Apparently our haplogroup (family of Joseph Charles Mair [Pfaffenhofen, Austria] and Esther Frieda Louise Boyce Mair [Zweismmen, Switzerland]) is U8a1a.
As our ancestors ventured out of eastern Africa, they branched off in diverse groups that crossed and recrossed the globe over tens of thousands of years. Some of their migrations can be traced through haplogroups, families of lineages that descend from a common ancestor. Your maternal haplogroup can reveal the path followed by the women of your maternal line.
If you're wondering what brought this on, I think it's AI and LLMs, which are featured in the rest of the article, especially as they relate to oracle bones and traditional Chinese writing.
It will also help to understand the aim of the article if you know something about the nature of the journal in which it appears, for which see below.
Easier to assimilate and attractively prepared with striking illustrations:
Tom Almeroth-Williams, "The hermit’s best-seller: The only surviving original version of one of late medieval England’s most popular works of literature reveals its secrets", University of Cambridge (1/5/26).
Following upon our enthusiastic, productive discussions on the main East Asian word for "slave" (奴隷 J. ドレイ M. núlì) a few weeks ago and Chau Wu's drawing of parallels with the corresponding Greek word for a person of that status several days after that, I've become deeply interested in Greek δούλος ("slave"). (See the first three items in "Selected readings".)
As announced in the title of the first post on this subject, my aim is to understand where the Galatians originated and how / why they migrated to where they were when Apostle Paul wrote his epistle to them. Since I was apparently insufficiently clear about both of those purposes in part 1, in this follow-up post I will provide additional scholarly material. Inasmuch as the identification of the Gauls / Celts and the languages they spoke will be important for several posts about them that I will write in the coming weeks, today's post will necessarily be long and detailed.
That's the title of a valuable Wikipedia article. I have no idea who wrote it, but I'm very glad to have access to this comprehensive article, since it touches on so many topics that concern my ongoing research.
Here are some highlights:
Before British colonisation, the Persian language was the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent and a widely used official language in the northern India. The language was brought into South Asia by various Turkics and Afghans and was preserved and patronized by local Indian dynasties from the 11th century, such as Ghaznavids, Sayyid dynasty, Tughlaq dynasty, Khilji dynasty, Mughal dynasty, Gujarat sultanate, and Bengal sultanate. Initially it was used by Muslim dynasties of India but later started being used by non-Muslim empires too. For example, the Sikh Empire, Persian held official status in the court and the administration within these empires. It largely replaced Sanskrit as the language of politics, literature, education, and social status in the subcontinent.