Latest news with #LauraSpinney
RNZ News
30-05-2025
- General
- RNZ News
Proto: an ancient language, mother to many tongues
Photo: HarperCollins Thousands of miles apart, people who speak English, Icelandic or Iranic use more or less the same words: star, stjarna, stare. All three of these languages - and hundreds more - share a single ancient ancestor, spread by ancient peoples far and wide. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. But, Proto Indo European is a language that has been dead for thousands of years and was never written down. British science journalist Laura Spinney's epic tale Proto - How One Ancient Language Went Global retraces its steps. Spinney has written for the New Scientist, The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph. She speaks with Susie.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
At Its Beginnings, Only a Handful of People Spoke This Language. It's the Origin of Every Word You Say.
The most successful version of the most powerful tool humanity has ever created was born in a place where war now rages. That tool is human language, without which we would never have achieved the social organization and transmission of knowledge that have made us masters of the planet. Although the tongue called Proto-Indo-European hasn't been used in 4,000 years, about half Earth's inhabitants speak its more than 400 descendant languages: English, the Romance languages of Europe, the Slavic and Baltic languages, the Celtic languages of Wales and Ireland, Armenian, Greek, and languages spoken in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. The explosion of Proto-Indo-European from its origins in Eastern Ukraine—the subject of science journalist Laura Spinney's beguiling and revelatory new book, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global—is, according to Spinney, 'easily the most important event of the last five millennia in the Old World.' It's astonishing how much we've discovered about these languages that have gone unspoken and unheard for millennia. In the past two decades, new DNA analysis technologies, combined with archaeological advances and linguistics, have solved many mysteries surrounding the spread of the Proto-Indo-European (or PIE). For example, Anatolian, a now-extinct group of languages, was once thought to be the earliest offshoot of PIE, the first instance in which a new language split off from the mother tongue. But in recent years, genealogical analysis of human remains from the period shows no genetic connection between the people who spoke the Anatolian languages and the Yamnaya, a people of the Pontic–Caspian steppe region north of the Black Sea—now considered the source of PIE. The presiding theory now is that Anatolian isn't the daughter of PIE, but its sister, with both being the products of an even more ancient lingua obscura. If this sounds a bit wonky, well, it is. Tracing the triumphant spread of PIE-derived languages from Central Asia through Europe and the Indian subcontinent, and even to one fascinating outpost in the ancient Far East, is a matter of comparing syllable sounds and consonant pronunciations and following them through a bewildering maze of obscure outposts in unfamiliar places inhabited by long-lost peoples. Fortunately, Spinney is a stylish and erudite writer; it's the rare science book that quotes Keats, Seamus Heaney, and Ismail Kadare. She also has a keen sense of the romance of her subject. Her vivid scene-setting takes us from the vast, grassy steppes where the nomadic Yamnaya grazed the livestock whose meat and milk made them exceptionally tall and strong to the perplexing Tocharian culture on the western border of China—whose capital was regarded by the Chinese as filled with 'heavy-drinking, decadent barbarians,' famed for its dancing girls and 'the flock of a thousand peacocks upon which its nobles liked to feast.' This latter culture—and not Sanskrit, as was long thought—may even be the source for the English word 'shaman.' PIE itself is a reconstructed or 'deduced' language, with no living speakers, although if you want to hear one adventurous man's attempt to voice it, you can listen to a translation of the Lord's Prayer on YouTube. The prayer is a good choice of text for this experiment because it doesn't contain words for which the Yamnaya were unlikely to have counterparts or that linguists haven't been able identify. The reconstructed lexicon of Proto-Indo-European has only about 1,600 words, and at its dawn the language may have been spoken by as few as 100 people—people who didn't need words for such exotica as, for example, bees. Spinney illuminates the way that languages reflect the material reality of the world in which they are spoken. 'Hotspots of linguistic diversity,' she writes, 'coincide with hotspots of biodiversity, because those regions can support a higher density of human groups speaking different languages.' These are the places where the speakers of different languages are most likely to borrow words from each other, leaving clues to their encounters for later generations of scholars. Historical linguists were able to map the epic trek of the Roma people from India to the West by the vocabulary they picked up along the way, such as words for honey and donkey taken from the Persians. After the Hittites conquered the Hattian people in central Anatolia, Hittite myth, according to Spinney, portrayed 'the two peoples as equal partners' in the social order that followed. But while the Hittites borrowed some words from Hattian (a non-Indo-European tongue), over time, Hattian was more deeply transformed, moving from placing verbs at the beginning of a sentence to placing them at the end, as the Hittites did. This suggests, Spinney writes, 'that the Hittites retained the upper hand.' Genetic evidence has also revealed that while the Yamnaya did not venture all that far from the steppes where they domesticated horses and ate tulip bulbs, their more aggressive successors, the Corded Ware Culture (named for their distinctive style of pottery), carried the PIE languages all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. In much of Europe, this advance resulted in, as Spinney writes, 'an almost complete replacement of the gene pool,' in particular the male chromosome. The Corded Ware men 'had bred with local women and prevented local men from passing on their genes,' she explains; 'Rape, murder, even genocide could not be ruled out.' However, a group of Danish scientists now believe that the replacement was not necessarily intentional—that plagues swept through Europe in the Late Neolithic period, diseases to which the newcomers from the steppes were resistant. In a related mystery, the population of Ireland is one of the few in Europe that has been genetically consistent since the Bronze Age, yet somehow Ireland also adopted (and still strives to preserve) Gaelic, its own Indo-European language. Usually genetic and linguistic change go hand in hand, but in this case, not. Multilingualism predominated in the ancient world, where you might need different tongues to chat with your neighbor, perform religious rituals, and trade with the metal workers upriver. Monolingualism is a modern phenomenon, one Spinney links to the concept of the nation-state. Though in the 21st century humans move greater distances even more easily, languages seem to intermingle and influence one another much less than in ancient times. Spinney theorizes that 'the desire to belong is as strong as ever, and as it becomes harder to see the difference between 'them' and 'us', linguistic and cultural boundaries are being guarded more jealously.' The war currently ravaging the Yamnaya's ancestral homeland, destroying irreplaceable archaeological treasures even as it takes many lives, is, Spinney asserts, 'in part, a war over language—over where the russophone sphere begins and ends.' Putin himself has said as much. But Spinney points out that the people who spoke the primordial tongues from which Russian and Ukrainian both emerged would have regarded this project as bizarre. 'Prehistoric people undoubtedly had identities as complex and multi-layered as ours,' Spinney writes, 'but we can be sure that nowhere among the layers was the nation-state.' The more we learn about these ancestors, the more we bump up against what we don't (and shouldn't presume) to understand. They seem both close and far. Spinney describes the work of Gabriel Léger, a French artist who has restored the polish to old bronze mirrors from Greece and Rome so that they can once more reflect the faces they're held up to. 'We know that ancient people looked at themselves in mirrors,' she observes. 'We don't know what they saw.'
Mint
18-05-2025
- General
- Mint
Manu Joseph: It isn't true that every language holds secret feelings
Usually, when a person speaks a language poorly, it is a sign that they speak some other language very well. But many Indians who eat avocados cannot speak any language well. This includes English, their current dominant language that made them forget their own. I, too, have lost the ability to speak well, especially an Indian tongue, even though I used to think in both Tamil and Malayalam once. It is hard to kill an Indian mainstream language because there are so many of us, but our mother tongues have died inside us and our children do not know them at all. Yet, I am unable to mourn a dying language. This is because beyond the nostalgia of heritage, the broad reasons why people mourn the demise of a language are based on false assumptions. Also Read: Manu Joseph: How language may have conspired to keep people unfit There is a view that every language encodes a unique human emotion or a way of thinking, which cannot be decoded by another language. I want to believe this because I want there to be magic in this world, but from what I have seen, there is nothing emotionally unique about any language, and the lament about dying languages is overstated because we are afraid of death in general. Laura Spinney, whose latest book is Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, told the Indian Express recently that, 'A quarter of living languages will die." This would have brought a familiar ache to many of us. The same ache we feel when we are made to hear the sounds of the last person to have spoken a language, inevitably a poor tribal person in some remote place, or the last songs of an extinct bird, sounds that filled the forests for millions of years that vanished, never to return. The death of a language is not a trifling matter. Millions of people, for thousands of years, once loved, fought and figured stuff out in it. Then, a generation began to abandon it, or simply became another sort of people. So modern people try to 'preserve' it. Our age is defined by preservation; every dying thing must be preserved. But the true heritage of a place is made up of the things that intellectuals do not try to save, but which survive anyway—paradisiacal food, mainstream music, the clothes of a bride, even daily-wear. What goes is usually the insignia of the old elite, also known as culture, or what the masses can afford to let go. Also Read: Verbal e-volution: Language technologies are still shaping global culture A language always dies of natural causes, because it has been forsaken by its people for a more useful language. (People who want South India to adopt Hindi don't seem to get this—for many in this region, Hindi is useless.) A powerful reason why people want to preserve a language is the assumption that every language contains a way of thinking, or human feelings that are unique to it. This has spawned some esoteric overreach. Thus, we are told of an African tribe (it's always an African tribe) that refers to the future as behind it and the past as ahead of it. And we are supposed to marvel at some secret the tribe knew. But there is nothing more to it. Just as there is nothing to the fact that Hindi has the same word for tomorrow and yesterday. Some naive Anglicized writers try to see too much philosophy in what is just an etymological accident. Maybe some incompetent pundit made an error and it stuck. There is this famous view that the Inuit people of the Arctic region have hundreds of words for snow because they can see many aspects of it. That's not true. It is just that the Inuit languages are poly-synthetic, so they can make up long strings of words, like 'lightly falling snow.' Also Read: Three-language formula: Chhattisgarh offers an education case study In her book Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions, the Dutch psychologist Batja Mesquita cites words in several languages to build the argument that emotions are not entirely innate, that they are cultural artefacts, recorded in and even arising from local languages. Inevitably, Japanese comes up often in Mesquita's book. She says that the Japanese word amae, which means 'a complete dependence on the nurturant indulgence of their caregiver,' has no English equivalent. And that the Samoan word alofa, which encompasses love, sympathy and pity among other emotions, does not have an English parallel. Mesquita makes too much of such words. That we fully grasp the meaning of the foreign words she lists indicates that we know the feeling, just that we need many words to express the same feeling. For instance, 'a complete dependence on the nurturant indulgence of their caregiver.' In fact, the most useless aspect of English is that it has many words that represent elaborate feelings, but these are not widely known. Etymologist Susie Dent frequently posts such words on the social media platform X—the kind that would be marked red in your Word file. Like 'beek,' which means to bask in the pleasurable warmth of the sun, and 'apricate,' which means to sunbathe. Surely, these words don't mean anything unique to the British, especially as they never saw much of the sun even in ancient times. Also Read: Let the market pick the language on signboards What about 'jihad,' a word that seems to contain an idea of war. The word simply means 'struggle' in Arabic. Everything else about it is a metaphorical application and nothing about the word or its emotion is unique to Arabs. If there is a word that denotes an emotion or a way of thinking that only speakers of that language can achieve, please let this writer know. Like I said, I want there to be magic. The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, 'Decoupled'.
Deccan Herald
11-05-2025
- Science
- Deccan Herald
Read of the Week (May 11 to May 17)
Laura Spinney is a science journalist and writer. She is the author of the celebrated Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. Her writings have appeared in several reputed international publications.
Indian Express
09-05-2025
- Science
- Indian Express
‘Some suggest we might lose a quarter of all living languages by end of the century': Author Laura Spinney
Eight billion people speak roughly 7,000 languages worldwide. These languages are grouped into about 140 families, though most spoken ones belong to just five major groups: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, and Austronesian. However, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Old Norse, and English all trace their roots to a much older tongue: Proto-Indo-European, combining proto, meaning 'first,' with Indo-European, the name of the language family it spawned. It is this language that forms the subject of author Laura Spinney's latest book: Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (2025). According to Spinney's research, Proto-Indo-European was originally spoken by just a small group living near the Black Sea. Around 5,000 years ago, their language began to spread rapidly in all directions, fragmenting as it went. This linguistic expansion of Indo-European languages, which Spinney likens to a 'Big Bang', is central to her newest release. In an interview with Spinney discusses the inspiration behind her book, the significance of the Black Sea region and its early technologies, and the implications of a world shifting toward monolingualism. Edited excerpts: Q: What drew you to a topic that is both so weighty and widely debated? Spinney: As a science journalist, I have always been interested in language, though in the past my focus was more on its neuroscientific and psychological aspects. I became aware that the story of the Indo-European languages had been transformed by the ancient DNA revolution — which might sound surprising to those unfamiliar with this story. But the first of those languages died before they could be written down, so historical texts are no use to us when it comes to probing their origins. We call the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages Proto-Indo-European. It was the language of people who never saw their names written down. The reason that ancient DNA is so useful in this context is that, along with archaeology and historical linguistics, it can help us identify the probable speakers of Proto-Indo-European and trace them through time and space. Since migration is thought to be a major, if not the main, driver of language dispersal and change in prehistory – before writing – information about how those people moved is invaluable. Q: How central was the Black Sea region to the origins of the languages many of us speak today? Spinney: I think the consensus among experts is that the Black Sea region is where these languages were born. The language I describe as Proto-Indo-European in my book is the parent of all living Indo-European languages, as well as many that are now extinct. I make that clarification because there is an ongoing and often intense debate about what came before Proto-Indo-European — since no language appears out of nowhere. The general idea is that Proto-Indo-European, as I define it, was a language that emerged on the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas around 5,000 years ago. The debate centres on where the parent of that language was spoken, and when. Again, while much less is known about that earlier stage, the prevailing view is that it was still spoken somewhere around the Black Sea — possibly in the Volga steppe, or south of the Caucasus in the Armenian highlands. So, whether you are talking about the earlier or the later phase, the Black Sea region remains the focal point – the cradle in which these languages were born. Q: We do not often think of technology and language as connected, but how deeply intertwined are they? Spinney: I think we do not automatically see language and technology as related, but it takes just a moment's reflection to realise they clearly are — because people talk about what matters to them. They move and interact to trade in what they value. Around 6,500 years ago, in the Black Sea region, trade in copper was thriving. Copper was the first metal humans worked with, marking the start of the Copper Age. People were trading copper across the Black Sea and beyond — it was smelted in the Balkans and transported deep into the steppe, for example. Many societies around the region became involved. To begin with, those societies would have had no common language. There's no known example in human history of people trading in high-value goods without a common language. In such situations, people tend to develop a lingua franca — a shared language for commerce — and they do so surprisingly quickly. The term lingua franca comes from a later example spoken around the Mediterranean, but many experts believe a lingua franca emerged around the Black Sea during the Copper Age, and that an early Indo-European language contributed to it. Q: Would you say English is the global lingua franca for trade today? Spinney: Yes, English is definitely a lingua franca — the first and arguably the only global one, for now. Of course, that could change. People often assume language is fixed, but that's not how it works. If the geopolitical, demographic and economic situation changes, English could forfeit its dominant position in the world. Still, for the moment, English is the most widely used lingua franca. It is not the only one —Swahili and Lingala are major lingua francas in Africa, and Malay plays a similar role in parts of Asia. So, there are many, but English is currently the most prominent. Ultimately, language is a tool — possibly humanity's oldest — and we use it to create opportunities, improve our lives, and connect with others. That is why it is always changing, adapting through the brains and mouths of its speakers. Q: How essential are genetics and archaeology in tracing linguistic history? Spinney: Historical linguists have spent hundreds of years reconstructing language family trees, mainly by comparing living languages and historical ones — like Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin. They analyse vocabulary, sound, and grammar to understand how languages are related, what they share, and how they diverged from a common ancestor. However, they can only determine the relative chronology of events in a language's life. To anchor those events in chronological time, they rely on historical texts where those are available. If they are not, which is the case by definition in prehistory, they must turn to archaeology and genetics to understand who was alive and what was happening in the world. Archaeology provides critical insights by examining material culture. It reveals who lived when, where, and how, as well as their relationships to other societies, with tools like radiocarbon dating helping to establish timelines. This is invaluable for understanding the lives of ancient people, often in ways that written texts from later periods cannot. Genetics, particularly ancient DNA, offers a means of tracing ancient migrations and relationships. While we could previously track migration patterns through modern populations, we could only do so to about 10 generations or a couple of centuries back. Ancient DNA allows us to understand, in quite a detailed way, what was happening long before that. Since migration is such an important driver of language change and dispersal, knowledge about ancient diasporas is a game-changer in the study of prehistoric languages such as Proto-Indo-European. Though archaeology, genetics, and linguistics do not always align perfectly, their collaboration is powerful. Each discipline provides independent data, allowing for cross-referencing and strengthening the conclusions we draw. Q: Is language loss a phenomenon unique to modern times? Spinney: No, though the phenomenon looks different now. Starting in the Neolithic, after the invention of farming, populations grew because they were able to feed more people in a given area. As populations expanded, so did their languages. Dialects formed, and many eventually became distinct languages, leading to the birth of major language families still spoken today. In total, there are roughly 140 language families, with Indo-European being the largest. With the advent of writing and the rise of early states, about 5,000 years ago, those states typically chose one language, often that spoken by the elite, to serve as the language of administration. This led to the dominance of certain languages and the decline of smaller ones. While this process began long ago, it has accelerated in recent times. Today, we are in a unique phase where languages evolve more slowly due to factors like schooling, standardised writing, and state administration. Global trade and the internet have further reinforced the spread of certain languages, with English being the prime example, pushing smaller languages to the margins. This has led to an accelerated loss of languages. Some estimates suggest we might lose a quarter of all living languages by the end of this century—numbers that are quite alarming. We are living through a period of rapid language decline, much like the ongoing loss of biodiversity. These two trends are interconnected. While language decline has always been gradual, something more significant is happening now. Q: What are your thoughts on the push towards monolingualism by governing elites around the world? Spinney: This phenomenon largely arose with the nation-state, with Europeans especially focused on imposing a single national language. This often stems from power dynamics—it's politically advantageous for those in power to create a unified sense of identity and to present the nation as a cohesive entity. A single language makes it easier to organise people, but it does not reflect the natural state of human societies. In many parts of the world, including much of Africa, stable bilingualism or even multilingualism is the norm. In theory, there is no reason why a country cannot have an official administrative language while people continue speaking their local languages in daily life. These two can coexist harmoniously. So when authorities insist on one official language, as (US) President (Donald) Trump did with his recent order that English be the sole official language of the USA, they are largely playing a game of nationalist politics. Such top-down orders can have an impact, but they are not the only factor affecting the extent to which a language is spoken. Demography, geopolitics and popular culture play a role too. As I said, language is a tool. A given language will survive for as long as it is useful. But who knows what languages will be useful in future? There is a Darwinian parallel here with biology. A diverse gene pool tends to be a good thing because it allows a population to adapt to changing circumstances. Linguistic diversity is valuable for the same reason, and unfortunately, we are losing it quite fast. Moreover, smaller languages contain vast amounts of local knowledge and history that we stand to lose. Preserving languages for research and revitalising them are distinct processes. Reviving a language requires the full support of the community that speaks it, whereas preserving it for study can be done with research investment. Both are important, but they serve different purposes. Q: How does climate change affect languages? Spinney: Climate change has played a significant role in shaping migration patterns, particularly in prehistory, and when people moved, they carried their languages with them – at least for a while. This reconfigured the linguistic landscape, such as the spread of Indo-European languages from the Black Sea region. Today, with over 7 billion people on the planet and a worsening climate crisis, it is interesting to think about how that crisis will impact our linguistic landscape. There is no evidence yet that a refugee crisis will follow in the wake of the climate crisis, and indeed, some experts say it won't happen. However, people have always moved – and if we needed proof of that, ancient DNA has provided it in buckets. The directions of flow of migrations are also shifting in interesting ways in the modern world. So I would say that migration will continue to shape our linguistic landscape, as it always has. We have to factor in other things, like the internet and schooling and literacy – things that barely existed, if at all, hundreds of years ago. It is impossible to predict exactly what the linguistic landscape will look like in 100 to 200 years, but change is certain. In fact, I would argue that the language landscape our grandchildren know will likely differ more from ours than ours does from our grandparents', which is something to think about! Nikita writes for the Research Section of focusing on the intersections between colonial history and contemporary issues, especially in gender, culture, and sport. For suggestions, feedback, or an insider's guide to exploring Calcutta, feel free to reach out to her at ... Read More
