Heruli towards the end of the 3rd century, the Goths in the end of the 4th century, the Vandals during the 5th century, the Slavs after the middle of the 6th century, the Saracens in the 8th century onwards) was the reason of a nerveless social, financial and cultural life." - maitani - -

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The English Breakfast by Kaori O'Connor – review | Books | The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books...

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"According to a recent poll for the British Nutrition Foundation, almost a third of British 14-to-16-year-olds no longer eat breakfast. That fact would have appalled Victorians. For them, not only was a proper English breakfast "the mark of a gentleman", but it was "the national dish of a mythic and indivisible England". That's a lot of symbolism with which to season your bacon and eggs, but Kaori O'Connor's splendid biography of what she claims is the most famous national meal in the world shows how it came to occupy such a unique place in the nation's heart and stomach. The origins of the English breakfast lie in lavish country house repasts (three of which are printed here) that were codified in popular middle-class cookbooks of the late 19th century. Colonel Kenney Herbert's colonial flavoured Fifty Breakfasts (1894) includes "Khitchri" (aka kedgeree), vegetable curry and "eggs à l'Indienne" (poached eggs with curry sauce). First published in 2006, O'Connor's book now includes an additional chapter on the fate of the English breakfast in recent years. Despite McMuffins, croissants, brownies and designer coffees there will, says O'Connor confidently "always be an English Breakfast"." - maitani - -

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Early agriculture from Iran - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2013...

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"The issue of whether there was a single or (more likely multiple) areas of early agriculture is potentially important as it would imply that there were genetically differentiated (due to geographic distance) populations in the Neolithic womb of nations. In a global, or even a Eurasian context, these populations would be relatively genetically close, but not identical; it would be interesting to see to what extent present-day differentiation in the Near East reflects those early differences as opposed to more recent events." - maitani - -

"Emergence of Agriculture in the Foothills of the Zagros Mountains of Iran Simone Riehl et al. The role of Iran as a center of origin for domesticated cereals has long been debated. High stratigraphic resolution and rich archaeological remains at the aceramic Neolithic site of Chogha Golan (Ilam Province, present-day Iran) reveal a sequence ranging over 2200 years of cultivation of wild plants and the first appearance of domesticated-type species. The botanical record from Chogha Golan documents how the inhabitants of the site cultivated wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum) and other wild progenitor species of modern crops, such as wild lentil and pea. Wild wheat species (Triticum spp.) are initially present at less than 10% of total plant species but increase to more than 20% during the last 300 years of the sequence. Around 9800 calendar years before the present, domesticated-type emmer appears. The archaeobotanical remains from Chogha Golan represent the earliest record of long-term plant management in Iran." - maitani - -

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Language Log » Das Wort "Shitstorm" hat nun einen Platz im Duden - http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll...

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"So says Die Welt. But this Teutonic lexicographical event has gotten an unusual amount of press coverage in other languages: "English profanity earns place in standard German dictionary", Reuters; "English rude word enters German language", BBC News; "'S***storm' adopted into German equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary", The Independent; "Shitstorm. Němčina má nové slovo, kvůli krizi zdomácnělo", iDNES.cz; "Duitsers omarmen Engelse shitstorm", NOS OP 3; "H αγγλική βρισιά shitstorm μπήκε στα λεξικά της γερμανικής γλώσσας -Τη χρησιμοποιεί και η Μέρκελ", iefimerida; "Shitstorm entra no diccionário alemão depois de usada por Merkel na crise", Diário Digital; etc." - maitani - -

"After being used by Angela Merkel to describe the eurozone crisis, the word shitstorm has now made it officially into German dictionaries. Duden, the German standard lexicon and the country’s equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, has now recognised the word. But in German it has a slightly different meaning and has come to define a controversy on the internet rather than the general calamity it is in English. Duden defines shitstorm as: ‘Noun, masculine – a storm of protest in a communications medium of the internet, which is associated in part with insulting remarks.’" - maitani - -

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Weinrich Revisited | Caxton - http://caxton1485.wordpress.com/2013...

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"Warsaw Will and John Cowan raised some interesting points about Standard English in response to my post of 30 June, and they deserve fuller treatment than would be possible in a further comment. The Yiddish linguist Max Weinrich, poor man, is remembered chiefly as the alleged source of the quotation that heads this post, and it is one to bear in mind in considering various views on the status of a standard language variety." - maitani - -

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy." - maitani - -

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When it rains, it does not necessarily pour | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2013...

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"Contrary to some people’s expectation, July has arrived, and it rains incessantly, that is, in the parts of the world not suffering from drought. I often feel guilty on account of my avoiding the burning questions of our time. Experienced word columnists tend to begin their notes so (my example is of course imaginary): “Last week the President declared: ‘These shenanigans won’t deceive anybody.’ What can we say about the word shenanigans? According to the OED…. Professor S. of Shine-Sheen College confirmed in a telephone interview that, to the best of his knowledge, no consensus exists as to where the word came from. However…” This is what I call socially sensitive, sustainable word journalism: no sooner said than done. Today is my turn. The Fourth of July is with us, it raineth on the just and the unjust, and I want to rise to the importance of the moment. What then is the origin of the word rain? This question will not go away, and, even if does, it will come another day." - maitani - -

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"“Rain” need not have signified “water,” “moisture, vapor,” or “wet” (such is the range of meanings in the putative cognates of the Germanic noun). People distinguish between several kinds of water falling from the sky. Rain (the most abstract of the many synonyms) is, we are told, “condensed vapor of the atmosphere falling in drops” (true enough), while shower refers to “a brief and usually short fall of rain” (also true; only showers, not rains, can be scattered, and only they can bring May flowers). Rains, in the plural, unless it refers to a rainy season, sounds suspicious; compare Kipling’s: “In August was the Jackal born;/ The rains fell in September; ‘Now, ‘such a fearful storm’/ Says he/ ‘I can’t remember’”. By the way, the oldest sense of the Germanic word for “shower” seems to have had harsher connotations than those familiar to us. In Gothic, the phrase skura windis, literally “storm of wind,” has been recorded, and in all probability, Latin caurus and some other Indo-European words for “north” are related to s-kura. The violence associated with shower may corroborate my guess presented below." - maitani - -

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BBC News - Two osprey chicks hatch in Dyfi Valley - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"The first bird emerged at the Cors Dyfi reserve near Machynlleth on Friday, followed by a second on Sunday. The eggs were laid six weeks later than usual leading to concerns over whether the chicks would hatch. Parents Monty and Glesni set up home on a 30ft (9m) tall man-made nest on 3 May. They are one of only two known breeding pairs in Wales, with a second pair nesting near Croesor in the Glaslyn Valley." - maitani - -

"Two osprey chicks have hatched at a nature reserve in Powys despite fears their parents had paired up too late in the mating season." - maitani - -

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Insight – Futility Closet - http://www.futilitycloset.com/2013...

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"Still more wisdom from German aphorist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799):" - maitani - -

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A Calendar Page for July 2013 - Medieval manuscripts blog - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"Our glimpse into the summer pursuits of aristocrats continues in this miniature from the month of July. In the foreground, a nobleman is setting out on horseback to hunt with falcons; he is accompanied by two retainers carrying more birds of prey, along with two dogs who seem eager for the hunt. Behind him, a group of haymakers are at work mowing a field. In the bas-de-page, a group of men are trying, unsuccessfully it appears, to capture some outsized butterflies. On the following folio can be found the saints' days for July and a rather fierce-looking lion for Leo. Below we can see the conclusion of the haymakers' labours, as they head off into the distance with a horsecart laden with their harvest." - maitani - -

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Gogol Bordello - Immigraniada (acoustic) - YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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Coexistence and variation in numerals and writing systems « Glossographia - http://glossographia.wordpress.com/2013...

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"At the time I posted it this morning, it was the only postage stamp I knew of to contain four numerical notation systems. (As Frédéric Grosshans quickly noted, however, a few of the stamps of the Indian state of Hyderabad from the late 19th century contain Western, Arabic, Devanagari, and Telugu numerals, and also meet that criterion, although all four of those systems are closely related to one another, whereas the Roman numerals and the Egyptian fractional numerals are not closely related to the Western or Arabic systems. So that’s kind of neat. I have a little collection of stamps with weird numerical systems (like Ethiopic or Brahmi), multiple numeral systems (like the above), unorthodox Roman numerals (Pot 1999), etc., and am looking to expand it, since it is a fairly delimited set and, as a pretty odd basis for a collection, isn’t going to break the bank. In case I have any fans who are looking for a cheap present for me. Just sayin’ …" - maitani - -

"Well, it only took about 20 minutes for Dan Milton to solve the mystery of the Egyptian stamp: it has four distinct numerical notation systems on it: Western (Hindu-Arabic) numerals, Arabic numerals, Roman numerals, and most prominently but obscurely, the ‘Eye of Horus’ which served, in some instances, as fractional values in the Egyptian hieroglyphs:" - maitani - -

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Reflections on Violence by Hannah Arendt | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/article...

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"Moreover, the recent rise of nationalism around the globe, usually understood as a world-wide swing to the right, has now reached the point where it may threaten the oldest and best established nation states. The Scotch and the Welsh, the Bretons and the Provençals, ethnic groups whose successful assimilation had been the prerequisite for the rise of the nation state, are turning to separatism in rebellion against the centralized governments of London and Paris." - maitani - -

"The political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) contributed over twenty articles, reviews, and letters to The New York Review between 1963 and her death twelve years later. The following is an extract from “Reflections on Violence,” published in the February 27, 1969, issue. It may be read in full at www.nybooks.com/50/Arendt." - maitani - -

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Amsterdam | Caxton - http://caxton1485.wordpress.com/2013...

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Having read your comment, grizabella, I looked up 'Port of Anvers' (huge and really impressive), 'Port of Amsterdam' and some information on the song. I also learned that the tune is based on Greensleeves. :-) - maitani - -

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the song was meant to be for the port of anvers actually :) but anvers was replaced with amsterdam because it didn't fit the singing line well. - maitani - -

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Where I like to spend my evenings

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Oh, keines meiner Bilder hat es bisher auf einen Bildschirmschoner geschafft! :-) - maitani - -

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Die Blumen sind sehr schön! And they're now in my screen saver. - maitani - -

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Indo-European homeland and migrations: half a century of studies and discussions (Gamkrelidze & Ivanov 2013) - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2013...

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"The problem of the initial place from which the original Indo- European dialects spread over Eurasia has been studied by several generations of scholars. Few alternative points of view have been proposed: first an area near the North Sea (in the works of some scholars of the border of the 19th and 20th centuries), then the North coast of the Black Sea (an old idea of Schrader revived by Maria Gimbutas and her followers) or an area closer to the more eastern (Volga-Ural) parts of Central Eurasia. 40 years ago we suggested first in a talk at a conference, then in a series of articles and in a resulting book (published in Russian in 1984) that the Northern part of the Near East (an area close to North-East Syria and North Mesopotamia) may be considered as a possible candidate for the Indo-European homeland; similar suggestions were made by C. Renfrew and other scholars in their later works. Recent research on these topics has brought up additional evidence that seems to prove the Near Eastern hypothesis for the time that had immediately preceded the dispersal of the Indo-European protolanguage. Indirect evidence on the early presence of Indo-Europeans in the areas close to the Near East can be found in the traces of ancient contacts between linguistic families in this part of Eurasia. Such contacts between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Kartvelian have been suggested in the work of T. Gamkrelidze and G. Mach’avariani more than 60 years ago. The following studies have established a number of important loanwords from Proto-Indo-European in Proto-Kartvelian. Particularly interesting discoveries in this field were made by the late G. A. Klimov. He has found many new common elements of the two families in addition to a relatively long list in our joint work. The main difficulty in interpreting the results of his investigations is connected to the problem of a possible common Nostratic origin both of Proto-Indo-European and of Proto-Kartvelian. If these two linguistic families were originally cognate, then some part of the correspondences found by Klimov and other scholars might be traced back to the early period of Proto-Nostratic (more than 10 000 years ago). Only those words that were not inherited from this ancient time are important as a proof of the later presence of Proto-Indo-European in the area close to the Proto-Kartvelian (to the southwest of the Transcaucasian area in which the latter spread in the historic time). In our book, published in 1984, we suggested some common terms shared by these languages, explaining them as possible traces of later Indo-European (probably Indo-Iranian) migrations through the Caucasus. The study of this problem has been enriched through the recent research on Proto-North Caucasian. S. L. Nikolaev and S. A. Starostin have compiled a large etymological dictionary of this family, furthering the comparative studies started by Prince N. S. Trubetzkoy. Starostin has gathered a large collection of the terms of material culture common to North Caucasian and Indo-European. They include many names of domestic animals and animal body parts or products of cattle-breeding, plants and implements. In a special work on this subject Starostin suggested that all these terms were borrowed in the area of the Near East to the South of Transcaucasia in the early 5th mil. BC. Although we still use the traditional term “North Caucasian”, it is not geographically correct even if applied to such living languages as Abkhaz and to the extinct Ubykh (spoken originally at the southern part of the South-West Transcaucasian area). Since both Hurro-Urartian and Hattic (two ancient dialects of this linguistic group) were spoken in the regions to the South of Transcaucasia already in the 3rd mil. BC, it becomes possible to pinpoint the homeland of the whole family (which at that time was not North Caucasian) in the same area close to the supposed Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Kartvelian homelands. The fricative š in the Hurrian name for ‘horse’, eššə, and an affricate *č (> š) in the forms of the other North Caucasian dialects correspond to the Proto-Indo-European palatal stop *k’ that has become an affricate *č and then a fricative š /s in the Indo-European languages of the satəm type. Similar changes are present in the other borrowings discussed by Starostin. He supposed that the common words discovered by him were mostly borrowed from Proto-North Caucasian (or from a dialect of it) into Proto-Indo-European. The opposite direction of borrowing from an Indo-European dialect of a satəm type can be suggested due to the typologically valid laws of sound change. But no matter which direction of the borrowing should be chosen, the existence of these loanwords is beyond doubt. They clearly point to the location of the Indo-European homeland. In our monograph we suggested that several words shared by Semitic and Indo-European (such as the ancient term for ‘wine’, Hittite wiyana) can be considered Proto-Indo-European borrowings (as distinct from the rest of the most ancient old Semitic or Afro-Asiatic loanwords in Proto-Indo-European). S. A. Starostin suggested that a large number of (mainly West) Semitic words that did not have correspondences in the other Afro-Asiatic languages had been borrowed from Proto-Indo-European. He came to the conclusion: “the original Indo-European (Indo-Hittite) homeland was somewhere to the North of the Fertile Crescent from where the descendents of Indo-Hittites could have moved in two directions (starting with early 5th millennium BC) to the South where they came into the contact with the Semites, and indeed could have driven a part of them further to the South, and to the North (North-East) whence they ultimately spread both to Europe and to India”. The interference of the early dialects of Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Semitic and Proto-Kartvelian to which the early Proto-“North” Caucasian can be added might have led to the formation of a sort of linguistic zone (Sprachbund) that not only shared many words pertaining to a new farming economy, but also had several phonological and grammatical features in common. After we had published our hypothesis on the Near Eastern homeland of the Indo-Europeans, several scholars asked us why, at a time when writing had already been invented, there were no written documents testifying to the presence of Indo-Europeans in these areas. It seems that now there are several possible answers to the question. The great specialist on Iranian, W. B. Henning, who had worked for many years on the problem of the name of Tocharians, suggested in a posthumous article that their early ancestors were Gutians who had invaded Mesopotamia in ca. 2350—2200 BC. In an article written after we had already published our book, we have developed Henning’s idea (based mainly on the etymological links of Near Eastern Guti and Tukri and Central Asian names of corresponding Indo-European Kuchean and Tocharian ethnic groups), also paying attention to the possible explanation of some names of Gutian kings preserved in Sumerian texts. Recently it has been suggested that an unknown “Pre-Sumerian” language, reconstructed on the basis of the phonetic values of many cuneiform signs, was an archaic “Euphratic” Indo-European dialect spoken in Southern Mesopotamia in the second half of the 4th mil. BC. According to this hypothesis, the phonetic values of approximately one hundred of the early signs that are different from the Sumerian ones go back to the Euphratic words. A large number of Anatolian personal names (of a very archaic Indo-European type) have been found in the Old Assyrian texts from trade colonies in Asia Minor. The continuation of the excavations in Kanish that have yielded more than 23000 cuneiform tablets has made it possible to discover in them many Anatolian Indo-European names and loanwords. The Old Assyrian documents in Kanish are encountered in the archaeological levels II and Ib dated by the first centuries of the 2nd mil. BC (on the base of the recently found lists of eponyms); they precede Old Hittite texts for ca. 250 years. At that time the two Anatolian groups of dialects — a Northern (Hittite) one, displaying centum dialect features, and a Southern (Luwian), partly similar to the satəm languages — were already quite distinct. From the very beginning, the idea of the Indo-European homeland in the Near East was connected to the discovery of a possible link between the appearance of speakers of Indo-European dialects in Europe and the spread of the new farming technology. This trend of thought has been developed in the archeological works of Sir Colin Renfrew. Subsequent attempts to support this hypothetical connection were made by comparing genetic data on the time and space characteristics of the European population. The farming terms common to Indo-European and other linguistic families discussed above show that the innovations were not restricted to one group of languages and were transmitted and exchanged between different ethnic formations. The area of the interference of these families coincides with the kernel of the rising farming in the Near East. That process of global (multilingual and multicultural) change had led to the diffusion of the results of the Neolithic revolution. The main directions of this diffusion coincide with the trends of the Indo-European migrations, but the new objects might have been introduced earlier than some of their Indo-European names and the latter might precede the coming of those who coined the terms. The spread of Near Eastern innovations in Europe roughly coincides with the split of Proto-Indo-European (possibly in the early 5th mil. BC), but some elements of the new technology and economy might have penetrated it much earlier (partly through the farmers close to the Tyrrhenian population as represented 5300 years ago by the genome of the Tyrolean Iceman). The diffusion took several thousand years and was probably already all over Europe ca. 3550 BC. At that time Indo-European migrations were only beginning. The speakers of the dialects of Proto-Indo-European living near the kernel of the technological revolution in Anatolia should have acquired the main results of this development. The growth of farming economy in Europe became more active with the split of the proto-language and the dispersal of the Indo-Europeans. The astonishing scope and speed of that process were afforded by the use of the domesticated horse and wheeled vehicles. The Indo-Europeans did not have to be pioneers in this field, but they were probably skillful in spreading other peoples’ innovations. Recent work on the Botai culture of North Kazakhstan makes it possible to suppose a contribution of the Proto-Yeniseian people to the development of horse domestication. For approximately fifteen hundred years serious preparatory work on horse domestication and the use of wheeled vehicles had been going on in different parts of Eurasia. Then, almost suddenly, the results are witnessed. On the border of the 3rd and 2nd mil. BC both of these important innovations appear together, usually in a context implying the presence of Indo-Europeans: traces of Near East-type chariots and the ritual use of the horse are clear in (probably Ancient Iranian) Margiana (Gonur), we see chariots on the Anatolian type of seals in Kanish; Hurrian sculptures and other symbols of horse abound in Urkeš as if foretelling the future Mespotamian-Aryan and Hurrian excellent training of horses in Mitanni (as later in Urartu). One of the first examples of the sacrificial horses used together with chariots in an archaic ritual was found in Sintashta; the following studies of the cities of the Transuralian Sintashta-Arkaim area made it clear that some Indo-European (and maybe Iranian as well) elements were at least partly present there. The movement of Indo-Europeans to the north of the Caspian Sea in the northeast direction documented in the Sintashta-Arkaim complex led them much farther to the Altai-Sayany area where recent genetic investigations found traces of a Caucasoid element. Another Indo-European group moving in a parallel eastward direction using the South Silk Road caused the presence of a similar anthropological group among the population of Central Asia. It may be supposed that the Caucasoid anthropological type of the Iranian and/or Tocharian population of Eastern Turkestan, attested in the mummies recently found there as well as in the contemporary images of the native people, should be considered as the result of these migrations from the West to the East. The problem whether the boats played a role comparable to that of chariots at the time of early migrations is still to be decided by maritime archaeology. It seems that before the efficient use of chariots and horses, long-term mass movements were hardly possible. The first changes in the geographical position of separate dialects, e.g. when the Anatolians separated the Greeks from the rest of the East Indo-European group (that included the Armenians and Indo-Iranians), were caused by rather small-scale migrations close to the original homeland in the Near East." - maitani - -

"An extensive English summary of an article in Russian by Gamkrelidze and Ivanov almost 30 years since the publication of their original book. There are other articles in the volume of the JOLR presenting different views (unfortunately most behind a paywall)." - maitani - -

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