An Incredible Trunk of the Language Tree

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Nearly half the people in the world speak languages that arose from just one source. It’s a linguistic ancestor of modern languages as diverse as English, Hindi, Irish, Russian, Greek, Spanish, and also ancient ones like Hittite and Akkadian as well as Tocharian.

And it’s thought that this ancestral tongue called Proto-Indo-European was spoken by a small number of people some 5,000 years ago, probably in eastern Ukraine near the Black Sea.

Now, not a word of it was written down, but scholars have deduced its existence because of the strikingly consistent correspondence of sounds among its descendants.

Take a basic word, like the word for the number three. In Spanish, it’s tres. In French, it’s trois. In Russian, it’s three. And in Albanian, it’s three. And of course, in English, it’s three.

And there are lots of other languages that have similar sounding terms for this very basic notion.

And just in the past decade, working alongside archaeologists and geneticists, linguists have been able to fill out a much bigger, much more detailed story of how the offspring of Proto-Indo-Europeans spread out thousands of miles.

And this story is told in a fascinating new book. It’s called Proto, How One Ancient Language Went Global. It’s by science journalist Laura Spinney.

And Spinney makes clear how both migration and climate change have been absolutely key to this history. And she also shows how loan words can serve as a kind of tracer dye of contacts between languages.

Take, for example, the Roma people’s thousand-year exodus out of India. They spoke Romani, which is a descendant of Sanskrit, but once they reached Persia, they assimilated the indigenous words for new things they encountered, such as honey, pear, and donkeys.

And so that’s like a linguistic fossil record of their travels.

And another thing I learned from this book is that a lot of linguists believe that the name of the early Slavs meant the famous people. That’s what they called themselves.

And then in the early Middle Ages, the Franks took the Slavs captive and Slav became Sklavus in the language of the Holy Roman Empire, that is Latin. And that went on to become Esclav in French.

And then when the Normans moved into Britain, it morphed into English slave. But the original idea of Slav, meaning fame, lives on today in the Polish name Stanislaw, which means he who’s achieved fame, and the Ukrainian rallying cry, Slava Ukraina, or glory to Ukraine.

And this is a beautifully written, sweeping history. But Spinney is careful to say that this is just a snapshot of current research at this moment.

All those threads coming together of archaeology and genetics and linguistics. And she compares it to sort of gazing backward into the mist. Like you see the shape of something there, but you’re still working out exactly what it is.

And I really appreciate the way she puts it, Grant, because she says, how do you study a language that’s been dead for thousands of years and never written down? The short answer is with humility.

Lovely. I can’t wait to finish it.

I’m almost through it, Martha. Proto by Laura Spinney is a book that we both recommend and we’ll link to it from our website.

Martha and I love to hear what you’re reading or your thoughts on this book. You can call or text 877-929-9673 or tell us more in email words@waywordradio.org.