★★★★☆ Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney
Where Indo-European languages came from
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
Laura Spinney
Where Indo-European languages came from
Here are some useful facts from the Introduction of Laura Spinney‘s Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
Now, eight billion humans speak around seven thousand languages. Those languages fall into about a hundred and forty families, but most of us speak languages that belong to just five of them: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Among those five, two behemoths stand out: Indo-European, whose major representative is English, and Sino-Tibetan, which includes Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin has more native speakers than English, but Indo-European has more native speakers than Sino-Tibetan. If you include second or subsequent language-speakers, Indo-European is by far the largest language family the world has ever known. That remains true if you measure it by geographical spread. Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European.
By definition, all Indo-European languages derive from a single language called Proto-Indo-European, spoken some 5000-7000 years ago by some small (probably) group of people who lived -- no one is quite sure where.
Spinney credits Dante Alighieri with being the first to realize that different languages evolved from ancient ancestors by descent with modification, an idea that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace would centuries later bring to biology. Later historical linguists/philologists (two names for one discipline) eventually convinced themselves that European languages were related by common ancestry to Indian languages such as Sanskrit, and the family now includes some seven subfamilies, as well as a handful of isolated languages that haven’t been assigned to a larger group.
Who the speakers of Proto were, where they lived, and when are unsettled questions, although the most likely answers have become clearer in the last few decades. Probably they lived in the north, where Europe gives way to Asia and forest gives way to steppe, in regions that are now Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkiye. (I remember how surprised I was on hearing this some 20 years ago. One typically assumes that human things originated in Africa, where humans evolved, or the Fertile Crescent, where civilization first arose.)
Spinney tells this story in the right way, not by telling us what happened, but by telling us what the evidence is. The evidence is of three types. Historical linguists compare written records of extant and historical languages and attempt to deduce from the things they share what the ancestral language might have looked like. Archaeologists compare the material leavings of ancient peoples. The New Kid on the Block is ancient genetics. In about 2000 it became possible to sequence DNA from well-preserved corpses. This information can be used to trace relationships among peoples and to work out who moved where. It appears that Proto was spread far and wide by the Yamnaya people who originated in and near what is now Ukraine.
Proto does not contain an author biography. Spinney does have a Wikipedia Page, which describes her as a science journalist. Science journalists are not always good at science. Spinney clearly knows her stuff, though. One gets the impression that she would be right at home on a dig. She is comfortable explaining comparative linguistics, and she seems to understand enough genetics to make sense of the revelations of ancient DNA.
Also, she puts the science and scholarship first. She doesn’t attempt to make her book a “human story” by telling irrelevant spicy anecdotes about the researchers. She seems to understand that her readers are really interested in languages and how they came to be. Furthermore, she understands that any story about language is inherently a “human story” already, and that her real job is to tell us everything she plausibly can about those ancient peoples.
I thoroughly enjoyed Proto.