The Prehistoric Mother Tongue (minicast)

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Welcome to another minicast from A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha and I are working hard on books, articles, speaking engagements, and, of course, our new season. We’ve got a lot of ideas planned for the fall, but in the meantime, we’re dropping a few interesting tidbits into the podcast feed.

Rich called us from Slinger, Wisconsin to ask how in the world we can ever really know when one word is derived from another. How do we know anything about the so-called Indo-European language from which many modern languages are supposedly descended? Boy, did I give him an earful.

Well, I have an etymological issue that’s really been bugging me. It has to do with word origins and Indo-European language.

Now, back when I was in college, I took a course in romance philology. So I understand word formation rules and how you can take a word from, say, Latin through a couple steps and end up with the word Spanish.

But how in the world do you go back to where there’s not even close to a written representation language, certainly no spoken representation?

I mean, isn’t this just fantasy?

So you’re talking about how can we, when you go to a dictionary and you look at the etymologies and sometimes it’ll say something about an Indo-European root, and you’re like, how could they possibly come up with that Indo-European root?

There’s nobody that speaks that language. We have no documents in that language. It seems like guesswork, doesn’t it?

It totally does.

Well, yeah, there’s a little bit of a leap of faith there, only because you have to trust their opinion, or else one has to become an Indo-European scholar oneself in order to get it.

This is a whole, of course, books have been written about Indo-European language and how we surmise what it had in it, what it was about, what its words were, what it meant, and what became of it, how it split off and become these other languages in the world.

But the short version of this is, first of all, we actually have written records further back than you might think. We have plenty of written records of language going back millennia, 5,000, 6,000, 8,000, even further back.

And some of these written records belong to Indo-European languages. So we can actually compare those written records, even if we don’t know what they sounded like, we can compare those records, try to decode them.

And some success has been made in decoding them and then draw comparisons and see what they had in common.

All right.

And then on top of that, you’ve got the languages that we do know and that we do speak. The modern languages, the stuff that we know, you know, in German and French and English and so forth and Latin and Greek and a variety of hundreds of different variations of languages and dialects.

We can compare those living languages as well and find their commonalities.

Yeah, and about half of the world’s languages descended from this one great mother tongue, right, Grant?

I mean, things as diverse as Russian and Hindi and Spanish and Lithuanian.

Yes, Sanskrit, Albanian, Lithuanian.

And therefore the Indian languages that are descended from Sanskrit.

Well, let me just kind of short circuit this and say once this kind of came to the attention of the scholars in the 1700s, there was a fellow by the name of Sir William Jones who kind of like in this perfect paragraph crystallizes this revolutionary idea that these languages did not spring up wholly formed from the earth, but that they were all descended from parents of parents of parents of parents in the same way that people are descended from parents, from parents and parents and so forth.

And this is how he put it, if you’ll bear with me, Rich.

Sure.

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either.

Yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident.

So strong indeed that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.

That right there is the nut of the idea that leads to Indo-European studies.

I’m telling you, my heart is pounding.

I love that passage.

And that’s in 1786 that he laid that out.

And we’ve made a great deal of distance since.

I’m going to later post some links to some stuff online that’s been about Indo-European and it really kind of gets into it.

If you’re ready to get wonky, Rich, are you?

What’s that?

Are you ready to get wonky?

I’m certainly ready to wonkify myself.

All right.

Well, I’m going to post some links to some stuff.

The scholarly level is middling to high.

But I think even if you don’t understand everything, you’re going to have a lot of eureka moments when you go, okay, I get it.

This is why these words sound the same.

This is why these words are similar.

This is how they composite this.

For example, we know that when a language changes, say, for example, a vowel.

Let’s talk about the H in Spanish.

When the H in Spanish has changed several times in the history of the Spanish language, the H has either been mostly pronounced at the beginning of a word or not pronounced at the beginning of a word.

Did you know that?

Yeah.

And when it has changed, it has almost completely changed one way or the other.

It’s always pronounced, almost always, or rarely pronounced, almost never.

And so when we know that a sound changes in language, it’s consistent, and we can draw conclusions about it.

And the same thing happens within languages, and even certain sounds across languages, for example, D and T, because of how the tongue hits the mouth, often are interchangeable.

So we know that if one set of words has migrated over time from a D sound to a T sound, that other words, we can guess, probably also made the change as well.

So there’s a lot to be said on this, but just by taking all of these rules about how language changes over time, and when I say rules, I mean we know these to be true because we can prove them with living languages.

Then we can kind of backtrack and kind of reverse engineer the modern languages and even the dead languages that we only have in written form and begin to propose what the original languages or the parent or grandparent languages might have looked like.

Well, isn’t it kind of like looking at, say, atomic theory?

I mean, who’s seen an atom?

But we see how different things behave that the atom is the center of.

You can infer it the same way that scientists do.

Or in archaeology, archaeologists can reconstruct a vase from the tiniest lip of a piece of pottery.

So there are all these inferences that get made through that discipline of comparing those Ds and Ts.

Similar words in different languages.

Rich, the final thing I’ll say on this, and maybe I’ve gone on too long already, and you can stop me if I have.

There was a linguist by the name of Don Ringe.

He posted a fabulous series of blog posts to Language Log, the Language Web Log, about Indo-European language.

He talks specifically about the linguistic diversity of Aboriginal Europe, that is, before modern Europe really was Europe at all.

And he makes a significant point about the spread of languages.

He says, the spread of Indo-European languages is not due to any innate superiority of the languages or their speakers, but to the fact that they had more cattle, better horses, and probably better weapons.

And as you can see there, if we can trace, for example, the domestication of animals, then we can begin to understand maybe how language patterns moved as well.

If we can trace the invasion of one group by another group, then we can begin to, you know, through their weapons and through their warfare, then we can begin to understand that the language probably traveled with them.

So there’s a cultural aspect to this as well.

Finding the Indo-European roots of language is directly tied to archaeology.

It’s directly tied to the potsherds that are being dug up, even if there’s no language on them at all.

Right, yeah, and I understand, but in my mind,

It’s still the difference between archaeology and animal bones and everything between something as ephemeral as the pronunciation of a word.

Well, that’s definitely, there’s a, you’re probably familiar with this, but I’ll tell everyone else. There’s a convention that you’ll find used in the writings about the Indo-European language, which I love. And this is when they posit a word that they say, well, this word might have existed. They prefix it with an asterisk. And that asterisk always means that the form is not attested in any print literature whatsoever, that they’ve only invented it on the spot based upon their conjecture and their surmise. And, of course, whether or not you believe their conjecture surmises up to you as an independent scholar. And certainly the infighting among Europeanists is immense. There’s nothing settled on this at all. They fight tooth and nail. So blood is drawn. So it’s not settled. But there’s a lot of strong theory there. And I think the foundations of the field are very good. So I shouldn’t let it bug me. I should just say, okay, it’s their best guess. It’s probably close. And go on with my life.

No, I would say you should let it bug you. And just continue to consume more material. Because if it’s bugging you, it either means that they’ve done a poor job in convincing you, maybe by having poor scholarship, or else you’re looking at it from a different way than they are. You might actually bring light to it on your own behalf. A doubt and skepticism are incredibly healthy. I encourage those in every aspect of life. I’ll leave you with two sources right off the bat that you can check, and I’ll post links to these and some other stuff on the website. But the first is, in the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the fourth edition, there is a great essay in the front matter about Indo-European roots and Indo-European language. It is fantastic. I highly recommend it. And actually, the etymologies in the American Heritage Dictionary also tend to feature Indo-European roots. Very strong etymologies there. The second one is Benjamin Fortson’s Indo-European Language and Culture and Introduction, published by Blackwell. And Fortson has designed this textbook for undergraduates, but I think anybody who’s graduated high school could probably sufficiently understand this text to come away a winner. Great.

So I’m sorry. I went on and on here, but this is a massive subject, and I hope I’ve summarized my beliefs enough that maybe I’ve convinced you a little bit that they are on the right path. I think my confidence has taken a step up.

Hey, that’s good to hear, Rich. Okay. Thanks for calling. Thank you very much, guys. All right. Bye-bye.

You know, as you know, Martha, I could talk about this for hours, not because of anything that has to do with me, but because this subject is so incredibly interesting.

Well, it is. I mean, it’s really mind-blowing the first time that you realize that these languages that are so diverse, like Swedish and Albanian and Hindi and Greek, all have this connection, this fundamental connection. And then you start seeing the connections, and they just don’t stop. And the fact is that it is hard to wrap your mind around that. But then we sort of stand on the shoulders of giants. All these people have done this research and are making all these inferences. And at some point, you just have to go along.

Right. Either that or you’ve got to start completely over. And then what’s the point? You’ll never finish before the end of your life. You take what is given to you by the scholars who have come before as granted until you can disprove it. You have to accept it.

Usually when I talk about this in public or even in just personal email, people ask these questions about how language is related. I like to use the examples of our word know, K-N-O-W, being related to the word that you often find in Scots English, ken, K-E-N, and the Spanish connoisseur and the French conneta. And if you look at the spelling of these, you can vaguely see the similarities. But if I tell you the rules about how these spellings, the phonetics changed over the history of these languages, then you can just in a room full of people just see the light bulb going on over their heads because it begins to make sense.

What’s missing from Rich, what Rich was saying, what’s missing from most people’s understanding of how language changes is an understanding of those fixed, fast rules of how language changes. There are some rules on the edge that aren’t proven, but there’s a core basis of rules that are fixed and proven and certain.

Yeah, yeah. You’re right. Anyway, on and on and on. As I said to Rich, you can find links about Indo-European and download dozens of full episodes of our program at no charge from our website at waywordradio.org. Also, if you’d like to hear A Way with Words on your local airwaves, why not write or call your public radio station and tell them about our program? You can follow us on twitter.com @wayword. For A Way with Words, I’m Grant Barrett in New York City. Thank you.