Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European is a long, fragmentary list of words used in daily speech by people who created no other texts. That is why it is important. The list becomes useful, however, only if we can determine where it came from. To do that we must locate the Proto-Indo-European homeland. But we cannot locate the Proto-Indo-European homeland until we first locate Proto-Indo-European in time. We have to know when it was spoken. Then it becomes possible to say where.
CHAPTER THREE
Language and Time 1
The Last Speakers of Proto-Indo-European
Time changes everything. Reading to my young children, I found that in mid-sentence I began to edit and replace words that suddenly looked archaic to me, in stories I had loved when I was young. The language of Robert Louis Stevenson and Jules Verne now seems surprisingly stiff and distant, and as for Shakespeare’s English—we all need the glossary. What is true for modern languages was true for prehistoric languages. Over time, they changed. So what do we mean by Proto-Indo-European? If it changed over time, is it not a moving target? However we define it, for how long was Proto-Indo-European spoken? Most important, when was it spoken? How do we assign a date to a language that left no inscriptions, that died without ever being written down? It helps to divide any problem into parts, and this one can easily be divided into two: the birth date and the death date.
This chapter concentrates on the death date, the date after which Proto-Indo-European must have ceased to exist. But it helps to begin by considering how long a period probably preceded that. Given that the time between the birth and death dates of Proto-Indo-European could not have been infinite, precisely how long a time was it? Do languages, which are living, changing things, have life expectancies?
THE SIZE OF THE CHRONOLOGICAL WINDOW: HOW LONG DO LANGUAGES LAST?
If we were magically able to converse with an English speaker living a thousand years ago, as proposed in the last chapter, we would not understand each other. Very few natural languages, those that are learned and spoken at home, remain sufficiently unchanged after a thousand years to be considered the “same language.” How can the rate of change be measured? Languages normally have dialects—regional accents—and, within any region, they have innovating social sectors (entertainers, soldiers, traders) and conservative sectors (the very rich, the very poor). Depending on who you are, your language might be changing very rapidly or very slowly. Unstable conditions—invasions, famines, the fall of old prestige groups and the rise of new ones—increase the rate of change. Some parts of language change earlier and faster, whereas other parts are resistant. That last observation led the linguist Morris Swadesh to develop a standard word list chosen from the most resistant vocabulary, a group of words that tend to be retained, not replaced, in most languages around the world, even after invasions and conquests. Over the long term, he hoped, the average rate of replacement in this resistant vocabulary might yield a reliable standardized measurement of the speed of language change, what Swadesh called glottochronology.1
Between 1950 and 1952 Swadesh published a hundred-word and a two-hundred-word basic core vocabulary, a standardized list of resistant terms. All languages, he suggested, tend to retain their own words for certain kinds of meanings, including body parts (blood, foot); lower numerals (one, two, three); some kinship terms (mother, father); basic needs (eat, sleep); basic natural features (sun, moon, rain, river); some flora and fauna (tree, domesticated animals); some pronouns (this, that, he, she); and conjunctions (and, or, if). The content of the list can be and has been modified to suit vocabularies in different languages—in fact, the preferred two-hundred-meaning list in English contains 215 words. The English core vocabulary has proven extremely resistant to change. Although English has borrowed more than 50% of its general vocabulary from the Romance languages, mainly from French (reflecting the conquest of Anglo-Saxon England by the French-speaking Normans) and Latin (from centuries of technical and professional vocabulary training in courts, churches, and schools), only 4% of the English core vocabulary is borrowed from Romance. In its core vocabulary English remains a Germanic language, true to its origins among the Anglo-Saxons who migrated from northern Europe to Britain after the fall of the Roman Empire.
Comparing core vocabularies between old and new phases in languages with long historical records (Old English/Modern English, Middle Egyptian/Coptic, Ancient Chinese/Modern Mandarin, Late Latin/Modern French, and nine other pairs), Swadesh calculated an average replacement rate of 14% per thousand years for the hundred-word list, and 19% per thousand years for the two-hundred-word list. He suggested that 19% was an acceptable average for all languages (usually rounded to 20%). To illustrate what that number means, Italian and French have distinct, unrelated words for 23% of the terms in the two-hundred-word list, and Spanish and Portuguese show a difference of 15%. As a general rule, if more than 10% of the core vocabulary is different between two dialects, they are either mutually unintelligible or approaching that state, that is, they are distinct languages or emerging languages. On average, then, with a replacement rate of 14–19% per thousand years in the core vocabulary, we should expect that most languages—including this one—would be incomprehensible to our own descendants a thousand years from now.
Swadesh hoped to use the replacement rate in the core vocabulary as a standardized clock to establish the date of splits and branches in unwritten languages. His own research involved the splits between American Indian language families in prehistoric North America, which were undatable by any other means. But the reliability of his standard replacement rate wilted under criticism. Extreme cases like Icelandic (very slow change, with a replacement rate of only 3–4% per thousand years) and English (very rapid, with a 26% replacement rate per thousand years) challenged the utility of the “average” rate.2 The mathematics was affected if a language had multiple words for one meaning on the list. The dates given by glottochronology for many language splits contradicted known historical dates, generally by giving a date much later than it should have been. This direction in the errors suggested that real language change often was slower than Swadesh’s model suggested—less than 19% per thousand years. A devastating critique of Swadesh’s mathematics by Chretien, in 1962, seemed to drive a stake through the heart of glottochronology.
But in 1972 Chretien’s critique was itself shown to be incorrect, and, since the 1980s, Sankoff and Embleton have introduced equations that include as critical values borrowing rates, the number of geographic borders with other languages, and a similarity index between the compared languages (because similar languages borrow in the core more easily then dissimilar languages). Multiple synonyms can each be given a fractional score. Studies incorporating these improved methods succeeded better in producing dates for splits between known languages that matched historical facts. More important, comparisons between most Indo-European languages still yielded replacement rates in the core vocabulary of about 10–20% per thousand years. Comparing the core vocabularies in ninety-five Indo-European languages, Kruskal and Black found that the most frequent date for the first splitting of Proto–Indo–European was about 3000 BCE. Although this estimate cannot be relied on absolutely, it is probably “in the ballpark” and should not be ignored.3
One simple point can be extracted from these debates: if the Proto-Indo-European core vocabulary changed at a rate ≥10% per millennium, or at the lower end of the expected range, Proto-Indo-European did not exist as a single language with a single grammar and vocabulary for as long as a thousand years. Proto-Indo-European grammar and vocabulary should have changed quite substantially over a thousand years. Yet the grammar of Proto-Indo-European, as reconstructed by linguists, is remarkably homogeneous both in morphology and phonology. Proto-Indo-European nouns and pronouns shared a set of cases, genders, and declensions that intersect with dozens of cognate phonological endings. Verbs had a shared system of tenses and aspects, again tagged by a shared set of phonological vowel changes (run-ran) and endings. This s
hared system of grammatical structures and phonological ways of labeling them looks like a single language. It suggests that reconstructed Proto-Indo-European probably refers to less than a thousand years of language change. It took less than a thousand years for late Vulgar Latin to evolve into seven Romance languages, and Proto-Indo-European does not contain nearly enough internal grammatical diversity to represent seven distinct grammars.
But considering that Proto-Indo-European is a fragmentary reconstruction, not an actual language, we should allow it more time to account for the gaps in our knowledge (more on this in chapter 5). Let us assign a nominal lifetime of two thousand years to the phase of language history represented by reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. In the history of English two thousand years would take us all the way back to the origins of the sound shifts that defined Proto-Germanic, and would include all the variation in all the Germanic languages ever spoken, from Hlewagasti of Holt to Puff Daddy of hip-hop fame. Proto-Indo-European does not seem to contain that much variation, so two thousand years probably is too long. But for archaeological purposes it is quite helpful to be able to say that the time period we are trying to identify is no longer than two thousand years.
What is the end date for that two-thousand-year window of time?
THE TERMINAL DATE FOR PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN: THE MOTHER BECOMES HER DAUGHTERS
The terminal date for reconstructed Proto-Indo-European—the date after which it becomes an anachronism—should be close to the date when its oldest daughters were born. Proto-Indo-European was reconstructed on the basis of systematic comparisons between all the Indo-European daughter languages. The mother tongue cannot be placed later than the daughters. Of course, it would have survived after the detachment and isolation of the oldest daughter, but as time passed, if that daughter dialect remained isolated from the Proto-Indo-European speech community, each would have developed its own peculiar innovations. The image of the mother that is retained through each of the daughters is the form the mother had before the detachment of that daughter branch. Each daughter, therefore, preserves a somewhat different image of the mother.
Linguists have exploited this fact and other aspects of internal variation to identify chronological phases within Proto-Indo-European. The number of phases defined by different linguists varies from three (early, middle, late) to six.4 But if we define Proto-Indo-European as the language that was ancestral to all the Indo-European daughters, then it is the oldest reconstructable form, the earliest phase of Proto-Indo-European, that we are talking about. The later daughters did not evolve directly from this early kind of Proto-Indo-European but from some intermediate, evolved set of late Indo-European languages that preserved aspects of the mother tongue and passed them along.
So when did the oldest daughter separate? The answer to that question depends very much on the accidental survival of written inscriptions. And the oldest daughter preserved in written inscriptions is so peculiar that it is probably safer to rely on the image of the mother preserved within the second set of daughters. What’s wrong with the oldest daughter?
THE OLDEST AND STRANGEST DAUGHTER (OR COUSIN?): ANATOLIAN
The oldest written Indo-European languages belonged to the Anatolian branch. The Anatolian branch had three early stems: Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic.5 All three languages are extinct but once were spoken over large parts of ancient Anatolia, modern Turkey (figure 3.1). Hittite is by far the best known of the three, as it was the palace and administrative language of the Hittite Empire.
Inscriptions place Hittite speakers in Anatolia as early as 1900 BCE, but the empire was created only about 1650–1600 BCE, when Hittite warlords conquered and united several independent native Hattic kingdoms in central Anatolia around modern Kayseri. The name Hittite was given to them by Egyptian and Syrian scribes who failed to distinguish the Hittite kings from the Hattic kings they had conquered. The Hittites called themselves Neshites after the Anatolian city, Kanesh, where they rose to power. But Kanesh had earlier been a Hattic city; its name was Hattic. Hattic-speakers also named the city that became the capital of the Hittite Empire, Hattušas. Hattic was a non–Indo-European language, probably linked distantly to the Caucasian languages. The Hittites borrowed Hattic words for throne, lord, king, queen, queen mother, heir apparent, priest, and a long list of palace officials and cult leaders—probably in a historical setting where the Hattic languages were the languages of royalty. Palaic, the second Anatolian language, also borrowed vocabulary from Hattic. Palaic was spoken in a city called Pala probably located in north-central Anatolia north of Ankara. Given the geography of Hattic place-names and Hattic_? Palaic/Hittite loans, Hattic seems to have been spoken across all of central Anatolia before Hittite or Palaic was spoken there. The early speakers of Hittite and Palaic were intruders in a non–Indo-European central Anatolian landscape dominated by Hattic speakers who had already founded cities, acquired literate bureaucracies, and established kingdoms and palace cults.6
Figure 3.1 The ancient languages of Anatolia at about 1500 BCE.
After Hittite speakers usurped the Hattic kingdom they enjoyed a period of prosperity enriched by Assyrian trade, and then endured defeats that later were dimly but bitterly recalled. They remained confined to the center of the Anatolian plateau until about 1650 BCE, when Hittite armies became mighty enough to challenge the great powers of the Near East and the imperial era began. The Hittites looted Babylon, took other cities from the Assyrians, and fought the Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II to a standstill at the greatest chariot battle of ancient times, at Kadesh, on the banks of the Orontes River in Syria, in 1286 BCE. A Hittite monarch married an Egyptian princess. The Hittite kings also knew and negotiated with the princes who ruled Troy, probably the place referred to in the Hittite archives as steep Wilusa (Ilios).7 The Hittite capital city, Hattušas, was burned in a general calamity that brought down the Hittite kings, their army, and their cities about 1180 BCE. The Hittite language then quickly disappeared; apparently only the ruling élite ever spoke it.
The third early Anatolian language, Luwian, was spoken by more people over a larger area, and it continued to be spoken after the end of the empire. During the later Hittite empire Luwian was the dominant spoken language even in the Hittite royal court. Luwian did not borrow from Hattic and so might have been spoken originally in western Anatolia, outside the Hattic core region—perhaps even in Troy, where a Luwian inscription was found on a seal in Troy level VI—the Troy of the Trojan War. On the other hand, Luwian did borrow from other, unknown non–Indo-European language(s). Hittite and Luwian texts are abundant from the empire period, 1650–1180 BCE. These are the earliest complete texts in any Indo-European language. But individual Hittite and Luwian words survive from an earlier era, before the empire began.8
The oldest Hittite and Luwian names and words appeared in the business records of Assyrian merchants who lived in a commercial district, or karum, outside the walls of Kanesh, the city celebrated by the later Hittites as the place where they first became kings. Archaeological excavations here, on the banks of the Halys River in central Anatolia, have shown that the Assyrian karum, a foreigners’ enclave that covered more than eighty acres outside the Kanesh city walls, operated from about 1920 to 1850 BCE (level II), was burned, rebuilt, and operated again (level Ib) until about 1750 BCE, when it was burned again. After that the Assyrians abandoned the karum system in Anatolia, so the Kanesh karum is a closed archaeological deposit dated between 1920 and 1750 BCE. The Kanesh karum was the central office for a network of literate Assyrian merchants who oversaw trade between the Assyrian state and the warring kingdoms of Late Bronze Age Anatolia. The Assyrian decision to make Kanesh their distribution center greatly increased the power of its Hittite and Luwian occupants.
Most of the local names recorded by the merchants in the Kanesh karum accounts were Hittite or Luwian, beginning with the earliest records of about 1900 BCE. Many still were Hattic. But Hittite speakers seem to have controlled business with the Assyrian kar
um. The Assyrian merchants were so accustomed to doing business with Hittite speakers that they adopted Hittite words for contract and lodging even in their private correspondence. Palaic, the third language of the Anatolian branch, is not known from the Kanesh records. Palaic died out as a spoken language probably before 1500 BCE. It presumably was spoken in Anatolia during the karum period but not at Kanesh.
Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic had evolved already by 1900 BCE. This is a critical piece of information in any attempt to date Proto-Indo-European. All three were descended from the same root language, Proto-Anatolian. The linguist Craig Melchert described Luwian and Hittite of the empire period, ca. 1400 BCE, as sisters about as different as twentieth-century Welsh and Irish.9 Welsh and Irish probably share a common origin of about two thousand years ago. If Luwian and Hittite separated from Proto-Anatolian two thousand years before 1400 BCE, then Proto-Anatolian should be placed at about 3400 BCE. What about its ancestor? When did the root of the Anatolian branch separate from the rest of Proto-Indo-European?
Dating Proto-Anatolian: The Definition of Proto- and Pre-Languages
Linguists do not use the term proto- in a consistent way, so I should be clear about what I mean by Proto-Anatolian. Proto-Anatolian is the language that was immediately ancestral to the three known daughter languages in the Anatolian branch. Proto-Anatolian can be described fairly accurately on the basis of the shared traits of Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic. But Proto-Anatolian occupies just the later portion of an undocumented period of linguistic change that must have occurred between it and Proto-Indo-European. The hypothetical language stage in between can be called Pre-Anatolian. Proto-Anatolian is a fairly concrete linguistic entity closely related to its known daughters. But Pre-Anatolian represents an evolutionary period. Pre-Anatolian is a phase defined by Proto-Anatolian at one end and Proto-Indo-European at the other. How can we determine when Pre-Anatolian separated from Proto-Indo-European?
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 6