Language Family

If you know one language in addition to the one you’re reading right now, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed that certain words in both your languages sound rather close to each other. For example, the English word mother is mutter in German, madre in Italian and Spanish. God in Italian is dio, and in French it’s dieu, and in Spanish, dios. And if you know some Latin, you know that French and Spanish and Italian are clearly children of Latin. Finding words that are related to each other in European languages is easy and for a very long time closely related words never surprised anyone, because Europe is a compact geographical area on a very much larger continental land mass.

The surprise came in the 18th century. At that time the British had taken control of India, and an Englishman, Sir William Jones, was a judge in Calcutta. Jones was an extraordinary man, brilliant in many intellectual fields, and after steeping himself in Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hinduism and of classical Hindu philosophy, he wrote a paper in 1786 noting sufficiently numerous similarities between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, and he asserted that all those languages must be derived from common ancestor language.

Linguistics has grown and deepened since Sir William Jones made his astonishing announcement, and it has become a fascinating intellectual endeavor. By tracking the changes in how words are pronounced over centuries, or how pronunciation changes when a tribe or nation of speakers splits and the parts migrate and separate from each other, linguists have discovered certain patterns of change. Sometimes these patterns of change can yield guidelines or rules about change. And, most important, if we know how words change as we move from the distant past to the present, then we can run the changes backward and get to the primal language that gave birth to all those subsequent languages.

Shortly after physicists recognized that the universe was expanding, they ran the scene backward and calculated that our universe began 13.8 billion years ago with a bang — a Big Bang, as they called it. Of course, they may be wrong. But by measuring the residual radiation of that Big Bang, and by measuring the shift in wavelength of light from stars on their continuous flight from each other, they feel comfortably certain of their calculations. Linguistics is not an exact science, not at all, but it’s very good at doing what it can do. Proto isn’t about our primal Indo-European language; it’s about the spread of the children of that language.

Laura Spinney isn’t a linguist. She’s an excellent writer of fiction and nonfiction who has broad interests and has written notable journal articles and books dealing with science and society.  She set herself a daunting task when she chose to write this one.

Language is people talking, and Laura Spinney begins by introducing the farmers and hunter-gatherers living on lands around the Black Sea ten thousand years ago. No one knows what what that early language sounded like. Eventually, as centuries pass, the author narrows her focus to a group of people living in the broad steppe on the northwest side of the Black Sea, four or five thousand years ago. Those ancestral people spoke a language that survived and spread among other groups who swept into or across that area. Proto is the story of those different groups — nomads,  settlers, herders, farmers, traders — who carried that ever changing language as they spread westward to the Baltic Sea  and eastward into India and  beyond.

Much of the work of historical linguists has been given to tracking the migration of people, and for help with this they have often turned to archeologists. The nice thing about archeology is that it yields solid evidence (bones, tools, jewelry), which is something linguists pursuing a prehistoric preliterate language rarely have. But as useful as such evidence has been, it’s often been spotty and incomplete.  

As Laura Spinney points out, recent advances in genetics and technology have made it possible to extract DNA from ancient bones. Archeologists who open a pre-historic burial site can now determine the hair, skin and eye color of the people who were buried there.

They can discover how those people were related, not only to each other, but also to people lying in distant burial sites. In other words, they can now confidently identify migrants. Indeed, a large part of Spinney’s book is the narrative of different migrant groups as they traveled the great Eurasian steppe, each group speaking its own ever-changing Indo-European tongue.

Proto:  How One Ancient Language Went Global isn’t written for linguists. Laura Spinney wrote it for anyone interested in the early history of our language and how that language spread and changed. Linguistics is a complex field burdened at times with conflicting theories and an irreducible amount of speculation and guess work. Spinney has assembled an enormous amount of material on the different peoples who migrated at different times in various directions, sometimes over centuries, across and at times back and forth or in grand swings on the great Euro-Asian steppe. How our proto went global isn’t a single linear story; it’s a mass of overlapping events across a large geographical area. Spinney has constructed an extensive and generously detailed narrative, but in being true to her subject she has produced a diffuse story in which everything is equal in importance to every other thing.

The general lay reader will certainly find some passages more interesting than others, for Proto is written to present the findings of linguists who searched the history of migrations and how the language of those migratory groups changed over long periods of time. It’s not a narrative with many surprise turns or a final culminating goal.

Yet even a churlish and impatient reviewer, so long as he has an interest in language, can enjoy this book. I can testify to that. Laura Spinney is an intelligent writer who is curious about all sorts of things and her tone in this volume is friendly and conversational. Readers will be interested in meeting the living scholars and field workers that she introduces in this book, and they’ll be engaged by her tale about a pre-historic copper manufacturing site, and equally interested in the emergence of a word meaning horse and the curious cult-like role that horses played in certain prehistoric societies. Proto : How One Ancient Language Went Global is an outstanding work that fulfills the promise of its title with abundant precision and style.