THE EARLY HISTORY
OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
by THOMAS V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. IVANOV
Scientific American, March 1990, P.110
MIGRATIONS AND CULTURAL DIFFUSION carried the
Indo-European protolanguage from the homeland, which the authors place
in the Transcaucasus( see Historical Armenia maps), and fragmented it
into dialects. Some spread west to Anatolia and Greece, others southwest
to Iran and India. Most Western languages stem from an Eastern branch
that rounded the Caspian Sea. Contact with Semitic languages in
Mesopotamia and with Kartvelian languages in the Caucasus led to the
adoption of many foreign words.
FAMILY
TREE
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 science developed from the study of the Indo-European
superfamily of languages, 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; six of the 10 languages in
which Scientific American appears—English, French, German, Italian,
Russian and Spanish—belong to this superfamily.
Over the past 200 years, linguists have reconstructed the vocabulary
and syntax of the postulated IndoEuropean 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. 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. Our work
indicates that the protolanguage originated more than 6,000 years ago in
eastern Anatolia 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.
The reconstruction of ancient languages may be likened to the method
used by molecular biologists in their quest to understand the evolution
of life. The biochemist identifies molecular elements that perform
similar functions in widely divergent species to infer the
characteristics of the primordial cell from which they are presumed to
have descended. So does the linguist seek correspondences in grammar,
syntax, vocabulary and vocalization among known languages in order to
reconstruct their immediate forebears and ultimately the original
tongue. Living languages can be compared directly with one another; dead
languages that have survived in written form can usually be vocalized by
inference from internal linguistic evidence. Dead languages that have
never been written, however, can be reconstructed only by comparing
their descendants and by working backward according to the laws that
govern phonological change. Phonology—the study of word sounds—is
all-important to historical linguists because sounds are more stable
over the centuries than are meanings.
Early studies of Indo-European languages focused on those most
familiar to the original European researchers: the Italic, Celtic,
Germanic, Baltic and Slavic families. Affinities between these and the
"Aryan" languages spoken in faraway India were noticed by
European travelers as early as the 16th century. That they might all
share a common ancestor was first proposed in 1786 by Sir William Jones,
an English jurist and student of Eastern cultures. He thus launched what
came to be known as the Indo-European hypothesis, which served as the
principal stimulus to the founders of historical linguistics in the 19th
century.
In their reconstruction of the ancestral Indo-European language, the
early linguists relied heavily on Grimm's law of Lautverschiebung ("
sound shift"), which postulated that sets of consonants displace
one another over time in predictable and regular fashion. The law was
posed in 1822 by Jacob Grimm, who is more widely famed for the anthology
of fairy tales he wrote with his brother, Wilhelm. Grimm's law
explained, among other things, why in the Germanic languages certain
hard consonants had persisted despite their universal tendency to yield
to soft ones. The set of softer "voiced" consonants
"b," "d," "g" (followed by momentary
vibration of the vocal cords), posited in the protolanguage, had
apparently given way to the corresponding hard set "p,"
"t," "k." According to Grimm's law, this had come
about by "devoicing" those consonants ("p," for
example, is unaccompanied by vocal vibration). Thus, the Sanskrit char
is seen as an archaic form of the English "draw," which is
itself more archaic than the German tragen (all of which mean
"to pull").
These rules were used to reconstruct an Indo-European vocabulary that
implies how its speakers lived.
The words described a landscape and climate that linguists originally
placed in Europe between the Alps in the south and the Baltic and North
seas in the north [see "The Indo-European Language," by Paul
Thieme; ScientificAmerican , October, 1958].
More recent evidence now places the probable origin of the
Indo-European language in western Asia. Three generations of
archaeologists and linguists have thus far excavated and deciphered
manuscripts in close to a dozen ancient languages from sites in modern
Turkey and as far east as Tocharia, in modern Turkestan. Their
observations, together with new ideas in pure linguistic theory, have
made it necessary to revise the canons of linguistic evolution.
The landscape described by the protolanguage as now resolved must lie
somewhere in the crescent that curves around the southem shores of the
Black Sea, south from the Balkan peninsula, east across ancient Ana
tolia (today the non-European territories of Turkey) and north to the
Caucasus Mountains [see illustration below]. Here the
agricultural revolution created the food surplus that impelled the
Indo-Europeans to found villages and city-states from which, about 6,000
years ago, they began their migrations over the Eurasian continent and
into history.
Some of the migrants invaded Anatolia from the East around 2000 B.C.
and established the Hittite kingdom, which held all of Anatolia in its
power by 1400 B.C. Its official language was among the first of the
Indo-European languages to find its way into writing. Early in this
century, Bedrich Hrozny, a linguist at Vienna University and later at
Charles University in Prague, deciphered Hittite inscriptions (written
in cuneiform, the ancient writing system based on wedge-shaped symbols)
on tablets that had been found in the library of the capital at Hattusas,
200 kilometers east of modernAnkara. The library also contained
cuneiform tablets in two related languages: Luwian and Palaic. The
evolution of Luwian could be traced in later hieroglyphic inscriptions
made around 1200 B.C., after the fall of the Hittite Empire. To this
emerging family of Anatolian languages linguists added Lydian (closer to
Hittite) and Lycian (closer to Luwian), known from inscriptions dating
back to late in the first millennium B.C.
The appearance of Hittite and other Anatolian languages at the tum of
the third to the second millennium B.C. sets an absolute chronological
limit for the breakup of the Indo-European protolanguage. Because the
Anatolian protolanguage had already fissioned into daughter languages by
that point, investigators estimate that it departed from the parent
Indo-European no later than the fourth millennium B.C. and possibly much
earlier.
This inference is supported by what is known about the portion of
the Indo-European community that remained after the Anatolian family had
broken away. From that community came the languages that persisted into
written history. The first to branch off was the Greek-Armenian-Indo-lranian
language community. It must have begun to do so in the fourth
millennium B.C. because by the middle of the third millennium B.C. the
community was already dividing into two groups, namely, the Indo-lranian
and the Greek-Armenian. Tablets in the Hattusas archives show
that by the middle of the second millennium B.C. the Indo-lranian group
had given rise to a language spoken in the Mitanni kingdom on the
southeast frontier of Anatolia that was already different from ancient
Indian (commonly called Sanskrit) and ancient Iranian. Cretan Mycenaean
texts from the same eras as Mitanni, deciphered in the early 1950's by
the British scholars Michael G. F. Ventris and John Chadwick, fumed out
to be in a previously unknown dialect of Greek. All these languages had
gone their separate ways from Armenian.
Tocharian was another language family that diverged from the
IndoEuropean protolanguage quite early. Tocharian is one of the more
recently discovered Indo-European languages, first recognized in the
early decades of the 20th century in texts from Chinese Turkestan. The
texts were comparatively easy to decipher because they were written in a
variant of the Brahmi script and were mainly translations from known
Buddhist writings.
Not long ago, the British scholar W. N. Henning suggested that the
Tocharians be identified with the Gutians, who are mentioned in
Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions (in Akkadian, a Semitic language)
dating from the end of the third millennium B.C., when King Sargon was
building the first great Mesopotamian Empire. If Henning's views are
correct, the Tocharians would be the first Indo-Europeans to appear in
the recorded history of the ancient Near East. Lexical affinities of
Tocharian with Italo-Celtic give evidence that the speakers of the two
language families had associated in the Indo-European homeland before
the Tocharians began their migration eastward.
The diverging pathways of linguistic transformation and human
migration may now be traced back to a convergence in the Indo-European
protolanguage and its homeland. This has followed from the revision in
the canons of phonology we mentioned above. An uncontested peculiarity
of the sound system of the protolanguage, for example, is the near
absence, or suppression, of one of the three consonants "p,"
"b" or "v," which are labials (consonants sounded
with the lips). Traditionally, it had been thought that "b"
was the suppressed consonant. Subsequent studies in phonology indicated,
however, that if one of the three labial consonants is lacking in a
language, it is least likely to be the one sounded as "b" in
English and other living European languages.
On that basis we decided to reexamine the entire system of consonants
posited for the protolanguage, and as early as 1972, we proposed a new
system of consonants for the language. Our proposal remains in the
crucible of debate from which consensus forms in every science. The
debate now focuses more strongly on features that relate the
Indo-European protolanguage to other major language families and that
have at last begun to bring their common ancestor into view.
According to classical theory, the "stop"
consonants—those that are sounded by interruption of the outward flow
of the breath that excites the vibration of the glottis, or vocal
cords—are divided into three categories [see top of illustration on
this page]. The labial stop consonant "b" appears in the
first column as a voiced consonant; the parentheses enclosing it there
indicate its supposed suppression. It is associated with two other
voiced stop consonants: "d" (stopped by the forward part of
the tongue against the palate) and "g" (stopped by the back of
the tongue against the palate).
In the scheme we have developed, the corresponding consonants
are sounded with a glottalized stop: a closure of the throat at the
vocal cords that prevents the outward flow of breath. Here the voiceless
labial stop ("p"') appears suppressed, followed by
"t"' and "k'." As ("p"') is to
("b"), voiceless and voiced, respectively, so "t"'is
to "d" and "k"'is to "g." Glottalized
stops occur in many different language families, particularly those of
northern Caucasian and southern Caucasian ( Kartvelian ) provenance. The
glottalized stop—which hardens a consonant—tends to weaken and
disappear in most languages of the world. So we surmised that—among
the labial stops—it was the "p"'rather than the
"b" that most likely had been suppressed in the Indo-European
pro t o language .
Our so-called Indo-European glottalic system, which has been
constructed by comparing the phonology of the living and the
historically attested Indo-European languages, appears more probable
than the classical one. The near absence of the labial phoneme
("p"') finds a natural phonological explanation in relation to
the evolution of the other two glottalized stops and to the entire
system of stops shown above.
In revising the consonant system of the Indo-European protolanguage,
we have also called into question the paths of transformation into the
historical Indo-European languages.Our
reconstruction of the protolanguage's consonants shows them to be closer
to those of the Germanic, Armenian and Hittite daughter languages than
to Sanskrit. This neatly reverses the classical conception that
the former languages had undergone a systematic sound shift, whereas
Sanskrit had faithfully conserved the original sound system.
The transformation of consonants from parent to daughter languages
may be illustrated by the word "cow" in English and Kuh in
German; in Sanskrit the word for "ox" is ganh, and in
Greek it is bous All have long been recognized as descending from
a common Indo-European word for "ox," or "cow." The
word has different forms, however, in the glottalic and classical
systems. In the glottalic it has the voiceless consonant *k'Wou- (the
asterisk before a word designates it as a word in the protolanguage),
which makes it phonetically closer to the corresponding words in English
and German than to those in Greek and Sanskrit.
In the classical system the word is *gwou, which is practically the
same as that in Sanskrit. In accordance with Grimm's law, the
transformation of *gwou to the German would require devoicing of the
first consonant from "g" to "k." And so the
glottalic system seems to make the most sense: it eliminates the need
for devoicing and correlates the voiceless stops in the Germanic
languages (German, Dutch, Scandinavian and English) with voiceless
glottalized stops in the ancestral Indo-European protolanguage. In this
respect the Germanic languages are more archaic than Sanskrit and Greek.
The glottalic system is seen, correspondingly, as more conservative than
the classical system. It has brought the protolanguage closer to some of
its daughter languages without resorting to such difficult phonological
transformations as that from "g" ta "k."
We can learn more about the earliest Indo-Europeans from other
aspects of their reconstructed vocabulary. Some words, for example,
describe an agricultural technology whose existence
dates back to 5000 B.C. By that time the
agricultural revolution had spread north from its origins in the Fertile
Crescent, where the first archaeological evidence of cultivation dates
back to at least 8000 B.C. From this region agriculture also spread
southward to sustain the Mesopotamian civilizations and westward to
Egypt. The Indo-European words for "barley," "wheat"
and "flax"; for "apples," "cherries" and
their trees, for "mulberries" and their bushes; for
"grapes" and their vines; and for the various implements with
which to cultivate and harvest them describe a way of life unknown in
northern Europe until the third or second millennium B.C., when the
first archaeological evidence appears.
The landscape described by the reconstructed Indo-European
protolanguage is mountainous—as evidenced by the many words for
high mountains, mountain lakes and rapid rivers flowing from mountain
sources. Such a picture cannot be reconciled with either the plains
of central Europe or the steppes north of the Black Sea, which have been
advanced as an alternative homeland for the Indo-Europeans. The
vocabulary does, however, fit the landscape of eastern Anatolia and
Transcaucasia, backed by the splendor of the Caucasus Mountains.
The language clothes its landscape in the flora of this region, having
words for "mountain oak," "birch,"
"beech," "hornbeam," "ash,"
"willow" or"white willow," "yew,"
"pine" or"fir," "heather" and
"moss." Moreover, the language has words for animals that are
alien to northern Europe: "leopard," "snow leopard,"
"lion," "monkey" and "elephant."
The presence of a word for "beech tree," incidentally, has
been cited in favor of the European plains and against the lower Volga
as the putative Indo -European homeland. Beech trees, it is true, do not
grow east of a line drawn from Gdansk on the Baltic to the northwest
corner of the Black Sea. Two species of beech ( Fagus orientatis and
F. sylvatica) flourish, however, in modern Turkey. Opposing the
so-called beech argument is the oak argument: paleobotanical evidence
shows that oak trees (which are listed in the reconstructed language's
lexicon) were not native to postglacial northern Europe but began to
spread there from the south as late as the turn of the fourth to the
third millennium B.C.
Another significant clue to the identification of the Indo-European
home land is provided by the terminology for wheeled transport. There
are words for "wheel" (*rotho-), "axle" (*hakhs-),
"yoke" (*iak'om) and associated gear. "Horse" is
*ekhos and "foal" *pholo. The bronze parts of
the chariot and the bronze tools, with which chariots were fashioned
from mountain hardwoods, furnish words that embrace the smelting of
metals.Petroglyphs, symbols marked on stone, found in the area
from the Transcaucasus to upper Mesopotamia between
the lakes Van and Urmia are the
earliest pictures of horse-drawn chariots.
PETROGLYPHS
from the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (dating
from the second or third millennium B.C.) provide archaeological
corroboration of linguistic evidence that the Indo-Europeans had
chariots. Wheeled vehicles, such as those drawn here, facilitated
agriculture and the migrations that resulted from a growing hunger for
land.
The postulated homeland of the Indo-Europeans is, if not the only
region, certainly one of the regions in which the horse
completed its domestication and was harnessed as a draft animal in the
fourth millennium B.C. From here wheeled vehicles spread with the
migration of the Indo-Europeans in the third and second millennia B.C.
eastward to central Asia, westward to the Balkans, and in a circular
motion around the Black Sea and thence to central Europe.
The chariot provides significant evidence of cultural mixing, for
chariots figured in the funerary and other religious rites of both the
Indo-European peoples and the Mesopotamians. Contact with other
western Asiatic cultures is also evidenced in the sharing of various
mythological subjects—for example, the theft of the Hesperian apples
by Hercules and similar tales in Norse and Celtic. Moreover, the
Semitic and Indo-European languages each identify man with the earth.
In Hebrew, adam means "man" and adamahmeans
"earth"; bothwere derived from a root in the Semitic
protolanguage (cf. Genesis 2: 7, ". . . God formed man from the
dust of the ground"). "Human" and "humus" came
to English through Latin ( homo, humus) from *dheghom-, the
word for "earth" and "man" (etymologically,
"earthly creature") in the Indo-European protolanguage. The
rooting of the IndoEuropean languages in eastern Anatolia is also
suggested by the frequency of words borrowed from a number of languages
that flourished there: Semitic, Kartvelian, Sumerian and even Egyptian.
Conversely, Indo-European contributed words to each of those languages. Nickolai
1. Vavilov, a prominent Soviet plant geneticist, found a vivid instance
of such an exchange: the Russian vinograd ("grape"), the
Italic vino and the Germanic wein ("wine"). These all reach
back to the Indo-European *woi-no (or *wei-no), the proto-Semitic *wajnu,
the Egyptian *wns, the Kartvelian *wing and the Hittite *wijana.
We concede that in the broad territory in which we have placed he
homeland of the Indo-Europeans there is no archaeological evidence of a
culture that can be positively linked to them. Archaeologists have
identified, however, a number of sites that bear evidence of a material
and spiritual culture similar to the one implied by the Indo-European
lexicon. The Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia decorated its
vessels with religious symbols—bulls' horns and sometimes rams' heads,
which are masculine symbols, and ritual images of leopard skins—that
are shared by the somewhat later Catal Huyuk culture of the seventh
millennium B.C. in western Anatolia. Both cultures have affinities with
the later Transcaucasian culture in the region embraced
by the Kura and the Araks rivers,
which includes southern Transcaucasia, eastern Anatolia end northern
Iran.
