I will stop here, with an ancestral *k’ -, in my discussion of the Proto-Indo-European ancestor of centum. The analysis should continue through the phonemes that are attested in all the surviving cognates to reconstruct an acceptable ancestral root. By applying such rules to all the cognates, linguists have been able to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European sequence of phonemes, *k’tom, that could have developed into all the attested phonemes in all the attested daughter forms. The Proto-Indo-European root *k’tom is the residue of a successful comparison—it is the proof that the daughter terms being compared are indeed cognates. It is also likely to be a pretty good approximation of the way this word was pronounced in at least some dialects of Proto-Indo-European.
The Limitations and Strengths of Reconstruction
The comparative method will produce the sound of the ancestral root and confirm a genetic relationship only with a group of cognates that has evolved regularly according to the rules of sound change. The result of a comparative analysis is either a demonstration of a genetic connection, if every phoneme in every cognate can be derived from a mutually acceptable parental phoneme; or no demonstrable connection. In many cases sounds may have been borrowed into a language from a neighboring language, and those sounds might replace the predicted shifts. The comparative method cannot force a regular reconstruction on an irregular set of sounds. Much of the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, perhaps most of it, never will be reconstructed. Regular groups of cognates permit us to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European root for the word door but not for wall; for rain but not for river; for foot but not for leg. Proto-Indo-European certainly had words for these things, but we cannot safely reconstruct how they sounded.
The comparative method cannot prove that two words are not related, but it can fail to produce proof that they are. For example, the Greek god Ouranos and the Indic deity Varuna had strikingly similar mythological attributes, and their names sound somewhat alike. Could Ouranos and Varuna be reflexes of the name of some earlier Proto-Indo-European god? Possibly—but the two names cannot be derived from a common parent by the rules of sound change known to have operated in Greek and Old Indic. Similarly Latin deus (god) and Greek théos (god) look like obvious cognates, but the comparative method reveals that Latin deus, in fact, shares a common origin with Greek Zéus.8 If Greek théos were to have a Latin cognate it should begin with an [f] sound (festus ‘festive’ has been suggested, but some of the other sounds in this comparison are problematic). It is still possible that deus and théos were historically related in some irregular way, but we cannot prove it.
In the end, how can we be sure that the comparative method accurately reconstructs undocumented stages in the phonological history of a language? Linguists themselves are divided on the question of the “reality” of reconstructed terms.9 A reconstruction based on cognates from eight Indo-European branches, like *k’tom-, is much more reliable and probably more “true” than one based on cognates in just two branches. Cognates in at least three branches, including an ancient branch (Anatolian, Greek, Avestan Iranian, Old Indic, Latin, some aspects of Celtic) should produce a reliable reconstruction. But how reliable? One test was conceived by Robert A. Hall, who reconstructed the shared parent of the Romance languages using just the rules of sound change, and then compared his reconstruction to Latin. Making allowances for the fact that the actual parents of the Romance languages were several provincial Vulgar Latin dialects, and the Latin used for the test was the classical Latin of Cicero and Caesar, the result was reassuring. Hall was even able to reconstruct a contrast between two sets of vowels although none of the modern daughters had retained it. He was unable to identify the feature that distinguished the two vowel sets as length—Latin had long vowels and short vowels, a distinction lost in all its Romance daughters—but he was able to rebuild a system with two contrasting sets of vowels and many of the other, more obvious aspects of Latin morphology, syntax, and vocabulary. Such clever exercises aside, the best proof of the realism of reconstruction lies in several cases where linguists have suggested a reconstruction and archaeologists have subsequently found inscriptions that proved it correct.10
For example, the oldest recorded Germanic cognates for the word guest (Gothic gasts, Old Norse gestr, Old High German gast) are thought to be derived from a reconstructed late Proto-Indo-European *ghos-ti- (which probably meant both “host” and “guest” and thus referred to a relationship of hospitality between strangers rather than to one of its roles) through a Proto-Germanic form reconstructed as *gastiz. None of the known forms of the word in the later Germanic languages contained the i before the final consonant, but rules of sound change predicted that the i should theoretically have been there in Proto-Germanic. Then an archaic Germanic inscription was found on a gold horn dug from a grave in Denmark. The inscription ek hlewagastiz holitijaz (or holtingaz) horna tawido is translated “I, Hlewagasti of Holt (or Holting) made the horn.” It contained the personal name Hlewagastiz, made up of two stems, Hlewa-‘fame’ and gastiz ‘guest’. Linguists were excited not because the horn was a beautiful golden artifact but because the stem contained the predicted i, verifying the accuracy of both the reconstructed Proto-Germanic form and its late Proto-Indo-European ancestor. Linguistic reconstruction had passed a real-world test.
Similarly linguists working on the development of the Greek language had proposed a Proto-Indo-European labiovelar *kw (pronounced [kw-]) as the ancestral phoneme that developed into Greek t (before a front vowel) or p (before a back vowel). The reconstruction of *kw was a reasonable but complex solution for the problem of how the Classical Greek consonants were related to their Proto-Indo-European ancestors. It remained entirely theoretical until the discovery and decipherment of the Mycenaean Linear B tablets, which revealed that the earliest form of Greek, Mycenaean, had the predicted kw where later Greek had t or p before front and back vowels.11 Examples like these confirm that the reconstructions of historical linguistics are more than just abstractions.
A reconstructed term is, of course, a phonetic idealization. Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European cannot capture the variety of dialectical pronunciations that must have existed more than perhaps one thousand years when the language was living in the mouths of people. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable victory that we can now pronounce, however stiffly, thousands of words in a language spoken by nonliterate people before 2500 BCE.
THE LEXICON: HOW TO RECONSTRUCT DEAD MEANINGS
Once we have reconstructed the sound of a word in Proto-Indo-European, how do we know what it meant? Some archaeologists have doubted the reliability of reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, as they felt that the original meanings of reconstructed terms could never be known confidently.12 But we can assign reliable meanings to many reconstructed Proto-Indo-European terms. And it is in the meanings of their words that we find the best evidence for the material culture, ecological environment, social relations, and spiritual beliefs of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. Every meaning is worth the struggle.
Three general rules guide the assignment of meaning. First, look for the most ancient meanings that can be found. If the goal is to retrieve the meaning of the original Proto–Indo–European word, modern meanings should be checked against meanings that are recorded for ancient cognates.
Second, if one meaning is consistently attached to a cognate in all language branches, like hundred in the example I have used, that is clearly the least problematic meaning we can assign to the original Proto-Indo-European root. It is difficult to imagine how that meaning could have become attached to all the cognates unless it were the meaning attached to the ancestral root.
Third, if the word can be broken down into roots that point to the same meaning as the one proposed, then that meaning is doubly likely. For example, Proto-Indo-European *k’tom probably was a shortened version of *dek’tom, a word that included the Proto-Indo-European root *dek’ ‘ten’. The sequence of sounds in *dek’ was reconstructed independently using the cognates for the wo
rd ten, so the fact that the reconstructed roots for ten and hundred are linked in both meaning and sound tends to verify the reliability of both reconstructions. The root *k’tom turns out to be not just an arbitrary string of Proto-Indo-European phonemes but a meaningful compound: “(a unit) of tens.” This also tells us that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European had a decimal numbering system and counted to one hundred by tens, as we do.
In most cases the meaning of a Proto-Indo-European word changed and drifted as the various speech communities using it became separated, centuries passed, and daughter languages evolved. Because the association between word and meaning is arbitrary, there is less regular directionality to change in meaning than there is in sound change (although some semantic shifts are more probable than others). Nevertheless, general meanings can be retrieved. A good example is the word for “wheel.”
“Wheel”: An Example of Semantic Reconstruction
The word wheel is the modern English descendant of a PIE root that had a sound like *kwékwlos or *kwekwlós. But what, exactly, did *kwékwlos mean in Proto-Indo-European? The sequence of phonemes in the root *kwékwlos was pieced together by comparing cognates from eight old Indo-European languages, representing five branches. Reflexes of this word survived in Old Indic and Avestan (from the Indo-Iranian branch), Old Norse and Old English (from the Germanic branch), Greek, Phrygian, and Tocharian A and B. The meaning “wheel” is attested for the cognates in Sanskrit, Avestan, Old Norse, and Old English. The meaning of the Greek cognate had shifted to “circle” in the singular but in the plural still meant “wheels.” In Tocharian and Phrygian the cognates meant “wagon” or “vehicle.” What was the original meaning? (table 2.2).
Five of the eight *kwékwlos cognates have “wheel” or “wheels” as an attested meaning, and in those languages (Phrygian, Greek, Tocharian A & B) where the meaning drifted away from “wheel(s),” it had not drifted far (“circle,” “wagon,” or “vehicle”). Moreover, the cognates that preserve the meaning “wheel” are found in languages that are geographically isolated from one another (Old Indic and Avestan in Iran were neighbors, but neither had any known contact with Old Norse or Old English). The meaning “wheel” is unlikely to have been borrowed into Old Norse from Old Indic, or vice versa.
Some shifts in meaning are unlikely, and others are common. It is common to name a whole (“vehicle,” “wagon”) after one of its most characteristic parts (“wheels”), as seems to have happened in Phrygian and Tocharian. We do the same in modern English slang when we speak of someone’s car as their “wheels,” or clothing as their “threads.” A shift in meaning in the other direction, using a word that originally referred to the whole to refer to one of its parts (using wagon to refer to wheel), is much less probable.
The meaning of wheel is given additional support by the fact that it has an Indo-European etymology, like the root for *k’tom. It was a word created from another Indo-European root. That root was *kwel-, a verb that meant “to turn.” So *kwékwlos is not just a random string of phonemes reconstructed from the cognates for wheel; it meant “the thing that turns.” This not only tends to confirm the meaning “wheel” rather than “circle” or “vehicle” but it also indicates that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European made up their own words for wheels. If they learned about the invention of the wheel from others they did not adopt the foreign name for it, so the social setting in which the transfer took place probably was brief, between people who remained socially distant. The alternative, that wheels were invented within the Proto-Indo-European language community, seems unlikely for archaeological and historical reasons, though it remains possible (see chapter 4).
One more rule helps to confirm the reconstructed meaning. If it fits within a semantic field consisting of other roots with closely related reconstructed meanings, we can at least be relatively confident that such a word could have existed in Proto-Indo-European. “Wheel” is part of a semantic field consisting of words for the parts of a wagon or cart (table 2.2). Happily, at least four other such words can be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European. These are:
1. *rot-eh2-, a second term for “wheel,” with cognates in Old Indic and Avestan that meant “chariot,” and cognates that meant “wheel” in Latin, Old Irish, Welsh, Old High German, and Lithuanian.
2. *aks- (or perhaps *h2eks-) ‘axle’ attested by cognates that had not varied in meaning over thousands of years, and still meant “axle” in Old Indic, Greek, Latin, Old Norse, Old English, Old High German, Lithuanian, and Old Church Slavonic.
3. *h2ih3s- ‘thill’ (the harness pole) attested by cognates that meant “thill” in Hittite and Old Indic.
4. *wégheti, a verb meaning “to convey or go in a vehicle,” attested by cognates carrying this meaning in Old Indic, Avestan, Latin, Old English, and Old Church Slavonic and by cognate-derived nouns ending in *- no- meaning “wagon” in Old Irish, Old English, Old High German, and Old Norse.
TABLE 2.2
Proto-Indo-European Roots for Words Referring to Parts of a Wagon
These four additional terms constitute a well-documented semantic field (wheel, axle, thill, and wagon or convey in a vehicle) that increases our confidence in reconstructing the meaning “wheel” for *kwékwlos. Of the five terms assigned to this semantic field, all but thill have clear Indo-European etymologies in independently reconstructed roots. The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were familiar with wheels and wagons, and used words of their own creation to talk about them.
Fine distinctions, shades of meaning, and the word associations that enriched Proto-Indo-European poetry may be forever lost, but gross meanings are recoverable for at least fifteen hundred Proto-Indo-European roots such as *dekm- ‘ten’, and for additional thousands of other words derived from them, such as *ktom- ‘hundred’. Those meanings provide a window into the lives and thoughts of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European.
SYNTAX AND MORPHOLOGY: THE SHAPE OF A DEAD LANGUAGE
I will not try to describe in any detail the grammatical connections between the Indo-European languages. The reconstructed vocabulary is most important for our purposes. But grammar, the bedrock of language classification, provides the primary evidence for classifying languages and determining relationships between them. Grammar has two aspects: syntax, or the rules governing the order of words in sentences; and morphology, or the rules governing the forms words must take when used in particular ways.
Proto-Indo-European grammar has left its mark on all the Indo-European languages to one degree or another. In all the Indo-European language branches, nouns are declined; that is, the noun changes form depending on how it is used in a sentence. English lost most of these declinations during its evolution from Anglo-Saxon, but all the other languages in the Germanic branch retain them, and we have kept some use-dependent pronouns (masculine: he, his, him/feminine: she, hers, her). Moreover, most Indo-European nouns are declined in similar ways, with endings that are genetically cognate, and with the same formal system of cases (nominative, genitive, accusative, etc.) that intersect in the same way with the same three gender classes (masculine, feminine, neuter); and with similar formal classes, or declensions, of nouns that are declined in distinctive ways. Indo-European verbs also share similar conjugation classes (first person, second person or familiar, third person or formal, singular, plural, past tense, present tense, etc.), similar stem alterations (run-ran, give-gave), and similar endings. This particular constellation of formal categories, structures, transformations, and endings is not at all necessary or universal in human language. It is unique, as a system, and is found only in the Indo-European languages. The languages that share this grammatical system certainly are daughters of a single language from which that system was inherited.
One example shows how unlikely it would be for the Indo-European languages to share these grammatical structures by random chance. The verb to be has one form in the first-person singular ([I] am) and another in the third-person singular ([he/she/it] is). Our English
verbs are descended from the archaic Germanic forms im and ist. The Germanic forms have exact, proven cognates in Old Indic ásmi and ásti; in Greek eimí and estí; and in Old Church Slavonic jesmi and jestû. All these words are derived from a reconstructable Proto-Indo-European pair, *h1e’smi and *h1e’sti. That all these languages share the same system of verb classes (first person, second person or familiar, and third person), and that they use the same basic roots and endings to identify those classes, confirms that they are genetically related languages.
CONCLUSION: RAISING A LANGUAGE FROM THE DEAD
It will always be difficult to work with Proto-Indo-European. The version we have is uncertain in many morphological details, phonetically idealized, and fragmentary, and can be difficult to decipher. The meanings of some terms will never be fully understood, and for others only an approximate definition is possible. Yet reconstructed Proto-Indo-European captures key parts of a language that actually existed.
Some dismiss reconstructed Proto-Indo-European as nothing more than a hypothesis. But the limitations of Proto-Indo-European apply equally to the written languages of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, which are universally counted among the great treasures of antiquity. No curator of Assyrian records would suggest that we should discard the palace archives of Nineveh because they are incomplete, or because we cannot know the exact sound and meaning of many terms, or because we are uncertain about how the written court language related to the ‘real’ language spoken by the people in the street. Yet these same problems have convinced many archaeologists that the study of Proto-Indo-European is too speculative to yield any real historical value.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 5