Laura Spinney
Appearances
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Another example of a sound law would be the fact that, for example, pater in Latin became father in English, the P became the F. These are sound laws, and linguists use them to reconstruct the family tree to say which came first in the order.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
But that exercise can't tell you anything about the chronological ages of languages, like when in actual historical time or prehistorical time languages split or were born or died. Okay, so to do that, you need to use non-linguistic sources and to sort of cross-reference them. So I'll give you an example. An example where you would use a historical source
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
would be, for example, we know from ancient historians' chronicles that Hadrian, he wasn't yet the emperor, but before he was an emperor, he addressed the Roman Senate in around 100 AD CE, and he was mocked by the other senators for his Spanish accent. So Hadrian was born in what we call Seville now in Spain.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So he had a Spanish accent and the other senators thought that was very funny, but he still spoke recognizable Latin. So that's a clue that at that point, Latin was still Latin. It hadn't yet exploded into the Romance languages, but it was in the process of doing so. Now by the ninth century CE, we have another little
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
historical glimpse of what the languages in Europe were doing from something called the Oaths of Strasbourg. So this is when two grandsons of Charlemagne signed a pact, a military pact. And in order to broadcast this pact to their followers, they read it out in their respective languages. One of them spoke German and the other spoke Romance.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So the Germanic speaker had to speak in Romance and the Romance speaker had to speak in Germanic. And obviously it was very important to avoid any kind of misunderstanding in this situation. So the Romance speaker spoke in German. The Germanic speaker could easily have spoken in Latin, which was the language of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, but he had more trouble with Romance.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So he needed a crib sheet to help him to say the right thing. And that crib sheet is what we call the Oath of Strasbourg. It's the first evidence of the French language written down and in fact of any Romance language. So that shows us that at that point, the reason he was unsure of himself was that it was no longer Latin. It had become Romance, in this case, French, Old French.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So those are examples of the kinds of historical clues that help us to put dates on these things. But obviously, before the beginning of... So how far does history go back? Let's answer that question. The oldest texts in an Indian language of any substantial size are the Rig Veda. It's the Rig Veda. In Greek, the oldest texts are about the same age, so about 1400 BC.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Exactly. That's 1400 BC. There are older inscriptions in Indo-European language. The oldest of all are Hittite, and they date to about 2000 BCE. But these languages are older than that. And so they were spoken for thousands of years before they were written down. So how do we get at that period prior to 2000 BCE?
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
How do we understand what they sounded like, who was speaking them, and what the differences were between them before that? That's where archaeology and genetics come in. And obviously, it's a more indirect exercise because we don't have symbols expressing the sounds that they made. It's a far more complicated job to get at them. It doesn't mean we can't say anything about them.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And in fact, we can say fascinating things about them. So the basic point here to understand, I suppose, is that people speak about the things that matter to them. So what that means, among other things, is that the vocabulary that linguists can reconstruct for these languages will be, in some sense, a reflection of their world. So they'll have more words.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
If they're herders, they're going to have more words for the sorts of animals that they herd, for dairying, for... Horses, cows, sheep. Exactly. Words related to a mobile lifestyle. Whereas if they're farmers, they're going to have more words related to crops and fields and the sorts of tools that farmers use, right? So that's the basic, that's the simple way in which we can tell things.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So about who they were and how they lived. So archaeologists can also tell that kind of thing about those people, obviously. They can date things using radiocarbon dating. So they can say, let's say 5,000 years ago, there was a culture on the steppe north of the Black Sea who were mobile pastoralists. They kept sheep and goats. They may have ridden horses and they also had dogs.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And then if you look at a vocabulary of a language that may have been spoken about that time, but anyway, predates writing, and you can make some cross references with the culture that the archaeologists have described. The genetics comes in for essentially for a hundred or more years of the exercise of trying to understand the Indo-European languages.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
It was linguists and archaeologists alone trying to reconstruct this picture. In the last 10 years, actually a bit longer, but essentially in the last 10 years, geneticists have come along and injected a whole new dimension to it and essentially rewritten the story. Because what they've allowed us to do, especially with ancient DNA, is to track prehistoric people through space.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So we can now see where they've moved. And we can see the links literally in the form of people between archaeological cultures. So we can see where people travel to. And when people move, we know they carry their languages. So it's another piece of evidence in the puzzle, if you like. People don't always keep their languages when they move.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Sometimes they give them up and learn the language of the people who are in the place where they go to. but they definitely carry it for a while. And so we can see, we can use the genetic profile of people to track where the language is moved to and see how that corresponds with the languages spoken at that time and with the cultures that the archaeologists have defined.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So it's kind of like a three-piece puzzle. Each one is giving us more information about the other. Sometimes they disagree. But essentially with the three parts, we can begin, albeit patchily and with great humility, to try to patch together the picture before writing.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
The speakers of Proto-Indo-European words have been constructed for their vocabulary from the descendant languages for cow, sheep, goat, horse, dog, or wheeled vehicles for at least one metal, although that's a little bit contentious. and for words related to dairying.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Now, the only people herding that selection of animals and who knew wheel transport before about 3000 BC lived on the steppe to the west of the Ural Mountains. We know that from archaeology. So that's just an example of how we cross-reference the two to try and say where those people were and when they spoke this language.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Yes. One of the longstanding puzzles in the Indo-European story was the branch of languages that we call Anatolian. So the best known and best chronicled example of this branch would be Hittite, which was spoken in the Hittite empire in what is now Turkey until about 1200 BC. It was one of the great pre-classical empires along with Egypt and Babylon and the Assyrians.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So in the early 20th century, linguists, philologists, as they were more likely to be called then, realized that Hittite was probably an Indo-European language, and the evidence for that is now overwhelming. So here's a branch of the family that had died out by the early part of the Common Era, but that was clearly linked to the modern Indo-European languages.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
I mean, Indo-European is essentially a linguistic term. So it refers to this family of languages. Strictly speaking, we shouldn't talk about Indo-Europeans because that implies there was a group of people with that identity. Whereas what we're talking about is people speaking a language. So it could have been people of many different ethnicities. In fact, it was, and many different cultures.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And one of the explanations that has basically emerged that links Anatolian to the parent of all the modern Indo-European languages is that there was an ancestor to all of them that was spoken somewhere around the Black Sea around 6,000 years ago. Okay. So at that time, we know from archaeology that there was a trade network around the Black Sea,
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
that copper was the main metal, it was the copper age, copper was the main metal driving this trade network, and that there was trade over huge distances. This was before wheeled transport, but people could walk, obviously, and they could also, they probably had some kind of canoe or simple vessel which they used in the shallow parts of the Black Sea.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So there was trade in copper from deep into the Eurasian steppe, places on the Volga River, all the way to Bulgaria on the west coast of the Black Sea. And the main center of this trade network was a place called Varna, which is now Bulgaria, which was a huge copper center. They're essentially the first people to have smelted copper and to have made weapons and spectacular things.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
They panned gold. Yes, absolutely extraordinary culture. Now, the Varna people were farmers. The people in the steppe were herders. Since we think that the first Indo-European language was probably a language of herders, the idea is that this ancestor was probably not the people of Varna themselves, but one of their clients in this network.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And it may have been somebody living in the region of the Caucasus, right across the Black Sea, and that these people then eventually all their descendants migrated, one branch going into Anatolia, bringing the Anatolian languages there, and another branch going up onto the steppe and taking the mother of all living Indo-European languages there. And that would then explain this link.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
It's a theory. Everybody doesn't support it. But that very early part of the Indo-European story is still somewhat vague. It gets more concrete the closer we come to the present. But that's the presiding idea for the moment, I would say.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So the sort of frontier between the steppe and non-steppe, if you like, because the non-steppe takes different forms. I guess there would be, the Caucasus would basically mark the frontier in that part of the world. And then you've got Ukraine. Ukraine, as we understand it now, and it's unfortunately a changing story, but the country, modern country, is essentially about half steppe.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So that's another steppe frontier that crosses modern Ukraine. And this boundary has been absolutely crucial through prehistory and history for one very basic reason that is underpinned by climate and ecology. But the basic reason is that the farmers were on one side of it and the herders were on another.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And this was a massive cultural divide, probably also mostly throughout most of time, linguistic divide as well. But these people... engaged in trade. They sometimes fought. They, in a way, interacted importantly in ways that impacted on both their cultures, either side of that line. So it's a crucial thing in forming the linguistic landscape all through this period.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
But in the Copper Age, yes, they were trading and the languages expanded through both worlds.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And it's important to make that clear because the categories have been blurred and abused, for example, by Nazis in the 20th century. So we'll clear that up from the start.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Right. So when the people of Varna started making their wonderful copper objects and everybody suddenly wanted them, They had a massive business opportunity on their hands, but they definitely wouldn't have spoken the same language as those people coming from the Volga in the steppe. And so how did they trade?
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
We don't have any evidence throughout history of human beings trading in high value goods without a common language. We've never done that. The assumption is that they would have quickly developed a lingua franca, a language of trade, a common language, as also, of course, happened later around the Mediterranean.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And that's where the name lingua franca comes from because that was the eponymous lingua franca. But it probably happened much earlier around the Black Sea. And one idea is that the lingua franca was that ancestral and Indo-European language, that it's the one that gave rise to the whole family. But it's not an idea that's very popular amongst linguists because lingua francas tend to just
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
be reserved for the purpose that they were invented for. So they're just restricted to that trade function. And they live alongside the native languages of the people in the network. So it's not necessarily a recipe for world domination. It doesn't replace other languages. It's very much tied to the function for which it was developed.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So a kind of more popular idea, certainly amongst linguists, I would say, is that the original Indo-European language was probably spoken by one of the clients of Varna. in that network. There's another reason for thinking that, which is that the people of Varna were essentially farmers.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
They were on the more temperate forest side of that non-steppe boundary, whereas Proto-Indo-European and its earlier incarnation were languages we think of herders. So more likely to come from a different biome, a different ecological environment. And so may have come from across the sea somewhere in the Caucasus region.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
One of the ideas is that it came just from the north of the Caucasus in what's now southern Russia. But another is that it came from the Armenian highlands just to the south.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So the Yamnaya are this culture who arise on the steppes north of the Black Sea at about 3500 BCE, so 5500 years ago. Yamnaya is the name of a very specific archaeological culture. And in fact, it's a Russian word that refers to their burial rite. They had a very distinctive burial rite.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
They put their dead in a chamber on their back with their knees up in a very particular layout with particular grave goods under a large burial mound that we call a kirgan. But the Yamnaya are a huge part of this story. because they sort of invented the mobile nomadic pastoralist way of life.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So they were herders who were always on the move, and they kind of lived either out of their wagons or out of tents. And it was because they were so mobile, at least in the beginning, that these languages probably spread so far. But the Yamnaya come along quite a long time after Varna. They're sort of the next stage of the story.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
We think that they spoke the language that is the mother of all the living, Indo-European languages. That means all the languages excluding the Anatolian branch. But they invented this way of life. Before that, people had herds and they moved with their herds, but more in a kind of transhumance way.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Yeah. Okay. So it's called Indo-European because it spanned or spanned initially languages from India, from the subcontinent to the West of Europe. Today, they're spoken on every inhabited continent. They're spoken as a first language. That's not even including people who speak it as a second or subsequent language by a first language by 46% of humanity. So 3.2 billion people.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
They were based in their river valleys in that steppe environment north of the Black and Caspian Seas. And when they needed new grass, they would move out of the valleys, but they would always come back to their villages. They had permanent bases. The Yamnaya took this transhumance to the next level. And they basically moved out permanently from the river valleys.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And they were on the move all the year round, moving with the seasons, moving with their herds in a sort of round, always looking for the best pastures. And that made them supremely adaptable. Once they'd adapted themselves to that environment, they were able to sort of tap into the huge energy resources of the Eurasian steppe. And that had all kinds of consequences, including for language.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
But there's a nice Russian term for the Yamnaya. The Russians call them perikartipoli, which is the same word they use for, and you have to excuse my pronunciation, but that's essentially it. It's the same word they use for the tumbleweed plant, which rolls without roots and scatters its seeds as it rolls, and for the nomads of the steppe.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So it's the same term they use to describe the Mongols, the Sarmatians, the Scythians, and the Yamnaya were the original Perikartipoli.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So linguists have reconstructed probably about 1600 words of their vocabulary. Yeah. Essentially, they're stems, not words. That means that they are the stem of a word that can be turned into other words when it's treated by the rules of grammar. But it's still a skeleton of the original vocabulary they would have used.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
But those are the words they're fairly sure of having been able to reconstruct from the living descendants or from the vocabulary of the dead languages that are related. And it's enough to say a little bit about the world that those people inhabited, even about their social norms, the way they organized their families, the way they For example, we know that it was a patriarchal society.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
We know that it was a patrilocal society, meaning that the women moved into their husbands' houses at marriage. Why do we know that? We know that because, for example, there are many words for a woman's in-laws in the reconstructed vocabulary, but none for a man's in-laws. which would make sense if the woman moves into the man's household upon marriage.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So we know, for example, that they did quite a lot of raiding, that they could be violent, but they also had words for things like restitution and blood price. So they had ways of dealing with violence, ways of regulating violence. relationships, ways of dealing with disputes, pacifying people. And we can see all that from this reconstructed vocabulary.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So we can tell quite a lot about the world that they inhabited, not the full picture, but aspects of that world from the vocabulary.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Absolutely crucial. If you think about it, before history, before states, before any kind of government that could impose a language on a large group of people, how do languages spread? They spread essentially with the people who speak them. And the Yamnaya we know were very mobile people.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And we know because, again, back to the genetics from the ancient DNA, we can trace people in different kergans under these burial mounds and different step cemeteries. And then in cemeteries further afield, we can trace genetic links. And we can see from the ancestry that the Yamnaya carried and cross-referencing that with that of their descendants. We can see that they moved vast distances.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So it's by far the largest language family in the world. We think there are about 140 language families in the world. And there are 12 main branches. I'll list them quickly. Iranic, the Iranic languages, the Indic languages, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Baltic, Slavic, Italic, Germanic, Celtic. And I don't think I've missed any out or have I? Perhaps I have. Tocharian and Anatolian.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
For example, we know that, this is one of my favorite stories, at least one group of Yamnaya, but probably many groups over hundreds of years, crossed the entire Eurasian steppe, thousands of kilometers, from what is now Ukraine to the Altai Mountains. And they did so quite near the beginning, around 5,000 years ago.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And that's thought to be the root of the Tocharian branch, which is one of the early branches of the Indo-European languages, according to linguists. And Tocharian is now a dead language that was spoken the furthest east of all these languages on the doorstep of China. And...
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
We know from studying the corpus of literature that's come down to us from the Takarian speakers that it was an Indo-European language, that it has undeniable similarities with the under-European languages. So how do we explain that related languages are spoken so far apart?
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And we also now have archaeological evidence that people of very similar cultures were living on either side of that, of the Eurasian landmass, and now genetic evidence showing that people crossed that border. huge expanse of steppe.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
There's a fascinating story that you can now, in that one case, cross-reference archaeology, genetics, and language to say that there was probably some huge trek across the steppe at some point by people who had wagons, may have ridden horses, that's another question, but probably most of them were walking. They crossed thousands of kilometers of steppe. Then, of course, you have to ask why.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
But from a linguistic point of view, it does at least explain why an Indo-European language has spoken thousands of kilometers to the east near China 5,000 years ago.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Absolutely. It was very much over generations. Successful is a word that troubles some linguists. What do you mean by successful? Many of those Indo-European languages died out along the way, but the ones that didn't and the ones whose descendants are still spoken today are the ones whose speakers were themselves adaptable and adapted in turn to their environments.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So these languages and the cultures and the genetics of the people who spoke them were always changing. We're never talking about the same entities across time. But again, you can see these relationships. So yes, and I think if you do want to talk about success, and I think you can talk about it if you qualify it. I mean, after all, it is the largest language family in the world.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
But then the secret for me would be adaptability at each time. And the same of all other language families. The reasons that they're still spoken today and that they're so old is that those speakers were over many generations adaptable to their environments.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Absolutely. I think... I mean, the reason I wrote this book now is because the story has been so transformed over the last 10 years by the advent of ancient DNA, which now allows us to trace prehistoric migrants. But even if we know more than we did, say, 30 years ago, it's still highly contentious. And we still, you know, in a way we lack definitive answers.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And we always will because of the lack of writing, because these languages weren't written down for so long.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
law so i think it's never going to be definitively settled some of the most basic concepts are still argued about like was there a homeland was there a birthplace and therefore you know i mean you're a historian you know history is rewritten for every generation and if history is rewritten for every generation then the prehistory many times more you know because it's that less
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
tangible that less accessible so i think it's definitely not a closed question and and my personal opinion is that it will never be but that doesn't make it any less fascinating and i don't think other people will ever stop asking questions about it either absolutely i think prehistory and especially as the further back you go is a fascinating field for the combination of archaeology and scientific modern scientific methods laura this has been absolutely fantastic chat last but certainly not least you mentioned your book your book it is called proto how one ancient language went global
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Absolutely. There's been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples. The one I actually opened the book with, because I think it's very striking, is the Sanskrit term Dhyapita, which literally meant sky father, or we would say father sky, English speakers. And it was the highest god in the ancient Indian pantheon. But it was also essentially the name of the highest god in the Roman pantheon.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Because if you think about it, Jupiter, it comes from the same original term meaning sky father, obviously became Jupiter. For the ancient Greeks, their supreme deity was Zeus Pater. Zeus Pater, shortened to Zeus, or we would say Zeus. So all of these languages at very distant points on the Eurasian landmass shared the same name and the same divinity. And that can't be a coincidence.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Absolutely. I mean, if you think about it, history literally refers to the study of the past through written records. But we existed, obviously, before writing, which was invented about 5,000 years ago. So prehistory is actually much longer, obviously much longer than history, because we've been around as a species for 300,000 years. And we also spoke for all of those 300,000 years.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And so what we spoke about and the languages that we use have shaped us as much, if not more, than the languages that we've used since then. But we have this kind of false idea that everything stops at the beginning of writing just because we can't see it so easily. So, for example, everyone in Western Europe or many people in Western Europe would trace themselves sort of culturally
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
back through the Jewish Christian Middle Ages to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Whereas in the subcontinent and Persia and India, they would trace themselves back perhaps to the gods of the ancient Indian and Hindu scriptures or the writings of Zarathustra. But what I'm saying is that prior to those very early writings, there's a layer that links both East and West.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And you can see it in the very oldest literatures. You can see that many, for example, the mythological motifs and tropes are very, very similar to the extent that it can't really be coincidental.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Right. So if you take, for example, the Rig Veda, which is the most ancient Indian text, and the Epics of Homer in Greece, you see not just the same sort of story motifs, but also the stories told in the same poetic formulae and often the same words.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Yes. First of all, and famously, there's Basque in the Basque country between France and Spain. That is currently considered to be much older than the Indo-European languages. So the idea is that it's a relic of the languages that were bought about 8,000 years ago rather than about 5,000 years ago, which is when we think the Indo-European languages came.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And it was probably brought by, originally by the farmers who expanded out of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent with the Neolithic revolution. after about 8,000 years ago, came into Europe. And Basque is spoken still today in that sort of mountain kingdom of the Pyrenees between France and Spain.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And that geography and that topography is probably really part of the reason why it's managed to survive. But that's not the only one. There's also, for example, the Finnic languages, Finnish and Estonian, which belong to the Uralic language family, as does Hungarian, though in a different branch, and the Sami languages of the far north of the Arctic Circle, traditionally of reindeer herders.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Those are Uralic languages. But if you were to go back, say, to 500 BC, let's say 2,500 years ago, you'd see a very different language landscape in Europe, and you'd see a much richer mix of Indo-European and Indo-European languages, just to say that the landscape has constantly evolved and is very different at different points in history and prehistory.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's definitely a simplification. Maybe I should start by saying that languages evolve all the time. They evolve by descent in In a sort of similar way to families in genetics, in that you can trace a descendant language back to its ancestor. You can see the similarities and how it's evolved over time.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
There are certain so-called sound laws which sort of control, govern that evolutionary process. But they also change, unlike people, unlike biology and genes. They change by horizontal borrowing. So languages, for example, loan words to each other all the time, and they also loan sounds and grammatical structures and all sorts of other aspects of language.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So there are these two main mechanisms, horizontal borrowing and vertical descent. Now, when you think about a family tree, that's only capturing the vertical aspect. the sort of familial genetic descent aspect of language evolution so in that sense it's a massive simplification but there clearly are descent aspects to language evolution i mean we We talked about the term for Father Sky.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
You can see very clearly that there's a familial relationship between those terms. And there are certain sound laws that control that relationship. So the tree also simplifies things in the sense that it will show you crisp branchings between languages. But language, the definition of a language, as we know, is very troubled.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Because it's partly political, as Max Weinreich famously said, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And there's some truth in that, you know, there's a political aspect to the definition of the language. So the tree is very much a simplification. And like any model in mathematics or science, it's useful, but it's not the whole story.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And we have to bear that in mind because, you know, it's too easy to jump on that and think that explains everything when it certainly doesn't.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Absolutely. Because if you look at a family tree, then it all branches neatly back to one common ancestor. And then if that was a language that was really spoken once by real people, then it's very easy to make the leap then to say that it was spoken by one people in one place. I think that linguists and everybody who's interested in this question is very quick today to say, no, that's not true.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And you can see why very easily, if I give you a couple of examples, in Australia, amongst indigenous Australians, hundreds of different languages are spoken, but those people generally tend to consider themselves as ethnically quite similar. So there's one or a few ethnicities related with a huge and rich spectrum of languages. Take the other extreme, you've got English.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
English is a language that is spoken by a dazzling array of people of different ethnicities and cultures. So there's clearly no one-to-one mapping of language, culture, and genetics. And that's why it's complicated and a very contentious point and discussed for over 200 years to say that there was a birthplace for these languages. We have to be clear what we're talking about.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
It's not one people, one place. It's probably a variety of people speaking this one language.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
It's a really important question because, of course, we don't know what those people call their own languages. The naming of these languages is complicated. People don't agree. I have used in my book Proto-Indo-European to refer to the language that gave rise to all the modern Indo-European languages.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
because that is the name given to the one that most is known about, that has been most reconstructed and so on. But we know that there were Indo-European languages before that, because we have to explain the link between that language and, for example, the languages spoken in what is now Turkey, the Anatolian branch.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And the only way we can do that is by postulating an older ancestor spoken at the time of Varna.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
Yes. The first thing to say is that, let's start with the assumption that we know people were speaking before writing, okay? So they had languages. And we can see that these languages are related. And we know that languages change over time because that's our lived experience.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So what linguists do is they try to learn about languages that are no longer spoken, dead languages, including languages that were never written down. by comparing their living descendants, not just their living descendants, but also, for example, dead languages that we know about because they did post-date writing. So we have written records for them.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So that would be languages like Sanskrit, Latin, ancient Greek, which are no longer spoken, but they were written. So we know they were spoken at some point.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
So linguists compare these on various different aspects, their phonology, so the way they sounded, their grammar and the words and the vocabulary, to try and reconstruct what they looked like in the past or what their ancestors looked like in the past. So that's called the comparative method.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
And using that method, they have been able to say quite a lot about the sort of intermediate nodes in this Indo-European language family. So, you know, the proto-languages, as we call them, of the 12 different branches of proto-Celtic, proto-Iranic, proto-Armenian, and ultimately to say something about the mother of all of those, which would be proto-Indo-European. Okay.
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
If you want to know who spoke those languages, so when you compare those languages, you can say things about their relative ages, which came before another or which came after another, because linguists know that languages evolve in certain directions more probably than in others. So this is where we come back to the sound laws that I mentioned earlier. We know that languages...
The Ancients
The Birth of Indo-European
For example, the Latin word for 100 is kentum, and that hard C later in certain branches of the Indo-European family became an S. So the K to S sound in that particular linguistic context is a change that's known about, it's called satemization, but it wouldn't go, it's very unlikely to go in the other direction from the S to the K. So using these kinds, that's an example of a sound law.