Tangled Roots of English & 2 Class Definitions Flashcards

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1
Q

Iranian & European languages are largely descended from an ancient language known as

A

proto-Indo-European

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2
Q

Two theories concerning how languages were spread: one by the …., the other by the …

A

sword; plow

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3
Q

historical linguists can …. many words of proto-Indo-European from their .. ..

A

reconstruct; descendants

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4
Q

reconstructed vocab led to notion that proto-Indo-European speakers were …., familiar with … and ….

A

pastoralists; sheep; wheeled vehicles

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5
Q

pastoralists: a … or …

A

sheep; cattle farmer

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6
Q

wheeled vehicles emerged around …., which suggests that proto-Indo-European speakers began to flourish … years ago on the …. grasslands above the … and … seas

A

4000 B.C.; 6500; steppe; Black; Caspian

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7
Q

Steppe theory stipulates that the proto-indo-european speakers spread their language to …, … and …. through either … or the appeal of their ….

A

Europe; India; western China; conquest; pastoral economy

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8
Q

Colin Renfrew: Cambridge … who proposed in 1987 that languages were spread by the … farmers who brought …. to Europe

A

archaeologist; Neolithic; agriculture

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9
Q

based on Renfrew’s proposition, the homeland of proto-Indo-European was in …., now …, and its speakers started migrating some … to … years ago

A

Anatolia; Turkey; 8000; 9500

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10
Q

Renfrew’s theory was important because … is an accepted mechanism of …, and the migration of Neolithic farmers in Europe is ….

A

expansion of farming; language spread; well documented archaeologically

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11
Q

linguists objected to Renfrew’s theory due to the fact that the wheel wasn’t invented so long ago, but Renfrew argued that after their dispersal, these languages could all have …. along with the ….itself

A

borrowed the word for wheel; invention

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12
Q

Renfrew’s theory is known as the … theory

A

Anatolian

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13
Q

Two New Zealand biologists, … and … of University of Auckland, devised a new method of constructing … trees of ….

A

Russell Gray; Quentin Atkinson; datable; language descent

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14
Q

historical linguists had drawn up trees of how proto-indo-european had split into its … based on sets of … known as …

A

daughter languages; similar words; cognates

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15
Q

linguists tried and failed to date trees by comparing …. languages shared

A

how many cognates

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16
Q

Gray and Atkinson realized that statistical methods developed by .. for tracking the evolution of … and … addressed man o the problems that exist in reconstructing trees of ….

A

biologists; genes; proteins; language descent

17
Q

gray and atkinson represented each indo-european language as a string of … and …, depending on whether it shared … for a list of words known to …

A

1s; 0s; cognates; resist change

18
Q

after the representations of the languages, gray and atkinson computed the likeliest of the many possible trees that would give rise to the ….. Their preferred tree’s lower branches could be dated from ….. As such, they were able to date the root

A

observed data; historical events;

19
Q

according to gray and atkinson, proto-indo-european was spoken …. to … years ago

A

7800; 9800

20
Q

gray and atkinson’s study supported the … theory

A

anatolian

21
Q

gray and atkinson, with remco bouckaert and others, applied to the dispersal of proto-indo-european a statistical model developed to track the geographical spread of …. which showed support for an … origin

A

viruses; anatolian

22
Q

gray and atkinson’s … approach was significant

A

computational

23
Q

Linguist … from U. of California, worked with …, linguist skilled in computational stuff noticed that in bouckaert’s article, their were 8 cases where an ancient language was the widely assumed ancestor of a modern language, but the modern language would be shown as being descended from a …. of the …

A

Andrew Garrett; Will Chang; hypothetical cousin; ancient language

24
Q

garrett and chang figured it would be more realistic for tree to adopt …. ancestries, despite the fact that it overlooked ….

A

generally accepted language; probability calculations

25
Q

when garrett and chang changed the tree to use generally accepted language ancestries, the tree shrank in … and its root stepped down to …. years old, in agreement with the …. hypothesis

A

age; 6500; steppe

26
Q

the largest study of ancient DNA in Europe (analyzed … people who lived … to … years ago) revealed patterns that provided evidence of a … into Germany some … years ago of people from the … culture of the …, who were the first to develop a ….

A

69; 3000; 8000; migration; 4500; Yamnaya; steppes; pastoral economy

27
Q

(DNA study) if so much of the population was replaced, the newcomers’ language probably …, supplementing theory that there was an expansion of indo-european speakers due to the …

A

prevailed steppes

28
Q

Don Ringe, historical linguist of UPenn states that the 3 oldest branchings off the Indo-European tree are: 1) languages such as …once spoken in …; 2) …, language group of … 3) the .,.. and … language groups of …

A

Hittite; Anatolia; Tocharian; western China; Italic; Celtic; Europe

29
Q

Ringe and David Anthony (archaeologist) stated that archaeological evidence attests migrations out of the …. in these … in the …

A

steppe; directions; right order

30
Q

proto-indo-european borrowed words from .., ancestor of languages such as …, … and .., and from languages of the … a location in the … would make such borrowings….

A

proto-Uralic; hungarian; finnish; estonian; caucasus; steppes; geographically plausible

31
Q

Dr. Renfrew, Anatolian theory offer, says that there is a strong possibilty that migration from the steppes to Europe recorded in ancient DNA may be a

A

secondary phenomenon

32
Q

secondary phenomenon in this situation means that indo-european could have spread first from … to the … and from there to …

A

anatolia; steppes; europe

33
Q

biologists who draw up statistically probable language trees disagree with Garrett and Chang’s methodology, claiming that it is … and ….

A

overzealous; unsupported

34
Q

written languages tend to be …

A

fossilized

35
Q

close reading: to make … what is …. in a piece of lit

A

explicit; implicit

36
Q

micro-fiction: a … written in fewer than … words

A

short-story; 300