So let’s talk about pie. Not the delicious flaky kind, or the transcendental number kind,
but P.I.E., or the Proto-Indo-European language. We didn’t always sound remotely the same
as we do now. But a lot of languages - more than you may think - actually come from the
same historical tongue. But how can we know that, when there’s no one around to ask?
Please, check these methods and results with us today. I’m Moti Lieberman, and this is the Ling Space.
Languages are amazing. They change and evolve over time, adapting to suit the needs and
whims of their speakers. And everything changes - word usage, pronunciation, phonology, syntax,
the whole system. You can see language change at work all around you right now, but it's
even clearer when you look backwards. Books written a hundred years ago don't sound the
same as those written today; they sound like Sherlock Holmes, the last novel of which came
out in 1915. And if you go further back, Shakespeare's English was a very different idiom than the
one I'm speaking to you in today. But what about... further back? Like we're talking WAY back.
People have been trying to piece together the way their ancestors spoke for centuries.
By looking at how a given language has been written over time, you can reconstruct the
shape it used to take in the distant past. But at some point, you run out of written
records to search for changes. So then what do you do?
Well, the more you observe your language and the ones around you, the more you might notice
certain similarities. Like, say I speak French, and I notice that my word for wing, "aile",
looks like "ala" in Spanish and Italian, and even kind of like “asa” in Portuguese.
Hmm! Intriguing. Could it be that these languages are somehow related?
The answer, in this case, is yes: they're all Romance languages, and they share a common
ancestor. You can look at the words and grammatical systems of French and Spanish and Italian
and see some real parallels, and wouldn't you know it, all roads lead to Rome. If you
want to find the closest linguistic ancestor of these languages, you don't need to look
any further than Latin.
When we look for parallels between languages like this to build their phonology, we use
what’s called the comparative method, and there’s a really systematic way to go about
it. The first thing you need to do is find cognates. These are words in different languages
that have similar sounds and similar meanings, like our “wing” example from before, or
the English “hound” and German “Hund”, for dog.
Once you have a list of cognates, then you look at the way they’re different from each
other. Let’s say you want to rebuild the Proto-Polynesian language, which is what people
would have been speaking in the central Pacific a few centuries BCE, so, before the Polynesian
people spread further across the islands and the languages began to diversify.
You’d look at a few languages in the family, like, say, Hawaiian, Maori, and Tongan, and then you'd
line up your cognates. If all these languages are related, you’ll probably find a bunch
of words that sound basically the same.
Like, if the word for “bird” in all three languages is “manu”, you can assume that
was probably the word in Proto-Polynesian, too. And on top of that, you can assume that
the language had all the sounds that make that word up: *m, *a, *n, and *u. But of course,
not everything is going to be the same - otherwise, all your languages would still be the same
language. So take a word like “bat”: in Hawaiian, it’s [peʔa], but in Maori and
Tongan, it’s [peka]. Well, this gives us *p and *e as additional likely phonemes of
Proto-Polynesian, but what about that second consonant in the word? Would the ancestor
word have a [ʔ] or a [k]?
Well… we can’t really tell, just looking at that example. It could be either. So we
need to look elsewhere in the language, for more data. So let’s add a word to our data
set: the one for “current”. This is [au] in Hawaiian and Maori, but [ʔau] in Tongan,
with that glottal stop on the front. Aha! Since there’s no reason to assume a language
would just throw in a new random sound, in this particular word, it’s likely that the
*ʔ was originally there in *ʔau in Proto-Polynesian, and then got lost over time in Hawaiian and Maori.
Okay, so now we know that the Proto-Polynesian glottal stop just up and vanished in the phonology
of its daughter language, Hawaiian. So let’s look at the word for ‘bat’ again, and
try to get an answer. If it had been *peʔa underlyingly, you’d expect it to have turned
into [pea] in Hawaiian. Historical change happens across the board in the same phonological
environments - it doesn’t pick and choose which words to apply to. But we don’t get that,
we get [peʔa]. So it looks like the underlying phoneme was *k in the original - and that
Hawaiian had that *k transform into a glottal stop over time.
By using these comparisons, and looking between languages, we can build a whole sound system
up. Give a quick check to make sure that what you came up with makes sense with how phonology
works overall, and you’re set! You’ve reached your proto-goal.
By looking for cognates, we can find what languages should be grouped together. And
we’ve puzzled out a few of these family trees. If we look at the over 6000 languages
in the world today, along with the ones that have disappeared over time, we can collect
them into a few major groups, and a whole lot of smaller ones. There’s actually over
a hundred language families out there, but the ten biggest ones capture about 75% of
the languages in the world. The Niger-Congo and Austronesian families have over a thousand
languages in them each!
But if each family tree consists of a whole lot of branches, that makes you wonder: what’s
at the trunk? Well, let’s take the example of the language family spoken in Europe and
the Indian subcontinent. The ancestor here is called PIE, or Proto-Indo-European. Although we have no way
of knowing for sure what Proto-Indo-European sounded like, or if it even existed, a ton
of research has been done on it, and most linguists agree that the theory is solid.
After all, scholars have been puzzling out PIE since the 18th century! Different versions
and approaches have battled it out in the 200 years since, but there's a few things
we have a pretty good grasp on.
The best guess that most people have today is that it was spoken in about 3500 BCE, and
started out in the steppes of Eastern Europe. Over time, the language spread out and changed
and evolved into over 400 different languages in Europe and the Indian subcontinent: Germanic
languages like English or Dutch; Romance languages like Spanish and Italian; Slavic languages
like Polish or Russian; Indo-Iranian languages like Hindi and Urdu, and more.
Let’s look at some examples of cognates from across these. The word for “house”
was probably *dom in PIE, and is /domus/ in Latin, /domos/ in Greek, ‎/dama/
in Sanskrit, and /tsɪmə/ Zimmer in German.
And “snow” has been reconstructed in PIE as *snejgʷʰ-, like in Polish /ɕɲɛk/,
Old Norse /snjor/, Sanskrit /sneha/, and Irish /ʃnʲaxtə/. And we could
list off a lot more examples for each of these.
So by analyzing connections between related languages, and using the comparative method,
linguists have figured out a lot about the likely phonology of PIE. For example, English
has the alveolar plosives /t/ and /d/, but PIE probably had *t, *d, and *dʱ, a voiced
aspirated sound. Now, some bits of the reconstruction seem to be a little weird: like, it had *p
and *bʱ, but probably no /b/, which is something that you’d expect to be there. And having those
voiced aspirated sounds, and not voiceless aspirated ones, is at best super rare. But
that’s where our method leads us, and it seems like it checks out.
So like we said, there are a whole lot of language families, of which PIE is just the
most widely studied one. But...why stop there? Is there a way to link together all the families, and
get some kind of “proto-human” language? Well, people have tried, but unfortunately, even
if something like that existed at some point, we almost certainly can’t rebuild it. It’s
already really challenging to go back even a few thousand years without records to work
from. Going back even more is just an insurmountable problem.
After all, we want to rule out any similarities due to chance. And it’s too easy to make
mistakes when we start operating as abstractly as we have to if we want to make Proto-Human
a thing. Trying to match hypothesized Proto-Human roots to actual languages, doesn’t always
line up well. Like, there’s no match for the proposed ancient root for “woman”
anywhere in Spanish - all the possible cognates that it could match up with actually came
from other sources. And if we try working out what the syntax looked like, we just end up
guessing. We can’t skate by these issues with any confidence.
What we know about the speech of early humans isn’t a whole lot, but here’s what we
can say. If we’re holding to the position that Universal Grammar is hardwired in our
brains, then it’s probably been around for as long as our noggins have been the way that they
are. So maybe although we can’t figure out the specifics of its phonology and syntax,
we can assume that early human speech would have had recursion and binding and movement,
and allophones, and assimilation, and all the universals we see today that make up the
whole UG apparatus.
Looking back into the past of language, things can get pretty misty. But our knowledge about
where our speech comes from isn’t all bitty and small. Using our techniques and working
carefully, we can learn a lot about where we came from. And all that research definitely
merits a piece of PIE.
So we’ve reached the end of the Ling Space for this week. If you reconstructed my phonemic
inventory, you learned that we’ve established over a hundred language families by finding
cognates and then using the comparative method on them; that we can reconstruct ancient languages,
like Proto-Indo-European, by working back from these cognates; and that we probably
can’t rebuild any languages further back than that with any real accuracy.
The Ling Space is produced by me, Moti Lieberman. It’s directed by Adèle-Elise Prévost,
and it’s written by both of us. Our editor is Georges Coulombe, our production assistant
is Stephan Hurtubise, our music is by Shane Turner, and our graphics team is atelierMUSE.
We’re down in the comments below, or you can bring the discussion back over to our
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