Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like: A Reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European Language

As schol­ars of ancient texts well know, the recon­struc­tion of lost sources can be a mat­ter of some con­tro­ver­sy. In the ancient Hebrew and less ancient Chris­t­ian Bib­li­cal texts, for exam­ple, crit­ics find the rem­nants of many pre­vi­ous texts, seem­ing­ly stitched togeth­er by occa­sion­al­ly care­less edi­tors. Those source texts exist nowhere in any phys­i­cal form, com­plete or oth­er­wise. They must be inferred from the traces they have left behind—signatures of dic­tion and syn­tax, styl­is­tic and the­mat­ic pre­oc­cu­pa­tions….

So it is with the study of ancient lan­guages, but since oral cul­tures far pre­date writ­ten ones, the search for lin­guis­tic ances­tors can take us back to the very ori­gins of human cul­ture, to times unre­mem­bered and unrecord­ed by any­one, and only dim­ly glimpsed through scant archae­o­log­i­cal evi­dence and observ­able aur­al sim­i­lar­i­ties between vast­ly dif­fer­ent lan­guages. So it was with the the­o­ret­i­cal devel­op­ment of Indo-Euro­pean as a lan­guage fam­i­ly, a slow process that took sev­er­al cen­turies to coa­lesce into the mod­ern lin­guis­tic tree we now know.

The obser­va­tion that San­skrit and ancient Euro­pean lan­guages like Greek and Latin have sig­nif­i­cant sim­i­lar­i­ties was first record­ed by a Jesuit mis­sion­ary to Goa, Thomas Stephens, in the six­teenth cen­tu­ry, but lit­tle was made of it until around 100 years lat­er. A great leap for­ward came in the mid-nine­teenth cen­tu­ry when Ger­man lin­guist August Schle­ich­er, under the influ­ence of Hegel, pub­lished his Com­pendi­um of the Com­par­a­tive Gram­mar of the Indo-Euro­pean Lan­guages. There, Schle­ich­er made an exten­sive attempt at recon­struct­ing the com­mon ances­tor of all Indo-Euro­pean lan­guages, “Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean,” or PIE, for short, thought to have orig­i­nat­ed some­where in East­ern Europe, though this sup­po­si­tion is spec­u­la­tive.

To pro­vide an exam­ple of what the lan­guage might have been like Schle­ich­er made up a fable called “The Sheep and the Hors­es” as a “son­ic exper­i­ment.” The sto­ry has been used ever since, “peri­od­i­cal­ly updat­ed,” writes Eric Pow­ell at Archae­ol­o­gy, “to reflect the most cur­rent under­stand­ing of how this extinct lan­guage would have sound­ed when it was spo­ken some 6,000 years ago.” Hav­ing no access to any texts writ­ten in Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean (which may or may not have exist­ed) nor, of course, to any speak­ers of the lan­guage, lin­guists dis­agree a good deal on what it should sound like; “no sin­gle ver­sion can be con­sid­ered defin­i­tive.”

And yet, since Schleicher’s time, the the­o­ry has been con­sid­er­ably refined. At the top of the post, you can hear one such refine­ment based on work by UCLA pro­fes­sor H. Craig Melchert and read by lin­guist Andrew Byrd. See a trans­la­tion of Schle­icher’s sto­ry, “The Sheep and the Hors­es” below:

A sheep that had no wool saw hors­es, one of them pulling a heavy wag­on, one car­ry­ing a big load, and one car­ry­ing a man quick­ly. The sheep said to the hors­es: “My heart pains me, see­ing a man dri­ving hors­es.” The hors­es said: “Lis­ten, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the mas­ter, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm gar­ment for him­self. And the sheep has no wool.” Hav­ing heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Byrd also reads anoth­er sto­ry in hypo­thet­i­cal Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean, “The King and the God,” using “pro­nun­ci­a­tion informed by the lat­est insights into PIE.”

See Powell’s arti­cle at Archae­ol­o­gy for the writ­ten tran­scrip­tions of both Schleicher’s and Melchert/Byrd’s ver­sions of PIE, and see his arti­cle here to learn about the arche­o­log­i­cal evi­dence for the Bronze Age speak­ers of this the­o­ret­i­cal lin­guis­tic com­mon ances­tor.

Note: The won­der­ful image that accom­pa­nies this post on Face­book and Twit­ter comes from this post in our archive: The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic. It was cre­at­ed by Min­na Sund­berg and can be pur­chased as a poster here.

via io9

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Was There a First Human Lan­guage?: The­o­ries from the Enlight­en­ment Through Noam Chom­sky

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in its Orig­i­nal Ancient Lan­guage, Akka­di­an

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness