The Proto-Indo-European Puzzle: Interview with Laura Spinney

All right, Laura Spinney, welcome to Words for Granted.

Thanks, Ray.

It's a pleasure to be here.

So we are about to get into one of my favorite topics, which is Proto-Indo-European.

I'm sure that many listeners of this show have at least some familiarity with this language, with the, the people who spoke this language.

But for those who may not, and even for those who do who might need a refresher, my first question to you is what was Proto-Indo-European?

Okay, so proto means first from Greek, and Indo-European is the name we give to a family of languages that, as its name would suggest, spans, uh, it spanned, even in the ancient world, uh, many of the languages of Europe and, uh, further east towards the subcontinent.

In fact, at one point in time, even further east than that.

Today, there are about four hundred living Indo-European languages and dialects, but there have been many more, and it's considered the largest family of languages on Earth today, whether you measure that by the number of speakers or by geographical spread.

So it's, it's huge.

Proto-Indo-European is the presumed last common ancestor of all those living languages and many of the dead ones too.

It is thought to have been spoken before writing was invented and even to have died before writing was invented.

It certainly died before it was written down.

So it is, technically speaking, a hypothetical language.

We can't prove directly that it existed, but linguists, uh, basically agree that it probably did.

You can talk about different forms of it, different dialects, whether what we're con-- reconstructing when they try to reconstruct this language is one real language that was actually spoken or a sort of amalgam of different dialects that were spoken by different groups at different times.

But, uh, the bottom line is that something called that was probably spoken, and in a way, it's needed to explain the relationships between the descendants that are recognized today.

Right.