08-05-2025
- Science
- Wall Street Journal
‘Proto' Review: Ancient Speech, Carried Far
Roughly five millennia ago, a small band of nomads set out from their homeland around the Black Sea. On the wide-open grasslands of the steppe, they honed their skills as horsemen and herders and worshiped a god they called Father Sky. They neither erected great landmarks nor penned any texts. Yet their legacy persists, hidden within the words of the languages spoken by more than three billion people today.
In 'Proto,' Laura Spinney details the centurieslong effort to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European (PIE), what linguists believe to be the mother tongue of a diverse constellation of languages from Sanskrit to Gaelic. Ms. Spinney, a journalist whose previous book, 'Pale Rider' (2017), charted the worldwide spread and cultural impact of the 1918 influenza epidemic, here demonstrates how the language of those humble, preliterate nomads radiated across the prehistoric world and how their myths and rituals may have helped sow the seeds of modern civilization. It's a comprehensive and at times dizzying account that draws from the latest archaeological and genetic research to craft a compelling portrait of a people thought lost to time.
Thinkers from Dante to Leibniz had long noticed peculiar similarities among languages from far-flung places. But it wasn't until 1786, when William Jones, a British judge stationed in India, proposed a link among Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, that the idea of a common lingual ancestor was taken seriously. Since then, researchers have developed a hypothetical vocabulary for PIE that consists of about 1,600 word stems, which form the basis of many of our most common words. For example, 'daughter' in English, 'thugátēr' in Greek and 'duhitár' in Sanskrit are all believed to have been derived from a common PIE root that was transformed by local speech patterns over time. In this, Ms. Spinney sees 'a seam that connects east and west; a fiber stretched taut between them that thrums in all of us.'
While it's not clear precisely why PIE was able to establish such a wide domain, Ms. Spinney suggests that commerce likely played a role. 'In all of recorded history,' she writes, 'you'd be hard-pressed to find a single example of human beings trading in high-value goods without an effective means of communication.' By 4500 B.C., commodities such as gold, copper and salt were moving along a vast trade network centered on the Black Sea. PIE may have first spread thanks to its association with these valuable luxuries.
