Mother tongue
How a group of nomadic farmers gave birth to languages now spoken across Europe and the Indian sub-continent
Last week I said that linguists don’t like theories that lack direct evidence.
This week I’m going to tell you about a huge thing that pretty well all linguists agree on that lacks even the slightest shred of direct evidence.
It’s the existence of a language called Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short.
PIE is the equivalent of astronomy’s Big Bang theory. As you’ll recall from your high school astrophysics class, that theory had its beginnings when astronomers noticed all the galaxies were moving away from each other, and the further their distance from each other, the faster their relative getaway speed.
Play that tape backwards and you get the universe shrinking and shrinking until everything’s scrunched up in a single point.
Almost 14 billion years ago, that point exploded – and here we all are now trying to make a living, as the Allman Brothers so beautifully put it, and doing the best we can.
Linguists have done something similar with languages spoken across Europe and the Indian sub-continent.
There are enough common features of those languages to suggest they share a single source. And the further we look back in written history, the stronger those similarities are.
By playing the language tape backwards, linguists have concluded that English, Sanskrit, Hindi, Russian, Kurdish, Serbo-Croatian, Tosk, Punjabi and dozens of other languages all emerged from a single language spoken between roughly 4500 BC and 2500 BC. Where those speakers lived is still a matter of debate, but the general consensus is that it was somewhere near the Black Sea.
You may be thinking that language similarities could easily come about by languages borrowing from each other. But the linguists are way ahead of you there, my friend, and have ruled that out. They’ve also ruled out so-called “linguistic universals” (things that all languages share, no matter what) and random chance.
How they did this warrants nothing less than awe and respect from the likes of you and me.
Similarities between Indo-Iranian languages and European languages were noticed as early as the mid-1600s, when the ornately named Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (above) published a proposal for a proto-language that includes many of the descendants of PIE. He was followed by the only slightly less ornately named Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, who demonstrated a link between Sanskrit and European languages, and he was followed by a Welshman who went by the disappointingly unimaginative name of William Jones, who argued in 1786 for common ancestry of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. The early 1800s then saw Rasmus Christian Rask and Franz Bopp (it just gets better and better, doesn’t it?) muscle in on the act.
But these men were just the curtain raiser to the main event.
In the early 1800s Jacob Grimm of Brothers Grimm fame knuckled down and mapped sound changes across languages, showing that they systematically transform all words of a language. In other words, when a language changes, those changes are neither random nor partial. That created a solid foundation for believing that similarities between languages really did tell us something.
In the mid-1870s, German August Schleicher published the first attempt to actually reconstruct Proto-Indo-European. In the process, he created Schleicher’s Fable, a story about a shorn sheep who has a conversation with some horses. You can listen to it here. It’s strangely beautiful and don’t be surprised if you get goosebumps listening to a voice from thousands of years in the past. I sure did.
The work of those amazing men continues to this day, making PIE the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. Things widely believed to be true about it are that it included (and I quote Wikipedia) “inflectional suffixes (analogous to English child, child’s, children, children’s) as well as ablaut (vowel alterations, as preserved in English sing, sang, sung, song) and accent. PIE nominals and pronouns had a complex system of declension, and verbs similarly had a complex system of conjugation. The PIE phonology, particles, numerals, and copula are also well-reconstructed.”
All of this gives you a sense of the detailed, and surely tedious, study that must go into reconstructing PIE, and I have nothing but respect for those who do it. At the same time, I’m really, really happy that it’s them doing it and not me.
It’s all I can do to summarise their work in a short newsletter that probably does grievous injustices to it in the process. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to take a wee lie down to recover.
Bits and specious
Prometheus, the most recent of the wonderful Alien movie series, features an android named David who learns Proto-Indo-European to communicate with the Engineer, an extraterrestrial whose race may have created humans.
Reader Bruce Mackenzie writes that one of his lecturers while he was studying architecture “claimed that the workd beautiful originally had the opposite meaning” to its current one. While your lecturer undoubtedly knew architecture, Bruce, he didn’t know his etymology. Beautiful is a 15th century word that has always meant pleasing to the eye (or ear, or mind or soul). A little known factoid about the phrase beauty queen, though, is that it was originally a show-name of cattle and hogs.
On a totally unrelated matter to language, here’s one of the coolest animations I’ve seen for a while. It shows the moon being formed according to the latest thinking about how it happened. Rather than rocks being shot into space when another planet hit Earth, the theory is that a river of molten rock was ejected into space and that a blob of it more or less held together and solidified into you-know-what. For more, I highly recommend Bad Astronomy, a newsletter from science writer Phil Plait.
Quote of the week
I personally think we developed language because of our deep need to complain.
Lily Tomlin