Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

Linguists consider that on average it takes between five hundred and a thousand years for a language to become incomprehensible to its original speakers

Few people realise how far the steppe extends into Europe. About half of Ukraine is steppe (U kraina means ‘at the border’) and it runs right down to the northern shore of the Black Sea, leaping over the Isthmus of Perekop into Crimea. ‘When I am dead, bury me / In my beloved Ukraine, / My tomb upon a grave mound high / Amid the spreading plain,’ wrote the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko.

Modern English-speakers can understand the Middle English of Shakespeare, who wrote in the sixteenth century, but not the Old English of Beowulf, which was composed nine hundred years earlier.

a language is a dialect with an army and a navy,

The phenomenon that scholars are attempting to understand is ephemeral: the emanations of long-vanished brains that caused long-vanished eardrums to vibrate. They are acutely aware that the rules that guide them are, with the exception of the sound laws, rules of thumb and no more. If migration has driven language change, it hasn’t been the whole story. The Scythians rode into Ukraine and India but left their language in neither.‡ The Romans got as far as Britain, but Latin stayed (mostly) in France. Whoever carried Celtic to Ireland caused barely a tremor in the Irish gene pool.

One archaeologist I listened to recently laughed in sheer delight as he described how dental plaque lifted from the teeth of shepherds who had lived thousands of years ago contained particles of charcoal from the smoke they had breathed in. An analysis of the particles revealed the species of tree they had burned.

Migration has been a constant, ‘indigenous’ is relative. Ten thousand years of human displacement have shrunk the genetic distance between populations to the point where ethnic divisions are losing meaning. The desire to belong is as strong as ever, and as it becomes harder to see the difference between ‘them’ and ‘us’, linguistic and cultural boundaries are being guarded more jealously. Language is becoming a battleground in the identity wars, and preserving our linguistic ‘purity’ a justification used by those who want to raise walls.

The past is a lighthouse, not a port.† †  Russian proverb

When Jacob and his brother Wilhelm went hunting fairy tales in the German backwoods, it was partly to build a body of material in different dialects from which to reconstruct their Proto-Germanic ancestor. Among the happy by-products of their efforts were Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood.

If you were to represent the three hundred millennia of Homo sapiens’ existence as a twenty-four-hour clock, writing emerged at about thirty minutes to midnight. It was at that moment that history began (history, from Greek historia meaning ‘knowledge’ or ‘inquiry’, and later ‘chronicle’ or ‘account’). Everything before that we call prehistory.

Now, eight billion humans speak around seven thousand languages. Those languages fall into about a hundred and forty families, but most of us speak languages that belong to just five of them: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Among those five, two behemoths stand out: Indo-European, whose major representative is English, and Sino-Tibetan, which includes Mandarin Chinese.

People who spoke of wheels and wagons could not have lived before 3500 BCE, when that technology was invented.

These particular sound transformations form part of a set known as Grimm’s Law, after Jacob Grimm. When Jacob and his brother Wilhelm went hunting fairy tales in the German backwoods, it was partly to build a body of material in different dialects from which to reconstruct their Proto-Germanic ancestor. Among the happy by-products of their efforts were Snow White and Little Red Riding Hood.

In the Bible, Judges 12:5–6, the men of Gilead identified their Ephraimite enemies by making them utter a single Hebrew word meaning ‘stream’: ‘Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan.

Words can moonlight too, taking on second shifts as new concepts are born and demand labels. English ‘mouse’, from Latin mus, can refer to a small rodent or a manual device for moving the cursor on your computer screen, but when the Romans used it they only meant one of those things. Much of the pleasure of etymology lies in charting the tortuous path that each word’s meaning has travelled from its root to its modern usage.

a word’s meaning can shrink, stretch or sashay over time. The English word ‘focus’, referring to the point to which attention is drawn, comes from a Latin word meaning ‘hearth’.

When we talk about languages being ‘born’ or ‘dying’, we’re defining a language as a package of communication tools that is unintelligible to users of other such packages. (Similarly, according to a standard definition in biology, species are distinct if they can’t interbreed, or strictly speaking if their offspring can’t interbreed.)

The important thing to understand about writing is that a given script can encode different languages, while a given language can be rendered in more than one script.