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By the hoe, not the sword

I know I said I was going to talk about the body language of the Flemish, but after hours of field research, I have come to the conclusion that they don’t really have any. They don’t shake their hands like the Italians, nor do they pout like the French. If body language is any measure to go by, the Flemish are decidedly northern.

But perhaps you have a different view? Perhaps you’ve noticed something I haven’t? Perhaps the Flemish flap their ears when they’re happy or wiggle their toes when they’re not? If so, I’d be very happy to hear about it.

In de tussentijd, meanwhile, something completely unrelated but nevertheless very interesting has happened. Dutch, it turns out, began in what is now Turkey. That, at least, is the assertion of a study from New Zealand (whose name, as you know, comes from Nieuw Zeeland, after the region of Zeeland, or Sea Land, in the Netherlands). Th e study was published late last month in the prestigious journal Science. (Ok, I read it in the newspaper.)

Dutch is a member of the Indo-European language family. It’s a big and diverse family that includes most European languages – except for such mysteries as Basque, Finnish and Hungarian – as well as Persian, Hindi and many others.

You, like me, may have known that. But what I didn’t know is that for many years, there has been a big rivalry, a vendetta if you will, about the origin of the mother tongue – proto-Indo-European – between linguists and biologists. (I, too, wonder what that battle looks like.)

Linguists believe that the fi rst speakers were “chariot-driving pastoralists who burst out of their homeland on the steppes above the Black Sea about 4,000 years ago,” writes Nicholas Wade in the International Herald Tribune. Biologists, on the other hand, believe they were “peaceable farmers in Anatolia, now Turkey, about 9,000 years ago, who disseminated their language by the hoe, not the sword”.

I would say: Choose one, they both sound equally enchanting. But now, the author of the study claims, there is “decisive support for an Anatolian origin over a steppe origin”. Whether it will settle the vendetta remains to be seen. The linguists have already replied that they don’t believe it.

The only thing I can tell you is what I have been telling you over and over again: Dutch and English are cousins. I just know, without having to read Science.

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Philip Ebels
(September 12, 2024)