Portugal and India share a lot of common history
ever since Vasco Da Gama’s voyage, but what may come as a surprise is that the Portuguese language
already shared many similarities to the numerous languages spoken in India, including inflection,
word structure, pronunciation, and vocabulary. Languages constantly change and adapt, but in the
case of Portuguese, Hindi, Farsi, Latin, Greek, English, Polish, and many others, there is only
one common ancestor, which binds them all into a single family. Welcome to the first video on
the evolution of the Indo-European languages.
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For millions of years, evolution was
the main pathway of human development, as genetic information was passed down from one
generation to the next. It was that same force, which gave humans very unique tools, which we used
to climb the food chain, such as opposable thumbs, sweating, and larger brains. Then suddenly
the ability to make complex sounds and more importantly, the acute sensitivity to comprehend
speech ushered in the development of languages, which allowed us to pass knowledge at a
speed that dramatically surpassed evolution. Languages to this day remain an essential part of
our everyday life, as they help us communicate, express ourselves and define our identity.
Over the years thousands of languages have gone extinct, and yet there are still over 7100 of them
divided into 142 families. The largest among them, spoken by 3.2 billion people or 46% of the world’s
population is the Indo-European language family.
The story begins with the incredibly influential
Yamnaya culture at around 4000 BC in the Pontic Steppe of modern day Ukraine. Its people were
semi-nomadic pastoralists who domesticated cattle, dogs, and above all horses. This is where the
oldest discovered wheels were uncovered, as well as burial sites that show one of the earliest
forms of ownership. Compared to the widespread communal tombs we find in most societies, the
Yamnaya burial pits belonged to clans, families, or even individuals, sometimes buried with entire
wagons. Combined with the fact that they were one of the first bronze age cultures, this allowed the
Yamnaya to spread across Eurasia on their horses. This expansion was swift and aggressive, and
rather than developing their own colonies, they interbred with the local neolithic
cultures spreading their genes, as well as their Proto Indo-European language.
In time, the speakers of this language became isolated from each other and regional dialects
developed into their own daughter languages, a process that continues to this day. Using the
comparative method, linguists and archeologists were able to reconstruct the original ancestor
vocabulary, despite the fact that it was never written down. In fact, the words for writing,
sea, and iron are vastly different across the many Indo-European languages, since those
concepts arose after the original migration. However, the words that were commonly used
by the Yamnaya people, were nearly identical across Latin, Germanic, Ancient Greek,
Hittite, Slavonic, Avestan, and Sanskrit.
On your screen, you can see how the cognate
words for family remained mostly the same across Indo-European sister languages, including words
for family members: Mother -Father-Brother-Sister. This is also the case for various verbs
describing actions that were fundumental to the lifestyle of the Yamnaya people, like
Sew-Cloth-Eat-Drink-Carry-Give-Die. The same can be said about various objects, animals,
and particularly the word wine, among them: Tooth-Bone-Eye-Night-God-Water-Fire-Tree-New-Young-Pig-Sheep-Beaver -Honey-Brew -Wine . One of the very first things
we learn in a new language are the pronouns and basic numbers and yet again we see that both are
shared throughout the various different cultures: I-You-We- As well as the
numbers from one to ten.
Languages and pronunciations changed as they
grew apart and interacted with each other, as well as other languages outside the
Indo-European family, adding and exporting loan words, but the writing that these various
cultures developed hints at their shared origin. The comparisons between the Greek god Zeus
and Roman god Jupiter are often discussed, but in reality, both of those gods are adaptations
of the original Yamnaya god Perkwunos the Striker, a concept also shared in Hittite culture as
Tarhuna, in the Thracian tribes as Zibelthiurdos, while Dacian tribes knew him as Gebeleizis,
Albanian culture groups knew him as Perendi. Baltic mythology has Perkunas, Slavic people
knew him as Perun, Celtic tribes as Taranis, while the Norse people split the singular concept
into Thor and Odin, Anglo-Saxon mythology knew him as Thunor, and Hindu people initially believed
that Indra was the king of the heaven and thunder. Additionally, the very concept of an
overarching conflict between Rain and the Sun, Water and Fire, Man versus Beast most likely
arose from the Proto-Indo European legends.
While it is easier to imagine the various
subgroups of the Proto Indo-European as separate branches, it is more accurate to
view them as waves, that constantly moved and interacted with each other and others. That being
said, the first major branch we will look at is Italic, a language that spread alongside Celtic,
until the Alps split the two around 1500 BC. By 300 BC the language was fighting for
survival against its Celtic, Illyrian and Greek neighbors who dominated the north and
even eliminated the Sicel branch in Sicily, with only Faliscian, Umbrian, Oscan, and Venetic
remaining. And then suddenly the Roman Republic rose from obscurity and spread the Latin language
across the Mediterranean and western Europe like wildfire, obliterating all other Italic and
most of the Celtic languages in the process.
The Latin language itself had two variants,
classical Latin, which was the formal language and Vulgar Latin, which Cicero describes as
“the speech of the masses”. A standardized and universal language in the Empire, one that
brought status and economic opportunity was one of the tools that allowed the Romans to establish
themselves as a military and cultural powerhouse. However due to the size of the Empire, many
regions began developing a distinct dialect, unique to the province and when Rome fell,
those dialects evolved into their own languages, ushering in the dawn of the Romance languages. The
subdivisions of Romance include the now-extinct British, Pannonian, and African Romance languages,
Sardinian which is an incredibly conservative language, Romanian , and finally one of the most
dominant subdivisions: Western Romance, featuring Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
To simplify what could be its own video, each of these languages underwent significant
changes throughout the middle ages, as various feudal states and dynasties struggled
for power internally and externally. This resulted in dozens of dialects within each
language , but if we draw a line between any two points between these countries, the further
you go, the harder it is to understand the local language. But as the middle ages came
to a close and states became more centralized, rulers selected the dialect of their hometown and
emphasized its use, a process mirrored in every other branch. The Castillian kings choose
Castillian as the foundation for Spanish, discouraging the use of Galician, Leonese, Basque
, and Catalan, and eliminating Mozarabic, and this process was finalized by the so-called Catholic
monarchs - Ferdinand and Isabella, who understood the efficiency of using just one language to rule
their realm. The French kings ruling from Paris chose the langue d'oïl, spoken in the north,
rather than Occitan or Franco-Provencal, as king Francis I formalized this in 1539 with
the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts , which was also aimed against the power of the
Occitan nobles and Catholic church.
The unification of Italy occurred
much later, but a similar process ensued after the Tuscan dialect was
chosen as the foundation of Italian. Modern day Italy could give us a glimpse
of what other countries looked like as there are numerous local dialects with
varying degrees of differences between them. For example, an Italian from Florence is more
likely to understand a person speaking in Spanish rather than another Italian from Sicily .
Nationalism, education and literature are always major drivers of standardization and helped shape
languages within a certain state, but given enough time and isolation, speech can alter dramatically,
even if the writing system remains the same. That is exactly what we see in the colonies of
the Romance languages: Mexico, Quebec, and Brazil all share the languages of their founders, but
they also developed their own unique features.
The next major branch we will review is
Proto-Greek , which arrived in northern Greece around the 3rd millennium BC. The first
stage of its evolution saw the rise of Mycenaean Greek as the dominant language of the region, with
its very own writing, which we now call Linear B. But neither would survive the fall of the
Mycenaean civilization in the 12th century BC, instead around the same time the Greek alphabet
was created, based on the Phoenician alphabet, with a few added letters. It was this same
alphabet, which would deeply influence the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic and Gothic alphabets. Armed
with one of the first written systems, Greek colonists settled the coasts of France, Italy,
Anatolia, and the entire Black Sea, but despite using the alphabet, rival dialects competed for
dominance. As you may have guessed this rivalry was mostly between the Greek city-states of Athens
and Sparta. Despite the popularity of the Spartan Doric Greek in the mainland, Crete, and Sicily
and military victory over Athens, the Ionic Greek won the cultural war, thanks to the works of
Homer, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and others. And thus Classical Greek became the staple of
Greek culture and would contribute to numerous loan words, present in many other languages
today. The next crucial figure in this story is Alexander the Great himself, who spread the
common version of the language called Koine with his conquests and firmly established it in Greece,
as well as inner Anatolia, Egypt, and India. This was the language in which the New Testament
was written. Despite centuries under Roman rule, the prestige of the language with its deeply
embedded written form, allowed it to avoid the Celtic fate, and when the West collapsed
Koine Greek transformed into Medieval Greek, spoken in the Eastern Roman Empire. By this point,
there was a huge disparity between the Classic and spoken versions of the language, with the
former being used primarily in court and writing. The fall of Constantinople, triggered many
events, one of which was the transformation of both of these languages. The spoken Medieval Greek
turned into Demotic Greek meaning by the people and the written language called Katharevousa,
which added some elements of the spoken language, but mostly resembles Classical Greek. The
substantial differences in both languages made daily transactions incredibly confusing and
this problem persisted for centuries, until it was finally solved in 1976, when Demotic Greek
was made the official language still used today. As for Doric Greek, it is spoken by only a few
hundred elderly people in Southern Greece and is expected to become extinct in the coming years.
It took a significant amount of time for Proto-Germanic to expand beyond a small area
in North Europe, during which it already split into three distinct dialect s: East, West and
North . We know very little about the early stage of this branch, as it used a runic
writing system, usually carved on trees. But as the Roman Empire fell, the most famous
language from the eastern dialect spread all over Europe. Gothic was incredibly influential and
left a lasting mark on the continent, despite the fact that it would eventually become extinct.
The North dialect, which we now call Old Norse was also very popular due to the Viking era. It
would create west and east variants of its own from which modern Icelandic, Norwegian,
and then Danish and Swedish descended. It is important to note that Icelandic stands out
as a very conservative language, which has more in common with Old Norse than any of them, once
again outlining the important role of geography.
During the first millenium BC, Celtic was the
lingua franca of Western and Central Europe, largely due to the dominant Urnfield culture.
As the branch spread it split into various other forms like Lepontic, Celtiberian, Gaulish,
Galatian and others. However the rise of the Roman Republic would lead to the extinction of all
continental Celtic languages. The few surviving speakers migrated to the British isles, forming
what is known as the Insular Celtic languages, further divided in Goedelic languages, featuring
Irish, Scottish and Manx Gaelic and Brythonic languages, featuring Breton , Cornish and Welsh.
Despite being so closely connected to each other, the two groups are not intelligible. Each
of these languages struggled to endure the centuries of deliberate censorship and
oppression from various states. In total there are just under 1 million speakers of the
Celtic languages, with half of them being Welsh. In the 19th century Cornish came very close
to joining Pictish and Cumbric in extinction, but has since undergone a revival and now boasts
a few hundred speakers. The Celtic language group stands as a clear example of how politics can
affect culture in incredibly impactful ways.
Lastly, we have West Germanic, which spread
towards areas disconnected from each other by forests, mountains, wide rivers, and the English
channel. Naturally, this split the language into four notable branches: Old High German, Old Low
German, Old Low Franconian, and Anglo-Frisian, which will inevitably form German, Dutch and
English. The evolution, development and spread of each of these languages are very interesting,
but extends far beyond the scope of this video, so we will just share one interesting
fact about each of them. The Gutenberg printing press and the Luther Bible set the
foundation of a standardized German language, which was essential in the later unification
process. When we look at places like Iceland, Albania or Sardinia it is easy to understand
why those languages are conservative, yet despite having few natural defenses and
being surrounded by more powerful states, the Dutch language is incredibly conservative.
English is a member of the Germanic language family, yet only 26% of its vocabulary is
Germanic, 29% of it is French, and 29% is Latin.
Alongside these four major branches, there are
several others, which we would love to cover in futures videos including the Balto-Slavic,
Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Albanian, not to mention the now extinct Anatolian, Phrygian, Dacian,
and Tocharian. Each of these language groups has a fascinating story as it changed throughout
the years and under different regimes. The languages spread around the world, while other
language groups left a lasting impact on them, particularly Arabic, Turkic, and Hungarian. Like
this video and share it with your friends if you want us to delve deeper into the field of
historical linguistics and tell us which branch or language family deserves an entire
video with more details.
I saw this video. Was kind of disappointed by it honestly, since it only goes over the European branches and doesn't even touch Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan.
Most of the maps are wrong concerning historical languages in Gaul then France : about Aquitanian language, extent of occitano-romance languages, etc...
Title is Indo-European, but it is mostly European. I guess it is a decent Pop-Edu video that gives an overview.