Proto-Indo-European (4000s BC), or PIE for short, is the language that Indo-European languages came from. It was probably spoken in or near what is now the Ukraine, though some place it in Armenia, Turkey or even India.
Indo-European languages are most of those of those spoken in Europe and northern India and in many of the places in between (pictured above) – languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Russian, Persian, Punjabi, Hindi and Bengali (the ten largest). Half of mankind speaks an Indo-European language.
In the late 1700s Sir William Jones, a British judge in Calcutta, was learning Sanskrit, an ancient language of India. He noticed how much it was like Latin and Ancient Greek. So alike that it could not be an accident. It was well-known that Italian, French and Spanish had come from Latin, so maybe Greek, Latin and Sanskrit had come from an even older language. That language is PIE.
The word for snow in different languages:
- English: snow
- Russian: snyek
- Spanish: nieve
- Turkish: kar
- Arabic: galid
- Swahili: theluji
Notice how much alike English, Russian and Spanish are compared to the others. That could be an accident, but by looking at thousands of words and at grammar it soon becomes apparent which languages are probably Indo-European and which are not. Finnish, Hungarian and Basque, for example, are just too different – even if they are spoken in Europe.
By looking at all the words in all the known Indo-European languages, past and present, and by using the linguistic laws of sound change, you can work backwards to reconstruct what PIE must have been. For snow, the PIE root is *sneigwh- (the * means the word is reconstructed).
Not only have linguists worked out the words, but even the grammar. PIE looks kind of like a very old form of Latin. Because that is what it is. It is also a very old form of English, but that is harder to see since English is 2,000 years of sound changes further removed from PIE.
Some English words that still kind of look like their PIE roots:
- mother: *mater-
- sister: *swesor-
- daughter: *dhugheter
- widow: *widhewa
- star: *ster-
- night: *nokwt-
- snow: *sneigwh-
- one: *oinos
- two: *dwo
- three: *treyes
- know: *gneh-
- kiss: *kus-
- birch: *bherhgos
It helps that English spellling is 500 years out of date: no one in English any more says the gh in daughter, the w in two or the k in know. That shows you the kind of sound changes that have been taking place all along.
We know PIE had words for:
- animals: salmon, trout, crane, eagle, duck, cuckoo, beaver, moose, weasel, horse, turtle
- trees: birch, beech, apple, maple, willow
By looking at the words PIE had and by considering climate change and the rate of sound change, we can get a good idea of where and when it was spoken: probably somewhere near the Black Sea about 6,000 years ago, give or take a thousand.
See also:
- The Proto-Indo-Europeans – the people who spoke the language
- English
- Latin
- A Guide To Persians
- Top languages
- Africa: the last 13,000 years – views the history of Africa through its language families, which are comparable to Indo-European.
- White Americans: the last 15,000 years – views the history of White American culture through the history of language, going back to PIE times and beyond.
On the subject of swahili and arabic:
Swahili is somewhat similar to arabic.. In school, they said it originated in the coastal provinces of east africa as arab traders and the local population intermingled and inter-married.
Round the coastal province of kenya and pretty much all of tanzania, they speak a highly purified version of it called swahili sanifu…
So it isn’t surprising that a lot of words in swahili are similar to those in arabic. In fact in East Africa most people who would consider it to be their first language are muslims – another connection to the arabic influence.. The remaining/surrounding populations would consider their respective tribal language as their first language and swahili as the language used for commerce between people of different tribes..
Swahili also borrows from european languages. E.G
– “baiskeli” (bicycle)
– “basi” (bus)
– “koti” (coat)
– Shule (Schule – german) – School.
Example of shared words between swahili and arabic:
– Sita (6)
– Saba (7)
– tisa (9)
– alkhamisi (Thursday)
– ijumaa (Friday)
– wakati (Time)
– alfajiri (Dawn)
– rafiki (friend)
etc etc..
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The school system in Dallas Texas sucks.They didn’t teach us that in school. I like these post. They inform me about things I didn’t know. Thanks Abagond.
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http://kalamu.posterous.com/culture-worlds-languages-traced-back-to-singl
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One interesting fact about the PIE speaking people is that they developed a trait referred to as lactase persistence, what we call lactose tolerance, that probably was a random mutation in just one person; it enabled them to live off cattle in hard times and travel over much of Eurasia.
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I found this awhile back : http://theblessedisle.blogspot.com/2010/12/origins-of-irish-language.html
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@ Kwamla
Thanks!
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@ Peanut
I cannot speak it. I can read it well enough to read the Bible or Aquinas pretty easily but not, say, Cicero.
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Abagond,
Does Old English have any connections to PIE?
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@ Brothawolf
Yes: Old English comes out of Proto-Germanic which comes out of PIE.
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@ Bulanik:
I don’t think Nick is saying that lactase tolerance is exclusive to Indo-Europeans. You are right that it appeared independently in several places.
However, it may be significant for Indo-Europeans because one of the latest theories goes that it was a major factor in allowing that language family to spread all over Europe as it did. Europe was already occupied by people who appear to have already been farmers. But at some point, Indo-Europeans spread across the continent and mixed with them, spreading their genes and languages. It is possible that the extra nutrition from dairy foods was what gave them a distinct advantage over the people that were there before them.
This is only speculation at this point as there is a lot of new research happening at present. But it seems quite reasonable to me. Something very similar seems to have happened in India.
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@Abagond
Oh okay. I kinda figured, but I wanted to be sure.
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And where the heck came the fenno-ugric languages??? 😀
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@ Bulanik
“…. the genetic evidence strongly indicates that the Indo-European speaking peoples of Europe have been present since their ancestors arrived from Africa via South-West Asia…”
This is where it gets, in my view, confusing and non-nonsensical to try to work and account for the language and origins of peoples based on a one time migration out of Africa theory. This is a substituted version of events which cannot be made to fit!. Though many of us will try because its the only information allowed on to the table.
The out of Africa migration theory suggests that indo-European peoples developed from 60-70,000 years ago in this same region. Yet the language familiar to the people of that region suggests it is only 10-15,000 years old?
In the BBC video you posted they make the point of saying not to confuse language with ethnicity. So how did the language only develop 10-15,000 years ago? How does new language develop or become adopted separately from the cultures of the same people?
Which also would have to explain the development or adoption of other different languages in nearby regions as in Sam’s question?
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@ Bulanik
Ok…Now this is one intended for you..!.
You too are coming across further evidence which questions this one time migrations of people out of Africa theory. If the various findings are taken to be true then how could this be so?
Don’t you think its time we started questioning the officially presented wisdom instead over bending over backwards, as it were, trying to make it fit?
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@ Bulanik
Indeed we need to question all of it….
Then we need to follow our intuitively guided inner feelings and decide what we wish to believe for ourselves. Unfortunately many of us have been to entrained to react in FEAR towards knowing and trusting ourselves and our own inner wisdom. Preferring instead to trust the external beliefs or mis-information of others. Its this tendency which keeps a lot of us dumbed down and ignorant. Making us ripe for exploitation by others..
It also keeps us perpetuating officially presented wisdom when its clear these have become less than farcical story tales!
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Somewhere in the region of Siberia
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@ Kwamla:
The theory of tracing everyone’s language back to one that is 70,000 years old is pretty shaky science.
Regarding what was happening say, 10,000 years ago, the languages that eventually gave rise to today’s languages were spoken by various tribal groups who were small in number. Eventually, the adoption of farming and animal husbandry meant expanding populations, which meant that people started spreading out from their original lands, and in some cases also allowed them to conquer or absorb their neighbouring peoples.
To get an idea of how a language like PIE developed, look at a more recent example of a language that we know a lot about: Latin.
Go back 3000 years and Latin is an obscure language spoken by a single tribal group, amongst many other tribal languages that existed in what is now Italy. Yet within a few centuries, it had become the language of the Roman Empire. Through conquest, it absorbed other tribes of Italy, which meant those tribes’ languages died out. Then it spread all over Western Europe, eradicating the Celtic languages that were previously spoken all over France and Spain. While Latin is now effectively a dead language, it evolved and split into numerous languages and dialects: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Catalan and so on. The difference between those languages shows how a single language can change in less than 2000 years.
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^ I think all of those languages ( Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, Catalan, Galician, etc.) are exceedingly very similar – almost like dialects of the same language, ie, not any more dissimilar than subdialects within a larger Chinese dialect grouping (eg, Yue or Min dialects).
Now, if a mere 2000 years could evolve into languages as similar as Korean, Arabic, Xhosa and Celtic, I would find that impressive.
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@jared:
No, serbian is slavic language. Actually our home region linguistically is somewhere around Ural region. Before the slavic tribes immigated into the north east the majority of the area now belonging to Russia was habited by fenno-ugric people such as the Mari etc. Just north of present day Moscow was an area were people spoke almost finnish, some times called east carelian.
@bulanik:
We are party poopers 😀 One ukranian scientist has a theory which goes roughly like this: fenno-ugric people have always lived in north, during the ioce age they lived on the edges of the continental ice cap and were the original mammoth hunters. As the ice cap retreated to the north, these people followed. Who knows?? I know that turkish has some same words as finnish. 😀
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I’m talking about Siberia not Serbia
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@jared: my bad 😀
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@ Eurasian Sensation
“…The theory of tracing everyone’s language back to one that is 70,000 years old is pretty shaky science…
Well I suppose if you are to make that claim then DNA tracing of the human population back to a singe “African Eve” should also be considered similar.
If DNA can be traced back in this way then surely commonalities of language and culture must also be encoded? These too form part of the DNA memory even if scientists today can’t really explain the mechanism for how this works.
But even this commonality of some features is not the whole story. Which is what you are attempting to partially explain. However, you’ve allowed yourself to fall into the familiar trap of trying to shoe horn evidence into a space, in this case, so large of course it will fit!. But the evidence for human civilisations, which includes languages, goes back much further than 10 or 15,000 years.
So in your evidence if a single language can change so much in 2000 years how much more would it change in 20,000? or 200,000? This is the bigger space you still have to account for.
Which is why I maintain we’ve become guilty of: “…perpetuating officially presented wisdom when its clear these have become less than farcical story tales!…”
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@ Kwamla:
I don’t necessarily think it’s wrong to say that all our languages might be descended from one from 70,000 years ago. However, I doubt the veracity of those who made that claim simply because linguists can’t agree on any links that go back more than about 8000 years. They can’t conclusively link the Indo-European family to the Uralic, Caucasian or Altaic language families, even though they presumably originated not too far away. In SE Asia, the Austro-Asiatic, Tai-Kadai, Sino-Tibetan and Austronesian families all presumably have roots in early rice cultivation in Southern China, yet linguists can’t conclusively find links between these families.
Thus I’m very sceptical of anyone who claims to know anything about languages 70,000 years ago. But I’ll keep an open mind.
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@ Eurasian Sensation
They don’t have to be descended but they can be related. You, me and other people commenting on this blog don’t have to be descended from the same family in order to be connected or related to the same human race of people.
As in the structure of DNA. Just because the linguists don’t yet understand or agree on the links doesn’t mean the connections don’t exist.
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[…] 4000s: Proto-Indo-European […]
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