Indo-European

File: gelderen_elly_van_a_history_of_the_english_language (p.51………..)

Mugglestone - The Oxford History of English [rutracker.org]

A Linguistic History of English v01_PIE+PG (p. 16)

HistoryEnglish (p. 54)

A History of English Language (p. 34)

lerer_seth_the_history_of_the_english_language_lecture (p. 9)

momma_haruko_matto_michael_a_companion_to_the_history_of_the (p.160)

The Origins and Development of the English Language (Textbook) (p. 51)

viney_brigit_the_history_of_the_english_language (p. 8)

Андросова М.А. История языка _методичка (p.9)

остання версія історії мови_longer

In the history of language studies there has always been the question to which the final answer is not given yet – whether language was invented only once and then spread and diverged, i.e. whether all the languages of the world developed from one and the same archaic proto-language. Some languages share so many features not found in other languages that the conclusion that they were once the same language is inescapable. Such a clearly related group is normally called a language family, and the members of the group are called cognate languages. In deciding whether two languages are related by a common origin, scholars look for patterned, consistent relationships between them. In fact, consistent differences are more significant than absolute identity.

When we put the question which language among the cognate ones is older the research data prove it that all languages are the same age – all ultimately go back to the invention of language itself. Therefore, even though English father, for example, is cognate with Latin pater, English father does not “come from” Latin. Both words are independent developments from the same source. English paternal, on the other hand, does “come from” Latin because it was borrowed from Latin into English in the early seventeenth century.

Linguistics, the scientific study of language, can reach more deeply into the human past than the most ancient written records. It compares related languages to reconstruct their immediate progenitors and eventually their ultimate ancestor, or protolanguage. The protolanguage in turn illuminates the lives of its speakers and locates them in time and place.

The earliest ancestor of English that is reconstructable by scientifically acceptable methods is Proto-Indo-European, the ancestor of all the Indo-European languages (if a language is not attested in early writings, it is called a proto-language) The subgroup within Indo-European to which English belongs is Germanic, specifically West Germanic.

The Indo-European superfamily of languages is by far the largest in number of languages and number of speakers. Nearly half of the world's population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. The nineteenth-century philologers reasoned that all languages had a core lexicon, a set of words which, in their everyday ordinariness, were not affected by such processes as borrowing or rapid and extensive change. Such words labeled the basic concepts of human existence, such as kinship and social terms (mother, father, daughter, son, king, leader), sun and moon, body parts, a deity and the basic numerals. The core element of a language’s vocabulary therefore preserved its ancestral ‘essence’, yielding reliable indicators of genetic affiliation. Cognate databases, then, were compiled from posited cores. Cognate comparison established the fact that systematic grammatical, semantic and phonological correspondences existed between languages assumed to be related. However, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it was also being used to map out the linguistic genealogies of the Indo-European family. It is known, from archaeological records in particular, that different peoples had historically migrated and dispersed over Europe and Asia. It was therefore highly likely that the modern languages of these two continents, linked back to a common source, now called Proto-Indo-European (PIE), had evolved out of the splitting up of that language into smaller sub-families, which then in turn had gone through their own processes of division. Thus, the correspondences between cognates could establish degrees of relationship between language groups within the Indo-European family.

One of the primary concerns, therefore, was to discover the location of the original PIE homeland from which those paths of migration could be traced, not only through the linguistic record, but perhaps through the archaeological as well. A major consensus appears to have been to start looking for answers in the proto-lexicon. If terms for flora and fauna could be reconstructed, for example, they could provide an indication of geographical area. Similarly, PIE terms for animals and community life could also be used to build up a picture of their lifestyle, perhaps even providing some clue as to why dispersals would have begun in the first place. This area of research became known as linguistic palaeontology, a term coined by Adolphe Pictet (1859)

Over the past 200 years, linguists have reconstructed the vocabulary and syntax of the postulated Indo-European protolanguage with increasing confidence and insight. They have tried to unravel the paths by which the language broke into daughter languages that spread throughout Eurasia, seeking at the origin of those paths the homeland of the protolanguage itself.

As is usual with protolanguages of the distant past, we can’t say with certainty where and when PIE was spoken. A great deal of debate surrounds the possible Indo-European homeland. C. Renfrew (1987) argues that it is Anatolia and M. Gimbutas (1985) that it is North of the Caspian Sea. We can only guess where Indo-European was originally spoken – but there are clues, such as plant and animal names. Cognate terms for trees that grow in temperate climates (alder, apple, ash, aspen, beech, birch, elm, hazel, linden, oak, willow, yew), coupled with the absence of such terms for Mediterranean or Asiatic trees (olive, cypress, palm); cognate terms for wolf, bear, lox (Old English leax ‘salmon’), but none for creatures indigenous to Asia – all this points to an area between northern Europe and southern Russia as the home of Indo-European before its dispersion. Now the Indo-European languages generally have a common word for winter and for snow. It is likely that the original home of the family was in a climate that at certain seasons at least was fairly cold. On the other hand it is not certain that there was a common word for the sea. Instead, some branches of the family, when in the course of their wanderings they came into contact with the sea, had to develop their own words for the new conception. And the absence of a common word for ocean suggests, though it does not in itself prove, that this homeland was apparently an inland one, although not necessarily situated at a great distance from the coast.

Basing on the examples of the reconstructed lexicon offered for consideration by R. Claiborne in his book “English – Its Life and Times” (1990), we can come to the conclusion that the Proto-Indo-Europeans appear to have kept *uksen ‘ oxen ’, cows (*gwou-) and other livestock, such as sheep (*awi- >ewe), swine (*su-) and goats (*ghaido). A PIE *gen ‘ family ’ (eventually in genetics and kin) may have lived in a *domo ‘ house ’, furnished with *keromo- ‘ pottery ’ (> ‘ ceramic ’) and would have drunk *melg- ‘ milk ’ from the livestock and eaten dishes made with the *mel ‘ meal ’ of their *grno- ‘ grain ’. They may sometimes have had *pisk- ‘ fish ’, wild *ghans- ‘ goose ’ and when available, wild *abel- ‘ apples ’. They wore clothes made of woven (>*webh) *wel- ‘ wool ’ and possibly *lin- ‘ flax ’ (> linen), and footwear made of *letrom ‘ leather ’. Much work would have been done with tools fashioned from *stoino- ‘ stone ’, as well as wood and bone. In terms of environment, linguists were able to reconstruct words for snow *sneigw- and freezing cold *gel- (> congeal).

On the basis of such reconstructions a range of possible homelands was suggested. The early investigators placed the homeland in Europe and posited migratory paths by which the daughter languages evolved into clearly defined Eastern or Western branches; a reasonable guess would be the river valleys of Ukraine in the centuries around 4000 BC, though one can’t absolutely exclude a somewhat earlier date, nor a place somewhat further east. The most usual view is that Indo-European originated in the southern steppes of Ukraine and Russia, although an alternative view holds that the protolanguage originated more than 6,000 years ago in eastern Anatolia (today the non-European territories of Turkey) and that some daughter languages must have differentiated in the course of migrations that took them first to the East and later to the West.

It was also popularly assumed that PIE culture, existing sometime between 4500 and 2500 BC, had been pastoral, rather than agricultural. In 1890, Otto Schrader postulated that the Urheimathad been situated in the South Ukrainian/Russian steppe, stretching from Carpathia to Central Asia, where there was evidence of nomad pastoralism having been practiced. This theory would prove influential in twentieth-century debates on the ‘Indo-European problem’, as it came to be known.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas carried on the argument for a homeland situated in the South Russian steppes. M. Gimbutas equated the original Proto-IndoEuropeans with a culture – the Kurgan – which appeared in this area in the fifth and early fourth millennia BC. In the spirit of linguistic palaeontology, she drew support from linguistic reconstructions (such as those cited above), stating that the environment of the Russian steppes well suited the world described by the proto-lexicon:

in the fifth and fourth millennia the climate was warmer and damper... and what is now the steppe zone was more forested... including oak, birch, fir, beech, elder, elm, ash, aspen, apple, cherry and willow... [and] such forest animals as aurochs elk, boar, wild horse, wolf, fox, beaver, squirrel, badger, hare and roe deer. (Gimbutas, 1970: 159–160)

The archaeological evidence, largely available from the grave goods left in the distinctive burial mounds for which this culture was named, suggests that these early people were nomadic, warlike pastoralists who made use of horses and wheeled vehicles, had a patriarchal society and worshipped a pantheon of sky gods and the sun. M. Gimbutas argued that the booming population of Kurgans/Proto-Indo-Europeans dispersed from their steppe homeland in three successive waves of aggressive migration (4400–4200 BC, 3400–3200 BC, and 3000–2800BC), moving eastwards into central Asia, Persia and India, westwards into central Europe and the Balkans and southwards eventually into Anatolia. These invasions essentially destroyed peaceful, settled, agricultural and possibly matriarchal communities across Europe. Once the Kurgan aggressors had vanquished or absorbed those indigenous communities, the archaeological record changed, indicating instead abandoned settlements and the cessation of the production of delicate pottery and female figurines. In their place, fortified locations appeared, as did cruder pottery; and the horse and wheeled vehicles were introduced to everyday life as well as to iconography, as has been evidenced by stelae decorated with suns, horses, chariots and weapons. In addition, burial mounds like those of the Kurgans began to appear across the landscape, and in them, a new physical type very different from the earlier European skeletons but identical to those found in the steppes.

M. Gimbutas’ theory, then, assumes that the languages of the Indo-European family resulted from these successive migrations: as each wave of Kurgans moved out into virgin territory, or conquered already extant communities, they took their original PIE with them. In these new environments, and in isolation from the ‘motherland’ and perhaps each other, these dialects of PIE would eventually evolve into distinct daughter languages. M. Gimbutas states that there was no other culture than the Kurgan in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods which would correspond with the hypothetical mother culture of the Indo-European and this hypothesis has had widespread linguistic and archaeological support.

The Kurgan steppe homeland theory has not been without its detractors as well. The archaeologist Colin Renfrew has been one of its most vigorous opponents, on a number of fronts. С. Renfrew finds the notion of aggressive warrior nomads problematic and untenable: pastoral economies have lower yields than agricultural ones, and are therefore less liable to the kinds of population explosions that can lead to significant migrations. In addition, if the Kurgans set out to simply find more land for subsistence, why were three waves of sustained aggression necessary? In his view, it is also unlikely that any prehistoric people had the kind of resources necessary for large-scale invasions and conquests of populated areas. He instead postulates a more peaceful linguistic dispersal, which goes hand in hand with a technological advance, namely, the spread of agriculture. He places the original PIE homeland in Anatolia and postulates that members of this community would have crossed over into Greece sometime in the seventh millennium BC. He states that there is sound evidence that the ‘first farmers of Europe were settled in Greece (and Crete) before 6000BC’, sowing wheat, peas and vetch, and herding sheep, goats, cattle and pigs. It is assumed that some of the neighbouring hunter–gatherer populations would have acculturated to farming techniques and in turn, would have ‘spread’ those to other similar nomadic communities. As these farming communities spread into new environments, so did the original PIE, which would change, over the course of the centuries, into discrete daughter languages. In areas where earlier hunter–gatherer populations existed, the latter may have, especially if they were sparse in number, assimilated linguistically to the IE farmers. However, where those populations were denser and a sense of community stronger, as is thought to have been the case in Brittany and areas of Portugal, the non-IE languages may have impacted on the development of the relevant IE daughters. Renfrew’s stance has attracted significant support. However, it also offers a few challenges for linguists.

It seems unlikely at the moment that such areas of debate will be definitively solved. Working back to periods for which there is often little material, linguistic and archaeological, means that it is incredibly difficult to fill such puzzles in neatly. On the whole, the flora and fauna reconstructed for the proto-lexicon have a wide geographical distribution, but some are more restricted, thereby holding promises of physical delimitation. One of these reconstructions is that for ‘beech’ (*bhergo-). Many cognates exist across the IE daughters, implying that the word also existed in PIE. The common beech (to which this label was initially thought to apply) has a limited distribution, in that it is confined to central Europe, and is not native east of Poland and the Ukraine. Claims were therefore made for a homeland within the ‘beech tree line’, but again a major obstacle lay in the fact that it was unclear whether the PIE word actually designated what modern scholars understood to be a beech tree.

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