Paleolinguistics brings more light on the earliest history of the traditional Eurasian pulse crops

Traditional pulse crops such as pea, lentil, field bean, bitter vetch, chickpea and common vetch originate from Middle East, Mediterranean and Central Asia^1^. They were a part of human diets in hunter-gatherers communities^2^ and are one of the most ancient cultivated crops^3,4^. Europe has always been rich in languages^5^, with individual families still preserving common vocabularies related to agriculture^6,7^. The evidence on the early pulse history witnessed by the attested roots in diverse Eurasian proto-languages remains insufficiently clarified and its potential for supporting archaeobotanical findings is still non-assessed. Here we show that the paleolinguistic research may contribute to archaeobotany in understanding the role traditional Eurasian pulse crops had in the everyday life of ancient Europeans. It was found that the Proto-Indo-European language^8,9^ had the largest number of roots directly related to pulses, such as *arnk(')- (a leguminous plant), *bhabh- (field bean), *erəgw[h]- (a kernel of leguminous plant; pea), *ghArs- (a leguminous plant), *kek-, *k'ik'- (pea) and *lent- (lentil)^10,11,12^, numerous words subsequently related to pulses^13,14^ and borrowings from one branch to another^15^, confirming their essential place in the nutrition of Proto-Indo-Europeans^16,17,18^. It was also determined that pea was the most important among Proto-Uralic people^19,20,21^, while pea and lentil were the most significant in the agriculture of Proto-Altaic people^22,23,24^. Pea and bean were most common among Caucasians^25,26^, Basques^27,28^ and their hypothetical common forefathers^29^ and bean and lentil among the Afro-Asiatic ancestors of modern Maltese^30^. Our results demonstrate that pulses were common among the ancestors of present European nations and that paleolinguistics and its lexicological and etymological analysis may be useful in better understanding the earliest days of traditional Eurasian crops. We believe our results could be a basis for advanced multidisciplinary approach to the pulse crop domestication, involving plant scientists, archaeobotanists and linguists, and for reconstructing even earlier periods of pulse history

Indo‑European ‘ego’, Slavic ja = Runic ek, and Celtic Ø

The paper gives a new account of the development of the first person singular pronoun in Indo-European languages, finding innovating areals (1) Anatolian *VK; (2) South-East Indo-European (Indo-Iranian, Armenian) *eg’‑H‑ém; (3) Greek, Latin, Venetic *eg’‑(ó)H; (4) North I-E (Albanian, Baltic, Slavic, Germanic, Thracian, Tocharian) *eg’

Europe: So Many Languages, So Many Cultures

The number of different languages in Europe by far exceeds the number of countries. All European countries have national languages, and in nearly all of them there are minority languages as well, whereas all major languages have dialects. National borders rarely coincide with linguistic borders, but the latter (including dialect borders) mark by their nature also more or less distinct cultural areas. This paper presents a survey of the different language families represented in Europe: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and the four Caucasian language families, each with their sub-branches and individual languages. Some information is given on characteristic structural phenomena and on the status and history of these languages or language families and on some of their extinct predecessors. The paper ends with a short discussion on the language policy and practices of the institutions of the European Union. Europe lacks a language with the status and power comparable to Indonesian in Indonesia. The policy is therefore based on equal status of all national languages and on respect for all languages, including national minority ones. The practice, however, is unavoidably practical: “the more languages, the more English”

From Proto-Indo-European to Slavic

A correct evaluation of the Slavic evidence for the reconstruction of the Indo- European proto-language requires an extensive knowledge of a considerable body of data. While the segmental features of the Slavic material are generally of corroborative value only, the prosodic evidence is crucial for the reconstruction of PIE. phonology. Due to the complicated nature of Slavic historical accentology, this has come to be realized quite recently.1 As a result, much of the earlier literature has become obsolete to the extent that it is based upon an interpretation which does not take the multifarious accentual developments into account. I shall give one example

Temporal Phylogenetic Networks and Logic Programming

The concept of a temporal phylogenetic network is a mathematical model of evolution of a family of natural languages. It takes into account the fact that languages can trade their characteristics with each other when linguistic communities are in contact, and also that a contact is only possible when the languages are spoken at the same time. We show how computational methods of answer set programming and constraint logic programming can be used to generate plausible conjectures about contacts between prehistoric linguistic communities, and illustrate our approach by applying it to the evolutionary history of Indo-European languages. To appear in Theory and Practice of Logic Programming (TPLP)

The spread of the Indo-Europeans

The publication of Mallory’s book (1989) has rendered much of what I had to say in the present contribution superfluous. The author presents a carefully argued and very well written account of a balanced view on almost every aspect of the problem. Against this background, I shall limit myself to a few points which have not received sufficient attention in the discussion. ..

From Serbo-Croatian to Indo-European

The history of Slavic accentuation is complex. As a result, the significance of the Slavic accentual evidence is not immediately obvious to the average Indo-Europeanist. In this contribution I intend to render the material more easily accessible to the non-specialist. I shall focus on the Serbo-Croatian dialectal area, where the Proto-Slavic accentual system is better preserved than elsewhere. The main point of reference will be the neo-Štokavian system which was codified in the 19th century as a basis for the standard languages

When Do the Leaves Fall and When Do We Reap? – Semantic Analysis of Folk Month Names in the Languages of Eastern Europe

The abundance of folk month names in different languages of Eastern Europe results in specific mental pictures in a speaker's mind. Translation usually fails to communicate the elaborate connotations implied, even in the case of closely related languages. The paper gives a comparative semantical analysis of folk month names in the Slavic languages, the Baltic languages, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Romanian and Albanian, identifying the common features, the differences and possible reasons for both. The aim of the paper is to provide data for both linguistic and ethnological mapping of Eastern Europe, as an area that had been under less influence from the Latin-dominated culture and had in that way better preserved some original, less uniform linguistic features