Finding Tangled Roots of Indo European Languages
找尋印歐語言複雜的根源
By Nicholas Wade

The peoples of India, Iran and Europe speak tongues descended from an ancient language known as proto-Indo-European. Many origins have been proposed for the birthplace of the Indo-European languages, but only two are now under discussion, one of which assumes they were spread by the sword, the other by the plow.
印度、伊朗和歐洲各民族所操的方言，來自一種稱為原始印歐語的古老語言。它的發源地有許多理論，但目前只有兩個仍在討論之列，一說它是以劍傳播，一說它是以犁散播。

From the reconstructed vocabulary, the speakers of proto-Indo-European seem to have been pastoralists, familiar with sheep and wheeled vehicles. Archaeologists find that wheeled vehicles emerged around 4000 B.C., suggesting the proto-Indo-European speakers began to flourish 6,500 years ago on the steppe grasslands above the Black and Caspian Seas. This steppe theory holds that the proto-Indo-European speakers then spread their language by conquest or the appeal of their economy to Europe, India and western China.
從重建的詞彙觀察，操原始印歐語者似乎是熟悉羊群和有輪車輛的牧民。考古學家發現輪式車輛約莫出現於西元前4000年，意謂操原始印歐語的民族約6500年前開始在黑海和裏海北邊的大草原上繁衍發展。這項大草原理論認為，這些操原始印歐語的民族其後透過征服或是經濟影響力，把語言擴展到歐洲、印度和中國西部。

But Colin Renfrew, a Cambridge archaeologist, proposed in 1987 that the languages had been spread by farmers. Under this scenario, the homeland of proto-Indo-European was in Anatolia, now Turkey, and its speakers started migrating some 8,000 to 9,500 years ago.
但劍橋大學考古學家科林．倫佛魯1987年提出另一種看法，指出原始印歐語是由農民散播。依此說原始印歐語的家鄉是安那托利亞，即現今的土耳其，而操此語者8000到9500年前開始遷移。

Linguists objected that proto-Indo-European could not have fragmented so early because the wheel wasn’t invented 8,000 years ago, yet many Indo-European languages have related words for wheel. Dr. Renfrew said these languages could all have borrowed the word for wheel along with the invention.
語言學家駁斥這項理論，認為原始印歐語不可能開枝散葉這麼早，因為8000年前車輪還未發明，但許多印歐語卻與車輪相關。倫佛魯則認為所有這些語言可能是在車輪發明時，借用這個字作為車輪之用。

The standoff between the steppe and Anatolian theories persisted until 2003 when New Zealand biologists, Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland, came up with a method of constructing datable trees of language descent. Historical linguists had drawn up trees of how proto-Indo-European had split into its daughter languages, based on sets of related words known as cognates. The word for water is “wasser” in German, “vatten” in Swedish and “nero” in modern Greek. The similar English, German and Swedish words are said to be cognates, derived from an inferred proto-Indo-European word “wodr,” but the “nero” of modern Greek is not.
大草原和安那托利亞理論始終相持不下，直到2003年紐西蘭奧克蘭大學生物學家拉塞爾·格雷和昆丁·亞特金森找到建構語言家族樹確切年代的方法。歷史語言學家以一系列所謂同源的關聯詞，繪製出原始印歐語如何分化出同種語言的家族樹。英文的「水」字，德文是「wasser」，瑞典文是「vatten」，現代希臘文是「nero」。 相似的英文、德文、瑞典文是同源詞，據推斷衍生自原始印歐語的單字「wodr」，但是現代希臘的「nero」不是。

Using statistical methods developed by biologists for tracking the evolution of genes and proteins, the pair calculated that proto-Indo-European was spoken 7,800 to 9,800 years ago. In 2012 Dr. Gray and Dr. Atkinson, with Remco Bouckaert and colleagues, applied a statistical model developed to track the spread of viruses and found “decisive support for an Anatolian origin.”
利用生物學家所發展，用來追蹤基因和蛋白質進化的統計方法，格雷和亞特金森計算出原始印歐語使用於7800到9800年前。2012年，格雷、亞特金森、倫可．布科特和其他同事，應用一個追蹤病毒散播的統計模型，發現「支持安那托利亞起源的決定性證據」。

But two findings reported in February have tilted toward the steppes. Andrew Garrett, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, and Will Chang, a linguist, and colleagues noticed that in the 2012 article, in eight cases where an ancient language is the widely assumed ancestor of a modern one, the modern language is shown as being descended from a hypothetical cousin of the ancient language.
不過，2月披露的另兩個發現卻傾向大草原理論。柏克萊加大的安德魯·賈瑞特和語言學家威爾·張以及一些同事指出，在前述2012年的報告中，某個古代語言廣被認為是某個現代語言的血統來源，卻發現這個現代語言實則來自這個古代語言的假想同種語言，他們發現8個這種例子。

When they forced the Bouckaert tree to adopt the accepted language ancestries, the tree shrank in age and its root stepped down to 6,500 years old, in agreement with the steppe hypothesis.
當他們迫使布科特的語言樹採納公認的語言血統時，語言樹的年齡萎縮，它的起源也下降到6500年，和大草原假設不謀而合。

A second boost for the steppe theory emerged from a study of ancient DNA in Europe, based on analysis of 69 people who lived 3,000 to 8,000 years ago. Patterns in the DNA bear evidence of a migration into Germany some 4,500 years ago of people from the Yamnaya culture of the steppes, the first to develop a pastoral economy based on wagons, sheep and horses. Three-quarters of the ancient people sampled in Germany bear Yamnaya-type DNA, says a team led by Wolfgang Haak of the University of Adelaide, Australia, and David Reich of Harvard Medical School, who reported on bioRxiv.
大草原理論的第二個支撐來自對歐洲古代DNA的一項研究，研究以分析3000至8000年前的69人為基礎。這些人的DNA模式證明，他們於4500年前移入德國，且這些人來自大草原的顏納雅文化，也是第一個以武器、羊群、馬匹發展出田園經濟的民族。澳洲阿德雷德大學 的沃夫根·哈克與哈佛醫學院的大衛·萊克領導的團隊表示，採集自德國古代人的樣本顯示，四分之三的人擁有顏納雅型基因。兩人將發現發表於免費線上檔案網站bioRxiv。

But the case is not yet closed. Dr. Renfrew, the author of the Anatolian hypothesis, considers it a “strong possibility” that Indo-European could have spread first from Anatolia to the steppes and from there to Europe.
不過，爭論還沒結束。提出安那托利亞假說的倫佛魯認為，印歐語言「很可能」最早是由安那托利亞傳至大草原，再從那裡傳向歐洲。

And the biologists who draw up statistically probable language trees do not believe the Garrett team is justified in making the trees conform to ancestry constraints. “The seemingly innocent assumptions which Garrett introduces,” Dr. Renfrew said, “turn out not to be so uncomplicated.”
利用統計方法建構出可能的語言家族樹的生物學家，並不認為賈瑞特團隊提出的，語言家族樹與血統限制相符的論點言之成理。倫佛魯說：「賈瑞特引進這個看似無辜的假設，結果其實並不那麼簡單。」

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/24/science/new-light-on-the-roots-of-english.html

2015-03-10聯合報/G9版/UNITED DAILY NEWS 王麗娟譯 原文參見紐時週報十版上