Proto: Laura Spinney's new book explores the journey of global PIE

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

By Laura Spinney

Published by Harper Collins

342 pages ₹599

 

 

Across the ancient world, a powerful sky god once ruled supreme. Some ancient stories tell us that the universe emerged from him, others say that he was responsible for its creation with his partner, the Earth mother. The sky god, known by many names and whose identity morphed into many gods over time, spawned an army of minor and major gods and held the universe together with his shining eye and staff, or a lightning bolt and hammer or any other such divine accessory.

 

He was known as Dyaus Pita among Vedic Indians, Zeus pater or Zeus among the Greeks, Jupiter in the Roman pantheon and Tyr in the Scandinavian sagas. All these names and the multiple ideas about his divinity are derived from the speakers of a common language family. Proto Indo European (PIE)

 

Spoken by just a handful of people who lived between Asia and Europe 5,000-odd years ago, PIE is the largest language family in the world today. Nearly every second person in the world speaks one of its languages and its words are strewn across the universe, revealing a breathtaking expanse of connections between geographically and culturally distant communities. The fascinating journey of this language is the theme of Laura Spinney’s book  Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. 

 

The beginning of the language was remarkably obscure. It was born as an orphan tongue in the steppes of Eurasia. Spoken by a band of herdsmen who had no place to call home, the language too lacked a point of origin and is perhaps best described by a word in the Russian language that is used to describe the nomadic community—perekati pole. It means tumbleweed, a rootless plant that scatters its seeds as it rolls.

 

The rise from such humble beginnings, to the top of the popularity charts, has entranced linguists for centuries. Clear answers are just about starting to emerge as inter disciplinary boundaries are blurred and new discoveries and technology help shade in more colours into the hazy portraits of ancient tongues.

 

However, there are no neat answers and there is no singular narrative that frames the making of the PIE behemoth. Spinney writes that it could be the migratory nature of the earliest speakers that led to its popularity and spread. It could also be the dexterity and adaptability of the language that allowed its words to travel easily between cultures and also mean more than just one thing at the same time. And of course, it could also be the politics of culture and identity that has always been a part of language development that helped make PIE global.

 

The earliest speakers of PIE (a language that no longer exists and has been, in recent years, reconstructed by archaeologists and linguists) were most likely, the world’s first nomadic people. They lived out of tents and kept moving with the seasons. They were the Yamnaya, named after the pit graves they dug for their dead. However, even in identifying the Yamnaya, Spinney advises caution. “The phenomenon (the origin of the Indo-European language family) that scholars are attempting to understand is ephemeral; the emanations of long vanished brains that caused long vanished eardrums to vibrate.”

 

Beyond the hypotheses of origin and its subsequent demise and immortalisation, there is a huge world of learning for anyone looking to understand the evolution of languages and even, humankind. What builds linguistic resilience? Why did the original speakers have to move out and how did language help build relationships? What led to the emergence of so many tongues?

 

Languages are not lonely beasts, growing in isolation. They walk through the world, gathering masses of data about the regions that support them and the people who adopt them. They don’t survive unless they are adaptive and malleable. The Indo-European language family has scattered its words and through them, its ideas, images and ideologies, across the world. It has also borrowed from rival language families, even though it may be impossible to clearly identify the identities of borrowers and lenders.

 

For example, the Gundestrup cauldron, a silver vessel dug out of a Danish bog in 1891, is still classified as an object of unknown origin. The imagery on the object is believed to be Celtic and there is a goddess that has been embossed on its surface who, archaeologist Timothy Taylor has said, would be recognisable to Indians as Hariti and to Welsh people as Rhiannon. Shared ideas about divinity and a common language family can forge connections between people belonging to communities as diverse as the two.

 

No language lives in isolation, but it will always die alone. This is what the history of PIE tells us. The language of the Yamnaya, so called because of the way they buried their dead (the bodies were laid supine in pits with their legs folded) has long disappeared. But their ideas continue to shine through, braving the growing rhetoric of mono-lingualism and hardening national identities.

 

The reviewer is a journalist and co-founder of The Mythology Project, a centre for the study of mythology, legends, and folklore