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Comment by m_mueller | Hacker News Reader

You're aware that both European languages and Sanskrit have a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European? That's how you find identical wordstems like "Pa" for father in both (if I remember the example correctly). Something as basic as soup would be easy to imagine going back to PIE no?

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of course but PIE is an imagined language with an imaginary date of 2500 BC

lack of any attestation kills all PIE claims

whereas sanskrit is a solidly real language with a lot of evidence that it dates back to 4th millennium BC or even much further back for the rg veda

evidence that is vociferously ignored or censored in the west for various reasons

so the tactic of making sanskrit a daughter language of PIE is not accepted

So if you don’t accept PIE, what‘s the model you accept? Did Indian and European peoples migrate out of Africa separately according to your model? Using languages to analyze this is indeed a crude tool, but we have something better now: DNA evidence. And so far I at least never heard of DNA being used to disproof the Indo-European relationship, as opposed to some other hypothetical proto-people like Finno-Ugric-Mongolian-Korean-Japanese, whathever the name for that was.

You seem to be a bit emotionally attached to this? I for one like imagining that such a vast and diverse bunch of peoples may go back to just a couple of families crossing deserts, jungles and plains together.

there is no dna that encodes for language

how europeans got their language is not our problem

neither the yamnaya r1b z2103 nor sintashta r1a z2125 amounted to much in world history and the sintashtans were just scythians or what we called shakas

these geneticists are just looking for keys under the streetlight ignoring actual evidence

rest of the dna debate is massively hyped propaganda and search for relevance and funding

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