Complex Numbers

PIE in Your Face

Landed on another article about language. But this one's about the common root of many languages:

     A new look at our linguistic roots  
Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where, and when, the first Indo-European languages were spoken, and what kind of lives those first speakers led. A controversial new analytic technique offers a fresh answer.

The source, Knowable, is not one I've linked before, and I don't know much about it because I'm way too lazy to find out. As for timing, it's a recent article.

Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue.

Another way to put that is that less than half of the world speaks an Indo-European language. Depends on one's perspective. As I speak one, yes, its shared origin with other languages is interesting to me.

Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it.

I've mentioned this language group in here before. Repeatedly.

This is the heart of the discussion:

Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years before that, with a community of farmers in Anatolia, in the area of modern-day Turkey. Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter, albeit with an important later role for the steppes.

Now, look, I don't claim to be an expert in either linguistics or evolutionary biology. But I've seen the parallels between language evolution and biological evolution. There's at least one big, huge, major difference, though: in the latter, at least for eukaryotes, you don't get a lot of significant horizontal gene transfer. That is to say, organisms' DNA depend primarily on their ancestors' DNA. I understand there are exceptions. But with language, there's little barrier to horizontal meme transfer; that is, languages can liberally borrow from other languages. English is perhaps the most obvious of these; it's stolen pretty heavily from non-Indo-European languages.

I'm not saying they're wrong. They know more about this shit than I do. (There is some discussion of that sort of thing near the end of the really quite long article.)

I'd also like to point out that it's not like IE sprang into existence from nothing. It developed from an earlier language. I understand linguists call the earlier language Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, which cracks me up.

Anyway, the article goes on to describe the process by which they figured out that IE existed, and that's pretty fascinating by itself, but too much to quote here.

But then they mention the thing I find most intriguing:

For example, the Proto-Indo-European language had a word for axle, two words for wheel, a word for harness-pole and a verb that meant “to transport by vehicle.” Archaeologists know that wheel and axle technology was invented about 6,000 years ago, which suggests that Proto-Indo-European can’t be any older than that.

I knew I'd mentioned "the wheel" before, so I went and looked. It was way back in 2020: "As the Turn Worlds (or whatever)" 

The article speculates about the kind of people who would have used axles and wheels in prehistoric Eurasia: pastoralists or agriculturalists. Personally, I find it glaringly obvious that one speculation is missing. Once you have horses and carts, you can more effectively wage war, which is an even older human occupation than herding or farming. And tends to spread faster and further.

This, to me, is a more likely origin for the proliferation of Indo-European languages: a conquering people, not only taking over vast tracts of land, but imposing their language on the cultures they encounter. It happened with the Greeks and Romans, in historic times. Not so much with the Mongols, but not for lack of trying. And let's not forget how English got so widespread.

But, again, I'm far from an expert on these things. It just seems obvious that it's at least a hypothesis they can test. Maybe it's wrong. But given what I know of human nature, it could well be right.