The Birth of Indo-European

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Speaker 1 It's the ancients on history hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.
Today we're exploring the very intriguing topic that is the birth of Indo-European languages.

Speaker 1 Long before the beginning of writing, there was a connection between the prehistoric East and West, a connection established through their languages.

Speaker 1 Because ancient languages that varied from Celtic to Latin to Sanskrit shared the same complex language family tree. It's known as Indo-European.

Speaker 1 Most fascinating of all is the the common ancestor ancient language that they presumably all derived from thousands of years ago, a mysterious language that is labeled as Proto-Indo-European.

Speaker 1 This origin story is what we're going to explore today.

Speaker 1 Now this is a field that mixes together linguistics, archaeology and DNA. And it's a tale that features various prehistoric peoples that lived around the Black Sea and on the Great Steppe.

Speaker 1 Peoples such as the Vana and the Yamnaya. It is quite extraordinary.

Speaker 1 Much of this topic is still shrouded in mystery, but to explain what is known and what has been theorized so far, well I was delighted to interview the science journalist Laura Spinney.

Speaker 1 Laura has just written a new book called Proto, which is all about the birth of Indo-European languages and how they came to be spoken by nearly half of humanity. So let's get into it.

Speaker 1 Laura, it is a pleasure to have you on the podcast today.

Speaker 13 Thank you very much for inviting me. Delighted to be here.

Speaker 1 This is quite a topic.

Speaker 1 I mean, for me, from a historic background, not really a scientific background, I must admit, Indo-European languages and Proto-Indo-Europeans, this is something I know very little about, but I'm excited to learn more.

Speaker 1 First of all, what are we talking about when we talk about Indo-Europeans and the Indo-European language family?

Speaker 13 I mean, Indo-European is essentially a linguistic term. So it refers to this family of languages.

Speaker 13 Strictly speaking, we shouldn't talk about Indo-Europeans because that implies there is a group of people with that identity.

Speaker 13 Whereas what we're talking about is people speaking a language, so it could have been people of many different ethnicities. In fact, it was, and many different cultures.

Speaker 13 And it's important to make that clear because the categories have been blurred and abused, for example, by Nazis in the 20th century. So we'll clear that up from the start.

Speaker 1 It's a massive term, isn't it? I mean, how massive are we talking?

Speaker 1 How many language families and what families and branches are we talking about that can be incorporated under this great umbrella term that is Indo-European?

Speaker 13 Yeah. Okay.
So it's called Indo-European because it spanned or spanned initially languages from India, from the subcontinent to the West of Europe.

Speaker 13 Today, they're spoken on every inhabited continent. They're spoken...

Speaker 13 as a first language, so that's not even including people who speak it as a second or subsequent language, by a first language by 46% of humanity. So 3.2 billion people.

Speaker 13 So it's by far the largest language family in the world. We think there are about 140 language families in the world.
And there are 12 main branches. I'll list them quickly.

Speaker 13 Iranic, the Iranic languages, the Indic languages, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Baltic, Slavic, Italic, Germanic, Celtic, and I don't think I've missed any out. or have I? Perhaps I have.

Speaker 13 Tocharian and Anatolian. Sorry, those are the two that are dead.
Okay, okay.

Speaker 1 Well, I think you can get excused then. I mean, it's quite a massive amount in huge periods of time.
And I'm guessing, is that one of the most fascinating things about it?

Speaker 1 Is that you can look at maybe Latin or something like that, the Roman language of the ancient Romans, and maybe languages in ancient India, Sanskrit and so on.

Speaker 1 And can you see with certain words or meanings of certain words that there are clear similarities between the two?

Speaker 13 Absolutely. There's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples.

Speaker 13 The one I actually opened the book with, because I think it's very striking, is the Sanskrit term Dhyau Pita, which literally meant sky father, or we would say father sky, English speakers.

Speaker 13 And it was the highest god in the ancient Indian pantheon. But it was also essentially the name of the highest god in the Roman pantheon, because if you think about it,

Speaker 13 it comes from the same original term meaning sky father, obviously became Jupiter. For the ancient Greeks, their supreme deity was Theos Pater, Theos Pater, shortened to Theos, or we would say Zeus.

Speaker 13 So all of these languages at very distant points on the Eurasian landmass shared the same name and the same divinity. And that can't be a coincidence.
And that's what I set out to explain in the book.

Speaker 1 So often we can sometimes put these different parts of the ancient world into almost kind of different boxes and think that they're in different spheres.

Speaker 1 And although we know there is absolutely interaction through trade and so on between them, you know, you sometimes can often separate them.

Speaker 1 Say we're going to be talking about Rome or going to talk about India. Is Indo-European, is this a great way to explore them together and explore the similarities between the two?

Speaker 13 Absolutely. I mean, if you think about it,

Speaker 13 history literally refers to the study of the past through written records, okay? But we existed obviously before writing, which was invented about 5,000 years ago.

Speaker 13 So prehistory is actually much longer, obviously much longer than history because we've been around as a species for 300,000 years. And we also spoke for all of those 300,000 years.

Speaker 13 And so what we spoke about and the languages that we used have shaped us as much, if not more, than the languages that we've used since then.

Speaker 13 But we have this kind of false idea that everything stops at the beginning of writing just because we can't see it so easily.

Speaker 13 So for example, everyone in Western Europe, or many people in Western Europe, would trace themselves sort of culturally back through the Jewish-Christian Middle Ages to the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Speaker 13 Whereas in the subcontinent and Persia and India, they would trace themselves back perhaps to the gods of the ancient Indian and Hindu scriptures or the writings of Zarathustra.

Speaker 13 But what I'm saying is that prior to those very early writings, there's a layer that links both East and West. And you can see it in the very oldest literatures.

Speaker 13 You can see that many, for example, the mythological motifs and tropes are very, very similar to the extent that it can't really be coincidental.

Speaker 1 So, the mythological stories as well, and I guess when you're looking at the earliest scriptures, even religious texts, as well as kind of historical texts, is that where you see the similarities in both types of forms?

Speaker 13 So, if you take, for example, the Rig Veda, which is the most ancient Indian text, and the epics of Homer in Greece, you see many of the, not just the same sort of story motifs, but also the story is told in the same poetic formulae and often the same words.

Speaker 1 You mentioned those different groups that belong to Indo-European, but are there any languages in Europe that don't derive from Indo-European languages?

Speaker 13 Yes. First of all, and famously, there's Basque in the Basque country between France and Spain.
That is currently considered to be much older than the Indo-European languages.

Speaker 13 So the idea is that it's a relic of the languages that were bought about 8,000 years ago rather than about 5,000 years ago, which is when we think the Indo-European languages came.

Speaker 13 And it was probably brought by originally by the farmers who expanded out of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent with the Neolithic Revolution after about 8,000 years ago came into Europe.

Speaker 13 And Basque is spoken still today in that sort of mountain kingdom of the Pyrenees between France and Spain.

Speaker 13 And that geography and that topography is probably part of the reason why it's managed to survive. But that's not the only one.

Speaker 13 There's also, for example, the Finnic languages, Finnish and Estonian, which belong to the Uralic language family, as does Hungarian, though in a different branch, and the Sami languages of the far north of the Arctic Circle, traditionally of reindeer herders.

Speaker 13 Those are Uralic languages.

Speaker 13 But if you were to go back, say, to 500 BC, let's say 2,500 years ago, you'd see a very different language landscape in Europe and you see a much richer mix of Indo-European and Indo-European languages just to say that the landscape has constantly evolved and is very different at different points in history and prehistory.

Speaker 1 You often see with terms about languages and having different groups, I mean you see terms like branches and different trees of languages.

Speaker 1 We're using terminology like that with Indo-European languages. Does it oversimplify it a little? How should we be approaching this?

Speaker 13 Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's definitely a simplification.

Speaker 13 So maybe I should start by saying that languages evolve all the time and they evolve by descent in a sort of similar way to families in genetics in that you can trace a descendant language back to its ancestor.

Speaker 13 You can see the similarities and how it's evolved over time. There are certain so-called sound laws which sort of control, govern that evolutionary process.

Speaker 13 But they also change, unlike people, unlike biology and genes, they change by horizontal borrowing.

Speaker 13 So languages, for example, loan words to each other all the time and they also loan sounds and grammatical structures and all sorts of other aspects of language.

Speaker 13 So there are these two main mechanisms, horizontal borrowing and vertical descent.

Speaker 13 Now, when you think about a family tree, that's only capturing the vertical aspect, the sort of familial genetic descent aspect of language evolution. So in that sense, it's a massive simplification.

Speaker 13 But there clearly are descent aspects to language evolution. I mean, we talked about the diaupita, the term for father sky.
You can see very clearly that there is a familial relationship between

Speaker 13 those terms and there are certain sound laws that control that relationship. So the tree also simplifies things in the sense that it will show you crisp branchings between languages.

Speaker 13 But language, the definition of a language, as we know, is very troubled because it's partly political.

Speaker 13 As Max Weinrich famously said, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy and there's some truth in that. You know, there's a political aspect to the definition of a language.

Speaker 13 So the tree is very much a simplification. And like any model in mathematics or science, it's useful, but it's not the whole story.

Speaker 13 And we have to bear that in mind because, you know, it's too easy to jump on that and think that explains everything when it certainly doesn't.

Speaker 1 I guess it also helps if you're looking when talking about like the birthplace of certain Indo-European languages, doesn't it? If it goes horizontally and not just descending

Speaker 1 at the same time, almost like I remember doing a chat a long time ago about the origins of Homo sapiens and saying there's not just one birthplace where Homo sapiens first emerge.

Speaker 1 They might be in several different parts of Africa at once. I guess, is that the kind of approach you need to do with this topic too?

Speaker 13 Absolutely, because if you look at a family tree, then it all branches neatly back to one common ancestor.

Speaker 13 And then, if that was a language that was really spoken once by real people, then it's very easy to make the leap then to say that it was spoken by one people in one place.

Speaker 13 I think that linguists and everybody who's interested in this question is very quick today to say, no, that's not true.

Speaker 13 And you can see why, very easily, if I give you a couple of examples, in Australia, amongst Indigenous Australians, hundreds of different languages are spoken, but those people generally tend to consider themselves as ethnically quite similar.

Speaker 13 So there's one or a few ethnicities related with a huge and rich spectrum of languages. Take the other extreme, you've got English.

Speaker 13 English is a language that is spoken by dazzling array of people of different ethnicities and cultures. So there's clearly no one-to-one mapping of language, culture and genetics.

Speaker 13 And that's why it's complicated and very and a very contentious point and discussed for over 200 years to say that there was a birthplace for these languages.

Speaker 13 We have to be clear what we're talking about. It's not one people, one place.
It's probably a variety of people speaking this one language.

Speaker 1 One last overarching question before we delve more into it. There are so many different terms that are used for these languages.
You've got Proto-Indo-European, Indo-European.

Speaker 1 How do you approach this subject? What do you use? use?

Speaker 13 It's a really important question, because of course we don't know what those people call their own languages. The naming of these languages is complicated.
People don't agree.

Speaker 13 I have used in my book Proto-Indo-European to refer to the language that gave rise to all the modern Indo-European languages, because that is the name given to the one that most is known about, that has been most reconstructed, and so on.

Speaker 13 But we know that there were Indo-European languages before that, because we have to explain the link link between that language and, for example, the languages spoken in what is now Turkey, the Anatolian branch.

Speaker 13 And the only way we can do that is by postulating an older ancestor spoken at the time of Varna.

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Speaker 1 Well, Laura, I think we've set the scene very nicely now to delve into the science. So the origins of Indo-European languages.
How do linguists go about learning more about this?

Speaker 1 Trying to understand the origins of Indo-European language. I mean, languages that emerged in prehistory before writing and so on.

Speaker 13 Yes. The first thing to say is that

Speaker 13 let's start with the assumption that we know people were speaking before writing, okay? So they had languages. And we can see that these languages are related.

Speaker 13 So, and we know that languages change over time because that's our lived experience.

Speaker 13 So, what linguists do is they try to learn about languages that are no longer spoken, dead languages, including languages that were never written down, by comparing their living descendants.

Speaker 13 Not just their living descendants, but also, for example, dead languages that we know about because they did post-date writing. So we have written records for them.

Speaker 13 So that would be languages like Sanskrit, Latin, ancient Greek, which are no longer spoken, but they were written. So we know they were spoken at some point.

Speaker 13 So linguists compare these on various different aspects, their phonology, so the way they sounded, their grammatic, their grammar and the words and the vocabulary, to try and reconstruct what they looked like in the past or what their ancestors looked like in the past.

Speaker 13 So that's called the comparative method. And using that method, they have been able to say quite a lot about the sort of intermediate nodes in this Indo-European language family.

Speaker 13 So, you know, the proto-languages, as we call them, of the 12 different branches, so proto-Celtic, proto-Iranic, proto-Armenian, and ultimately to say something about the mother of all of those, which would be Proto-Indo-European.

Speaker 13 Okay.

Speaker 13 If you want to know who spoke those languages, So when you compare those languages, you can say things about their relative ages, which came before another or which came after another, because linguists know that languages evolve in certain directions more probably than in others.

Speaker 13 So this is where we come back to the sound laws that I mentioned earlier.

Speaker 13 We know that languages, for example, the Latin word for 100 is kentum and that hard C later in certain branches of the Indo-European family became an S.

Speaker 13 So the K to S sound in that particular linguistic context is a change that's known about. It's called satimization, but it wouldn't go very unlikely to go in the other direction from the S to the K.

Speaker 13 So, using these kind of, that's an example of a sound law. Another example of a sound law would be the fact that, for example, pater in Latin became father in English, the P became the F.

Speaker 13 These, these are sound laws, and linguists use them to reconstruct the family tree to say which came first in the order.

Speaker 13 But that exercise can't tell you anything about the chronological ages of languages, like when in actual historical time or prehistorical time languages split or were born or died.

Speaker 13 Okay, so to do that, you need to use non-linguistic sources and to sort of cross-reference them. So I'll give you an example.

Speaker 13 An example where you would use a historical source would be, for example, we know from ancient historians' chronicles that

Speaker 13 Hadrian, he wasn't yet the emperor, but before he was an emperor, He addressed the Roman Senate in around 100 AD CE

Speaker 13 and he was mocked by the other senators for his Spanish accent.

Speaker 13 So Hadrian was born in what we call Seville now in Spain, so he had a Spanish accent, and the other senators thought that was very funny, but he still spoke recognizable Latin.

Speaker 13 So that's a clue that at that point, Latin was still Latin. It hadn't yet exploded into the Romance languages, but it was in the process of doing so.

Speaker 13 Now, by the 9th century CE, we have another little historical glimpse of what the languages in Europe were doing from something called the Oaths of Strasbourg.

Speaker 13 So this is when two grandsons of Charlemagne signed a pact, a military pact, and in order to broadcast this pact to their followers, they read it out in their respective languages.

Speaker 13 One of them spoke German and the other spoke Romance. So the Germanic speaker had to speak in Romance and the Romance speaker had to speak in Germanic.

Speaker 13 And obviously it was very important to avoid any kind of misunderstanding in this situation. So the Romance speaker spoke in German.

Speaker 13 The Germanic speaker could easily have spoken in Latin, which was the language of Charlemagne's Holy Roman Empire, but he had more trouble with Romance, so he needed a crib sheet to help him to say the right thing.

Speaker 13 And that crib sheet is what we call the Os of Strasbourg. It's the first evidence of the French language written down.
and in fact of any Romance language.

Speaker 13 So that shows us that at that point, the reason he was unsure of himself was that it was no longer Latin, it had become Romance, in this case, French, Old French.

Speaker 13 So those are examples of the kinds of historical clues that help us to put dates on these things. But obviously, before the beginning of...

Speaker 13 So how far does history go back? Let's answer that question. The oldest texts in an Indian language of any substantial size are the Rigveda, is the Rigveda.

Speaker 13 In Greek, the oldest texts are about the same age, so about 1400 BC.

Speaker 1 This is Linear A and Linear B. Are we talking about that kind of writing?

Speaker 13 Exactly. That's 1400 BC.
There are older inscriptions in an Indo-European language. The oldest of all are Hittite, and they date to about 2000 BCE.
But these languages are older than that.

Speaker 13 And so they were spoken for thousands of years before they were written down. So how do we get at that period prior to 2000 BC? How do we understand what they sounded like, who was speaking them?

Speaker 13 what the differences were between them before that. That's where archaeology and genetics come in.

Speaker 13 And obviously, it's a more indirect exercise because we don't have symbols expressing the sounds that they made. It's a far more complicated job to get at them.

Speaker 13 It doesn't mean we can't say anything about them. And in fact, we can say fascinating things about them.
So

Speaker 13 the basic point here to understand, I suppose, is that people speak about the things that matter to them.

Speaker 13 So What that means, among other things, is that the vocabulary that linguists can reconstruct for these languages will be in some sense a reflection of their world. So they'll have more words.

Speaker 13 If they're herders, they're going to have more words for the sorts of animals that they herd, for dairying, for horses, cows, they like sheep. Exactly.
Words related to a mobile lifestyle.

Speaker 13 Whereas if they're farmers, they're going to have more words related to crops and fields and the sorts of tools that farmers use. Right.

Speaker 13 So that's a basic, that's a simple way in which we can tell things. So about who they were and how they lived.
So archaeologists can also tell that kind of thing about those people, obviously.

Speaker 13 They can date things using radiocarbon dating. So they can say, let's say, 5,000 years ago, there was a culture on the steppe north of the Black Sea who were mobile pastoralists.

Speaker 13 They kept sheep and goats. They may have ridden horses and they also had dogs.
And then if you look at a vocabulary of a language that

Speaker 13 may have been spoken about that time, but anyway predates writing, and you can make some cross-references with the culture that the archaeologists have described.

Speaker 13 The genetics comes in for essentially for a hundred or more years of the exercise of trying to understand the Indo-European languages, it was linguists and archaeologists alone trying to reconstruct this picture.

Speaker 13 In the last 10 years,

Speaker 13 actually a bit longer, but essentially in the last 10 years, geneticists have come along and injected a whole new dimension to it and essentially rewritten the story.

Speaker 13 Because what they've allowed us to do, especially with ancient DNA, is to track prehistoric people through space.

Speaker 13 So we can now see where they've moved and we can see the links literally in the form of people between archaeological cultures. So we can see where people travel to.

Speaker 13 And when people move, we know they carry their languages. So it's another piece of evidence in the puzzle, if you like.
People don't always keep their languages when they move.

Speaker 13 Sometimes they give them up and learn the language of the people who are in the place where they go to. But they definitely carry it for a while.

Speaker 13 And so we can see, you know, we can use the genetic profile of people to track where the languages move to and see how that corresponds with the languages

Speaker 13 spoken at that time and by the cultures that the archaeologists have defined. So it's kind of like a three-piece puzzle.
Each one is giving us more information about the other.

Speaker 13 Sometimes they disagree. But essentially, with the three parts, we can begin,

Speaker 13 albeit patchily and with great humility, to try to patch together the picture before writing.

Speaker 1 So when we're going that far back in time in prehistory, we can't say, even with this, we can't say exactly what the word for sheep or horse was or field or crops was for those particular people.

Speaker 1 But by looking at it, you can understand that it was almost the common ancestor to the many different Indo-European languages that we have today.

Speaker 1 and look about how that language might have spread.

Speaker 1 Although you don't know the meanings of the words themselves that they would have used, by looking at those different types of evidence, you can stretch it back, correct?

Speaker 13 Yes. So maybe this is a good way to do it.

Speaker 1 Please.

Speaker 13 The speakers of Proto-Indo-European words have been constructed for their vocabulary from the descendant languages for

Speaker 13 cow, sheep, goat, horse, dog, or wheeled vehicles

Speaker 13 for at least one metal, although that's a little bit contentious, and for words related to dairying. Now,

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 13 only people herding that selection of animals and who knew wheel transport before about 3000 BC lived on the steppe to the west of the Ural Mountains. And we know that from archaeology.

Speaker 13 So that's just an example of how we cross-reference the two to try and say where those people were and when they spoke this language.

Speaker 1 This idea of a common ancestor, I know, as you've highlighted earlier, oversimplified to say trees and branches, but can we talk about a common ancestor before these Indo-European languages, before they emerge?

Speaker 13 Yes, one of the long-standing puzzles in the Indo-European story was the branch of languages that we call Anatolian.

Speaker 13 Okay, so the best known and best chronicled example of this branch would be Hittite, which was spoken in the Hittite Empire in what is now Turkey until about 1200 BC.

Speaker 13 It was one of the great pre-classical empires, along with Egypt and Babylon and the Assyrians.

Speaker 13 So in the early 20th century, linguists, phylologists, as they were more likely to be called then, realized that Hittite was probably an Indo-European language.

Speaker 13 And the evidence for that is now overwhelming.

Speaker 13 So here's a branch of the family that had died out by the early part of the Common Era, but that was clearly linked to the modern indo-european languages okay and one of the explanations that has basically emerged that links anatolian to the parent of all the modern european indo-european languages is that there was an ancestor to all of them that was spoken somewhere around the black sea around 6 000 years ago

Speaker 1 okay

Speaker 13 so at that time we know from archaeology that there was a trade network around the Black Sea, that copper was the main metal, it was the copper age, copper was the main metal driving this trade network, and that there was trade over huge distances.

Speaker 13 This was before wheeled transport,

Speaker 13 but

Speaker 13 people could walk, obviously, and they could also, they probably had some kind of canoe or simple vessel which they used in the shallow parts of the Black Sea.

Speaker 13 So there was trade in copper from deep into the Eurasian steppe, to places on the Volga River, all the way to Bulgaria on the west coast of the Black Sea.

Speaker 13 And the main center of this trade network was a place called Varna in what is now Bulgaria, which was a huge copper center.

Speaker 13 They are essentially the first people to have smelted copper and to have made weapons and spectacular kinds of jewelry and diadems and scepters and so on.

Speaker 1 They smelt gold as well, aren't they? They've got some beautiful

Speaker 1 gold in burials as well. Remember talking about that?

Speaker 13 Yeah, extraordinary culture. Panned gold, yes, absolutely extraordinary culture.
And now, the Varna people were farmers, the people in the steppe were herders.

Speaker 13 Since we think that the first Indo-European language was probably a language of herders, the idea is that this ancestor was probably not the people of Varna themselves, but one of their clients in this network.

Speaker 13 And it may have been somebody living in the region of the Caucasus, right across the Black Sea, and that these people then

Speaker 13 eventually or their descendants migrated, one branch going into Anatolia, bringing the Anatolian languages there, and another branch going up onto the steppe and taking the mother of all living Indo-European languages there.

Speaker 13 And that would then explain this link. It's the theory, it's not,

Speaker 13 everybody doesn't support it. But that very early part of the Indo-European story is still somewhat vague.
It gets more concrete the closer we come to the present.

Speaker 13 But that's the idea, the presiding idea for the moment, I would say.

Speaker 1 And that rough area then, are we talking about the area of what is today Ukraine?

Speaker 1 Do we think that's where kind of the steppe meets the farming world, where those interactions would have taken place around that time?

Speaker 13 So the sort of frontier between the step and non-step, if you like, because the non-step takes different forms, I guess there would be the Caucasus would basically mark the frontier in that part of the world.

Speaker 13 And then you've got Ukraine. Ukraine is we understand it now, and it's unfortunately a changing story.
But the country, modern country, is essentially about half-step.

Speaker 13 So that's another step frontier that crosses modern Ukraine.

Speaker 13 And this boundary has been absolutely crucial through prehistory and history for one very basic reason that is underpinned by climate and ecology.

Speaker 13 But the basic reason is that the farmers were on one side of it and the herders were on another.

Speaker 13 And this was a massive cultural divide, probably also mostly throughout most of time, linguistic divide as well. But these people

Speaker 13 engaged in trade, they sometimes fought, they in a way interacted importantly in ways that impacted on both their cultures either side of that line.

Speaker 13 So it's a crucial thing in informing the linguistic landscape all through this period. But in the copper age, yes, they were trading and the languages expanded through both worlds.

Speaker 1 And this idea of a lingua franca that you see time and time again, a common language that was needed for trade to happen, you know, it has happened throughout history.

Speaker 1 That might have happened there as well.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 13 So when the people of Varna started making their wonderful copper objects and everybody suddenly wanted them, They had a massive business opportunity on their hands, but they definitely wouldn't have spoken the same language as those people coming from the Volga in the steppe.

Speaker 13 And so how did they trade? We don't have any evidence throughout history of human beings trading in high value goods without a common language. We've never done that.

Speaker 13 The assumption is that they would have quickly developed a lingua franca, a language of trade, a common language. as also, of course, happened later around the Mediterranean.

Speaker 13 And that's where the name lingua franca comes from, because that was the eponymous lingua franca.

Speaker 13 But it probably happened much earlier around the Black Sea and one idea is that the lingua franca was that ancestral and Indo-European language, that it's the one that gave rise to the whole family.

Speaker 13 But it's not an idea that's very popular amongst linguists because lingua francas tend to just be reserved for the purpose that they were invented for.

Speaker 13 So they're just restricted to that trade function and they live alongside the native languages of the people in the network. So it's not necessarily a recipe for world domination.

Speaker 13 It doesn't replace other languages. It's very much tied to the the function for which it was developed.

Speaker 13 So a kind of more popular idea, certainly amongst linguists I would say, is that the original Indo-European language was probably spoken by one of the clients of Varna in that network.

Speaker 13 And there's another reason for thinking that, which is that the people of Varna were essentially farmers.

Speaker 13 They were on the sort of more temperate forest side of that step, non-stepped boundary, whereas Proto-Indo-European and its earlier incarnation were languages we think of herders.

Speaker 13 So, more likely to come from a different biome, a different ecological environment. And so, may have come from across the sea somewhere in the Caucasus region.

Speaker 13 One of the ideas is that it came just from the north of the Caucasus in what's now southern Russia, but another is that it came from the Armenian highlands just to the south.

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Speaker 1 From this language of the time of the Varna culture, this kind of common ancestor of the Indo-European language, how do we go from that time period to the next big name I've got on my list, which is the Yamnaya?

Speaker 1 Who are the Yamnaya?

Speaker 13 So the Yamnaya are this culture who arise on the steppes north of the Black Sea at about 3,500 BCE, so 5,500 years ago. Yamnaya is the name of a very specific archaeological culture.

Speaker 13 And in fact, it's a Russian word that refers to their burial rite. They had a very distinctive burial rite.

Speaker 13 They put their dead in a chamber on their back with their knees up in a very particular layout with particular grave goods under a large burial mound that we call the kurgan.

Speaker 13 But the Yamnaya are a huge part of this story because they sort of invented the mobile nomadic pastoralist way of life.

Speaker 13 So they were herders who were always on the move and they kind of lived out either out of their wagons or out of tents.

Speaker 13 And it was because they were so mobile, at least in the beginning, that these languages probably spread so far. But the Yamnaya come along quite a long time after Vana.

Speaker 13 They're sort of the next stage of the story. We think that they spoke the language that is the mother of all the living Indo-European languages.

Speaker 13 That means all the languages excluding the Anatolian branch. But they invented this way of life.
Before that, people had herds and they moved with their herds, but more in a kind of transhumance way.

Speaker 13 They were based in their river valleys in that steppe environment north of the Black and Caspian Seas.

Speaker 13 And when they needed new grass, they would move out of the valleys, but they would always come back to their villages. They had permanent bases.
The Yamnaya took this transhumance to the next level.

Speaker 13 And they basically moved out permanently from the river valleys and they were on the move all the year round, moving with the seasons, moving with their herds in a sort of round, always looking for the best pastures.

Speaker 13 And that made them supremely adaptable. Once they had adapted themselves to that environment,

Speaker 13 they were able to sort of tap into the huge energy resources of the Eurasian steppe. And that had all kinds of consequences, including for language.
But there's a nice Russian term for the Yamnaya.

Speaker 13 The Russians call them Perakati Poli, which is the same word they use for, and you have to excuse my pronunciation, but that's essentially it.

Speaker 13 It's the same word they use for the tumbleweed plant, which rolls without roots and scatters its seeds as it rolls, and for the nomads of the steppe.

Speaker 13 So it's the same term they use to describe the Mongols, the Sarmatians, the Scythians, and the Yamnaya were the original Pericatipoli.

Speaker 1 Do we know much then? I think this is kind of going back to what you said earlier when you're using the example when we're talking about linguistics, psychology, DNA, and genetics.

Speaker 1 Do we know much about the Proto-Indo-European language that they spoke?

Speaker 13 So linguists have reconstructed probably about 1600 words of their vocabulary. Yeah.
Essentially,

Speaker 13 they're stems, not words that, that means that they are the stem of a word that can be turned into other words when it's

Speaker 13 treated by the rules of grammar. But it's still a skeleton of the original.
vocabulary they would have used.

Speaker 13 But those are the words they're fairly sure of having been able to reconstruct from the living descendants or from the or from the vocabulary of the dead languages that are related.

Speaker 13 And it's enough to say a little bit about the world that those people inhabited, even about their social norms, the way they organized their families, the way they, for example, we know that it was a patriarchal society, we know that it was a patrilocal society, meaning that the women moved into their husbands' houses at marriage.

Speaker 13 Why do we know that? We know that because,

Speaker 13 for example, there are many words for a woman's in-laws in the reconstructed vocabulary, but none for a man's in-laws, which would make sense if the woman moves into the man's household upon marriage.

Speaker 13 So, we know, for example, that they did quite a lot of raiding, that they could be violent, but they also had words for things like restitution and blood price.

Speaker 13 So, they had ways of dealing with violence,

Speaker 13 ways of regulating relationships, ways of dealing with disputes, pacifying people. And we can see all that from this reconstructed vocabulary.

Speaker 13 So we can tell quite a lot about the world that they inhabited, not the full picture, but aspects of that world from the vocabulary.

Speaker 1 And their spread and their movement, as you were saying there,

Speaker 1 is that that's crucial? Is it whether going westwards or southwards?

Speaker 1 Is that crucial in those early stages to the spread of Proto-Indo-European language that they

Speaker 13 Absolutely crucial. If you think about it, before history, before states, before any kind of government that could impose a language on a large group of people, how do languages spread?

Speaker 13 They spread essentially with the people who speak them.

Speaker 13 And the Yamnaya we know were very mobile people.

Speaker 13 And we know, because, again, back to the genetics from the ancient Dinae, we can trace people in different kurgans, under these burial mounds, in different steppe cemeteries.

Speaker 13 and then in cemeteries further afield we can trace genetic links and we can see from the ancestry that the yamnaya carried and cross-referencing that with that of their descendants we can see that they moved vast distances for example we know that this is one of my favorite stories at least one group of yamnaya but probably many groups over hundreds of years crossed the entire Eurasian steppe thousands of kilometers from what is now ukraine to the Altai Mountains.

Speaker 13 And they did so quite near the beginning, around 5,000 years ago.

Speaker 13 And that's thought to be the root of the Tocharian branch, which is one of the early branches of the Indo-European languages, according to linguists. And Tocharian is now a dead language that was

Speaker 13 spoken the furthest east of all these languages on the doorstep of China.

Speaker 13 And We know from studying the corpus of literature that's come down to us from the Tucharian speakers that it was an Indo-European language, that it has undeniable similarities with the Indo-European languages.

Speaker 13 So how do we explain that related languages are spoken so far apart?

Speaker 13 And we also now have archaeological evidence that people of very similar cultures were living on either side of that of the Eurasian landmass, and now genetic evidence showing that people crossed that huge expanse of steppe.

Speaker 13 So it's a fascinating story that you can now, in that one case, cross-reference archaeology, genetics, genetics, and language to say that there was probably some huge trek across the steppe at some point by people who had wagons,

Speaker 13 may have ridden horses, that's another question, but probably most of them were walking and they crossed thousands of kilometers of steppe. And then, of course, you have to ask why.

Speaker 13 But from a linguistic point of view, it does at least explain why an Indo-European language is spoken thousands of kilometers to the east near China 5,000 years ago. It's amazing.

Speaker 1 I mean, does it kind of emphasize how the eventual dominance of Indo-European,

Speaker 1 I mean, it's due to

Speaker 1 a chain of different migrations?

Speaker 1 We've looked at the Yamnaya one in detail, but are there more prehistoric migrations that will occur over time that also contribute to why Indo-European languages, why they are so dominant today, why they are so successful?

Speaker 13 Absolutely. And it was very much over.

Speaker 13 generations and successful is a word that is that troubles some linguists because what do you mean by successful Many of those Indo-European languages died out along the way, but the ones that didn't and the ones whose descendants are still spoken today are the ones whose speakers were themselves adaptable and adapted in turn to their environments.

Speaker 13 So these languages and the cultures and the genetics of the people who spoke them were always changing. We're never talking about the same entities across time.

Speaker 13 But again, you can see these relationships. So yes, and I think if you do want to talk about success, and I think, you know, you can talk about it if

Speaker 13 you qualify it. I mean, after all, it is the largest language family in the world.
But then the secret for me would be adaptability at each time. And the same of all other language families.

Speaker 13 The reasons that they're still spoken today and that they're so old is that those speakers were over many generations adaptable to their environments.

Speaker 1 Well, I'll tell you what, Laura, it's been a fascinating, I mean, I've learned a lot. from this chat and it's so interesting looking at the origins of Indo-European languages.

Speaker 1 I mean, the Indo-European family and covering cultures like the Varna and the Yamnaya. But you mentioned that it is just, I mean, it's a hypothesis.

Speaker 1 And although there is now growing evidence and that genetics in DNA, how important that is, but is this still a field, I mean, of debate?

Speaker 1 Is there still, you know, more information will be unearthed, will come to the fore that will hopefully... let us know more about this, maybe posit completely new hypotheses in the future?

Speaker 13 Absolutely. I think,

Speaker 13 I mean, the reason I wrote this book now is because the story has been so transformed over the last 10 years by the advent of ancient DNA, which now allows us to trace prehistoric migrants.

Speaker 13 But even if we know more than we did, say, 30 years ago, it's still highly contentious. And we still, you know, in a way, we lack definitive answers.

Speaker 13 And we always will because of the lack of writing, because these languages weren't written down for so long.

Speaker 13 So I think it's never going to be definitively settled. Some of the most basic concepts are still argued about, like, was there a homeland? Was there a birthplace?

Speaker 13 And therefore, you know, I mean, you're a historian, you know, history is rewritten for every generation.

Speaker 13 And if history is rewritten for every generation, then prehistory many times more, you know, because it's that less tangible, that less accessible. So I think it's definitely not a closed question.

Speaker 13 And my personal opinion is that it will never be. But that doesn't make it any less fascinating.
And I don't think other people will ever stop asking questions about it either.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. I think prehistory, and especially the further back you go, is a fascinating field for the combination of archaeology and scientific, modern scientific methods.

Speaker 1 Laura, this has been an absolutely fantastic chat. Last but certainly not least, you mentioned your book.

Speaker 13 Your book, it is called Proto, How One Ancient Language Went Global.

Speaker 1 Fantastic. Well, it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Speaker 13 Thank you, Tristan.

Speaker 13 Well, there you go.

Speaker 1 There was Laura Spinney talking all about Proto-Indo-European, the birth of Indo-European languages. I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients.

Speaker 1 Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 And don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits podcasts ad-free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.

Speaker 1 Lastly, if you want more ancient history videos and clips in the meantime, then be sure to follow me on Instagram at ancients Tristan. That's enough from me, and I will see you in the next episode.

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