English Comes from Turkey: Part I

This recent BBC article highlights the work of Kiwi researcher Dr. Quentin Atkinson on the origin of Indoeuropean. This is a language that we actually know very little about but many of the world’s major languages are derived from it (see the map below). The green countries mainly speak languages that descend from Indoeuropean, the neon green ones have an Indoeuropean language as their official language (or an official language) but actually have multilingual societies, and the turquoise ones have large minorities that speak an Indoeuropean language.

My friend Vlad (over at Forever a Student) has been attempting to learn Persian/Farsi. He speaks eleven languages, some of them with a near native level of mastery. Most of his languages are Indoeuropean: English, Italian, Slovak, French, Russian, German, Czech, Spanish, German and Portuguese. He also speaks two that are not Indoeuropean quite well (Mandarin Chinese and Hungarian). The man can’t help but be a philologist! Here are some examples of connections that he’s made between his different Indoeuropean languages and his newest Indoeuropean language: Persian.

Vlad:

Apart from the most obvious ones like bad (bad), tche (che), barâdar (brother), nou (new) and others, there are also a few mind blowing vocabulary relation to Slavic languages:
vopors – to ask (Rus vopros – question, Svk prosiť – to ask)

Zohré (Venus, Svk Zornička – Venus)

zohr – morning (Svk zore – morning red sky)

zan – woman (Svk žena – woman)

zemestân – winter (Svk zima – winter)

zamin – ground (Svk zem – ground)

Here’s a list of some other cognates I found so far:

Hast – there is, il y a, es gibt

Barâdar – brother

Markaz – market

Mâdar – mother

Dochtâr – doughter

Kelid – key

There are a lot of other cognates as well, but they are obviously much younger:

garson – boy

botri – bottle

taxi – taxi

All of these languages must have had a common source. We call that source Indoeuropean even though we have no idea who the Indoeuropeans were, what they actually called themselves or even exactly how their language worked. The modern language that is closest to the original Indoeuropean is supposed to be Lithuanian. What scientists have commonly suspected is that, after the wheel was invented, the Indoeuropeans left their home in the Caucuses (see below) and went all over the place.

Dr. Atkinson applied technology that shows the level of commonality in the DNA in different organisms to languages. This apparently was done with a huge data base of cognates. His results led him to believe that Indoeurpean does not come from the Caucuses but from Turkey.

What do you think of this idea? Do languages change the same way that organisms evolve?  Does it matter where Indoeuropean originated?