The Promise of Historical Linguistics and the Conundrum of Indo-European Origins - Martin W. Lewis

Talk by Martin W. Lewis of GeoCurrents.info on October 27, 2013 at the Oakmont Sunday Symposium.
Original audio recording can be found at www.oaksunsym.o...
"Historical linguistics, along with archeology and genetics, provide one of the main windows into the deeper reaches of the human past. This allows us to partially reconstruct the historical processes and geographical patterns found in times and places without written records. The most important-and most abused-issue in historical linguistics is the origins and spread of Indo-European, by far the world's largest language family. From Nazi dreams of Aryan demigods to radical feminist visions of blood-drenched Kurgan warriors, the original Indo-European speakers have been forced into a variety of unsupportable, ideologically-derived positions. Dr. Martin Lewis, a senior lecturer in the Department of History at Stanford University, discusses the archeological and linguistics approaches that allow us to understand the first "Indo-Europeans" for what they really were."