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Hey everybody, it's Inés - and I know what you're thinking, Happy Pi Day!
But guess what, I'm European, and in Europe - and for that matter, in most of the world -
we write the dates with the day preceding the month - so by this notation today is not
really Pi Day and we have already established on this channel that the 22nd of July is a
far better approximation of pi - so if you are in the mood for a maths themed video feel
free to check out the approximate history of pi for pi approximation day!
However, on this pi day I’ve decided to make a circular argument about how we know
enough about circles and instead, we're going to talk about a far more Indian and of course,
European type of PIE that no longer exists today: PIE or Proto-Indo-European language!
[Introduction by Caro Waro & Cristina de Manuel]
As I'm sure you're aware, language evolves over time, acquiring new words, forming new
dialects and maybe even going extinct if there aren't enough new speakers to pass it onto
the following generations. In a manner very much akin to biological evolution, whereby
species are descended from a common ancestor, languages as we know them today have also
undergone a similar evolution.
For example, speakers of Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan
may be able to understand each other when speaking, and can often just about understand
texts in the other languages when reading them. This is because they all belong to the
Romance Language Family that is descended from Vulgar Latin, so whilst the meanings,
declination and phonemes have diverged from Latin, they still share many root words in common.
Case in point, here is the first line of Don Quijote de la Mancha in 9 different romance
languages: “En un lugar de la mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho
tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco
y galgo corredor”. You’ve probably been able to see quite a few similarities and parallelisms
in the grammar and the words used, even though some of the translations actually vary quite
a bit.
Much like a geneticist can sequence the genomes from different species and assess the phylogenetic
relationship based on how similar or different their genome is, linguists have compared the
similarities and differences between languages to trace back their evolutionary history.
For instance, Galician seems to be most similar to Portuguese, but is also more similar to
Castilian Spanish than to the other languages, and a similar observation can be made of Catalan
and French. When taking into account the regions in which the languages are spoken within Europe,
these findings are unsurprising. By contrast, Romanian appears to be the most different,
and that is because they have a much greater influence from Baltic and Slavic proto-languages
compared to the other languages featured here.
From this example you can see how different languages are related, and one could try and
guess what the proto-version of each of these words may have looked like. And as it turns
out, it is thought that the Indo-Iranian languages in Asia and the vast majority of European
languages, with the exception of these fine languages [wave] are all derived from a common
ancestral language known as Proto-Indo-European, or PIE, or… pi!
PIE is estimated to have been spoken during the Late Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age,
though depending on which theory you support, the time it was spoken ranges from around
10,000BC to as recently as 2500BC. There are obviously no recordings or scriptures dating
back to those times, meaning that to reconstruct what words may have existed in PIE and what
they may have sounded like is based on healthy speculation based on comparative studies - this
does mean that yes, it is potentially controversial and not everyone is going to be in agreement
with each theory - but is still, in my opinion, a fascinating field!
I mean, think about it - how DOES one go about guessing what an ancestral language’s words
were and what they might have sounded like?
For instance, we can make a good attempt at guessing what words might have been like from
the words we have today, much like we did earlier. Here is a very Germanic
centric language tree with a handful of words that are present in Indo-European languages.
We have mother:
Don’t be too scared by the mix of superscripts, subscripts and asterisks on the Proto-languages.
Whilst I'm not going to go into the precise detail of what each letter represents phonetically
(go check the IPA for that, otherwise, this video would be far longer and far more technical
than it already is) it is worth mentioning that the asterisk indicates that the word
is a reconstruction and therefore, the sounds represented are how linguists hypothesise
the sounds were likely made in the mouth, but the exact pronunciations are still unknown.
There are actually quite a few more trees like this: we have
I;
we have
you;
two;
four;
Now, from these trees, in addition to similarities in spelling as was the case with
the Quijote text, you might have also noticed similarities and changes across different languages in
how the words are said.
Many scholars have studied historical phonology to study the correspondence and relationships
between sounds in different languages. Friedrich von Schlegel noted that the Latin p and Germanic
f corresponded to each other, such as pisces and fish, pater and father. Rasmin Rask later
extended this work to show the correspondence across other consonants and across more Indo-European
languages, including Sanskrit and Greek. And then along came Jacob Grimm, who put forth
this rule in what is now known as Grimm’s Law. Which, by the way, this is indeed one
of the Grimm brothers from the famous fairytales.
In essence, Grimm’s law explains how certain sounds changed from the original PIE cognates
to their descendant languages in three main parts.
Firstly, Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives, such as
the aforementioned p and f example. For instance, we have cognates conserving the unshifted
sounds such as
and the Germanic shifted cognates such as
We also have words such as
and the Germanic cognates:
Secondly, Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops. This is illustrated
for instance, by words such as
which have shifted to a voiceless /k/ sound.
Another example is the shift from ‘d’ to ‘t’, such as with ten.
One of the rarest shifts is the one from b to p. For example, there's the word [dubus]
in Lithuanian, which means concave, and it's taken on the meaning of 'deep' in Germanic
languages, and the ‘b’ has softened to a ‘p’.
Finally, Proto-Indo-European aspirated stops become voiced stops of fricatives. A good
example of this is the shift from sounds like:
to
We also have words such as:
whereas in the Germanic languages we have
You may have noticed that these form a chain, and they can be represented something like
this,
or this.
Interestingly, you may have also noticed that Lithuanian is one of the languages with the
most unshifted cognates. It is typically said that Lithuanian is likely the language that
most closely resembles PIE. Now of course, it is a modern language that has evolved greatly
since PIE, but it means that it has more archaic features with regards to its pronunciation
compared to other languages.
The examples illustrated today are some of many comparative techniques used by linguists
to infer what the original cognates of words we use today may have sounded like. And whilst
we cannot verify exactly how they were pronounced or said, the IPA symbols used in the words
indicate where in the mouth the sounds were thought to be created, even if exact pronunciation
may have varied.
Speaking of which, it’s time to come full circle - what would a video about reconstructing
PIE be without a reconstruction of PIE? Because I really hope you are sticking around to have
a slice of PIE with me. Sadly, my time machine is faulty and I couldn’t travel back to
the Neolithic to quench my curiosity, so instead I consulted with Andrew Byrd, Associate Professor
of Linguistics at the University of Kentucky who very kindly translated AND VOICED a little
something into Proto-Indo-European, and can I say, he made it seem as easy as pie.
Now, if you felt this video wasn’t Brilliant enough, and still fancy some maths because
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So, I really hope you enjoyed today’s video, once again, thank you so much to everyone
who helped voice this episode and helped provide feedback on this video. You might have noticed
this video was quite the mammoth to produce - there were over 20 people involved - but
hopefully the result was worth it.
And of course, if you want to be involved in things like this in the future, make sure
you follow me on Twitter because that's usually where I call out to people! Once again, thank
you so much to my amazing patrons on Patreon who have also supported the creation of this
content and I’ll see you very soon, this time for real, in another video. And as always,
thank you so much for watching me and I’ll see you in the next one… bye! Or should
I say… PI!
[Music: Thastor & Cryosleepkitten]
[Subtitled by {your name} into {language}]