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Thank you for the kind words!

If you mean 'oldest' as in broke away from proto-indo-european earliest, then no, that award would go to the Anatolian branch followed by Tocharian. If you mean 'has the most conservative features' then some people say Lithuanian, Icelandic or Greek look the 'oldest'. But using terms like 'oldest' or 'youngest' is sort of incorrect, all languages have the same age - just stability and rates of change are not constant. If the Anatolian branch for example left the proto indo-european dialect continuum very early on. We could expect to see that it would maintain some very conservative features of PIE alongside perhaps showing more innovations than say another language branch simply because it has had more time to evolve independant of the PIE dialect zone. It's a simplification but I hope it makes sense.

Great! Where can I check it out?

That's my basic understanding of the situation yes, although I'm no expert in the field of genetics.

Thank you! I tried my best with this video. Fantastic language and Amazing people!

@@LearnHittite I really appreciate it thank you so much and welcome to Agadir for anytime ❤️🙏

Colarusso argued that the word 'sun' was in fact a loan from Kartvelian and associated with a Maikp sun cult so there's that. I, too, find the Hattic / Hurro-Urartean question to be one worth investigating... whether we will actually find order as you say, 'in the Caucasian linguistic labyrinth', frankly I am doubtful but very interested to hear what developments will come out next!

@@LearnHittite - If real super-family, I'm all for calling it "Nartic" (on the Narts saga) because proto-proto-West-Caucasic-proto-Indo-European gets a bit unwieldy. 🤣

I'm completely in support of 'Nartic'!

Thank you for your very supportive words, and you hit the nail on the head regarding the goal of these videos - to bring interesting linguistic research to CZcams in an accessible form 👍

Thanks for the heads up, I'm going to check out that article right away!

You can't call those "Europeans" but, if anything, West Asians (usually "Caucasoids"). The Paleoeuropeans are either very diluted on other layers from West Asia or fully extinct. Europe is almost completely a branch of West Asia ("Middle East"), not the other way around.

@@LuisAldamiz you thing this.bur europeans are autocthonus in their land.how mongol how africans.everyone in their lands.west asian os bullshit. The most of west asian are europian until Afghanistan Tajikistan.the most of iranian.but you dont now the story

The probable origin of Semitic (which is generally accepted to be part of Afroasiatic, otherwise an African language family) should be as follows: 1. Migration from Egypt (Natufian, specifically the semi-desert specialist branch, the Harifian) 2. Continuity in PPNA/B as distinct desert-specialist branch in the Negev area, possible expansion to West Arabia all the way to Yemen (and later to parts of The Horn of Africa). 3. Spread to the wider semidesert south of the Fertile Crescent (Circum-Arabian Pastoralist Complex or CAPC). 4. Conquest of the Levant and Central Mesopotamia c. 4000 BCE, replacing other older languages/ethnicities. The rest is, as they say, history. My personal take is that Nubian languages were more important in the Levant (and maybe in parts of Egypt even) before the Afroasiatics became hegemonic. This is because I (rather shockingly) found strong vocabulary connections between Basque and Nubian languages when doing a routine mass lexical comparison "just beacuase" and that can only make sense if Nubian or proto-Nubian was spoken as main language of the Levant Neolithic at some point. Some day I have to take a look at the Semitic/Afroasiatic issue, haven't yet.

I'd be interested to see some of your Nubian / Basque comparisions.

@@LearnHittite - TY for your interest. Posting here the relevant link (links usually give me problems in YT comments, hope it gets through): > forwhattheywereweare.blogspot.com/2015/09/vasco-nubian.html From it you can access the Swadesh list comparison (for Nubian languages I used materials from Satrostin Jr., whom I believe is a respectable linguist, as there is no such list available in Wikitionary).

Got it, cheers. Yes, Starostin Jr is a very talented linguist. He's helped me before with some research I did on time depth in Khoe.

@@LearnHittite PS- Please notice that the work is from almost 10 years ago (it took me almost a whole year to get through the shock or self-disbelief and dare to write on it) and that some details of the explainatory hypothesis may need to be updated: 1. In those days I (and everyone else AFAIK) was still unaware of the Southern and Western Anatolian roots of mainline European Neolithic (EEF in genetic papers, proto-Vasconics for me and many others), so I described it as "coastal migration", which we now know it's not the whole or even the main story in the Anatolian leg of the Vasconic journey, which actually began in Southern Asia Minor and not in the Levant (but clearly influenced by Levant Neolithic anyhow). 2. The "Western Vasconic" of Dolmenic Megalithic cultural speciality may have or not been a thing but now I'm pretty sure that what we can call "proto-Basque" or "proto-Vasco-Iberian" is rather a Bell Beaker thing (because of archaeogenetics showing a major demographic change in that time in all Western Europe). In any case I differentiate Vasconic-1, of Sardinian-like genetics and Vasconic-2 ("proto-Basque"), which has Basque (and Irish) like genetics, dominated on the Y-DNA by R1b-S116 and spread in the late Chalcolithic or (in Iberia maybe) in the early Bronze Age at the expense of previously dominant Vasconic-1, which somehow collapsed west of the Alps (maybe because Indoeuropeans brought the bubonic plague with their Corded Ware invasion of Central-North Europe). 3. In those days I felt that the Nubian family should have migrated from Africa to the Levant. This is loosely backed by African, Egyptian or Sudanese derived, archaeology and archeogenetics, also readable in terms of Afroasiatic or proto-Semitic expansion (this however I associate rather with Harifian than Natufian proper). However later I began considering that maybe Nubian as such could also have expanded from the Levant to Africa (as back-migration if you wish). This is largely because Sudan has very intriguing genetics, especially in terms of Y-DNA, that seem to stem from West Asia: not just lots of R1b (some of which is surely V88, which is however not just African but also important in Sardinia and mainland Italy, overall R1b must have originated in West Asia anyhow, probably towards the West of it and IMO so did R1b-V88) but also of I, which is otherwise considered a Paleoeuropean haplogroup. This last is the weirdest one because it shows up in the Guanche (pre-colonial Canarian) mummies (along with R1b again but not "Indoeuropean" R1a, which only shows up after the Spanish conquest) but not at all in North Africa. It could represent a spillover of Cardium Pottery Neolithic (which definitely influenced NW Africa and is also clearly associated to I2, especially the "Sardinian-Pyrenean" variant) but how it got to Sudan is anyone's guess (it should have existed among early Berbers but why not anymore?, and even then...) So maybe there was some sort of founder effect involving West Asian Neolithic but a lot more research is needed, which seems unlikely to happen now as Sudan has again fallen to endless civil war. And that's it I think, except for a typo in the previous comment: "Starostin" and not "Satrostin". 😅

If I ever miss any just drop a comment and I'll add it to the video description or a pinned comment.

Sounds more like the Caspian Sea or even the wider, somewhat distant, concept of the Indian Ocean. Anatolian IE probably follows the line Maykop (NW Caucasus) > Kura-Araxes (Upper Mesopotamia) > historical Luwians, Hittites and such. I don't see them in the Balcans ever.

@@LuisAldamiz Anthony suggests the Suvorovo Culture.

@@marjae2767 - For the Anatolian Indoeuropeans? Yet another reason to strongly dislike Anthony. I'm rather Gimbutist almost senso stricto (updated but not by Anthony, whose theories I rather dislike). AFAIK that culture is just a leftover of Sredny-Stog, which is not even a "culture" but rather a "complex" of admixed Indoeuropean and Dniepr-Don (SHG, native hunter-farmer culture of much of Ukraine and the Don basin), a transitional thing, which may be related to Ezero culture (Bulgaria) and thus to the latter historical Thracians. I mention this because, unlike other early Indoeuropean/Kurgan cultures, Ezero practiced burials in extended position (not foetal) and with ochre, a Paleoeuropean tradition that persisted in Dniepr-Don, hence I withhold my judgement about Thracians being "truly Indoeuropean" even, although most people claim so (they must be related anyhow, especially to Dacians, who descend apparently from West Yamna, but there can be also some other complexity that is hard to understand). In any case there's no evidence for any Indoeuropean migration from the Balcans to Asia Minor (neither archaeological nor genetic) before the Phrygians, excepted the Mycenaean Greeks in some islands and the key fortress of Miletus/Milawanda. The Inodeuropean Anatolians are clearly documented as expanding westwards in the Hittite era and also there's a lot of indications for Western Anatolia being largely if not fully pre-Indoeuropean (Tyrsenian surely) before thise Hittite-related expansion of the likes of Kupanta Kurunta. Even then lands first conquered by the Hittites around Hattussa were not Indoeuropean but Hattic (arguably of NW Caucasian affinity), hence the name, as they were the Neshili rulers of the Hatti country, whose language they also used officially. Now, I'm unsure about how complex the Kura-Araxes likely stepping stone of the Anatolian Indoeuropeans was: were the Hurrians also involved in that migration-conquest or were they native living there beforehand? I don't have an answer but the Khvalynsk > Maykop > Kura-Araxes > early historical Anatolian IEs is coherent in terms archaeological and also in terms of Anatolian being the first branch to diverge from PIE (all the rest seem to derive from Yamna one way or another, even Tocharian) but the Anatolian branch is almost certainly from Maykop instead.

I probably will. I think I'll end up covering all proposed relationships to PIE at some point... I've developed somewhat of an addiction to researching them 😳

Interesting, I'd be curious to see what the other correspondences were.

Have you seen the Lazaridis preprint? I'm curious if you have any thoughts on it.

So proto-pontic/caucasian substrate hypothesis is plausible in terms of the genetics then in your opinion?

Yes but I'd go for Iran-Neolithic rather than CHG: they're very similar but CHG has a lot of "Basal Eurasian" that Iran-Neolithic and early Indoeuropeans lack. Also it seems it was farmers/herders and not hunter-gatherers who conquered the North Caucasus and Lower Volga area where the PIE ethnicity coalesced (Khvalynsk culture, later East Yamna).

@@LuisAldamiz So female farmers conquered the Ehg hunter-gatherers and formed the patriarchal nomadic PIE culture?

@@Ario-yt8ou - I didn't say so. Why would you think it was specificially "female farmers" and not male ones or generally populations (both genders) migrating north in search of new lands? My overall impression anyhow would be that Vasconic farmers (EEF) were more female-centric if anything in terms "ideological" (religious or cultural), while the various "Zagrosian" nations, not just the proto-PIEs but also the proto-Tyrsenians and proto-Sumerians, were probably more male-centric. A major exception may be the proto-Elamo-Dravidians of Southern Iran, unsure about pre-Semict peoples of Levant Neolithic. But in any case the early Neolithic migrations do not seem gender-biased but whole peoples (men and women) migrating and coquering/displacing (some times entering complex relations of long term admixture maybe) less numerous hunter-gatherers. The proto-Tyrsenian (or Pelasgo-Tyrsenian) expansion of c. 5000 BCE into Anatolia and parts of the Balcans (from the Halafian culture of Upper Mesopotamia) was probably the first strongly warrying (and thus maybe male-biased or tending to patriarchal, as some cultural indications suggest) expansion I can detect in West Eurasia. The Semitic and Indoeuropean expansions only happened at least 1000 years later.

Nice suggestion!

well it's not ONE vowel

Are you refering to the 'Foreign elements in the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary: a comparative loanword study'? because it was his Master's thesis and it won a gold medal from UCPH.

Sanskrit is not PIE. It's literally millennia too young to be PIE. If Sanskrit was PIE, you'd have to explain the kentum/satem split by doing mad phonological back flips if nothing else. Man, Hindu nationalism is a weird drug. Either everything can be traced back to India or even the slightest association of languages west of the Indus valley is treated like some kind of grave insult.

Also, let's suppose for a moment that the centum languages "left first": that very assumption means that Sanskrit isn't PIE, but a descendent of it that went through radical phonological change. And oddly the kind of phonological change that would come from contact with the Dravidian languages. So, to have PIE originate in the Indian subcontinent, PIE speakers would've had to studiously avoid contact with their neighbours to the south until some of the migrated out of India, and then discover that there were people living right next to them. You can see how deeply implausible that is. Especially when phonology tends to be one of the most dynamic aspects of a language. Also, it leaves out all the evidence we have from the Anatolian languages, which were deeply conservative and explain phonological developments. That pushes the PIE urheimat westwards. And the Anatolian languages also appear to have been the first to split off from the rest. Now, reasonable people can differ on where is the most plausible place, but it's at least somewhere around the Black Sea. Whether it's that the non-Anatolian speakers migrated north and spread out or the Anatolian speakers went south (shared vocabulary, IIRC, tends to indicate the latter) is another question. But what isn't a question is whether PIE originated east of the Caspian Sea.

@@talideon Wow. Thank you for this. You clearly have not read, or can not read what I wrote, or your communist boss told you to try to say something intelligent? I was actually quite specific when I said that Sanskrit has quite distinct features and is the only one of the whole language group that fits most of the parameters of "PIE". (PIE is just a hypothesis and has no evidence unlike Sanskrit that has thousands of years of evidence)

​@@talideon Please do explain the kentum/satem split question you need to be explained btw?

@@KeinsingtonCiscoPIE has comparison evidence.

Not yet, but I've just done one on Blevins' work on Basque and PIE.

lol

I would agree with you

probably not yeah :( so much has been put into PIE and we can only sorta approximate what sounds it even had. for relative unknowns, that’s even rougher:/

I think we'll get there in the end, but it'll take a long time.

No, Proto-Language is red herring.

See Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time by Johanna Nichols, a masterpiece for insight into this question.

This is very true

Colarusso did hold that NWC and NEC are related, just a bit less closely than NWC is to IE. In other words, Pontic is a branch of 'Indo-Caucasian'.

Prove it. I'm not so sure of that connection, although there must be of course areal interaction (sprachbund). Mythologically the Narts are the good guys for Iranics (Ossetians) and NW Caucasians but the bad guys for the NE Caucasians, which I find a very interesting bit of legendary "proto-history".

@@LuisAldamiz What is your source that the NE Causasian folklore displays Narts as the bad guys? I thought I had read Chechen folklore with tales of Sosruko/Soslan being a hero. But that was such a long time ago, I would love to read the 'bad guys' version.

Wow! I'm looking forward to it

@@LearnHittite thanks! Although it'll be the amateur's attempt 😄

@@ludomianwhere can we find this!

@@valentinaaugustina it's not out yet. and I'm not sure where I will publish it as an amateur😅

@@ludomian alright! but you should bc i’d love to read more

i do not agree with the mother thing, the majority of Hispano Americans descend from White Men pairing up with Indigenous Women, and the majority of them do not speak the language of their indigenous forebearers

In fact, usually the fathers: father toungue hypothesis.

I'm totally for that with the caveat that IMO the proto-PIE element is rather Iran-Neolithic type and thus from further south (probably historical Armenia or NE Anatolia) than strictly CHG (very similar but with much stronger "basal Eurasian" element). This could explain whatever Tyrsenian-PIE connections exist (proto-Tyrsenian would be from Upper Mesopotamia, bordering my presumed proto-PIE by the south and having also Iran-Neolithic genetics but with Y-DNA J2 as most clear genetic marker, absent in known ancient Indoeuropeans or other European peoples of old) and also the spooky Basque-PIE connections, which to me are just sprachbund and not phylogeny from that area of the "highlands" Neolithic (proto-Vasconic should be the language of earliest EEFs in Asia Minor and later the Aegean region). To me "Indo-Uralic" is not a true phylogenetic root but rather a signature of PIE being a creole language, probably mostly based on the migrant "Iran-Neolithic" farmers/herders but incorporating a lot of Volga Uralic substrate (and also maybe adstrate from Uralics living all the time just north of the PIE homeland, all the way to modern times). Proto-Uralic (incl. Nganassan as main Siberian descendant) should be much older, based on archaeology and genetics it represents the westwards expansion through Siberia of an East Asian population since c. 20,000 BP, reaching Europe maybe 12-10,000 BP, when ice was already retreating, and bringing the very concept of pottery with them all the way from China (where it was first invented, long before the Neolithic).

@@publicslum6495 - The context is somewhat different, notably a consolidated imperial structure and a religious "party" (brainwashing and repressive organization) and lots of effective racism (maybe not as extreme as in the Germanic sphere but still notorious). Whatever the case it's clear that there are LOTS of Native vocabulary in modern Spanish, especially in places like Mexico, and not just into Spanish but also into English and other European languages (avocado, atlatl, potato, tomato, maize, and a very long etcetera). The toponimy of countries like Mexico is largely pre-Spanish or pre-Indoeuropean, etc. To me it resembles much more like the lots of Vasconic vocabulary (vide for example Venneman but his is a limited exploration anyhow) that exist in all Western Indoeuropean languages from Germanic to Greek, from Latin to Celtic and even Slavic (never mind branches like Sardinian or Spanish, where the influence is huge) and that, oddly enough are "invisible" to most just because of ignorance and disinterest on Basque and overall Vasconic, which was the language family of mainline European Neolithic with Anatolian roots. If the Uralics (EHG) influenced PIE so much "from below" in terms genetic, they must have also influenced it in terms linguistic (substrate), never mind the almost perennial adstrate as steppe Indoeuropeans and Uralics were all the time neighbors, mostly each one on their preferred niche (steppe for the IEs, taiga for the Uralics).

@@publicslum6495 Spanish colonists battling the native languages and culture by assimilating their wives into a Hispanic culture is an imperial, orchestrated endeavor; while one tribe mixing with another wouldn't have had the same incentive for the husbands to suppress their wives native cultures.