Tracing English Back to Its Oldest Known Ancestor: An Introduction to Proto-Indo-European

Peo­ple under­stand evo­lu­tion in all sorts of dif­fer­ent ways. We’ve all heard a vari­ety of folk expla­na­tions of that all-impor­tant phe­nom­e­non, from “sur­vival of the fittest” to “humans come from mon­keys,” that run the spec­trum from broad­ly cor­rect to bad­ly man­gled. One less often heard but more ele­gant way to put it is that all species, liv­ing or extinct, share a com­mon ances­tor. This is true of evo­lu­tion as Dar­win knew it, and it could well be true of oth­er forms of “evo­lu­tion” out­side the bio­log­i­cal realm as well. Take lan­guages, which we know full well have changed and split into dif­fer­ent vari­eties over time: do they, too, all share a sin­gle ances­tor?

In the Rob­Words video above, lan­guage Youtu­ber Rob Watts starts with his native Eng­lish and traces its roots back as far as pos­si­ble. He ascends up the fam­i­ly tree past Low West Ger­man, past Pro­to-Ger­man­ic — “a lan­guage that was the­o­ret­i­cal­ly spo­ken by a sin­gle group of peo­ple who would even­tu­al­ly go on to become the Swedes, the Ger­mans, the Dutch, the Eng­lish, and more” — back to an ances­tor of not just Eng­lish and the Ger­man­ic lan­guages, but almost all the Euro­pean lan­guages, as well as of Asian lan­guages like Hin­di, Pash­tu, Kur­dish, Far­si, and Ben­gali. Its name? Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean.

Watts quotes the eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry philol­o­gist Sir William Jones, who wrote that the ancient Asian lan­guage of San­skrit has a struc­ture “more per­fect than the Greek, more copi­ous than the Latin, and more exquis­ite­ly refined than either, yet bear­ing to both of them a stronger affin­i­ty, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of gram­mar, than could pos­si­bly have been pro­duced by acci­dent.” As with such con­spic­u­ous­ly shared traits observed in dis­parate species of plant or ani­mal, no expert “could exam­ine all three with­out believ­ing them to have sprung from some com­mon source, which, per­haps, no longer exists.”

The evi­dence is every­where, if you pay atten­tion to the sort of unex­pect­ed cog­nates and very-near­ly-cog­nates Watts points out span­ning geo­graph­i­cal­ly and tem­po­ral­ly var­i­ous lan­guages. Take the Eng­lish hun­dred, the Latin cen­tum, the Ancient Greek heka­ton, the Russ­ian sto, and the San­skrit Shatam; or the more deeply buried resem­blances of Eng­lish heart, the Latin cordis, the Russ­ian serd­ce, and the san­skrit hrd. In some cas­es, lin­guists have actu­al­ly used these com­mon­al­i­ties to reverse-engi­neer Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean words, though always with the caveat that the whole thing “is a recon­struct­ed lan­guage; it’s our best guess of what a com­mon ances­tral lan­guage could have been like.” Was there a still old­er lan­guage from which the non-Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean-descend­ed lan­guages also descend­ed? That’s a ques­tion to push the lin­guis­tic imag­i­na­tion to its very lim­its.

Relat­ed con­tent:

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

How Lan­guages Evolve: Explained in a Win­ning TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion

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

The Alpha­bet Explained: The Ori­gin of Every Let­ter

The Tree of Lan­guages Illus­trat­ed in a Big, Beau­ti­ful Info­graph­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.