Introduction - Ariomania
- Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Norse, and English are all descended from a much older language - Proto-Indo-European. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European who might only have numbered a few dozen to begin with, lived between Europe and Asia in the region of the Black Sea. They worshipped Father Sky. About 5,000 years ago, their language exploded out of its Black Sea cradle, spreading east and west and fragmenting as it went. Within a thousand years, its offspring could be heard from Ireland to India.
- Language is humanity's oldest tool. When Homo sapiens emerged in Africa, 300,000 years ago, they were already equipped with it. Their vocal tracts could make all the sounds ours can. They had the cognitive capacity to map sound on to meaning, and to combine units of meaning into sentences.
- By the time humans walked out of Africa 60,000 years ago, they probably communicated mostly through speech and were capable of a more sophisticated level of expression.
- On the eve of the farming revolution, the human population was an estimated 10m. Perhaps 10k languages were spoken, each one having one or at most 2k speakers. Thanks to the new sources of energy that farming unleashed, communities grew and their language with them. Dialects emerged, and in time some of them became languages in their own right. Families of languages erupted like supernovas. This period, the Neolithic or New Stone Age, was our linguistic heyday: the moment in the human story when more languages were spoken than at any other. At their peak there might have been 15k of them.
- From its Neolithic peak human linguistic diversity entered a long, slow decline. The downturn started with the formation of the first states, beginning 5,000 years ago with Sumer in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq).
- Now 8bn humans speak around 7,000 languages. Those languages fall into about 150 families, but most of us speak languages that belong to just five of them:
- Indo-European - including English
- Sino-Tibetan - including Mandarin Chinese
- Niger-Congo
- Afro-Asiatic
- Austonesian
- Like language, writing was conceived of independently a number of time.The oldest know writing system was invented by the Sumerians
- As far as we know, the alphabet was only invented once, in or near Egypt.
- Linguists consider that on average it takes between 500-1,000 years for a language to become incomprehensible to its original speakers
1. Genesis - Lingua Obscura
- The first farmers would have needed new words to describe the plants and animals they cultivated and the tools they invented to harness them. They would have acquired a vocabulary of agriculture.
- Farmers from Anatolia entered Europe via two routes:
- One stream crossed the Bosporus, reaching the eastern Balkans by 6500 BCE and then following the Danube inland. Within a thousand years they were building villages in the Carpathian Basin - the depression, centred on modern Hungary, that is bound by the Carpathian Mountains and the Alps.
- A second stream island-hopped across the Aegean and along the northern Mediterranean seaboard by raft or boat (rowing, not sailing), then headed north from France's azure coast.
- The two streams met in the Paris Basin, the lowlands before the Atlantic, and there they mingled before fanning out again. By 4500 BCE, descendants of the Anatolian farmers were all over Europe, as far west as Ireland and as far east as Ukraine. These movements took place over many, many generations, but the distances covered are still extraordinary when you think that, apart from the sea crossings, they happened on foot. There was as yet no donkey or other docile pack animal, no horse that wasn't wild, no wheel and hence no wagon.
- Now, when hunter gatherers met farmers, in general they couldn't compete. Their way of life and their languages were on a fast track to extinction.
- By 4500 BCE, the competition was between:
- Herders, whose wealth was mobile and who prized self-sufficiency and lived for the present
- Farmers, whose wealth was immobile and who valued collective decision making and planned for the future.
- Both the bible (Cain and Abel) and the Qur'an recount how this clash of worldviews led to the first murder, but the clash is much older than the Abrahamic scriptures.
- By 4000 BCE, ancient DNA reveals that steppe women were moving into farming settlements, farming women were moving into steppe settlements, and these were no longer rare or sporadic events.
- A few centuries after the appearance of the first megasites in Ukraine, Mesopotamian villages by the names of Uruk and Tell Brak also began to swell. These would become the first cities that prehistorians would recognize as such, because they were organized as extreme versions of our modern cities.
- Sometime between 4000-3500 BCE, the first wheeled vehicle trundled onto the steppe, pulled by oxen. Evidence for it appears simultaneously east, west, and south of the Black Sea.
- Roads weren't long in coming.
- Around 3500 BCE the megasites in turn were abandoned.
2. Sacred Spring - Proto-Indo-European
3. First Among Equals - Analtolian
4. Over the Range - Tocharian
5. Lark Rising - Celtic, Germanic, Italic
6. The Wandering Horse - Indo-Iranian
7. Northern Idyll - Baltic and Slavic
8. They Came from Steep Wilusa - Albanian, Armenian, Greek
Conclusion - Shibboleth
