From the steppes of prehistoric Eurasia to the languages we speak today, the story of Indo-European is one of ancient roots and global impact. But what exactly is Indo-European? Who spoke it? And how did a single language family come to dominate nearly half the world?In this episode, Tristan Hughes is joined by Laura Spinney to uncover the origins of Proto-Indo-European. From Sanskrit to Latin, mythological echoes to linguistic detective work, discover how archaeology, genetics and early literature help trace this lost language and the diverse prehistoric peoples who once spoke it.Presented by Tristan Hughes. The producer is Joseph Knight, audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.The Ancients is a History Hit podcast.All music from Epidemic SoundsSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.
Chapter 1: What is Proto-Indo-European and why is it important?
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Chapter 2: How did languages like Sanskrit and Latin evolve?
It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring the very intriguing topic that is the birth of Indo-European languages. Long before the beginning of writing, there was a connection between the prehistoric East and West, a connection established through their languages.
Because ancient languages that varied from Celtic to Latin to Sanskrit shared the same complex language family tree. It's known as Indo-European. Most fascinating of all is the common ancestor ancient language that they presumably all are derived from thousands of years ago. A mysterious language that is labelled as Proto-Indo-European. This origin story is what we're going to explore today.
Now this is a field that mixes together linguistics, archaeology and DNA, and it's a tale that features various prehistoric peoples that lived around the Black Sea and on the Great Steppe. People such as the Vana and the Yamnaya. It is quite extraordinary.
Chapter 3: What prehistoric peoples spoke Indo-European languages?
Much of this topic is still shrouded in mystery, but to explain what is known and what has been theorised so far, well, I was delighted to interview the science journalist Laura Spinney. Laura has just written a new book called Proto, which is all about the birth of Indo-European languages and how they came to be spoken by nearly half of humanity. So let's get into it.
Laura, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Thank you very much for inviting me. Delighted to be here.
This is quite a topic. I mean, for me, from a historic background, not really a scientific background, I must admit, Indo-European languages and Proto-Indo-Europeans, this is something I know very little about, but I'm excited to learn more. First of all, what are we talking about when we talk about Indo-Europeans and the Indo-European language family?
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.
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.
It's a massive term, isn't it? I mean, how massive are we talking? How many language families and what families and branches are we talking about that can be incorporated under this great umbrella term that is 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.
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.
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Chapter 4: How do linguists reconstruct lost languages?
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.
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.
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.
It's not one people, one place. It's probably a variety of people speaking this one language.
One last overarching question before we delve more into it. There are so many different terms that are used for these languages. You've got proto-Indo-European, Indo-European. How do you approach this subject? What do you use?
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.
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.
And the only way we can do that is by postulating an older ancestor spoken at the time of Varna.
Well, Laura, I think we've set the scene very nicely now to delve into the science. So the origins of Indo-European languages. How do linguists go about learning more about this, trying to understand the origins of Indo-European language? I mean, languages that emerged in prehistory before writing and so on.
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Chapter 5: What role does archaeology play in understanding Indo-European origins?
Chapter 6: Are there languages in Europe that are not Indo-European?
One last overarching question before we delve more into it. There are so many different terms that are used for these languages. You've got proto-Indo-European, Indo-European. How do you approach this subject? What do you use?
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.
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.
And the only way we can do that is by postulating an older ancestor spoken at the time of Varna.
Well, Laura, I think we've set the scene very nicely now to delve into the science. So the origins of Indo-European languages. How do linguists go about learning more about this, trying to understand the origins of Indo-European language? I mean, languages that emerged in prehistory before writing and so on.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: How does language evolution challenge our understanding of cultural identity?
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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Chapter 8: What evidence do we have of ancient Indo-European speakers?
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.
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.
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.
So when we're going that far back in time in prehistory, we can't say, even with this, we can't say exactly what the word for sheep or horse was or field or crops was for those particular people. But by looking at it, you can understand that it was almost the common ancestor to the many different Indo-European languages that we have today and look about how that language might have spread.
Although you don't know the meanings of the words themselves that they would have used, by looking at those different types of evidence, you can stretch it back, correct?
Yes. So maybe this is a good way to do it.
Please.
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.
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.
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