If you ever studied Latin or Greek word roots in your middle-school or high-school English classes, you may have wondered why English words are so different from Latin or Greek roots. For example, the Latin root for the word “tooth” is “dent-,” as in “dentist.” The Greek root is “odont-“ as in “orthodontist.” But the English word, of course, is “tooth.” Here's another one: The Latin root for “foot” is “ped-,” as in “pedestrian” or “pedestal.” The Greek root is “pod-,” as in “podiatrist.” But instead of a word containing P and D, English just has “foot.”
‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ Are Surprisingly Similar Between Some Languages
On the other hand, sometimes an English word is a lot like the equivalent root in Latin or Greek. For example, the Latin word for “mother” is “māter”; the Greek is “mētēr”; and they both resemble the English word, starting with M, with a T in the middle, and an R at the end.
What's going on with this mix of similarities and differences? The answer is that Latin, Greek, and English are all related, but Latin and Greek are more closely related to each other than they are to English. In fact, all three of these languages, and many others as well, are all part of a single language family, called the Indo-European languages, and they all ultimately trace back to a single, ancestral language, which was spoken centuries before writing was invented. We don’t know what speakers of that language called it, but today, it’s known as Proto-Indo-European.
How Do We Know Proto-Indo-European Existed?
A reasonable question is how we can possibly know that this language existed. To get an idea of how linguists reconstruct earlier forms of a language, let’s look at one of the major subfamilies within the Indo-European family: the Romance languages. These include the modern-day national languages of Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian, as well as languages that don’t have a nation-state of their own, such as Occitan, and Catalan, which you may have been hearing about recently, as citizens of the Spanish region of Catalonia have pushed for independence.
These languages all developed from Latin, but let’s pretend for a moment that we don’t know that. We can still get a pretty good idea of what their ancestral language sounded like if we have enough words in the modern languages that we think might have a common origin. Let’s take the words for “mother” and “father” for example. In Portuguese, they’re “mãe” and “pai.” In Spanish and Italian, they’re “madre” and “padre.” In French, they’re “mère" and “père.”
Reconstructing Ancient Words
Let’s focus just on the word for “mother” at this point. We can be sure that the ancestral word began with M, because all the modern equivalents do. We can also be sure that the ancestral word had an R in it, because three out of the four modern equivalents do: the words in Spanish, Italian, and French. Next, we can be pretty confident that the ancestral word had a D between the M and the R, since the Spanish and Italian words do. You might be wondering at this point how we can be so sure, since the other two languages, Portuguese and French, don’t have a D in their words for “mother.” The reason is that certain kinds of sound changes are more likely to happen over time. For a D-R cluster to lose the D is a simplification, a natural kind of change. On the other hand, to insert a D before an R is a complication, and a less-common kind of change. So in the absence of further evidence, we conclude that the ancestral word for “mother” for these languages had a D-R cluster, and that two of those languages simplified it.
Now, what about the vowels? The first vowel was most likely A, since that’s what we have in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. The second vowel was most likely E, since that’s the one that appears more than any other. So the ancestral word was probably similar to the modern Spanish and Italian words: “madre.” Similar reasoning lets us conclude that the ancestral word for “father” was “padre.”
Of course, we don’t have to go to all that trouble, because we know from written history that all the places in Europe where these languages were originally spoken were part of the Roman Empire, and that Latin was the language spoken across the Empire. That’s actually why they are called Romance languages--because they were spoken in the Roman Empire. In fact, we know from written documents that the Latin word for “mother” actually had a T in the middle instead of a D--it’s “māter,” remember?--but now we can conclude that somewhere along the way from Latin to its daughter languages, that T turned into a D.
However, the surprising thing about the techniques for reconstructing ancestral languages is that they can work even when we don’t have written records of the ancestral language. How is that even possible?
How Do We Know Our Reconstructed Words Are Real?
It’s one thing to reconstruct ancient words when you have written texts that can confirm your reconstructions, as Latin texts can do for the Romance languages. But how can linguists know that their reconstructed words in Proto-Indo-European are anything close to reality? Well, in many cases, they disagree. For example, they still haven’t agreed on a precise reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European word for “horse,” even though it’s clear that Proto-Indo-European had such a word. However, a striking and unexpected discovery in the early 20th century gives linguists confidence in the method. (1)
In 1879, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was reconstructing a set of verbs in Proto-Indo-European that formed different tenses by using a process called ablaut. We actually have ablaut in English, with verbs that change their vowels such as “sing-sang-sung,” and “write-wrote-written.” Anyway, de Saussure found that he could collapse two families of Proto-Indo-European ablaut verbs into a single family if he assumed that there used to be a consonant in a certain position in some of these verbs. Unfortunately, whatever this consonant was, it did not exist in any of the known Indo-European languages. His analysis didn’t go over well at all, especially since he actually proposed not just one hypothetical, mystery consonant, but two of them! Some reconstructed verbs had one, and some had the other. If he could do that in his reconstruction, what couldn’t he propose?
Had de Saussure not died in 1913, he might have had the last laugh. Two years after his death, Bedrich Hrozny [sorry, I have no idea how to pronounce this name] deciphered the writing system for Hittite, the language spoken almost four millennia ago in what is now Turkey, and it turned out that Hittite was an Indo-European language--nearly the oldest one to have been written! (2) Moreover, it was later shown that Hittite verbs had consonants exactly where de Saussure had put them, confirming his outlandish reconstructions. (3) We still don’t know exactly what those consonants sounded like, though.
The ‘Discovery’ of Proto-Indo-European
The discovery of the Indo-European language family happened a century before de Saussure proposed his mystery consonants--and maybe even earlier, depending on whom you believe. The story of its discovery is famous among linguists. Like many famous stories, it’s not entirely true, but we’ll start with the popular version. It begins with Sir William Jones, a British judge in Calcutta, India, in the late 1700s, who knew a lot of languages. In particular, he knew Latin and Greek, having had a classical education in England, and he had also learned the ancient Indian language Sanskrit, because that was the official language in the courts he would be working in. During his years in India he gave an annual talk to a club he had helped found, called the Royal Asiatic Society. In the third of these annual talks, he discussed the origin and history of the people of India, and in one famous passage talked about a common ancestral language for Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. He said that the Sanskrit language was so similar to Latin and Greek that, in his words, “no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” (4)
A philologer, in case you’re wondering, is someone who studies language in its written form, and in fact, Jones’s remarks about Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit have become known as “the philologer passage.” The philologer passage is usually credited with kicking off a century of research and discoveries showing that not only were Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit linguistic cousins to each other, but also that many other languages originating in Europe, Asia Minor, and the Indian subcontinent were in that same family. This geographic distribution is what gave this family of languages its name, with “Indo-“ coming from “Indos,” the Greek word for India.
To get an idea what Jones was talking about, let’s take our example of the words for “mother” and “father” again. Remember that the Latin word for “mother” is “māter,” and the Ancient Greek is “mētēr.” In Sanskrit, the word is “mātr.” The Latin word for “father” is “pater” (“PAH-ter”); in Ancient Greek it’s “patēr” (“pah-TARE”); and in Sanskrit, it’s “pitr.” Many other such similarities can be found.
English’s Place in the Indo-European Family
So how does English fit into this picture? English is a member of the Germanic language subfamily, which also includes Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and German, as well as Gothic, a language that was last spoken more than 1,000 years ago. (5) One of the main changes that distinguish Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages is a pattern known as Grimm’s Law. It’s named after Jakob Grimm, who was one of the Brothers Grimm, famous for their collection of European folk tales. But he was also a philologer, and in the 1820s, he published a grammar of German, and in that grammar he described a pattern of several systematic sound changes that happened in the dialect of Proto-Indo-European that eventually became Proto-Germanic. (6) This is another language that was never written, but it’s the language from which all our modern Germanic languages developed. One of those changes involved the sounds P, T, and K, and in particular, we’re interested in the P sound. As the Proto-Germanic language began to split off from Proto-Indo-European, its speakers began to pronounce P as F. So while the Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit words for “father” begin with P, the word in English and other Germanic languages begins with an f sound. In German, it’s “Vater" (“fah-teh”); in Swedish, it’s “far”; and in Gothic, it’s “fadar.”
This P-to-F sound didn’t just affect the Proto-Indo-European word for “father.” One of the amazing discoveries that early historical linguists made is that sound changes eventually affect every word that has the relevant sound. This is why English has the word “fish” where Latin has “piscis”; “fire” where ancient Greek has “pyr-“; and “foot” where Latin has “ped-“ and Greek has “pod-.”
In addition to the Germanic subfamily, some other main subfamilies of Indo-European are the Celtic languages, including Welsh, Irish and Scots Gaelic; the Slavic languages, such as Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Croatian, and Macedonian; and the Indo-Iranian languages, which include Persian, Dari, and Pashto, as well as Sanskrit and all of its descendant languages, such as Hindi, Bengali, and Nepali.
Where Did the Original Proto-Indo-European Speakers Live?
With such a wide geographic range of Indo-European languages, it’s natural to wonder where the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European lived. This isn’t entirely settled, but the most widely believed scenario is that they lived about 5,000 years ago in the area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, in the present-day region of Russia that lies between Ukraine to the west, and Kazakhstan to the east. (7) Some of the words that have been reconstructed in Proto-Indo-European tell us a bit about these people’s culture. For example, they must have used wheels, because several Indo-European languages have a word for “wheel” or “circle” that allow us to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European word for it. In Old English, our word “wheel” was “hweogol,” and if you run that through Grimm’s Law and the other known sound changes in reverse, you arrive at “kwekwlos” as the Proto-Indo-European word. (8) In Greek, this word developed into the word “kuklos,” which you might recognize as the Greek root that we pronounce as “cycle.” In Latin, it shows up as “circus.” The Proto-Indo-European word “kwekwlos” is even the source of the Sanskrit word for “wheel,” “chakra,” which we’ve borrowed into English as a piece of yoga-related vocabulary--along with the word “yoga,” too.
A More Modern Take on the Proto-Indo-European Story
I said earlier that the story of William Jones and the discovery of Proto-Indo-European wasn’t entirely true. In an article published in 2006, linguist Lyle Campbell pointed out several problems with this story. (9) First of all, Jones incorrectly classified several languages, such as Arabic, as Indo-European languages. Furthermore, he didn’t classify several other languages as Indo-European that some of his contemporaries correctly did, such as the Slavic and Germanic languages. Not only that, but even for some of the languages that he did correctly include, his reasoning was unsound, and not acceptable in modern linguistics. And finally, he wasn’t even the first one to propose a common ancestral language for Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. That idea had been around for at least 100 years, and the relationship between these languages really is so obvious that it didn’t require modern comparative linguistic techniques to make the call.
Even so, in the more than 200 years since Jones’s remarks, the comparative method has helped establish not only the Indo-European family of languages, but many other language families of the world too.
Sources
1. Hock, Hans Henrich. 1991. Principles of Historical Linguistics, 2ed. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 545-550.
2. Hock, Hans Henrich, and Joseph, Brian D. 1996. Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. p. 96.
3. Hock 1991, pp. 545-550.
4. Jones, Sir William. 1786. “The third anniversary discourse, delivered 2d February, 1786: on the Hindus”, Asiatick Researches 1, 415-431. (cited in Campbell 2006)
5. Bennett, William H. 1980. An Introduction to the Gothic Language. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.
6. Hock and Joseph 1996, pp. 39-40.
7. “Kurgan hypothesis.” Wikipedia. http://ift.tt/180hVPM. Accessed 25 October 2017; last edited 25 October 2017
8. Hock and Joseph 1996, p. 469.
9. Campbell, Lyle. 2006. “Why Sir William Jones got it all wrong, or Jones’ role in how to establish language families.” International Journal of Basque Linguistics and Philology (ASJU) 50, 245-264.
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