Some years ago I went to “The Wonders of Rock Art” exhibition at the Sci-Bono Centre in Johannesburg. This exhibition showed a life-size reproduction of France’s Lascaux Cave complete with cave art paintings and models of humans who lived in them about 20,000 years ago. Anatomically they were just like us, though their lives were shorter and presumably more brutish.
Reading the information boards, I was struck by an item that speculated that it might be possible to one day extract sound from the cave walls, and so we would be able to hear their language. I thought this incredibly fascinating, and what a revelation it would be to “hear” our ancestors.
In some ways, Laura Spinney’s Proto shows how linguistics is attempting that feat, recreating the language and sounds of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), a hypothetical prehistoric, ancestral language spoken 5,000-6,000 years ago around the Black Sea. It was spoken before language had been invented, which is why tracing its roots becomes something of a detective story.
Nearly half of humanity now speaks an Indo-European language, descended from that much older language. As Spinney notes, “The Big Bang of the Indo-European languages is easily the most important event of the last five millennia, in the Old World. It took another three and a half thousand years and the invention of the ocean-going ship, but after 1492 some of those languages implanted themselves in the New World, and from there they expanded again.”
Some of the more than 400 languages that have grown from PIE include English, the Romance languages of Europe, the Celtic languages, Slavic and Baltic languages, Armenian, Persian, Russian, Greek, and languages in India, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.
Evidence that these languages sprang from a particular source is seen in many ordinary words that we use now. Take the word daughter. Reconstructed words are indicated by an asterisk in front of them and are traced back through our modern words. So the reconstructed *dhugh₂tḗr, gave rise to duhitár in Sanskrit, thugáter in Greek, dustr in Armenian and duktė in Lithuanian. You can also trace the ancestry of many other words, such as father and mother, for example. About 1,600 PIE words have been reconstructed, and it’s incredibly interesting reading about these words, the similarities between them and how they have travelled.
However, the field of language research has now been enriched by the fact that it is possible to analyse the DNA of these ancient people. This was impossible just a generation ago. This is important as we can now trace their routes and roots across Eurasia. Combine this with archaeological and linguistic advances, and it’s remarkable how much more the past comes into view. Spinney is not a linguist, but a science writer, and this book is an engaging travelogue into ancient time, and through the mystery of how one small language came to influence so many after it.
The story starts, more or less, with the nomadic Yamnaya people, of the Steppe Plains, north of the Black Sea. They had ox-drawn wagons and may have had horses. Spinney traces their movements across the region. They spread not only their genes but also their words from the Eurasian grasslands to the edges of Europe and India.
The book integrates genetic evidence, particularly ancient DNA, with linguistic patterns. For example, Spinney explains how scientists have shown that Yamnaya migrations significantly altered the genetic makeup of Europe, particularly in terms of male-line Y-chromosome ancestry.
The Corded Ware culture, one of their (more war-like) descendants, carried PIE into Northern and Western Europe. Meanwhile, other branches of the family such as the Tocharian, Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Italic, Slavic and Celtic spread and evolved, shaped by local circumstances and borrowing from those they encountered.
This was my one difficulty with the book: keeping track of the journey of the language(s), and the various peoples who spoke the languages that branched out from PIE. While maps placed at the end of each chapter are helpful in tracing what languages were spoken where and when, it’s still a lot to take in. To Spinney’s credit, though, the way she tells the story is accessible and engaging and drives the narrative pulse of the book easily along.
Along the way she also illuminates the myths of the people from prehistory, their lifestyles as well as the linguists who have cracked the codes of words chiselled into stone tablets and the archaeologists who have uncovered the skeletal and other remains of these ancient cultures. Also explored are the various linguistic theories that have evolved (and changed) through the years. It’s a revealing glimpse into prehistory, as well as the debates that permeate archaeology and linguistics.
As I closed the book, I was reminded of my grandfather who was born in Poland and came to SA with his brother as Jewish orphans when they were children. All traces of a Yiddish accent had left him, but now and again a Yiddish expression would come from him such as “Gottenyu” (Dear God). It was an echo of the language he had once spoken. It was a wisp of a trail into the past, and a reminder that languages die, a point that is also emphasised in Spinney’s account of the trail through PIE and beyond.
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