[Silence]
>>Okay, so, today we're raising the dead.
We're not actually going to raise dead people on stage here,
because I couldn't get a permit from the Board of Health, so,
if you were hoping for that, and if you're disappointed,
feel free to play Angry Birds on your iPhone,
while I spend 15 minutes talking
about something else raising dead languages
and dead cultures, using linguistic methods.
So, we're going to start with the Romance thing, which is,
you all know what Romance languages are; French, Spanish,
Italian, various other.
Why are they called Romance languages, again, you know this,
it's not because they're romantic,
although maybe they are, [inaudible, foreign language].
So, maybe they work for Romance,
but the reason they're called Romance language, of course,
is something we can see with data right here.
So, if we look at words meaning mother, in Spanish, Madre,
French, mere, Italian, Madre, dos and duex for two, and dix,
diez and dieci for ten.
You don't have to be particularly bright to look
at these and say, "Well, golly gee Maynard,
them sure languages do look similar to me."
Okay, so, the look similar to all of us, and we know why,
it's because they are descended from the language of the Romans,
hence Romance languages, mainly Latin.
What does that mean, that languages are descended
from some other language?
Again, I think you know what that means, it doesn't mean
that Latin ventured into a tavern in Gael sometimes,
and met a Gaelic speaker
and nine months later French was born, right?
What it means is that all languages change over time,
and they develop dialects in different places, for example,
you may notice that my dialect, although it somewhat attenuated
as what we call, oh yay, Minnesotan dialect, so,
probably different from your dialect.
Given enough time and political disunity
and various other things like lack of television, then,
these dialects might develop into different languages,
which is what happened with Spanish, French and Italian,
because, again, all spoken languages change.
So, in this case, we know
that the Romance languages are all descended
from a single language, Latin, and Latin was written
down around two thousand years ago,
so we know exactly what the Latin words
for mother, two and ten were.
Good. So, we have the Romance language family and others
that you have heard of; the Germanic language family,
including English, German, Dutch, etc.,
the Celtic language family, Irish, Welsh and some other,
Slavic, I mean, what does it mean to be a Slav,
that means that you speak a Slavic language, right,
Russia [inaudible], and so on.
In India, all of these languages, not just in India,
Urdu, spoken in Pakistan and in India a little bit,
Romani language of people, sometimes called gypsies,
spoken all over the world, these Indic languages are descended
from the ancient language San Script.
The Iranian Language is not just in Iran,
Farce is modern Persian, Kurdish, you know, Pashto,
of course in Afghanistan.
There are some languages that don't have any close relatives,
you can think of them as an only child.
I have nine brothers and sisters, so I feel sad
for Greek, no brothers and sisters,
must have been lonely growing up.
So, we have these language families,
and these are only some groupings
that we can establish using the exact same way
that we just established, the Romance language family.
These are some language families of Europe and Asia.
Okay, what you might not realize though,
is if we take those language families and a few other,
which I haven't put up here, and look at words for,
let's say mother, two and ten, in these language families,
we can, in fact, see some similarity will take Latin
for Romance Latin languages, ancient Greek, matre,
meaning mother, duex, deca, as in decagon, ten-sided figure,
San Script, [inaudible, foreign language], old Irish,
spoken over a thousand years ago in Ireland, Russian, [inaudible,
foreign language], as a representative,
Slavic languages, once again, it does not take a genius to look
at this data and say, "Hmm, those all look similar to me."
Okay. So, what do we make of that?
These languages must be descended
from some ancestral language.
Now, let's think back to Romance for a minute,
in the case of Romance, we know the ancestor language.
The ancestor language was Latin.
In the case of Germanic, the Germanic tribes were not,
in fact, literate, early in the historical period.
They were too busy running around the forest,
spearing moose and planning to overthrow the Roman Empire,
to start writing things down, nevertheless,
there was a Germanic language, which is the ancestor
of English, German, Dutch, etc. German is not the ancestor
of English, they're both descended
from a common ancestor, same way that Spanish
and French are descended from a common ancestor.
When we don't know what the common ancestor was, exactly,
because it wasn't written down, we give it a name
like Proto-Germanic, that's the ancestral language
for the Germanic languages.
These languages, or these groups, are spoken all the way
from Europe, all the way East as far as India,
and so we might call those language, this language family,
Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, don't call it pie,
I don't know why, but no one calls it pie.
If you go up to a linguistic and say,
I'm studying PIE, they'll say what?
If you say, I'm studying PIE, they'll say, oh, good for you.
So, I've put the words here.
Now, again, this language was never written down.
These speakers of this language were completely illiterate, but,
by using phonetic knowledge of various sorts and knowledge
of how languages change, we can, actually, reconstruct the way
that they pronounced these words.
So, there's an H2 there, that means there's more
than one different kind of H
in the Proto-Indo-European language,
this one was pronounced something like [inaudible],
so that word for mother was pronounced something
like [inaudible foreign language],
and 2 is [inaudible foreign language],
and 10 is [inaudible foreign language],
and I've put asterisks in front of them,
not because I love asterisks,
but to show that these are reconstructed languages,
or reconstructed words, never written down.
So, that's what the asterisks in front means.
Okay, so there's our Proto-Indo-European language
family [inaudible], includes a wide range
of languages spoken still today in most of the languages
of Europe, languages of Iran, languages of India,
Northern India, in particular.
A little side note, looking at this data,
you notice that the English word, where English begins
with a T, Latin is normally going to begin
with a D, and vice versa.
What this means is that the Indo-European word started
with a D and D turned into T, in English,
and that shouldn't be too shocking for you, if you say,
Ta, Da, go ahead and say it, it won't hurt you, Ta, Da,
feel where the tongue is hitting the roof of your mouth,
when you do it, Ta, Da,
and you'll see those two sounds are very similar to each other.
Voltaire said , a few hundred years ago,
that etymology is a science in which the consonants count
for little and the vowels count for nothing.
But, that was true 200 years ago, or 300 years ago, 250,
I guess, probably when he said, it's not true anymore.
Nowadays the consonants and the vowels count for everything,
and so you have to be very careful,
and the crucial thing here is that English T has to go along
with Latin D, unless there's certain other factors
intervening, but English D will not be the same as Latin D,
so we see this, here, beginning of the word,
and this can allow us to find other words that come
from the same ancestor cognate words.
For example, the English word tame,
the Latin word meaning tame is domo,
and there's that T D correspondence.
English eat and Latin eddo,
there's that T D correspondence regularity
of sound correspondence.
What this also means is that the English word day is not cognate,
not related to the Latin word dia,
or to its Spanish descent dia.
They are just accidental similarities,
because English D does not equal Latin D, English D equals some,
actually equals Latin F, normally.
So, day and dais are not cognate words.
I'm going to tell you something else,
which I'm sure you all realize, before finally getting
to something you don't realize, which is that there is a lot
of nonsense on the internet, okay.
Anyone in the world can look at words and languages like Dias
and day and say, "Whoa, those must be related."
You can look at words like the Chinese word for more,
which is whoa and say, "Hey, that kinds of looks
like [inaudible] in Latin, more than one, whoa, and or a lot,
[inaudible] is more than .
So, you could say those two languages are related, no.
So, when you see something on the internet, be careful,
but you knew that already.
Okay, let's go back to our data.
Up to this stage, I have raised a dead language, and to me,
as a linguist, that's exciting, because I can now say the word
for mother was pronounced something like [inaudible],
in this Proto-Indo-European language.
Others of you are looking at your watches,
because you don't care how they pronounce this.
So, let's go a little bit farther.
Something else, once you've developed the language
and figured out what words are in it, you can do,
figure out things about the people and their culture.
Now, there are other ways of figuring out things
about ancient people and cultures
that never wrote anything down, you can put on a pith helmet
and get a shovel and go and dig up their graves and their pots
and so on, that takes a lot of work, and you'll get hot.
So, instead, what you can do is you can look at language,
you can go over to the library and look at the languages,
and its air conditioned in the summer in the library,
which is nice, because most
of our buildings here are not air conditioned in the summer,
and you can figure out things like,
words that we can reconstruct for Proto-Indo-European,
the word for copper, so they had copper, that's significant
because it tells us something about when they lived, that is,
not before the copper age.
Copper doesn't grow on trees, right, you've got to smelt it
out of the ore, and so, if they had copper,
then they're not Neolithic people,
they're after that period.
On the other hand, we can't reconstruct a word for iron,
so they had not yet figured out iron working technology,
so that, sort of, puts them at a certain location and time.
How about a location and space, okay; they have a word for snow,
okay, so they probably don't live in Singapore, right?
And, along with that, they don't have a word for palm tree, okay.
So, not in a tropical area, probably snow but no palm trees.
They had a word for goose, but no word for chicken,
to paraphrase Chico Marx, buy a goose, buy a no chicken, well,
because we know chickens were originally domesticated
in South East Asia, sometime several millennia ago,
but they didn't make their way west for some millennia
after that, so, made their way to Greek
and Roman culture probably in the early first millennium BC,
so, the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in some place
where chickens had not yet been introduced.
But, they did have other kids of animals.
They had collies, and they had sheep and they have word
for wool, also, so they used the sheep to make wool, naturally,
and they had word for horse and a word for wheel,
and the last two are particularly interesting,
because we know that horses were domesticated somewhere
in Central Asia or maybe Southeast Europe,
sometime probably around six thousand,
seven thousand years ago.
And, we also know that wheeled vehicles were invented not too
long after that, maybe a millennium later,
originally when they domesticated the horses,
they probably ate them .
But, eventually, they figured out, oh, we can ride on them,
and them, someone figured out, hey, we can take these wheels
and attach them to cows and horses and get around faster.
This would be useful if, for example,
you wanted to move somewhere.
Any of you who have ever moved somewhere, are probably glad
that you had a wheeled vehicle, in which to pile all your stuff,
instead of having to carry it around on your back.
So, the Indo-Europeans, we know moved a lot,
because wherever they lived originally,
they weren't spread all the way from Ireland to India,
they must have lived some place, some smaller location
and then spread out from there,
probably using their newly developed wheel technology,
and riding around on horses, also.
Those of you who've heard of the Indo-Europeans may know, then,
all their theory that the Indo-Europeans went around,
charging around in chariots, conquering people,
which was a nice romantic story, that's probably not true,
because chariots were not invented until later,
so they had wheeled vehicles, like carts.
They may have gone around conquering people,
that's a shameful habit that many people are engaged in,
but they weren't using chariots to do it.
Crucially, all of this information put together helps
us to locate the Indo-Europeans in time and space,
that's still a very controversial topic,
but most linguist would agree, some don't,
because academics love to argue about everything,
but most would agree that, probably,
somewhere in what is now Ukraine, maybe Eastern Ukraine,
and probably around six thousand years ago, is where
and when we would locate the Proto-Indo-European speakers,
speakers of this language.
Okay, so we can, in fact, find out things about their culture,
their material culture, they had agriculture
as well as stock breeding.
We can find out all those things,
but what else can we find out?
We can actually find out things
about their non-material culture.
We can reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European,
dios, meaning sky God.
So, this is interesting.
We know that the Proto-Indo-European's,
and this seems to have been their chief God, worshiped a God
of the bright sky, this is, in fact,
related to a word meaning bright.
The God of the bright sky, and this should be familiar to you,
if you think, well, you probably don't know San Script,
[inaudible], but Greek Zeus, where the deu has turned
into a Zue, and now we pronounce it Z, but it was Zue,
in Ancient Greek, Zeus.
Or Latin, although it's a little bit harder to tell,
where the petre means father and the deu, has turned into a J
in Latin, so we have this father sky God, who was the chief God
of the Proto-Indo-European people, and he persisted
into a lot of these cultures.
You may be wondering about this point, what happened
to this God in English.
You don't see him around much anymore, right.
Well, let's pause for a minute and say, if we had this God
by name in English, his name ought to start with a T, right?
If its Proto-Indo-European D, then it should be English T.
So I want you to think of some English T and Thor isn't going
to works, because that's spelled with T,
but it's not pronounced ta, that pronounced th,
so that's not Thor, but Thor does give me an idea,
we do have some days of the week named for Gods;
today is Sunday, right?
And then, there's Moonday tomorrow, and then,
later in the week, we have Woodensday, or [inaudible],
if you're a fan of [inaudible], right?
And, he's the Chief God of the Germanic people
and obviously Thorsday, after that, but right in the middle
of those days, what do we have?
We have a day that starts with T, Tuesday.
Now you know who T was, so this is something you might not have
realized, that Tuesday is, in fact, the day dedicated
to the God whose name is the same as Zeus and Jupiter
and [inaudible] and a few other names
in some other Indo-European Languages.
You don't see Teiwaz around much anymore,
even in the Germanic period, he seems to have been supplanted
by Wooden, who was an upstart who had launched a coup
against him, Wooden is a God of Magic, and Teiwaz sort of,
got shoved into the background.
So, if you feel sad for Teiwaz, maybe you can pour
out a libation to him on Tuesday this week, or something.
But, so that's the, what we can reconstruct
for Proto-Indo-European culture.
I have focused on Proto- Indo-European
because that's what I know the most about,
but some of you might be saying, "Well,
what about other language families of the world.
Well, there are some, theirs Indo-European, obviously,
Semiotic languages like, like Arabic, Hebrew, Ancient Acadian,
ancient and modern Aramaic,
there's the Sino-Tibetan languages,
which includes Chinese and Tibetan and also Burmese
and also about two hundred other language,
and for any of these language families,
we can reconstruct the ancestral form and learn something
about the people and their culture,
where and when they lived, and what God's the worshipped
and what they ate and so on, all without having to go
out into the field and dig up people's graves.
Austronesia included language ranging all the way
from Madagascar over to Hawaii, so the Polynesian languages,
languages of Indonesia, Niger-Congo languages of Sub-
Saharan and Africa, including Swahili
and other Bantu languages, languages of Nigeria,
Algonquian languages, which were spoken right here, at one time,
in the past, in this part of the country,
before white people came, Iroquoian languages,
still spoken in, not too far away from here, and many other.
So, if you're interested in learning more
about the pre-history of the world,
you can do it using linguistics, you can research and find
out what cultures were like thousands of years ago,
just by looking at their languages.
If you're not interested in that, then I hope you
and your birds defeated the pigs.
[ Laughter and clapping ]