Vikings, Vikings, Vikings! “eastern” ancestry in the whole Baltic Iron Age

Open access Population genomics of the Viking world, by Margaryan et al. bioRxiv (2019), with a huge new sampling from the Viking Age.

#EDIT (16 SEP 2020): The paper has been published in Nature.

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine, modified for clarity):

To understand the genetic structure and influence of the Viking expansion, we sequenced the genomes of 442 ancient humans from across Europe and Greenland ranging from the Bronze Age (c. 2400 BC) to the early Modern period (c. 1600 CE), with particular emphasis on the Viking Age. We find that the period preceding the Viking Age was

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Resurge of local populations in the final Corded Ware culture period from Poland

Open access A genomic Neolithic time transect of hunter-farmer admixture in central Poland, by Fernandes et al. Scientific Reports (2018).

Interesting excerpts (emphasis mine, stylistic changes):

Most mtDNA lineages found are characteristic of the early Neolithic farmers in south-eastern and central Europe of the Starčevo-Kőrös-Criş and LBK cultures. Haplogroups N1a, T2, J, K, and V, which are found in the Neolithic BKG, TRB, GAC and Early Bronze Age samples, are part of the mitochondrial ‘Neolithic package’ (which also includes haplogroups HV, V, and W) that was introduced to Europe with farmers migrating from Anatolia at the onset of the

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Renewed German reparation demands by Poland mean also renewed territorial disputes

Maybe it is my impression, and this has been going on for a long time now, but in the past few months I have received many notifications from German newspapers about increasing demands by the Polish Government for war reparations (see today, five days ago, and see some editorials on the subject by the Berliner Zeitung and Die Welt).

This might seem a quick and easy way of obtaining money for the Polish administration; after all, Greece has been trying to do that since their economic crisis, not the least because of Germany’s strong support of austerity … Read the rest “Renewed German reparation demands by Poland mean also renewed territorial disputes”

WordPress Translation Plugin – now using Google Translation from and into Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.

The latest improvements added to the Indoeuropean Translator Widget have been included in the simpler WordPress Translation Plugin available in this personal blog.

It now includes links to automatic translations from and into all language pairs offered by Google Translation Engine, apart from other language pairs (from individual languages, like English or Spanish) into other online machine translators, viz Tranexp or Translendium.

Available language pairs now include English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan*, Czech, Chinese (traditional/simplified), Welsh*, Danish, German, Greek, Spanish, Persian*, French, Hindi, Croatian, Icelandic*, Italian, Hebrew*, Latin*, Korean, Hungarian*, Dutch, Japanese, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese*), Romanian, Russian, … Read the rest “WordPress Translation Plugin – now using Google Translation from and into Swedish, Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hindi, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc.”

WordPress Translation Plugin: ‘Indoeuropean Translator Widget’ – now also Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, …

The latest upgrades are only available in the simpler WordPress Translation Widget Plugin.

You can download it from the official WordPress Plugin Repository site. New upgrades will automatically appear on your WordPress blog dashboard.

As always, this widget plugin, when activated from the Design tab of your WordPress blog dashboard, will put links – with the tag rel="nofollow", so that search engines don’t follow them – to automatic translations of that website by mainly Google Translation Engine language pairs, to and from (at least) all of these ones into each other, all in all 24×23 language pairs [more … Read the rest “WordPress Translation Plugin: ‘Indoeuropean Translator Widget’ – now also Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Polish, Greek, Russian, Polish, Romanian, Finnish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, …”

How ‘difficult’ (using Esperantist terms) is an inflected language like Proto-Indo-European for Europeans?

For native speakers of most modern Romance languages (apart from some reminiscence of the neuter case), Nordic (Germanic) languages, English, Dutch, or Bulgarian, it is usually considered “difficult” to learn an inflected language like Latin, German or Russian: cases are a priori felt as too strange, too “archaic”, too ‘foreign’ to the own system of expressing ideas. However, for a common German, Baltic, Slavic, Greek speaker, or for non-IE speakers of Basque or Uralic languages (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian), cases are the only way to express common concepts and ideas, and it was also the common way of expression for speakers … Read the rest “How ‘difficult’ (using Esperantist terms) is an inflected language like Proto-Indo-European for Europeans?”