Monday, June 24, 2019

let's talk Indo-European

Open Archive Day

As I mentioned in my science news last month, there was a press release from Bristol University claiming that the Voynich manuscript has been decoded and turned out to be in "proto-Romance". I got really excited about it but the press reports quickly found a large number of experts who doubted the claim and even ridiculed it. Moreover, there have been lots of previous claims made for the same document. The PR has since then disappeared from EurekAlert. So, sadly, no proto-Romance document, but there is a surprising amount of information accumulating about the proto-Indo-European language and the genetics and culture of the people who spoke it, as I discovered a year ago.

My feature on the science around the evolution of Indo-European languages is now in the open archives:

The Indo-European ancestors' tale



Scholars studying ancient Indian documents written in Sanskrit noticed similarities with Ancient European languages. (Image: Wellcome Collection gallery (2018-04-02): https://wellcomecollection.org/works/vetkhzjj by a CC-BY-4.0 licence.)

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