Proto

Introduction - Ariomania

• Timeline:
  • 60k years ago: Homo Sapiens permanently settles Europe and Asia
  • 20k years ago: The peak of the last Ice Age
  • 12k years ago: Invention of agriculture in the Near East
  • 6.5k years ago: Varna's coppersmiths are thriving
  • 5.5k years ago: Yamnaya culture emerges
  • 4k years ago: Earliest written evidence of an Indo-European language, Hittite
  • 1,600 years ago: Fall of the Western Roman Empire
  • 1k years ago: Anatolian and Tocharian are extinct
  • 500 years ago: Europeans carry Indo-European languages to new continents
  • Now: Nearly half of humanity speaks Indo-European
• 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

• We know that, east of the Urals, in what is now Kazakhstan, people belonging to a culture called Botai were already raising horses by 3500 BCE.
• The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European lexicon consists of about 1,600 words

3. First Among Equals - Anatolian

• Most European men alive today, and millions of their counterparts in Central and South Asia, carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe.

4. Over the Range - Tocharian

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5. Lark Rising - Celtic, Germanic, Italic

• History in western Europe ignites as a spark at the tip of Italy in the 8th C BCE. The Greeks, who had been writing in one script or another for 700 years, landed in Sicily and the southern part of the boot to trade and settle, bringing the alphabet with them. The Etruscans further north borrowed it, with modifications, and their Italic-speaking neighbors borrowed theirs. From Italy, writing spread north and west in a traveling wave. If you think of the linguistic landscape of Europe as a skein of invisible ink, writing was the candle flame that illuminated it. And what that flame captured, in the middle of the first millennium BCE - around the time that the Parthenon was being erected in Athens - was a sooty mosaic of Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages.
• The first Celtic inscriptions, which exist in a few different scripts, date to the 6th C BCE.
• The Irish invented their own alphabet around the 4th C BCE.
• The first uncontested runic inscriptions date to the 2nd C CE and were found in Jutland, the peninsula that today straddles Denmark and Germany.
• Writing must has struck all those who encountered it for the first time as magical.
• The Poetic Edda is a collection of narrative poems and one of our richest sources of information about Norse mythology, not to mention the ancient Germanic languages. The oldest version comes from Iceland and date to the 13th C CE, though many of the poems are thought to be older.
• When the Yamnaya arrived in Hungary, the population of Europe was an estimated 7m. The migrants might have numbered in the 10k s, yet within a thousand years languages descended from theirs were spoken across the continent.
• The Yamnaya brotherhood that ventured out of Pontic river valley around 3500 BCE could have been the sole survivors of an early plague outbreak that cut down the rest of their community.
• It was principally social mechanisms, in other words, that drove the spread of the Indo-European languages. The seeds were sown in raids, marriage, fostering, and patronage. They were tamped down through storytelling and watered at feasts.

6. The Wandering Horse - Indo-Iranian

• Persepolis was the ceremonial capital founded by Darius the Great in the 6th C BCE, and because of its remote location in Iran's Zagros Mountains it was know as the safest place in the Persian Empire to store art, archives, and gold. Alexander of Macedon scuppered that reputation in 330 BCE, when he sacked and plundered the city and then set fire to it, destroying its many treasures and leaving it in ruins.
• The oldest Indic text is the Rig Veda, the first of the four Vedas that make up the most ancient Indian, and Hindu scriptures. Its thousand or more hymns were passed down orally for a very long time before they were recorded, and they were not recorded all at once.
• Scholars hazard that the Rig Veda dates to between 1500-1200 BCE, at least 400 years after the earliest Hittite texts.
• The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are two epic Sanskrit poems concerned with princely trials and tribulations. There are sanskrit works on philosophy, science, cookery, elephants, yoga, and sex, in the form of the Kamasutra.
• "Language, auspicious, charming, like a creeper, whose minds does it not win over?" as a sukta or hymn has it. Sanskrit probably dies as a vernacular sometime in the first millennium CE, having disintegrated, like Latin, into a rich panoply of daughter languages.
• The oldest surviving text in any Iranic language is the Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrianism, the religion of Persia before the Muslim conquest of the 7th C CE, and as the first truly monotheistic creed it had a profound influence on the Abrahamic religions.
• It's generally thought that Zarathustra composed the Gathas, a critique of the Rig Veda around 1000 BCE, a few centuries after the Rig Veda was composed.
• The Persians left the world one of its great poetic traditions, spanning the love poetry of Hafez and Rumi, Fedowsi's epic Shahnameh (the Book of Kings) and the quatrains of Omar Khayyam: The moving finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: not all your piety nor wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.
• Almost every one of the estimated 60m domesticated horses presently roaming the planet can trace its origins back to those reared in the rainshadow of the Urals around 2000 BCE.
• The association of dogs with death is a recurring theme in Indo-European cultures. The Greek hellhound Kerberos finds an exact linguistic counterpart in Sarvara, one of the four eyed docs that accompanied Yama, god of the Indic underworld.
• There is a strong link between twin deities and horses in Indo-European cosmogony - from the Greek horsemen Castor and Pollux, immortalised as the constellation Gemini, to the Ashvins, the twin charioteers of the Rig Veda, and Horsa and Hengist (Horse and Stallion in Old English) who, legend, has it, led the Anglo-Saxons to Britain.
• Among the oldest songs that Indo-European poets sang, mythologists tell us, is one about a smith who makes a pact with a devil. Having swapped his soul for the power to weld any materials together, the smith cunningly welds the devil to an immovable object. It is the kernel of Faust, a story reworked by Marlowe, Goethe, and Mann.
• Writing is often described as a miracle, and it certainly made many things possible. But the real miracle was that a story about a smith and a devil was handed down, more of less faithfully, for thousands of years before it was scored into a durable material.

7. Northern Idyll - Baltic and Slavic

• Psychologists report that people don't even hear the combinations of consonants that are forbidden in their native language; they hear the nearest pairing that's allowed, which they then reproduce.

8. They Came from Steep Wilusa - Albanian, Armenian, Greek

• Homer's inspiration, the models for Achilles and Agamemnon, belonged to the Mycenaean civilization which arose around 1700 BCE and reached the peak of its splendor 400 years later.

Conclusion - Shibboleth

• The human compulsion to communicate is overwhelming. It was there even before sapiens. Children born deaf have invented sign languages to escape what one researcher has called the "abysmal loneliness" of life without communication. Some argue that without language there is no reasoning, others that there is no consciousness. But besides the desire to reach out to strangers, there's another one that has deep roots in us: the desire to belong to our own group.
• People change languages just by using them. Sometimes they do so unconsciously, by reproducing a sound that they have heard infinitesimally altered. Sometimes they do so consciously, to imitate or differentiate themselves from others. The accumulation of these conscious and unconscious changes causes languages to split. There is some evidence that languages change most rapidly just after they split, as the two groups assert their diverging identities. From then on, the moment a newcomer opens their mouth they reveal whether they belong to "us" or "them".
• In the Bible, Judges 12:5-6, the men of Gilead identified their Ephraimite enemies by making them utter a single Hebrew word meaning "stream": "Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. They they took him and slew him at the passages of Jordan.
• In Ukraine, since the Russian invasion of February 2022, the Shibboleth is "palianytsia", which means a loaf of bread.
• Nationalists across the globe are projecting national identities back on to a world that didn't know them. Prehistoric people undoubtedly had identities as complex and multilayered as ours. We don't know what they were, but we can be sure that nowhere among the layers was the nation state.
• Europe has made a speciality of monolingualism. In much of the rest of the world, stable bilingualism or even multilingualism is still the norm.
• English is simultaneously diverging into varieties that may one day be unrecognizable as the same language. So is English killing or is it dying, or is it somehow doing both at the same time?
• English could well settle into a state of diglossia, where a gulf exists between the shared written form and the many spoken varieties, but the two bind each other together into a single tongue.
• Russian proverb: "The past is a lighthouse, not a port."