ABAlphaBeta has so much cool historical lingusitics content
:deeper-sadness: me when cavemen speak actual languages instead of funny unga bunga grunting
i got my education in plague island, so i've got very little knowledge of non-english language & linguistics in general
maybe I'm just misinformed but I do find the indo-european historical linguistics field a bit problematic. Whenever I've looked into it, it looks a lot to me like aryanism (idk if that's the right term), that european (Nazi, Russian Imperial, Br*tish etc) quest to find a mythical homeland in Asia to justify imperialism or racial theory. Scholars would know better than me, but a lot of the connections they make seem like a stretch, and the proposed chronology of linguistic transfer across so-called 'cultural horizons' (a term that makes little sense to me) is very reminiscent of that aryan narrative.
I'd be happy to be shown I'm wrong though.
It looks like Aryanism because Aryanism is a bastardized misinterpretation of PIE theory. PIE was identified in the 1800s, and was one element of fascist pseudo scientific mythmaking.
The theory itself however is extremely sound, and the modern academic linguistics and anthropology field is many decades past being an accessory to imperialism. Of course, this stuff remains a constant in modern fascist ideology, but that understanding is far removed from the actual field of historical linguistics. Not to mention the non-linguists who always jam themselves into the conversation with half-baked papers that don't understand
PIE is legit. The lines of language evolution in the family are mostly very well supported and understood, and healthy scientific discourse around the areas that aren't settled yet (is there evidence to support PIE's connection to any other language family? Where does Albanian fit in? What's the physical homeland of PIE?)
I suspect the difficulty you have with it comes from two sources: the fact that Nazis warped this ideology to their ends and the modern glut of pseudolinguistics that floods the conversation outside of academics (and among some real fringe academic loons). But language families are real, well-attested, and, imo, extremely cool. I think the fact that I share a traceable cultural heritage with people who racists would put as a different species is a refutation of racialism.
ok thanks for explaining, it makes sense. Do you know a good academic but dumbed down source for getting an idea of the modern non-fash perspective on it?
terminology like language 'families' puts me off a little, like english is spoken by a lot of people and there's nothing familial about the reasons for that if you see what I mean. But I guess they mean in a sense similar to use in other classification systems?
Also, as well as Albanian, why does it just skip the Iranian Plateau - is that an answered question?
And if you happen to know, what's up with 'cultural horizons' - is that part of PIE theories? It looks to my ignorant eyes like they just use pottery manufacture/design features to indicate a whole lot about huge geographic areas and peoples.
lastly, is it a traceable cultural heritage? I think I read that snake comes from an Indian area word, what's being traced in language theories? I see how language forms part of culture, but does an ancient Indian making a similar sound to describe a similar thing indicate a similarity or 'lineage' in perspective or thought?
yeah, thanks that part makes sense.
If anthropology & archeaology have been sucessfully de-colonialised as jack says, why do we call it a 'cultural horizon' is what I'm getting at I think. Something changed, sure, but why is that a cultural change or even association?
right, thanks for that distinction - I don't think I was making it correctly at all. I always read culture as both, if it's strictly 'pot making/decorating technique horizon' it makes more sense to me, having fewer connotations and being more explainable by what materials and techniques they had than what they thought or felt about things.
But I guess they mean in a sense similar to use in other classification systems?
Correct
Also, as well as Albanian, why does it just skip the Iranian Plateau - is that an answered question?
I'm not sure what you mean here. The Persian languages are all part of the Indo-European language family - the "Indo" half.
And if you happen to know, what’s up with ‘cultural horizons’ - is that part of PIE theories? It looks to my ignorant eyes like they just use pottery manufacture/design features to indicate a whole lot about huge geographic areas and peoples.
When discussing very pre-historic, pre-agricultural peoples, we don't really have anything to go on but pottery and other scant archaeological remains. We aren't able to do much besides group people together - everyone in X and Y areas at Z time made pottery with a set of the same distinctive features, so they must have some connection. What those cultures were like beyond scant material remains is impossible to tell.
lastly, is it a traceable cultural heritage? I think I read that snake comes from an Indian area word, what’s being traced in language theories? I see how language forms part of culture, but does an ancient Indian making a similar sound to describe a similar thing indicate a similarity or ‘lineage’ in perspective or thought?
Yeah, it is definitely a traceable heritage. It goes beyond language (though that lets us project back the farthest because it changes slower than other cultural features). There are very clear elements of European, Iranian, and Indian polytheism that come from the same roots, and we can make broad but reliable conjectures about what the original PIE people believed and how they worshipped. It's way more than a similar sound to describe a similar thing. Often, they aren't similar sounds and they don't describe similar things. But there are consistent patterns of sound changes - called correspondences - that let us say, 'oh the English word for bear is related to the Hindi word for brown' (made up example). The people who brought their languages and beliefs to India were the same as the ones who brought their beliefs to Iberia, Scandinavia, the Balkans, and beyond. And that's cool!
It's important to note that this isn't just for Indo-European. Every language has a history interwoven with other languages (though some have no more living relatives). Some of these language families go back much farther in time than PIE, which was spoken maybe 5-6kya. Afro-Asiatic, with includes the Semitic languages, ancient Egyptian, and plenty of others across northern Africa was spoken 10-12kya. There's solid evidence of Diné languages (a Native American group) being related to languages spoken today in central Asia with an ancestor fifteen thousand years ago.
As far as resources to learn more, uhh. Wikipedia is honestly a super clear and up to date source on this. A lot of this is leftover from my undergrad, and a lot is absorbed from regularly reading /r/linguistics and /r/badlinguistics. /r/AskHistorians has good content on these topics as well. YouTube can be sketchy but a popular historical linguist look there who's good is Jackson Crawford. He focuses mostly on Norse language and myth but he has a few excellent videos situating that subgroup within its broader Germanic and PIE context.
I think I was confused by Iranian languages being in a sub-group, I suppose the question is why is it a sub group, or why did that particular sub group happen, or I guess what's the reason for there being seemingly an Indo half and a European half?
the pottery thing makes sense, but why is it called a culture? Is a cultural connection necessary for people to make the same kind of pots, could it be due to materials available in a given region (I assume they've thought of this & there's a good reason). Like we all make spoons in a similar shape because the shape works, but is that a cultural connection? Isn't it better described as a 'Pottery horizon'?
I can see how elements of religious thought can be transfered alongside or via language, but isn't it like looking at African Christians for example and then making conjectures about pre-Christian African religion? Further, ancient Chinese people worshipped the Sun, and so did ancient Europeans, without (seemingly) any linguistic or 'cultural' connection, how do they differentiate between thought independently coming about and that transfered by trade or migration etc?
Indian polytheism (and other theologies) spread all over Asia (like China, Indonesia etc), what's the theory as to why in the PIE example that apparantly came with big linguistic changes where it seemingly didn't in those places?
Doesn't PIE have to go back further than 5-6kya, given that we've found civilisation remains in the areas it's claimed to exist that go back much further? Like in Pakistan and Turkey for example.
Yeah I got most of what I do know about it from wikipedia, partly why I'm cautious about it. Maybe this is a bad summary, but it looks like the idea is that a group living around the Caspian Sea somehow expanded and conquered or migrated to a seemingly vast area of the world and replaced (or absorbed?) original languages (and cultures, religions?), and also acted as a germ for all these modern languages - it looks a lot like Aryanism with a kind of Conan the Cimmerian twist. Though I understand it's not that in academia.
Also, we have the written ancient Egyptian language, but afaik nobody has a clue how it was spoken, how do they go about reconstructing old languages like this?
Thanks for taking the time to answer, it's interesting stuff.
I suppose the question is why is it a sub group, or why did that particular sub group happen, or I guess what’s the reason for there being seemingly an Indo half and a European half?
Because the descendants of PIE split many times. One major, early split was the European group and the Indo-Aryan group (keep in mind here that the Nazis appropriated the term Aryan but it does refer to an actual group of people - the word Iran is literally the same thing). So, a simplified version is that one group of PIE speakers went West into Europe and one group went southeast into Iran and then India (but maybe Greek and Albanian are actually closer to the Indo-Aryan than the European branch? This is a debate). Each of those big groups continued to split many more times into other languages that eventually split again and on and on.
the pottery thing makes sense, but why is it called a culture? Is a cultural connection necessary for people to make the same kind of pots, could it be due to materials available in a given region (I assume they’ve thought of this & there’s a good reason). Like we all make spoons in a similar shape because the shape works, but is that a cultural connection? Isn’t it better described as a ‘Pottery horizon’?
It's not literally just pottery. Pottery is the most abundant artifact type in the archaeological record from that time though. What I think you're missing here is the detail and complexity of these early pottery technologies. They were doing way more than just shaping clay into bowls. There were precise techniques and shapes and artistic elements that show clear similarity to and connection with each other. We use the term culture because cultural elements don't exist in isolation and groups that shared pottery technology also likely shared other cultural elements as well. This is supported by what other archaeological evidence exists.
I can see how elements of religious thought can be transfered alongside or via language, but isn’t it like looking at African Christians for example and then making conjectures about pre-Christian African religion? Further, ancient Chinese people worshipped the Sun, and so did ancient Europeans, without (seemingly) any linguistic or ‘cultural’ connection, how do they differentiate between thought independently coming about and that transfered by trade or migration etc?
Not trying to put you down, but this paragraph shows how little you understand this stuff. You've got a pattern of underestimating how much we actually know about ancient people. We don't just know they worshipped the sun. We know the names of their gods, the stories they told about them, and the rituals they practiced (a small slice of that, at least, but still very specific). We can distinguish which mythological and linguistic elements appeared when and from whom, like which Greek gods were from PIE roots and which ones were from the inhabitants of Greece before the PIEs arrived.
Indian polytheism (and other theologies) spread all over Asia (like China, Indonesia etc), what’s the theory as to why in the PIE example that apparantly came with big linguistic changes where it seemingly didn’t in those places?
Because they spread at different times via different mechanisms. Just totally different situations.
Doesn’t PIE have to go back further than 5-6kya, given that we’ve found civilisation remains in the areas it’s claimed to exist that go back much further? Like in Pakistan and Turkey for example.
PIEs weren't the first people in these regions. They were predated by other inhabitants for many thousands of years.
Maybe this is a bad summary, but it looks like the idea is that a group living around the Caspian Sea somehow expanded and conquered or migrated to a seemingly vast area of the world and replaced (or absorbed?) original languages (and cultures, religions?), and also acted as a germ for all these modern languages - it looks a lot like Aryanism with a kind of Conan the Cimmerian twist. Though I understand it’s not that in academia.
I mean, that's basically correct. Again, your timeline of what influenced what is reversed. Conan was influenced by the academic understanding of the time. So were Nazis. These ideas have had cultural capital for a very long time.
The best bet for how it actually happened is that the PIE made a few key technological advancements related to horses - chariots and saddles, probably - that let them roll over a vast section of the world. Central Asian horse people would continue this for thousands and thousands of years, but the OG PIEs got the farthest because they were mostly going against people who had just started settling into cities and practicing agriculture, not the organized states of later millennia. They didn't just conquer either, and they often lost - they made no headway in Mesopotamia or the Levant, where there were established states with large scale military organisation.
It should be noted this wasn't some grand empire that ruled all of this land. Just a bunch of different people with an increasingly distant shared heritage spreading and retreating in different waves of conquest, trade, and migration.
Also, we have the written ancient Egyptian language, but afaik nobody has a clue how it was spoken, how do they go about reconstructing old languages like this?
We actually do know a lot about how it was spoken. We can read hieroglyphics phonetically. That's thanks to the Rosetta Stone. The fact that we can know how a language spoken in such antiquity worked phonetically and grammatically is one of the reasons we can reconstruct PAA to such a distant date. Plus, Coptic is still used today as a liturgical language and that's a direct descendant of ancient Egyptian.
So, we aren't reconstructing Egyptian. We know the language pretty well. Reconstruction is for languages that we don't have any direct records of. What we do is look at their descendants we do have records of (this can be as ancient as Egyptian or Assyrian or as modern as the English we're using to communicate right now). We use the sound correspondences I mentioned in my last post as the key mechanism. Basically, we can say, "500 years ago, language X could start words with /b/, but then that changed so all of those words start with /p/ now". We look at the related languages, figure out as many correspondences as possible, and work backwards to figure out what the ancestral language is. We know this works because we can use the methodology on languages with a well-attested ancestor and closely reconstruct that language - basically, use Spanish and Italian and Romanian and reconstruct "Latin" to get something very close to what we actually know about Latin.
Is it possible their is one original spoken language that all language are based on if we can trace everything far back enough?
It is possible but there's no way to trace that far back. Human language has existed in its current form for, bare minimum, 100 thousand years. Maybe much longer. The oldest we can construct right now is maybe 15kya. Even if we optimistically assume that can be stretched about 5-10 thousand years, which is a reach, that brings us nowhere close. This is a topic that gets a lot of discussion but the academic consensus is that we simply have no way to know.
"Because the descendants of PIE split many times..."
Like actual descendents, or not necessarily related? Is descendent being used in a 'linguistic family' sense here like not necessarily related people - or can we find out from DNA or similar?
With the pottery, I see how different designs would help, but can't even complex aesthetics be independently arrived - there's only so many ways you can decorate a pot using cords? I'm glad it's not just pot sherds, but I'm still caught on the whole spoon thing, spoons all look the same but we don't say 'spoon culture horizons'. I don't have an issue with technology sharing, it seems natural & makes sense, but when chinaware or even civil service exams spread to England for example we don't say Chinese and English culture are the same or even especially related. Maybe I'm using 'culture' in a less focused way, but what does it mean to call a group of peoples a culture if it's based on a few material artifacts?
"Not trying to put you down, but this paragraph shows how little you understand this stuff."
Oh sure, no worries, I understand very little it's why i'm asking questions.
"You’ve got a pattern of underestimating how much we actually know about ancient people... Greek Gods"
Yeah probably. But aren't Greek gods comparatively easy, we've got written records - this isn't true of much of europe and steppe asia, though, especially prior to greeks writing about them. And they can call a sun god a different name or sex but it's the same thing being worshipped, so how do we differentiate cultures and peoples from that, where it's a comonality of the natural world that pretty much everyone worships in some way? Couldn't any similar name look like a connection, even if it were happenstance? Or is that seen as unlikely?
"Because they spread at different times via different mechanisms. Just totally different situations."
Sure, I was wondering what the different situations were. But I think you indicate it's to do with horse domestication?
"PIEs weren’t the first people in these regions. They were predated by other inhabitants for many thousands of years."
This makes sense, can we reconstruct those older languages from PIE in this case?
"The best bet for how it actually happened is that the PIE made a few key technological advancements related to horses - chariots and saddles, probably - that let them roll over a vast section of the world. Central Asian horse people would continue this for thousands and thousands of years, but the OG PIEs got the farthest because they were mostly going against people who had just started settling into cities and practicing agriculture, not the organized states of later millennia. They didn’t just conquer either, and they often lost - they made no headway in Mesopotamia or the Levant, where there were established states with large scale military organisation. It should be noted this wasn’t some grand empire that ruled all of this land. Just a bunch of different people with an increasingly distant shared heritage spreading and retreating in different waves of conquest, trade, and migration."
That makes a level of sense. But ultimately, is the perspective that their culture and ways of life replaced those of the previous inhabitants? Except where they encountered more organised states I guess? Do we have records from Egypt/mesopotamia of encountering these early PIE peoples like loan words or technology or religious changes?
"We actually do know a lot about how it was spoken. We can read hieroglyphics phonetically."
Really? That's impressive, how do we know how they said the squiggly water one? How does the rosetta stone (isn't it greek/persian/egyptian?) let you do that if it's just writing - does it give grammar/prononciation advice or are there accent symbols that help?
"So, we aren’t reconstructing Egyptian. We know the language pretty well. Reconstruction is for languages that we don’t have any direct records of. What we do is look at their descendants we do have records of (this can be as ancient as Egyptian or Assyrian or as modern as the English we’re using to communicate right now). We use the sound correspondences I mentioned in my last post as the key mechanism. Basically, we can say, “500 years ago, language X could start words with /b/, but then that changed so all of those words start with /p/ now”. We look at the related languages, figure out as many correspondences as possible, and work backwards to figure out what the ancestral language is. We know this works because we can use the methodology on languages with a well-attested ancestor and closely reconstruct that language - basically, use Spanish and Italian and Romanian and reconstruct “Latin” to get something very close to what we actually know about Latin."
this makes sense, thanks. I get the p/b thing, but how do we tell how they pronounced the p or b sound? Translation to greek/persian words? Just because spanish pronounces some letters differently right, even though they're the same. And hebrew has a weird ch sound that's different from other k or c or cz sounds.
Thanks for your patience & explainations! Feel free to tell me to just go read a book and stop bothering you (not wikipedia tho please)
Edit:
Sorry this is too long already, but to lay my cards on the table so to speak, my worry going into this was that for european academics 'culture' has replaced 'race', there's still a 'homeland' for us to conquer, the cultural-lingustic map looks very similar to other maps. By analogy, while i'm sure it's well supported, big bang cosmology looks to me a lot like judeo-christian-greek cosmology - creation from nothing, light first etc. I'm pretty uneducated of course, it's just what it looks like to me, I'm probably wrong but there's also the worry that to the ancient greeks ex-nihilo & then logos seemed very reasonable and well supported too.
I suppose the question is why is it a sub group, or why did that particular sub group happen, or I guess what’s the reason for there being seemingly an Indo half and a European half?
To add on to what u/jack said, I think that in modern research the idea that the indo-european languages can be split into “indo” and “european” branches is no longer accepted. The Indo-Iranian (persian and indian) languages are still well supported as a branch, but the other languages are no longer considered to fit cleanly into a single branch. I think the (now-extinct) Tocharian languages in particular have features of both “indo” and “european” languages.
Also, in regards to some of your other questions, I think it’s worth mentioning that there have been tons of proposed language families that have since been abandoned due to lack of evidence, even ones, like the Altaic languages, that group together very similar languages spoken by culturally similar peoples, but Indo-European is not one of them. It’s not just “a similar sound to mean a similar thing” and as u/jack pointed out, they often aren’t similar and often don’t mean the same thing. Instead it’s more about “reverse engineering” and working backwards from attested languages to find evidence of a common ancestor language how it changed into the other languages.
Ah ok thanks, it makes sense that it's an uncertain field with lots of revision, I suppose we've still got a lot to dig up.
So it's more just a few common threads between otherwise possibly very different cultures or languages or peoples?
So it’s more just a few common threads between otherwise possibly very different cultures or languages or peoples?
Yes and no. The languages themselves may be quite divergent, like english vs bengali or mandarin vs burmese, but the key thing is that they used to be the same; just like how latin diverged and evolved into the modern romance languages, the idea is that PIE (and the proto languages of other language families like sino-tibetan and afro-asiatic) diverged and evolved into other languages, which themselves diverged and evolved into further languages, in a process that is still continuing today. Sometimes with quite different results!
