Proto
Laura Spinney
- 17 minutes read - 3486 wordsAuthor: Laura Spinney
Rating: ★★
Have you ever encountered something and thought: I am completely the target market for this, and I cannot wait to read/watch/listen to this? I think about Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture multiple times per week. I’m always fascinated when the recursive ladder of etymology leads me from English (say, “mother”) to Greek/Latin (“mater”) to a splash in Sanskrit (“matar”) unto a constructed word in PIE ("*méh₂tēr"). That’s one word across multiple cultures across 5,000 years. By that reckoning, the word for mother is older than the Bible’s estimation at the age of the Earth.
Breathtaking.
So Proto — a biography of the PIE language told through the peoples who may have first spoken it — felt like it was written for me. The book could have awed; the book could have chased etymological chains; it could have found marks of where PIE became the Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit we know today; it could have found scientific/artistic firsts and traced how those firsts became a PIE word that became words we know today. But, despite the enormous scope and rich tapestry of source material, the book did something altogether remarkable: it bored the living hell out of me.
The Bad: Boring, Disconnected Factoids
Sadly, Proto follows the example of Mary Beard on Roman civilization: a genuine expert sharing expert nuggets in a book that winds up being an absolute slog. Her book on Rome, SPQR (encompassing topics like orgies, war, Game of Thrones politics) is boring. This is the culture that inspired multiple casts-of-thousands moving pictures. In Beard’s hands, it becomes a bunch of loose note-cards wrapped in a cover.
Spinney’s biggest weakness is that the book becomes a compendium of facts without thrust. I was repeatedly deflated when reading a compelling passage that just fell flat. There’s a man in Ukraine with heaps of cow thigh bones: apparently they loved to ice skate. Wonderful! The climate was different then. Is blade related to the word for femur? Not mentioned. So what?
Elsewhere there’s the theory of migration that the PIE people may have been mixed with Anatolian (Mediterranean) migrants. Fascinating! In their history they loved a specific seashell (the Spondylus). And burials along their migration have the shell. And then once in the theorized PIE homeland, we see the Spondylus shell as a decor motif. Wow, a multi-generation genetic memory about a shell that bespeaks an exodus and is used as a symbol of wealth or luxury. Fascinating. Is the shell in the PIE vocabulary? Unsaid. Is the shell used as a word for luxury or home or foreign money or? No. We get an amazing fact of humanity and no linguistic tie.
It also fails to flow back the other way. For a book with the word “Language” in the title, I was expecting a whole lot more about shared grammatical features, or etymological chains, or mutual intelligibility. It fails.
I can be gracious here and say that archaeology this far back is hard. And I can recognize that making etymological chains may be interesting for only a few (like me). But to make the story breathe despite these limitations is the apex performance of the job.
As is, Proto reads like popular science or popular sociology: you say “Neat” and chuckle sensibly. Sarah Vowell’s The Wordy Shipmates is this style of writing done well. But Proto wants to be seen as more: it wants to be a contribution. And it just doesn’t make it.
The Good
I had always assumed PIE had been spread by rape (the Rape of the Sabine women; Warrior men seeking to “take wives” while out on conquest). But Spinney theorizes other less-nasty models for PIE’s spread, specifically a culture of young male war-band/cohort culture and child fostering. War-bands were ways for cohorts of boys to become men outside the tribe: harrying, visiting kin-villages, meeting exotic girls and marrying them.1
As a variation, there was also a culture of child fostering. I find this fascinating as related to the grandmother hypothesis. Your parents were likely to be barely in their late teens. Their strength was needed to help the tribe work and to push out more babies. Care could be delegated to grandmothers or kinsmen/kinswomen. We see this historically enriched in The Song of Achilles where Achilles and Patroclus are fostered to other noble houses in the descendant Greek culture.
Conclusion
I think I have many of the best factoids of this book below. Since the book has no meta-narrative, if you skip reading this work, you’ll only be poorer a few factoids, not an enlightening socio-linguistic framework.
{
"title": "Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global",
"author": "Laura Spinney",
"highlightCount": 64,
"noteCount": 5,
"annotations": [
{
"highlight": "The most powerful god in the ancient Indian pantheon was Father Sky. His name was Dyauh pita, literally 'sky father'",
"location": 76,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "fibre stretched taut between them that thrums in all of us who speak Indo-European, though we may not be aware of it. This seam was forged in the heart of Eurasia before speech was written down – before history, that is, in mythological time. It teems with dragons and bears, wizards and warriors, formidable sky gods and wise, voluptuous queens. It's the realm of dreams and nightmares, of fantasies and fears.",
"location": 94,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "As far as we know, the alphabet was only invented once, in or near Egypt.",
"location": 154,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "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.",
"location": 155,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Indo-European languages were spoken for millennia by people who never saw their names written down.",
"location": 158,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Because language is so malleable, because it has ceaselessly built upon itself, it is an archive of its own journey.",
"location": 159,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "language as a package of communication tools that is unintelligible to users of other such packages.",
"location": 161,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Language is not only a tool; it's also a monument.",
"location": 165,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Dante looked around him at Europe's linguistic landscape. Calling the languages by their word for 'yes', he distinguished the Germanic or jo languages from the Romance languages spoken to the south and west of them. Romance he further subdivided into the langue d'oc and the langue d'oïl, which divided at the River Loire, and the sì languages spoken in Italy and Iberia.",
"location": 176,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "for what moves gradually is not at all recognised by us, and the longer something needs for its change to be recognised the more stable we think it is.'",
"location": 188,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "In 1786, in a speech that has been quoted in countless linguistics textbooks since, a British judge and polyglot in Calcutta, Sir William 'Oriental' Jones, asserted that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek had 'sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists'. He added that Germanic, Celtic and Iranian might have sprung from the same source.",
"location": 203,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "linguists, people who study how languages change over time, would eventually tease out twelve main branches of the Indo-European language family: Anatolian, Tocharian, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Indic and Iranic.7 To",
"location": 213,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Linguists consider that on average it takes between five hundred and a thousand years for a language to become incomprehensible to its original speakers",
"location": 237,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Though most modern scholars believe that there was one Proto-Indo-European language, and that it was spoken by real people in a real place, they don't assume that those people were ethnically or culturally homogeneous.",
"location": 270,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "It's partly thanks to loans that historical linguists were able to reconstruct the Roma people's thousand-year exodus from India. The Romani language is descended from Sanskrit, which is evident from the sound changes that separate the two, but Romani also picked up many loanwords during its epic trek west.",
"location": 314,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Roman chroniclers relate, for example, that when the future emperor Hadrian addressed the Senate around 100 CE, the senators mocked his Spanish accent",
"location": 357,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Above all, they have confirmed beyond reasonable doubt the huge role that migration has played in the story of humanity and its languages.",
"location": 413,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "the moment when the Bosporus plug could no longer hold back the Mediterranean came, in one telling, between nine and ten thousand years ago.",
"location": 484,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "The Bosporus Valley might have roared at full spate for decades rather than months, a wondrous sight and sound in itself.",
"location": 492,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "in 1997, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, speculated that the tales told by traumatised eyewitnesses might have been passed down orally over generations, until eventually they inspired the flood myths of the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh. 'He who saw the deep' are the first words of Gilgamesh's poem,",
"location": 493,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Noah witnessed 'all the fountains of the great deep broken up'.",
"location": 495,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "the goat (only the second animal to be domesticated after the dog, whose wolfish origins lie deep in the ice age).",
"location": 522,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "By 4500 BCE, descendants of the Anatolian farmers were all over Europe, as far west as Ireland and as far east as Ukraine.",
"location": 537,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "The hunter-gatherers had that now rare combination of dark hair and skin and blue",
"location": 547,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "barriers that had divided Eurasian populations for tens of thousands of years had begun to come down, but a new divide had opened up. This one was cultural. It separated herders from farmers, those whose wealth was mobile from those whose wealth was immobile. The two economic models bred two different mindsets: one that prized self-sufficiency and lived for the present, the other that valued collective decision-making and planned for the future. Both the Bible and the Qur'an recount how this clash of worldviews led to the first murder, that of the shepherd Abel by his farmer brother Cain, but the clash is much older than the Abrahamic scriptures.",
"location": 564,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Around seven and a half thousand years ago, long before Varna had distinguished itself, the Hamangia had been among the first farmers to settle these parts. They brought with them material reminders of their Anatolian roots, in the form of the white or pink-orange Spondylus shells that their relatives had collected from the islands and coast of the Aegean",
"location": 606,
"annotation": "bulgaria as settlement field of Anatolia!"
},
{
"highlight": "Slavchev identifies it as a cow's thigh bone. 'They used them as ice skates,' he says, beaming. The climate in Copper Age Bulgaria was slightly warmer and wetter than it is now, but a body of water might still freeze over in winter, especially in these uplands.",
"location": 622,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "gold to their repertoire. It was panned out of the rivers that rose in the nearby Balkan Mountains, probably using fleeces,",
"location": 645,
"annotation": "wool and gold and Jason and Brooks Brothers since forever"
},
{
"highlight": "(Fisherfolk out of the Turkish port of Sinop have a saying: 'The Black Sea has only three safe harbours: July, August and Sinop.')",
"location": 670,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "In all of recorded history, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single example of human beings trading in high-value goods without an effective means of communication.",
"location": 709,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "At some Copper Age Balkan sites, though not at Karanovo or Varna, there is evidence of extreme violence just before they were abandoned: massacres that spared no man, woman or child. This violence wasn't restricted to the Balkans. The archaeological record attests to growing tensions across Neolithic Europe at this time – manifesting, for example, in ever more robust fortifications around settlements",
"location": 775,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "(As in the Balkans, people used fleeces to pan for gold in those mountain streams. It was in Georgia, in the ancient kingdom of Colchis, that the Greek mythological hero Jason found the golden fleece:",
"location": 805,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Sometime between 4000 and 3500 BCE, the first wheeled vehicle trundled into the steppe, pulled by oxen.",
"location": 822,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Hospes underlies the word 'hospitality' while hostis is the root of 'hostility', via Latin loans to English. These two words seem antithetical in their meaning, but they were once linked by the concept of a stranger, that passer-by whom a good welcome might turn into a friend and a bad one into a foe.",
"location": 1163,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "*ghostis might have been the unspoken rule that allowed speakers of Proto-Indo-European to pass safely through each other's territory.",
"location": 1166,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Some claim that *ghostis contains the echo of another word, *ghes, meaning 'to eat'. If they are right, then from the beginning the proper way to receive a guest may have been to lay on a feast.",
"location": 1168,
"annotation": "the first act of.propriation to christ is putting food in the mouth of the wayfaring stranger."
},
{
"highlight": "The same phrase, 'fame imperishable', appears in The Iliad (kléos áphthiton) and the Rig Veda (śrávah. áks.itam), suggesting that the concept was familiar to the speakers of Proto-Indo-European too.",
"location": 1173,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "inhabitants of snake-free Alaska tell of a serpentine sea monster called a palraiyuk). Some mythologists locate the trope's origins in Africa, from where they say it spread to all the other continents with the first long-distance migrants. Even after an ice age had caused people to retreat, and subsequent diasporas had scattered them again, the memory of a dangerous reptile stayed with them.",
"location": 1192,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "In Trito lies the germ of every Indo-European dragon-slayer, from Siegfried who slew the dragon on the glittering heath, to Bellerophon triumphing over the Chimaera",
"location": 1197,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Cattle were given to us, it implied, because only we know how to sacrifice them properly, so if anyone else has cattle, they stole them. Raiding was the perpetual response to the original insult.",
"location": 1208,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Underpinning the brotherhood concept was that of the age-set,",
"location": 1216,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "the prevailing view was that it was the eldest daughter, the first to split from the Proto-Indo-European trunk.",
"location": 1357,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "two major cultural transformations since the last ice age, which had affected both Europe and Asia. The first was the farming revolution. The second was triggered by those nomadic herders who roamed the western Eurasian steppe about five thousand years ago.",
"location": 1366,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "the spread of the Indo-European languages could not have happened in a vacuum. It had to have piggy-backed on some major social upheaval, and that upheaval must have left a trace in the archaeological record.",
"location": 1371,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Starting in the 2000s, genetic studies (based on modern genes, not yet on ancient DNA) furnished evidence that migration had, after all, been a powerful force in prehistory.",
"location": 1434,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Their ancestry had replaced at least forty per cent of the European gene pool, and in some places close to a hundred per cent.",
"location": 1436,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Europeans genetically had fallen into place. They remain overwhelmingly, to this day, part hunter-gatherer, part farmer and part steppe nomad.",
"location": 1442,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Arguably no other writing system besides the Egyptian hieroglyphs is wrapped in such an aura of mysticism as the runes (the word actually means 'secret'),",
"location": 2030,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Imagine being shown a scratch on a mossy log and told that it's your 'name'. It has no head, arms or legs, yet others who see it will think only of you.",
"location": 2033,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "When you consider all that writing made possible, from seducing and defrauding people over long distances, to keeping track of complex transactions and claiming property and kinship after your death, it's not hard to believe that people felt reverence for it; that in their minds it could alter a person's destiny.",
"location": 2034,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "After the Beaker people came to Britain around 2450 BCE, their DNA replaced around ninety per cent of the local gene pool, and all of the Y chromosomes.",
"location": 2232,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "There was no getting round the genetic evidence: by 2000 BCE steppe ancestry had penetrated as far west as Ireland. In Britain and Scandinavia the genetic turnover was over ninety per cent, on the Iberian peninsula forty per cent, but in all those places the replacement of the male sex chromosome was near-total. By fair means or foul, the migrants had bred with local women and prevented local men from passing on their genes. Rape, murder, even genocide could not be ruled out, but as the geneticists gathered more samples and honed their methods, they began to see that other explanations could and should be entertained.",
"location": 2284,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "the plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, was already present in Europe at that time.",
"location": 2297,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "The Yamnaya brotherhood that ventured out of a Pontic river valley around 3300 BCE could have been the sole survivors of an early plague outbreak that cut down the rest of their community. If they survived because of a genetic predisposition that boosted their immunity,",
"location": 2305,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "David Anthony has noted that both the Indic god Rudra and the Greek god Apollo hurled weapons that sowed disease, and both gods were associated with warbands. If that association already existed in the minds of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, then – sobering thought – the advance guard might have imagined their gods clearing a path for them, especially if they themselves remained healthy.",
"location": 2309,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "The Yamnaya brought from the steppe a suite of institutions that they had honed over time to maintain social cohesion over large distances and long separations. They had expansion built into them,",
"location": 2322,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "From the age of about seven boys were fostered out.",
"location": 2325,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "In Old Irish, the words for 'mother' and 'father' (máthair, athair) referred to one's real parents, while the more affectionate diminutives muimme and aite were reserved for one's foster parents.",
"location": 2328,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "At about fourteen, following the age-set system, boys born to the elite headed into the wilderness to prove themselves, returning at twenty-one to take their place in society. But they maintained their links to each other all their lives long, forming alliances when the need arose and maintaining reciprocal ties of guest-friendship, sometimes over generations.",
"location": 2331,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "this would have been an effective way of moving knowledge and skills around at a time before literacy and technical schools.",
"location": 2359,
"annotation": "fostering and taking just foreign enough wife. why exoticism is erotic?"
},
{
"highlight": "Yet the steady influx of people from distant places, in the form of wives and foster sons, could also be the reason that the community survived the outbreaks.",
"location": 2388,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "The Indo-Europeans may simply have been good at having children and keeping them alive. If they kept it up over generations, steppe ancestry would have spread through the population, and Indo-European languages with it.",
"location": 2392,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Ashoka had peppered the subcontinent with billboards broadcasting his edicts. (In one of them he described, in the third person, how a particularly bloody war had led to his own conversion: 'From that time pity and compassion overcame him. And he bore it grievously.')",
"location": 2623,
"annotation": null
},
{
"highlight": "Neither the story of the cauldron nor the story the cauldron tells is ever likely to be elucidated in full,",
"location": 2953,
"annotation": "what?"
}
]
}
-
Isn’t it odd that exoticism is erotic? Consider how tribal and possessive humans are over sports involving a ball. How did natural selection ever come to get that thread preserved? The cruel scythe of disease and the boon of kin-bond must have been very helpful indeed for helping genes survive. ↩︎