Proto-Indo-European comes up a lot in my videos, heck, my first two videos were both about
P.I.E., but in case you don't know, linguists believe that a huge percentage group of the
world's languages are all descended from one common ancestor.
This group includes almost all of the languages of Europe and like a third of the languages
of Asia, mostly around Iran and India, so the group of languages are collectively called
the "Indo-European Languages," and the language that they're all descended from is called
"Proto-Indo-European."
Thing is, linguists don't believe any of this because we have written records of PIE, they
believe it because and only because all the languages of this region are so similar that
it's the only reasonable explanation.
The original Proto-Indo-Europeans didn't leave anything behind, well, OK, they probably did,
but they might have been any number of ancient groups of people who left behind a bunch of
poetry and stuff, and all you have to do to start a fight between linguists is ask them
whether the proto-indo-europeans lived in modern day Russia or Turkey.
And yet, that doesn't at all mean that we don't know anything about who these people
were.
Linguists, including myself, will love telling you how important language is to culture and
human society and how it's a reflection of how we see our world, but I don't think there's
any better example of this then how we've figured out so much about the Proto-Indo-European
people just based on their language.
For instance, if you remember my last video you'll know that in general, English words
with a "h" sound tend to correspond to Spanish words with a "k" sound, because early in the
history of English all "k" sounds turned into "h" sounds.
But, the word "computer" corresponds to the only barely different Spanish "computadora,"
indicating that one language came up with the term and then it spread to the other after
English went through that change.
Which means, the word for "computer" had to be created after the change English went through,
which means the Proto-Indo-Europeans probably didn't have computers.
Meanwhile, the Spanish word "Casa" corresponds to the English word "House," suggesting that
the Proto-Indo-Europeans probably did have a word for house, and therefor probably had
houses.
Now, those two things are pretty obvious, but we can actually use similar strategies
to figure out a lot about Proto-Indo-European culture.
At the most basic level, we can figure out what kind of technology they had.
We can successfully reconstruct PIE words for wheel, hub and axel, indicating that they
had wheeled vehicles like wagons and such.
They also had words for yoke and thill, and also words for cow, steer, ox and bull, indicating
that they had domesticated cattle and that they used them to plow their fields.
And yes, we also know that they could farm.
They had words for field, for wheat, for barley, and also words for threshing and grinding
grain.
We also know that they used their cattle for dairy, as they had word for milk, butter and
curds.
Although those diary products might also have come from goats, because they also had a word
for goats, as well as sheep, ram, lamb, horse and dog.
They also had words for "wool," as well as a verb for "to weave," indicating that they
knew how to make their own textiles out of wool.
We don't know much about what they would have eaten, but they did have words for "oven,"
"to cook," "to bake," and to boil, so they were making something out of something.
They also had words for "to brew" and a word for "mead," so we also know that they were
definitely drinking something or another.
Interestingly, they had a word for door, but in the daughter languages the word for "door"
usually comes in the form that words take when you're talking about two of them, which
indicates that their doors might have usually come in pairs of to.
They definitely had words for houses and buildings, but we don't know much about what they would
have been like.
We do know one thing about them though, because their word for "roof" also became verbs meaning
"to thatch" in some daughter languages, suggesting that they tended to have thatched roofs.
Also, we can reconstruct two different PIE words that both ment "to fart," one that ment
"to fart loudly" and the other that ment "to fart softly."
That last one doesn't have anything to do with anything, I just thought it was kind
of funny.
OK, so, we can earn about their material culture based on their vocabulary, but can we also
maybe learn about the way they saw the world through their language?
The ancient greeks had the word "ainumai" which ment "to take," and it's pretty clearly
a cognate with the Tocharian "ai" to give.
Also, the ancient greek "németai" to allot, is a cognate with the German nehmen, "to take."
You find examples of this kind of thing a fair amount in Indo-European languages, where
words that mean "to take" in one language have a common ancestor with words from other
languages that mean "to give."
This is pretty hard to explain until you consider one intriguing possibility: what if the Proto-Indo-Europeans
thought of the two has the same?
Many modern linguists believe that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had this idea of "mutual gift-giving," the
idea that when one person gives someone else something, both of them expect that the receiver
will have to give something back to the giver in return, to the extent that neither action
can really be viewed separately, and that they are in fact two aspects of the same event.
Think that one's a bit of a stretch?
Yeah, I'm a bit dubious too, but how about this one: the Proto-Indo-Europeans had words
for close family relations just like any other language: father, mother, brother, sister,
etcetera.
They also had words that ment "son's wife" and "brother's wife," but not words for "daughter's
husband" or "sister's husband."
They also had words for husband's father, husband's mother, and husband's brother, but
not words for wife's father, wife's mother or wife's sister.
All this indicates that when a woman marries a man, she is now a family member to his whole
family, but the husband isn't a family member to her family, that when a marriage occurs,
the wife leaves her family to go to her husband's family, not the other way around.
Now this doesn't necessarily mean that their society was incredibly patriarchal, or at
least, it wouldn't if not for the fact that there is a very clear, easily reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European word for "Bride-price," and when you combine that with the Proto-Indo-European
idea of reciprocity and mutual gift-giving and you can start to see the whole thing as
two aspects of one exchange and get a bit of a sense for how Proto-Indo-European society
viewed women.
On a less chauvinistic note, perhaps my favorite part of all this is that we can get an idea
of how they viewed the place of humans in the universe.
Many words for "human" in Indo-European languages originate from a Proto-Indo-European word
meaning "earth" or "land," indicating that they thought of humans as fundamentally "earthly."
Furthermore, Indo-European cultures widely use the same word to mean both "human" and
"mortal," indicating that the Proto-Indo-Europeans thought of humans as also inherently mortal.
Both of these things are likely ment to be in contrast with things which are neither
mortal nor earthly, as in, gods.
Now, we can't reconstruct to much about Proto-Indo-European religion.
Most Indo-European societies originally believed in a pantheon of many gods, so the Proto-Indo-Europeans
probably did too, but beyond that we don't have to much to go on.
Here's on interesting bit though: The speakers of Vedic Sanskrit believed in a powerful entity
they called "dyáus-pítar," the Greeks originally referred to "Zeus" by the name "Zéu páter,"
and the Romans originally called their god "Jupiter" by the name "Iu-piter."
All of these phrases can be confidently said to have come from a single name for a supreme
god in Proto-Indo-European religion, a god who's name literally translated as "Sky Father."
Keep in mind how patristical Proto-Indo-European society was.
Given how they saw women, the father of a household was almost definitely the household's
head, so the idea that the universe would be headed by an entity who was a sort of father
to the whole world and who resided in the sky must have made sense to them, as if the
cosmos was a sort of macrocosm of the home.
Now, if you think about other stuff you can infer even more about Proto-Indo-European
society.
For instance, many scholars have noticed how numerous Indo-European peoples divided their
societies into three-groups, the warriors, the priests, and the commoners, and have suggested
that the Proto-Indo-Europeans probably also had such a devision.
However, others think that this devision might originally have just been a sort of idea or
a conceptualization of their society that at the time didn't actually affect their day-to-day
behavior.
Either way, though, I just think that it's one of the coolest achievements of modern
linguistics that we've managed to learn so much about these people, that, despite the
fact that we have almost no idea where they might have lived or when, despite the fact
they they left no written records or pictures or even pottery or ruins that we can confidently
associate with them, despite all that we've managed to look only at the words they left
behind for us and we've used those words as a window into their thoughts and feelings
in a way clay pots or brick houses never could have.
Catch me later for more linguistics videos!