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Bridging Eurasia

Rasmus Gudmundsen Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Eurasia connected

The opening of the Steppe

• The rise of agriculture, east and west
• The Indo-European expansion (West)
• Transeurasian expansion (East)
• A bridge of languages

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Bridging a continent

• There is more than 4000 km from their posited homelands.
• Within 2000 years they had split the steppe

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

The Steppe – from wasteland to highway

• The linguistic void – and how horses changed that
• Inhospitable to permanent settlement, requires movement
• The Botai culture, Kazakhstan, early horsebreeders (Anthony 2007)
• Unknown substrate common to Tocharian and Indo-Iranian (Carling 2005)
• Indo-Europeans east of the Urals
• First traversed by the Tocharians (ca. 3000 BC)
• Conquered by Indo-Iranians (ca. 2100 BC)
• Turks and Mongols West of the Altai

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Becoming Transeurasian

• Transeurasian ousted Iranian from the Steppe
• Connected to Neolithic Boisman culture in the Southern Primorye

(4825‒2470 BC)

• Mongolic and Turkic receive western admixture with the Bronze age (cf.

Robbeets et al. forthc.)

• The dispersal of Boisman coincides with the Indo-European eastern

traversing of the Steppe, essentially founding the northern Silk Road.

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

New methods, new knowledge

• Comparative linguistics
• Relative chronologies
• Potential to preserve cultural aspects
• Lot of data, but very few fixed points
• Archaeobotanic and isotope analyses
• Spread of plants
• Change in sustenance strategies
• Can date and locate fixed points

Miller et al. 2016

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Agriculture as a vocabulary event

• A demonstrable revolution human prehistory
• Different crops in different places
• Comes with rich terminologies
• Many different strains (e.g. types of grain, regional innovations)

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Methodology

1. Build a database of linguistic data

• Semantic spheres: agriculture, horticulture
• Languages:
• Indo-European, primarily the eastern branches, i.e. Indo-Iranian & Tocharian
• Transeurasian
• Sino-Tibetan

2. Add archaeobotanical and isotope data

• Dating, location, strain

3. Describe the spread and posit hypotheses

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Different crops, different data

• Innovations spread at different rates
• On the following slides we will look at two early crops

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Case 1: ‘Barley’

• Different types
• Early western Eurasian crop (Badr et al. 2000)

Indo-European Turkic Tungusic Sino-Tibetan W-PIE *bhar- P-Iran. *arbusa- >> PTurk. *arba P-Iran. *karšaka >> OChin. *klas ‘grain, sow’ *murgi Mallory & Adams (1997) & Robbeets et al. (forthc.)

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Case 2: Millet

• First domesticated in NE China 6th mil. BC (Miller et al. 2016)
• Central crop for the Transeurasian family
• Different species, broomcorn (BC), barnyard (BY), and foxtail (F)

Indo-European Turkic Mongolic Tungusic Koreanic Japonic *konak (F) <- *ko- ‘to put’ >> *konag (F) *ügür (BC) *amun (BC) *pisi-ke (BC) ~ *pihi (BY) *jiya- (F) *ip-i <- *pi- ‘to eat’ P-Iran. *pan- Mallory & Adams (1997) & Robbeets et al. (forthc.)

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Exchanging barley and millet

• Internal transfers of millet between dispersing Transeurasian phylae.
• Millet late in Indo-European, but not from Transeurasian languages.
• Barley, on the other hand, shows clear influences west to east.

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Resources

• Indo-European:
• DIEAT (Guus Kroonen, CPH & Leiden)
• Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture (Mallory & Adams)
• Transeurasian:
• Robbeets et al. (forthc.)
• Tenishev (2001)

Rasmus G. Bjørn (MA) Foreign Elements in the Proto-Indo-European Vocabulary

Bibliography

Anthony (2007) The Horse, the Wheel and Language. Princeton. Bjørn (2017) Foreign elements in the PIE vocabulary [MA thesis/prize paper]. Copenhagen Badr et al. (2000) ”On the Origin and Domestication History of Barley (Hordeum vulgare)”. Molecular Biology and Evolution 17(4). Carling (2005) ”Proto-Tocharian, Common Tocharian, and Tocharian”. 16th UCLA IE Conf., 47-70. Mallory & Adams (1997) Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture. Chicago & London. Miller et al. (2016) “Millet Cultivation across Eurasia”. The Holocene 26: 1566-1575. Robbeets et al. (forthc.) Oxford Guide to the Traneurasian Languages. Oxford. Tenishev (2001) Sravnitelno-istoricheskaya Grammatika Turskix Yazykov, Leksika. Moscow.

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