Latest news with #PIE
1News
16 hours ago
- Business
- 1News
Call to rethink tax on KiwiSaver
KiwiSaver members could be significantly better off if New Zealand adopted a taxation model similar to Australia's, an economist says. Simplicity chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub ran some numbers modelling a system similar to Australia's, where contributions and returns are taxed at 15%. In New Zealand, full tax is paid on income contributed to KiwiSaver, and returns in PIE schemes taxed at an investor's prescribed investor rate up to 28%. Eaqub said an "average" KiwiSaver investor starting now could end up $60,000 better off in nominal terms at retirement on a model similar to Australia's. If tax was not paid on contributions or returns, they could be about $1 million better off - and if only taxes on returns were removed the gain would be about $300,000. "In Australia, the context is there's some conversation about whether the tax breaks are too generous for richer people. It's not that it's perfect but the point is in other countries it's heavily incentivised for people to save in their private pension." ADVERTISEMENT But it was not in New Zealand. Kirk Hope, chief executive of the Financial Services Council, which represents KiwiSaver providers, said the Australian model was different because that country has a means-tested pension. "The tax break that occurs in New Zealand occurs when you retire, when you get national super... that is the equivalent of about $500,000. So I think it's hard to do a comparative analysis without acknowledging that there are significant differences between the schemes and what they are trying to achieve." Winter's here, supermarket spying, and TikTok's new feature. (Source: 1News) But he said if the tax on savings for New Zealanders was reduced it would give future governments more "fiscal options" in relation to superannuation. He said New Zealand previously had a system that was EET — or exempt, exempt, taxed, where contributions were tax-exempt, exempt from tax within the scheme and then fully taxed when withdrawn. The Tax Working Group in 2018 acknowledged that the change from that system had potentially created incentives for New Zealanders to direct savings into investments like houses instead. ADVERTISEMENT Hope said it would be expensive to adjust back to EET but there could be other changes that would be more affordable. The tax working group estimated that ignoring behavioural changes, it would cost $200m to $300m a year to move to a system where returns and withdrawals were not taxed, and $2.5b a year to move to an EET system. "The higher initial cost for an EET regime arises from the fact that there will be a substantial deferral period before significant amounts are withdrawn from the scheme, and thus taxed under the third 't'. Although these are very different initial costs, the costs will be the same in the long run on a net present value basis." Hope said providing different forms of tax incentives would be beneficial for savers. He said removing or reducing the employer contribution tax would be particularly useful for low-income people. Kernel Wealth founder Dean Anderson said New Zealand was one of the few countries operating a TTE — taxed contributions, taxed returns and exempt withdrawal — model. "Our future savings would be much better off under an EET approach, where we don't pay tax on the way in but on the way out. ADVERTISEMENT "With low savings rates in NZ, the government should be exploring everything in its powers to grow savings rates, which benefits NZ and Kiwis over the long term. "But it's not a surprise. The recent meek KiwiSaver policy announcement did all the hard work to announce a positive gradual increase to KiwiSaver contributions, yet they fell short by announcing a three-year policy rather than outlining a decade plus long policy of incremental KiwiSaver increases." Ana-Marie Lockyer, chief executive at Pie Funds, said KiwiSaver members were at a disadvantage compared to Australians because there was no upfront tax incentive or concession as in Australia to encourage them to contribute more. "Maybe consideration of a mid-tier flat tax rate on savings up to a certain amount would encourage savings." She said employer contributions were also taxed so investors lost the benefits of compounding, and investors paid tax on bonds and deemed dividends on global equities so they were effectively paying a capital gains tax. "So contrary to the government's stated goal of helping New Zealanders' grow their KiwiSaver balances, these factors mean New Zealanders have less incentives to make voluntary contributions and pay more tax on investment earnings, resulting in smaller balances at retirement relative to our Australian friends."
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
At Its Beginnings, Only a Handful of People Spoke This Language. It's the Origin of Every Word You Say.
The most successful version of the most powerful tool humanity has ever created was born in a place where war now rages. That tool is human language, without which we would never have achieved the social organization and transmission of knowledge that have made us masters of the planet. Although the tongue called Proto-Indo-European hasn't been used in 4,000 years, about half Earth's inhabitants speak its more than 400 descendant languages: English, the Romance languages of Europe, the Slavic and Baltic languages, the Celtic languages of Wales and Ireland, Armenian, Greek, and languages spoken in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. The explosion of Proto-Indo-European from its origins in Eastern Ukraine—the subject of science journalist Laura Spinney's beguiling and revelatory new book, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global—is, according to Spinney, 'easily the most important event of the last five millennia in the Old World.' It's astonishing how much we've discovered about these languages that have gone unspoken and unheard for millennia. In the past two decades, new DNA analysis technologies, combined with archaeological advances and linguistics, have solved many mysteries surrounding the spread of the Proto-Indo-European (or PIE). For example, Anatolian, a now-extinct group of languages, was once thought to be the earliest offshoot of PIE, the first instance in which a new language split off from the mother tongue. But in recent years, genealogical analysis of human remains from the period shows no genetic connection between the people who spoke the Anatolian languages and the Yamnaya, a people of the Pontic–Caspian steppe region north of the Black Sea—now considered the source of PIE. The presiding theory now is that Anatolian isn't the daughter of PIE, but its sister, with both being the products of an even more ancient lingua obscura. If this sounds a bit wonky, well, it is. Tracing the triumphant spread of PIE-derived languages from Central Asia through Europe and the Indian subcontinent, and even to one fascinating outpost in the ancient Far East, is a matter of comparing syllable sounds and consonant pronunciations and following them through a bewildering maze of obscure outposts in unfamiliar places inhabited by long-lost peoples. Fortunately, Spinney is a stylish and erudite writer; it's the rare science book that quotes Keats, Seamus Heaney, and Ismail Kadare. She also has a keen sense of the romance of her subject. Her vivid scene-setting takes us from the vast, grassy steppes where the nomadic Yamnaya grazed the livestock whose meat and milk made them exceptionally tall and strong to the perplexing Tocharian culture on the western border of China—whose capital was regarded by the Chinese as filled with 'heavy-drinking, decadent barbarians,' famed for its dancing girls and 'the flock of a thousand peacocks upon which its nobles liked to feast.' This latter culture—and not Sanskrit, as was long thought—may even be the source for the English word 'shaman.' PIE itself is a reconstructed or 'deduced' language, with no living speakers, although if you want to hear one adventurous man's attempt to voice it, you can listen to a translation of the Lord's Prayer on YouTube. The prayer is a good choice of text for this experiment because it doesn't contain words for which the Yamnaya were unlikely to have counterparts or that linguists haven't been able identify. The reconstructed lexicon of Proto-Indo-European has only about 1,600 words, and at its dawn the language may have been spoken by as few as 100 people—people who didn't need words for such exotica as, for example, bees. Spinney illuminates the way that languages reflect the material reality of the world in which they are spoken. 'Hotspots of linguistic diversity,' she writes, 'coincide with hotspots of biodiversity, because those regions can support a higher density of human groups speaking different languages.' These are the places where the speakers of different languages are most likely to borrow words from each other, leaving clues to their encounters for later generations of scholars. Historical linguists were able to map the epic trek of the Roma people from India to the West by the vocabulary they picked up along the way, such as words for honey and donkey taken from the Persians. After the Hittites conquered the Hattian people in central Anatolia, Hittite myth, according to Spinney, portrayed 'the two peoples as equal partners' in the social order that followed. But while the Hittites borrowed some words from Hattian (a non-Indo-European tongue), over time, Hattian was more deeply transformed, moving from placing verbs at the beginning of a sentence to placing them at the end, as the Hittites did. This suggests, Spinney writes, 'that the Hittites retained the upper hand.' Genetic evidence has also revealed that while the Yamnaya did not venture all that far from the steppes where they domesticated horses and ate tulip bulbs, their more aggressive successors, the Corded Ware Culture (named for their distinctive style of pottery), carried the PIE languages all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. In much of Europe, this advance resulted in, as Spinney writes, 'an almost complete replacement of the gene pool,' in particular the male chromosome. The Corded Ware men 'had bred with local women and prevented local men from passing on their genes,' she explains; 'Rape, murder, even genocide could not be ruled out.' However, a group of Danish scientists now believe that the replacement was not necessarily intentional—that plagues swept through Europe in the Late Neolithic period, diseases to which the newcomers from the steppes were resistant. In a related mystery, the population of Ireland is one of the few in Europe that has been genetically consistent since the Bronze Age, yet somehow Ireland also adopted (and still strives to preserve) Gaelic, its own Indo-European language. Usually genetic and linguistic change go hand in hand, but in this case, not. Multilingualism predominated in the ancient world, where you might need different tongues to chat with your neighbor, perform religious rituals, and trade with the metal workers upriver. Monolingualism is a modern phenomenon, one Spinney links to the concept of the nation-state. Though in the 21st century humans move greater distances even more easily, languages seem to intermingle and influence one another much less than in ancient times. Spinney theorizes that 'the desire to belong is as strong as ever, and as it becomes harder to see the difference between 'them' and 'us', linguistic and cultural boundaries are being guarded more jealously.' The war currently ravaging the Yamnaya's ancestral homeland, destroying irreplaceable archaeological treasures even as it takes many lives, is, Spinney asserts, 'in part, a war over language—over where the russophone sphere begins and ends.' Putin himself has said as much. But Spinney points out that the people who spoke the primordial tongues from which Russian and Ukrainian both emerged would have regarded this project as bizarre. 'Prehistoric people undoubtedly had identities as complex and multi-layered as ours,' Spinney writes, 'but we can be sure that nowhere among the layers was the nation-state.' The more we learn about these ancestors, the more we bump up against what we don't (and shouldn't presume) to understand. They seem both close and far. Spinney describes the work of Gabriel Léger, a French artist who has restored the polish to old bronze mirrors from Greece and Rome so that they can once more reflect the faces they're held up to. 'We know that ancient people looked at themselves in mirrors,' she observes. 'We don't know what they saw.'
Wall Street Journal
08-05-2025
- Science
- Wall Street Journal
‘Proto' Review: Ancient Speech, Carried Far
Roughly five millennia ago, a small band of nomads set out from their homeland around the Black Sea. On the wide-open grasslands of the steppe, they honed their skills as horsemen and herders and worshiped a god they called Father Sky. They neither erected great landmarks nor penned any texts. Yet their legacy persists, hidden within the words of the languages spoken by more than three billion people today. In 'Proto,' Laura Spinney details the centurieslong effort to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European (PIE), what linguists believe to be the mother tongue of a diverse constellation of languages from Sanskrit to Gaelic. Ms. Spinney, a journalist whose previous book, 'Pale Rider' (2017), charted the worldwide spread and cultural impact of the 1918 influenza epidemic, here demonstrates how the language of those humble, preliterate nomads radiated across the prehistoric world and how their myths and rituals may have helped sow the seeds of modern civilization. It's a comprehensive and at times dizzying account that draws from the latest archaeological and genetic research to craft a compelling portrait of a people thought lost to time. Thinkers from Dante to Leibniz had long noticed peculiar similarities among languages from far-flung places. But it wasn't until 1786, when William Jones, a British judge stationed in India, proposed a link among Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, that the idea of a common lingual ancestor was taken seriously. Since then, researchers have developed a hypothetical vocabulary for PIE that consists of about 1,600 word stems, which form the basis of many of our most common words. For example, 'daughter' in English, 'thugátēr' in Greek and 'duhitár' in Sanskrit are all believed to have been derived from a common PIE root that was transformed by local speech patterns over time. In this, Ms. Spinney sees 'a seam that connects east and west; a fiber stretched taut between them that thrums in all of us.' While it's not clear precisely why PIE was able to establish such a wide domain, Ms. Spinney suggests that commerce likely played a role. 'In all of recorded history,' she writes, 'you'd be hard-pressed to find a single example of human beings trading in high-value goods without an effective means of communication.' By 4500 B.C., commodities such as gold, copper and salt were moving along a vast trade network centered on the Black Sea. PIE may have first spread thanks to its association with these valuable luxuries.
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Science
- The Guardian
Proto by Laura Spinney review – how Indo-European languages went global
How did the language you're reading this in come to exist? The Indo-European family of languages covers most of Europe, the Iranian plateau, northern India and parts of Asia. Its members are spoken by almost half of all living people, and they all stem from a common source. English, Hindustani, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Norse and many others (more than 400 still exist) can all be traced back to this starting point: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Laura Spinney's new book tells the story of how a language that may initially have been spoken as a kind of lingua franca by only a few dozen people evolved into the mother tongues of billions. The words we use feel inevitable. We take them for granted. But they began life about 6,000 years ago, when copper was being smithed in the lands to the west of the Black Sea. Spinney says 'an aura of magic must have hovered around the early smiths, who drew this gleaming marvel from blue-green rock'. New language hovered around them, too. Novel technologies needed a novel vocabulary to describe them. The goods produced were transported across the Black Sea, which required the language of travel and exchange, as well as words that prepared merchants to meet with bears, boars and lions. Smithing brought new specialisations: metallurgy, casting, mining, charcoal-burning. All had to be named. As the traders travelled, the words they shared went with them across the Black Sea and then around the world: from the forests of Romania to the steppe of Odessa, now with the development of larger and larger settlements, now with steppe herders becoming global traders, now with roads, now with the crossing of the Volga, sped up by the wheel, and on to the edge of China. Spinney draws on a wealth of recent evidence to tell this story, combining linguistics, archaeology and genetic research to trace the movement of people and their language. Making these links is not straightforward. PIE was not written down; it has been reconstructed by comparing the languages that evolved from it. The word for daughter, for example, is very similar in English, Sanskrit, Greek, Armenian and Lithuanian (daughter, dúhitr, thugátēr, dustr, duktė). This has all been used to deduce the PIE word *dhugh2ter. (The h2 might have sounded like the French guttural r. The asterix denotes that the word is reconstructed.) There are between 1,000 and 2,000 PIE words, and Spinney's book is at its most interesting when dealing with them. The word *h2ster has become 'star'. *kerd is the root of 'cardio' and 'heart'. The phrase *kerd dheh meant 'to put your heart', which became śraddhā in Sanskrit (believe) and crēdo in Latin; *ghostis is 'guest-friendship', a mutual obligation of guest and host. As humans travelled and traded, *ghostis was probably the concept that gave them safe passage. It echoes another word *ghes, 'to eat'. Safe passage meant good eating. How we know this, though, is a little uncertain. *ghostis is the reconstructed root of words in Gothic (gasts), Old English (giest), and Latin (hospes, hostis). (That Old English word giest, meaning 'an accidental guest, a chance comer', is the root of our modern 'guest'.) From these known words, linguists deduce the original in Proto-Indo-European. But deductions are not certainties. Whether *ghes really is echoed in *ghostis is debated. And this process is far from complete. Even though PIE is the most studied of all proto languages, there is not yet a reconstructed word for metal, despite those Black Sea coppersmiths. This reflects a larger difficulty. We can only read as far back as 5,000 years. To go further, we need genetics and archaeology. 'There is no one-to-one mapping of language, culture and genes,' Spinney says. We see links and similarities between population movements and language movements, and this gives some external evidence for when languages began to change. Loan words, for example, can help date a language, but that sort of evidence is rare, and knowing when one group of people started marrying another provides additional insight. But the reconstructions are still enticing. However dimly we can see back that far, we can see something. Scholars think PIE must have existed among the coppersmiths because that is long enough ago for the various descendent languages to have branched off from them, given what we know about the rate of language change. Genetic analysis shows intermarrying around the Black Sea, suggesting multilingual children – vectors for the development of PIE out of a trading lingua franca. In Spinney's account, the Yamnaya nomads take PIE from the steppe to the edge of China, back into Europe, down through India and Iran. The combination of evidence from different disciplines makes this a compelling case. In India today, for example, speakers of Sanskrit-derived languages have more steppe ancestry than non-Sanskrit language speakers. We don't yet know why those PIE speakers started travelling, why they went so far east. Recent research, impeded by the Ukraine war, has identified Mykhailivka, in southern Ukraine, as an important site where traders, and languages, converged. Spinney presents the best of our knowledge, which is that PIE spread through migration: trade among nomads gave us almost half the languages of the modern world. But new revelations await. The work continues. As we face the dominance of global English, the potential erosion of languages around the world, and linguistic nationalism, PIE is in some ways a mirror of humanity. As Spinney says in her conclusion, people are moving around the Black Sea today for the same reasons they did 6,000 years ago: commerce, war and climate change. The language you're reading this in will change. It will change as it has always done. When Proto-Indo-European came back to Europe around 2000BC there were about 7 million people living there. That it took over is extraordinary. Spinney says it is as if Italian had taken over New York in the early 20th century. However scary we might find such a future, one in which languages rise and fall, cultures come and go, our past suggests it is inevitable. Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney is published by William Collins (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Biz Bahrain
31-01-2025
- Business
- Biz Bahrain
FACEKI and Payment International Enterprise (PIE) Sign Agreement to Enhance Customer Security
FACEKI, a leading provider of advanced fraud prevention technology, and Payment International Enterprise (PIE), a prominent financial services provider, Signed an agreement that will enable PIE to integrate FACEKI's cutting-edge Anti-Fraud and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) screening solutions to enhance the security and integrity of their customer transactions. The agreement was signed at a ceremony attended by senior executives from both companies. This partnership underscores the commitment of both FACEKI and PIE to leveraging innovative technologies to combat financial crime and protect customer data. Hamza Al-Ghatam, CEO of FACEKI, expressed his enthusiasm for the partnership: 'We are thrilled to partner with PIE, a leader in the financial services industry. Our advanced Anti-Fraud and AML screening solutions will provide PIE with the robust tools needed to safeguard their customers' transactions and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. This collaboration marks a significant step forward in our mission to create a safer digital environment for all.' Shabbir Modi, Managing Director of PIE, also shared his thoughts on the agreement: 'PIE is a leading fintech company committed to maintaining high compliance standards across our services. We prioritize the highest levels of security and trust for our customers. By integrating FACEKI's cutting-edge solutions, we are proactively addressing the challenges of fraud and money laundering. This partnership will not only strengthen our security protocols but also reaffirm our dedication to providing exceptional service to our clients..' The integration of FACEKI's solutions will enable PIE to detect and prevent fraudulent activities in real-time, ensuring that their customers' financial transactions are secure and compliant with international AML regulations. This partnership highlights the commitment of both companies to innovation and excellence in financial security.
