Origin of Thoughts!

I took one Philosophy class in undergrad, Knowledge and Reality, and the only thing I really remember is a question our professor asked us on the first day: How do we think?

I still remember, very clearly, the answer was finally shouted out from the back-center row of that amphitheater-style room: in language! Our teacher started off the term by reminding us every thought we ever had, and ever will have, has been constructed and shaped by our language. And isn't that revelatory? That your ideas exist (and exist the way they do) because of language? What about people who speak many languages? My American Sign Language teacher told me the moment you know you have mastered a language is when you begin thinking in it, even sign language. Maybe those lucky folks have very expansive thoughts?
And what if you had no language? What if you were born in the forest Nell-style with sustenance but no society? What would you think? Could it be all instinct and sensation?...

Language is a particularly interesting facet of human history. Apparently, concerning the origin of Indo-European languages* there are two camps:

Camp Steppe - those languages arose from people inhabiting the steppe region north of the Black Sea! They spread out 6000-4000 years ago with their horse-drawn chariots and conquered left and right! Arrr!

(Most people believe this one)








Camp Anatolia - a gentler narrative; these folks are from modern-day Turkey, below the Black Sea. They spread their plowing secrets and language during the agricultural expansion initiated about 9000 years ago.







As summarized in this new NYT article, researchers used some fancy statistical program (this included scoring words known to be heavily used and thus do not change much language-to-language or through time, i.e. "mother") to determine that point to be Anatolia. Score one more for talkative farmers! What is really cool about this project is that they used an approach originally developed to track the origin of viruses!!!! It makes perfect sense right? Viruses evolve and spread all over the globe just like languages. And with each divergence, the new lineage changes a little bit whether it is a nucleotide base pair in a gene or a letter in a word! And so the lineage rolls on and on and becomes ever more removed from its parent over time. It's easy to see how with some savvy statistics you could easily build up a family history of sorts.

Mother was right, everything does back to math. Math can explain the world if you know what to do with the numbers :)

Uzungöl lake near the northern coast of Turkey lining the Black Sea. These researchers do not think the Indo-European origin is from here even though it looks like a lovely place to call home.

* Indo-European languages: English, German, French, Bengali, Russian, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Spanish, ... there are over 400! Somewhere in the 16th century when there was enough travel taking place between the two, people started noticing uncanny similarities between European and Indian languages - thus was born Indo-European linguistics! The elder language from whence all other Indo-European languages come from is called Proto-Indo-European, abbreviated PIE. When I started reading about the topic I kept seeing PIE everywhere and it was initially very confusing.