Portugal and India share a lot of common history ever since Vasco Da Gama’s voyage, but what may
come as a surprise is that the Portuguese language already shared many similarities to the numerous
languages spoken in India, including inflection, word structure, pronunciation, and vocabulary.
Languages constantly change and adapt, but in the case of Portuguese, Hindi, Farsi, Latin, Greek,
English, Polish, and many others, there is only one common ancestor, which binds them all into
a single family. Welcome to the first video on the evolution of the Indo-European languages.
Wait, did you know you can watch this video in Spanish and in 4 other languages?
You can simply change the audio track in the video settings.
We generated these audio tracks using Aloud. Aloud lets creators translate their videos. At no cost
and no special skills needed. We have been using Aloud for months already and we see that it brings
value to our viewers. If you think more creators should make videos available in other languages,
check out the link in the pinned comment. Let’s overcome the language barrier in videos together.
For millions of years, evolution was the main pathway of human development,
as genetic information was passed down from one generation to the next. It was that same force,
which gave humans very unique tools, which we used to climb the food chain, such as opposable thumbs,
sweating, and larger brains. Then suddenly the ability to make complex sounds and more
importantly, the acute sensitivity to comprehend speech ushered in the development of languages,
which allowed us to pass knowledge at a speed that dramatically surpassed evolution.
Languages to this day remain an essential part of our everyday life, as they help us communicate,
express ourselves and define our identity. Over the years thousands of languages have gone
extinct, and yet there are still over 7100 of them divided into 142 families. The largest among them,
spoken by 3.2 billion people or 46% of the world’s population is the Indo-European language family.
The story begins with the incredibly influential Yamnaya culture at around 4000 BC in the Pontic
Steppe of modern day Ukraine. Its people were semi-nomadic pastoralists who domesticated cattle,
dogs, and above all horses. This is where the oldest discovered wheels were uncovered, as well
as burial sites that show one of the earliest forms of ownership. Compared to the widespread
communal tombs we find in most societies, the Yamnaya burial pits belonged to clans, families,
or even individuals, sometimes buried with entire wagons. Combined with the fact that they were one
of the first bronze age cultures, this allowed the Yamnaya to spread across Eurasia on their horses.
This expansion was swift and aggressive, and rather than developing their own colonies,
they interbred with the local neolithic cultures spreading their genes,
as well as their Proto Indo-European language. In time, the speakers of this language became
isolated from each other and regional dialects developed into their own daughter languages,
a process that continues to this day. Using the comparative method, linguists and archeologists
were able to reconstruct the original ancestor vocabulary, despite the fact that it was never
written down. In fact, the words for writing, sea, and iron are vastly different across the
many Indo-European languages, since those concepts arose after the original migration.
However, the words that were commonly used by the Yamnaya people, were nearly identical
across Latin, Germanic, Ancient Greek, Hittite, Slavonic, Avestan, and Sanskrit.
On your screen, you can see how the cognate words for family remained mostly the same across
Indo-European sister languages, including words for family members: Mother -Father-Brother-Sister.
This is also the case for various verbs describing actions that were fundumental
to the lifestyle of the Yamnaya people, like Sew-Cloth-Eat-Drink-Carry-Give-Die. The same
can be said about various objects, animals, and particularly the word wine, among them:
Tooth-Bone-Eye-Night-God-Water-Fire-Tree-New-Young-Pig-Sheep-Beaver
-Honey-Brew -Wine . One of the very first things we learn in a new language are the pronouns and
basic numbers and yet again we see that both are shared throughout the various different cultures:
I-You-We- As well as the numbers from one to ten.
Languages and pronunciations changed as they grew apart and interacted with each other,
as well as other languages outside the Indo-European family, adding and exporting
loan words, but the writing that these various cultures developed hints at their shared origin.
The comparisons between the Greek god Zeus and Roman god Jupiter are often discussed,
but in reality, both of those gods are adaptations of the original Yamnaya god Perkwunos the Striker,
a concept also shared in Hittite culture as Tarhuna, in the Thracian tribes as Zibelthiurdos,
while Dacian tribes knew him as Gebeleizis, Albanian culture groups knew him as Perendi.
Baltic mythology has Perkunas, Slavic people knew him as Perun, Celtic tribes as Taranis,
while the Norse people split the singular concept into Thor and Odin, Anglo-Saxon mythology knew
him as Thunor, and Hindu people initially believed that Indra was the king of the heaven and thunder.
Additionally, the very concept of an overarching conflict between Rain and the Sun,
Water and Fire, Man versus Beast most likely arose from the Proto-Indo European legends.
While it is easier to imagine the various subgroups of the Proto Indo-European
as separate branches, it is more accurate to view them as waves, that constantly moved and
interacted with each other and others. That being said, the first major branch we will look at is
Italic, a language that spread alongside Celtic, until the Alps split the two around 1500 BC.
By 300 BC the language was fighting for survival against its Celtic, Illyrian and
Greek neighbors who dominated the north and even eliminated the Sicel branch in Sicily,
with only Faliscian, Umbrian, Oscan, and Venetic remaining. And then suddenly the Roman Republic
rose from obscurity and spread the Latin language across the Mediterranean and western Europe like
wildfire, obliterating all other Italic and most of the Celtic languages in the process.
The Latin language itself had two variants, classical Latin, which was the formal language
and Vulgar Latin, which Cicero describes as “the speech of the masses”. A standardized
and universal language in the Empire, one that brought status and economic opportunity was one
of the tools that allowed the Romans to establish themselves as a military and cultural powerhouse.
However due to the size of the Empire, many regions began developing a distinct dialect,
unique to the province and when Rome fell, those dialects evolved into their own languages,
ushering in the dawn of the Romance languages. The subdivisions of Romance include the now-extinct
British, Pannonian, and African Romance languages, Sardinian which is an incredibly conservative
language, Romanian , and finally one of the most dominant subdivisions: Western Romance, featuring
Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. To simplify what could be its own video,
each of these languages underwent significant changes throughout the middle ages, as various
feudal states and dynasties struggled for power internally and externally.
This resulted in dozens of dialects within each language , but if we draw a line between any two
points between these countries, the further you go, the harder it is to understand the
local language. But as the middle ages came to a close and states became more centralized,
rulers selected the dialect of their hometown and emphasized its use, a process mirrored in every
other branch. The Castillian kings choose Castillian as the foundation for Spanish,
discouraging the use of Galician, Leonese, Basque , and Catalan, and eliminating Mozarabic, and this
process was finalized by the so-called Catholic monarchs - Ferdinand and Isabella, who understood
the efficiency of using just one language to rule their realm. The French kings ruling from Paris
chose the langue d'oïl, spoken in the north, rather than Occitan or Franco-Provencal,
as king Francis I formalized this in 1539 with the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts , which was
also aimed against the power of the Occitan nobles and Catholic church.
The unification of Italy occurred much later, but a similar process
ensued after the Tuscan dialect was chosen as the foundation of Italian.
Modern day Italy could give us a glimpse of what other countries looked like
as there are numerous local dialects with varying degrees of differences between them.
For example, an Italian from Florence is more likely to understand a person speaking in Spanish
rather than another Italian from Sicily . Nationalism, education and literature are always
major drivers of standardization and helped shape languages within a certain state, but given enough
time and isolation, speech can alter dramatically, even if the writing system remains the same.
That is exactly what we see in the colonies of the Romance languages: Mexico, Quebec, and Brazil
all share the languages of their founders, but they also developed their own unique features.
The next major branch we will review is Proto-Greek , which arrived in northern
Greece around the 3rd millennium BC. The first stage of its evolution saw the rise of Mycenaean
Greek as the dominant language of the region, with its very own writing, which we now call Linear B.
But neither would survive the fall of the Mycenaean civilization in the 12th century BC,
instead around the same time the Greek alphabet was created, based on the Phoenician alphabet,
with a few added letters. It was this same alphabet, which would deeply influence the Latin,
Cyrillic, Coptic and Gothic alphabets. Armed with one of the first written systems, Greek
colonists settled the coasts of France, Italy, Anatolia, and the entire Black Sea, but despite
using the alphabet, rival dialects competed for dominance. As you may have guessed this rivalry
was mostly between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta. Despite the popularity of the Spartan
Doric Greek in the mainland, Crete, and Sicily and military victory over Athens, the Ionic Greek
won the cultural war, thanks to the works of Homer, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and others.
And thus Classical Greek became the staple of Greek culture and would contribute to numerous
loan words, present in many other languages today. The next crucial figure in this story
is Alexander the Great himself, who spread the common version of the language called Koine with
his conquests and firmly established it in Greece, as well as inner Anatolia, Egypt, and India.
This was the language in which the New Testament was written. Despite centuries under Roman rule,
the prestige of the language with its deeply embedded written form, allowed it to avoid
the Celtic fate, and when the West collapsed Koine Greek transformed into Medieval Greek,
spoken in the Eastern Roman Empire. By this point, there was a huge disparity between the Classic
and spoken versions of the language, with the former being used primarily in court and writing.
The fall of Constantinople, triggered many events, one of which was the transformation of
both of these languages. The spoken Medieval Greek turned into Demotic Greek meaning by the people
and the written language called Katharevousa, which added some elements of the spoken language,
but mostly resembles Classical Greek. The substantial differences in both languages
made daily transactions incredibly confusing and this problem persisted for centuries, until it
was finally solved in 1976, when Demotic Greek was made the official language still used today.
As for Doric Greek, it is spoken by only a few hundred elderly people in Southern Greece and is
expected to become extinct in the coming years. It took a significant amount of time for
Proto-Germanic to expand beyond a small area in North Europe, during which it already split
into three distinct dialect s: East, West and North . We know very little about the early
stage of this branch, as it used a runic writing system, usually carved on trees.
But as the Roman Empire fell, the most famous language from the eastern dialect spread all
over Europe. Gothic was incredibly influential and left a lasting mark on the continent, despite the
fact that it would eventually become extinct. The North dialect, which we now call Old Norse
was also very popular due to the Viking era. It would create west and east variants of its own
from which modern Icelandic, Norwegian, and then Danish and Swedish descended.
It is important to note that Icelandic stands out as a very conservative language, which has more
in common with Old Norse than any of them, once again outlining the important role of geography.
During the first millenium BC, Celtic was the lingua franca of Western and Central Europe,
largely due to the dominant Urnfield culture. As the branch spread it split into various other
forms like Lepontic, Celtiberian, Gaulish, Galatian and others. However the rise of the
Roman Republic would lead to the extinction of all continental Celtic languages. The few surviving
speakers migrated to the British isles, forming what is known as the Insular Celtic languages,
further divided in Goedelic languages, featuring Irish, Scottish and Manx Gaelic and Brythonic
languages, featuring Breton , Cornish and Welsh. Despite being so closely connected to each other,
the two groups are not intelligible. Each of these languages struggled to endure the
centuries of deliberate censorship and oppression from various states. In total
there are just under 1 million speakers of the Celtic languages, with half of them being Welsh.
In the 19th century Cornish came very close to joining Pictish and Cumbric in extinction,
but has since undergone a revival and now boasts a few hundred speakers. The Celtic language group
stands as a clear example of how politics can affect culture in incredibly impactful ways.
Lastly, we have West Germanic, which spread towards areas disconnected from each other by
forests, mountains, wide rivers, and the English channel. Naturally, this split the language into
four notable branches: Old High German, Old Low German, Old Low Franconian, and Anglo-Frisian,
which will inevitably form German, Dutch and English. The evolution, development and spread
of each of these languages are very interesting, but extends far beyond the scope of this video,
so we will just share one interesting fact about each of them. The Gutenberg
printing press and the Luther Bible set the foundation of a standardized German language,
which was essential in the later unification process. When we look at places like Iceland,
Albania or Sardinia it is easy to understand why those languages are conservative,
yet despite having few natural defenses and being surrounded by more powerful states,
the Dutch language is incredibly conservative. English is a member of the Germanic language
family, yet only 26% of its vocabulary is Germanic, 29% of it is French, and 29% is Latin.
Alongside these four major branches, there are several others, which we would love to cover
in futures videos including the Balto-Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Albanian, not to mention
the now extinct Anatolian, Phrygian, Dacian, and Tocharian. Each of these language groups
has a fascinating story as it changed throughout the years and under different regimes.
The languages spread around the world, while other language groups left a lasting impact on them,
particularly Arabic, Turkic, and Hungarian. Like this video and share it with your friends if you
want us to delve deeper into the field of historical linguistics and tell us which
branch or language family deserves an entire video with more details.