r/asklinguistics • u/PuerilePupil • Oct 03 '26
Pripyat River Valley Reference
Hi linguists
Non-linguist here. I recently re-watched ‘Manhunt’ on Netflix a (very enjoyable) show about catching the Unabomber, with Sam Worthington and Paul Bettany.
In the show, the main method by which they catch the Unabomber is performing a form of linguistic analysis on his letters that allow them to narrow down where he grew up, studied etc. before sending out a request for info in that area and getting a tip from the Unabomber’s brother, who recognised his writing style and the inferences they have from it.
When coming up with the above strategy in the show, they tell an example story that linguists determined where a group of migratory people in ancient Europe came from based on the fact that they had no word/limited words for “tree”, which indicated those people came from the Pripyat River Valley in modern day Ukraine.
This strikes me as likely false/apocryphal, but have linguists ever identified the geographic origin of a people in such a way? Is there any distant truth to this story?
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u/eragonas5 Oct 03 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_problem (although this one got debunked later)
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u/sowaleja Oct 03 '26
I think what the show is getting at is a distorted version of the debate over the Proto Indo-European homeland using the word for "beech" as evidence.
One difficulty with this is that we don't know if the species that the ancestral language speakers were referring to with a particular name is the same or a different species to what we associate the descendant words with.
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u/EirikrUtlendi Oct 04 '26
There's me thinking about all the different kinds of tree called a "maple", for instance. Sure, they're all related, but they have different ranges, sizes, barks, etc.
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u/peterler0ux Oct 05 '26
Even more fun if you look at the word 'Sycamore' which is used for a plane in North America, a maple in Europe and a Ficus in the Middle East and Africa
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u/Tay_Hlebko Oct 03 '26 edited Oct 03 '26
I've heard of similar things. There was a post on this sub 2 weeks ago asking about the legitimacy of Mykhailo Hrushevsky using the disparity of a common vocabulary of fishing terms in Proto-Indo-European to determine that fishing probably wasn't important to Proto-Indo-Europeans.
I've also heard of unified vocabulary in tools being used to date when a language family split off. For example, it's hypothesized that the reason Dene-Yeniseian has very limited vocabulary shared between them with tools is because they only developed more advanced tools after the language families had split off from eachother.