Proto-Indo-European - Frequently Asked Questions

[@petadee5141]

Simon: “I’m not a linguist” Internet: “Yes you are.”

[@rattrap1009]

“It’s all a bit messy.” If that doesn’t sum up historical linguistics I don’t know what does.

[@Great_Olaf5]

If that doesn't sum up history I don't know what does.

[@Moses_Caesar_Augustus]

If that doesn't sum up the everything in the universe I don't know what does.

[@SJ-ym4yt]

"I apologize for the weird Angle" wow that's pretty prescriptivist against anglo-saxon

[@c.norbertneumann4986]

There is no reason to apologize for the Saxons.

[@dotdashdotdash]

They called themselves the English anyway. Anglo Saxon is a modern term that they didn’t call themselves.

[@c.norbertneumann4986]

@@dotdashdotdash The name England - Engla londe - came up in the tenth century and was first recorded in Bede's Ecclesiastical History. Before this period, England was called Britannia and was splintered in several kingdoms. The Germanic inhabitants of these kindoms did not see themselves as "English" but as Saxons, Angles, Danes or Vikings.

[@jacobandrews2663]

@@c.norbertneumann4986 no one saw themselves as "vikings" though.

[@flutterwind7686]

@@jacobandrews2663 Yah, even the sailors, some were simply seafarers, which is what the term "viking" came from in the first place.

[@nathanward8553]

Simon roper is one of the greatest independent content creators I have ever seen.

[@samharper5881]

Agreed. Simon is absolute KZbin gold.

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

Try Asha Logos, literally Godly Order.

[@TheHistocrat]

As someone who can barely speak one language, this stuff is fascinating.

[@decem_sagittae]

Histocrat pls

[@sinsemilia70]

I believe is fascinating because the linguistic itself is fascinating; also Simon is like a magnet to me - his videos are so well documented and presented and when he’s recordind nature images&sound I love those videos!

[@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714]

Pathetic. I speak english very well and my native tongue I speak perfectly, my faworite song: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rYbNeX-bntKMgsU

[@BellaFirenze]

This is the most fascinating video I've seen in a while. I am a retired professor of Romance languages and a polyglot. Mr. Roper has stated he is not a linguist. Such modesty. He is a linguist of the highest order. Thank you for your videos. Greetings from Florence, Italy. Bravissimo!

[@vaultdude4871]

¿qué lenguajes hablas?

[@BellaFirenze]

Italiano (mi lengua madre), francés, alemán, ruso, portugués, finlandés, catalán, euskera, búlgaro, árabe y hebreo. Me gustaría aprender chino mandarino y griego, pero a mi edad (82) lo dudo. Es usted muy amable en preguntarme. Mis más calurosos saludos desde Florencia, Italia.@@vaultdude4871

[@d.2605]

Your voicings are often so much better than trained linguists. A casual search of youtube makes this quite evident.

[@simonroper9218]

Thank you! Pronunciation is definitely my main area of interest, but I will make mistakes from time to time. I'm not sure if I got the pharyngeal fricative right in the sentence I read out! Nobody's corrected it yet, though, so fingers crossed

[@FreddieHg37]

I totally agree!!! I came across this channel just yesterday and I'm astounded by the wonderful content...

[@gloriascientiae7435]

mjah thats what passion does for ya i think. im a firm believer theres no such thing as talent, its just what happens when passion an effort collide

[@dwightmansburden7722]

This stuff is way beyond my comprehension, but the little bit I understand is absolutely fascinating. Love your content, Simon.

[@chadsloog9649]

You’re one of my favorite KZbinrs, I’ve learned so much from you

[@elbuggo]

You are only saying that because he is so handsome!

[@simonroper9218]

That's a lovely compliment, thank you :)

[@dorsvenabili5573]

It’s cool that you mentioned Xidnaf’s video! I loved his content so much, it’s unfortunate that he doesn’t upload anymore...

[@belstar1128]

He has gone crazy.

[@dorsvenabili5573]

belstar Whaat? What happened?

[@bacicinvatteneaca]

@@belstar1128 following for gossip

[@belstar1128]

@@dorsvenabili5573 He said we was a feminist communist brony he made a few videos here he said some strange things and eventually he stopped making videos this was all on his alt channel where he did not get many views.

[@belstar1128]

@@bacicinvatteneaca He made some videos on his alt channel a few years ago where he said he was a feminist communist brony he then made some more ridiculous videos about mlp and politics and then he quit this all happened on his alt channel with low views.

[@sean3533]

Thank you Simon for all your work on your videos. You are no small part of why I am studying linguistics today.

[@simonroper9218]

I'm glad you're taking your interest forward! Best of luck :)

[@tioy3442]

Your sideburn and mustache kinda make you look like a early 20th century European military officer to me.

[@jenniferschmitzer299]

look at the music video heathcliff

[@scarletpimpernel230]

I suspect he could fill in quite easily, both in terms of looks and acquired accent, as an extra (or more) for example in 'Breaker Morant' , 'Gallipoli', or 'A Passage to India'!

[@jenniferschmitzer299]

@@scarletpimpernel230 those movies sound suspiciously australian

[@scarletpimpernel230]

@Jennifer: Two out of three directly are! And the third of course is by famed British director David Lean-who at least used Australian actress Judy Davis in the role of Miss Quested.

[@jenniferschmitzer299]

@@scarletpimpernel230 oh!

[@ailicha1951]

This young man is amazing, Not a linguist? If he's not, I can't imagine what a linguist is!

[@simonroper9218]

What a kind comment! Thank you :)

[@addib926]

I would totally agree! And I did linguistics at uni as a part of my master’s degree in English. There are very few historical linguists who are as competent as you are - “just” being an enthusiast. Maybe you should go for a PhD in linguistics? Keep up the good work. Niche channels like yours show why KZbin can be such a great thing!

[@archonix]

Bees! You forgot bees! Not that I blame you, because it would require an obsessive focus on the fuzzy little darlings, but apiculture is generally thought to be one of the oldest, and thus most widely known, form of agriculture common to indo-european culture (alongside the equal obsession with cattle). Shared vocabulary surrounding apiculture is a pretty reliable indicator of when a particular language branched off from the PIE root.

[@t.c.bramblett617]

This gives me full blown nostalgia because I took a grad level class in Intro to PiE Studies at university as one of my electives. And I actually got an A on my term paper, which was a rarity for me (Problems in Balto-Slavic origins) lol

[@Symphing12]

I think something else that prevents the “behemoth language” hypothesis is that it would have to have united languages as far apart (geographically) as Celtic and Indic.

[@hajenso]

That's a great point.

[@catsnads01]

English is spoken in Australia, South Africa and North America, right? The distance from Western Russia to Kamchatka is comparable to the distance from Ireland to India. I mean to say that languages can spread pretty far. By the way, Indo-Europeans made it as far as Western China

[@ankurmandloi5456]

It didn't unite, it spread to different places, like how English is spoken in Australia in the far east, while also spoken in the west, in The UK and the Americas.

[@Triumph263]

@@catsnads01 Yeah but that's in the modern period. How could a late stone-age/early bronze-age civilization control that much territory? Not to mention we don't have any artifacts we can trace back to them, so they would have had to take over most of Eurasia without modern technology and also not leave anything obvious behind in the archeological record.

[@cosettapessa6417]

@@Triumph263 true

[@zaker721]

I love your content. This is something that I have been interested in since I was about 10 and first heard something about it on the radio as I was getting ready for school in the morning. I was stunned. It was like the time "before" the time we learned about in school. I felt like I was really getting to the origins with the old languages. It gave me that butterflies in the stomach sense of finding a layer under the one we had been told was the "final" layer. I'm so happy that you are out here and that I'm not alone in the world with this fascination. The awe and wonder are still just as glorious as it was that day long ago.

[@DaveTexas]

You have some of the most fascinating content available anywhere. The history of language is something our public educational systems here in the U.S. completely ignore. Thank you for taking the time to create these videos and make this subject understandable. (I like the facial hair, by the way! It looks great on you.)

[@molderman7673]

You don’t need to apologize for everything, you are not Canadian.

[@stevelknievel4183]

That may be the case, but he is English and as such will still apologise more than average.

[@jenniferschmitzer299]

@@stevelknievel4183 and stick you in the gut at the same time. noice!

[@jenniferschmitzer299]

@Doris Karloff its my married name. im a fecking brock from manchester

[@jenniferschmitzer299]

@Doris Karloff we is badgers.

[@jenniferschmitzer299]

@Doris Karloff and whats with the ramjet true lies name?

[@narutodayo]

Simon, if it's not too much trouble, in your video descriptions could you please start listing some related recommended texts? I often want to learn more about what you discuss but am not really sure where to look.

[@Iron_Heinrich]

Regarding the third question, about how we know that the similarities between Indo-European languages isn't just the result of language contact. Now I only minored in linguistics and took a very, very small number of classes related to the subject, so please take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt, but if I remember correctly one of my professors pointed out the verb conjugation in Indo-European languages. I think they were saying that all modern Indo-European languages conjugate their verbs for present and past tense, which is not something that all languages do. Language contact can result in similar vocabularies and maybe sometimes one language may pick up some new phonemes, but it would be highly unlikely for something like conjugation for tense to spready across all of these languages.

[@simonroper9218]

You're right, deep grammatical similarities are also a fantastic way to tell if languages are related :)

[@Mr.Nichan]

Just that they all have a past-present distinction is not enough for that, since that is a simple and very common feature, even if not universal, and even rarer and more specific grammatical features can definitely spread through language contact. However, there are many more and deeper similarities in the grammar, especially in the oldest attested Indo-European-Languages (Hittite, Avestan, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin), including irregularites.

[@groupvucic24]

French has the distinctive future conjugation.

[@Mr.Nichan]

@@groupvucic24 What really matters most for reconstruction is that Latin has one, since we already know that all the Romance languages are descended from some kind of Latin. I think the future tense in French and Spanish does not descend directly from the Latin future tense, but actually from an auxiliary verb construction: infinitive + habēo(conjugated), same with the conditional mood forms. Presumably the future tense in Latin was added to the PIE base in some way not unlike this. A random source on the internet (latin.stackexchange.com/questions/6484/what-is-the-origin-of-the-future-suffix-b) tells me the Latin future tense is reconstructed to have come from an auxiliary construction using a descendant of the PIE root *bʰuH- (en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/b%CA%B0uH-), which means "become", similar to how the German word "werden", with the same basic meaning, is used as the future tense auxiliary in German.

[@BastiaanvandeWerk]

Nested hierarchy - pretty much how we look at evolution of species of animals / plants.

[@dirkscheidemann3127]

Dear Simon, I love your channel. Thank you so much for your work from Germany.

[@kabeerjay7401]

Thanks, Simon! Looking forward to the big PIE video

[@SparkySywer]

> Xidnaf if he still exists Too real buddy

[@aryyancarman705]

Why did he stop uploading tho

[@jaojao1768]

He did upload stuff on his "secret channel" for quite a while after his main one, but he has stopped working on that channel too

[@qwertyTRiG]

I miss Xidnaf. I think he ran out of motivation. I can relate to that.

[@simonroper9218]

I hope he's doing alright. He was fantastic

[@qwertyTRiG]

@@Thelaretus Perhaps. No real way for us to know.

[@sterlingkuhlmann6270]

Interesting video! Always enjoy your perspective on things. Would love to hear your take on Old Hittite and how it relates to other Indo-European languages. Anyway greetings from Texas

[@mscrabson]

Yet another time when I can experience hanging out in an English yard and listen to something fascinatingly interesting.

[@cathjj840]

Garden, my dear ;)

[@alexandrbatora9674]

Wow, that quote at 6:02 gave me chills. It's like it came from Aron Ra videoclip. "The further back in time you go, the more similar living things are."

[@esetomash]

One other problem with viewing PIE as a single dialect is that it's possible that different bits and pieces of reconstructed PIE actually go back to different time periods and may not have all coexisted together (that's my very basic understanding of it).

[@OnliPhans_Kenobi]

Love what you have to say, Simon. Is there a chance you could do some commentary on the ways that a language will change in the future? I’m thinking mainly English, being the modern global language, would be the primary focus of this. For example, I’m curious how it’s entrenchment in the media, economy, & politics, along with standardized modern education may slow how it’d change. But then there’s the large factor that a majority of its speakers are ESL speakers which might drive more divergence. That plus the way it’s structure will trend to gradual change, like with regularization.

[@simonroper9218]

It's a fascinating thing to speculate on! On the other hand, there are so many variables that any prediction we make, especially in the long term, is highly unlikely to hit the mark. If we had a few written texts from the next 500-or-so years, we might be in a better position to guess at the phonological changes (and would definitely be better equipped to comment on grammatical changes), but such things are impossible for the time being!

[@alexandruianu8432]

There may have also been 2 slightly different waves as well. An earlier R1b wave - from the Don region to Anatolia via the Balkans, and a later R1a wave from the Dniepr region into Central Europe and Central Asia, then some to India, and others to Persia and Kurdistan (Mitanni).

[@OnliPhans_Kenobi]

Simon Roper Thank you for taking the time to respond! I suppose the possibilities would be quite variable that any prediction we make would look like how 19th century sci-fi writers pretended how today would be. Keep up the great work. As a fellow university student, I admire your ability to manage that and the channel!

[@Hard-Boiled-Bollock]

Watching your videos, I sometimes feel like you were born to be a link between us and the past

[@RollModel724]

The first few podcasts of “history of the English language” does a great job covering the history of PIE.

[@dashingfabrics]

Thank you for this video. This pulled some loose ends of my understanding PIE together.

[@JohnnyT0pside]

What I feel about languages, in my opinion, having been around a ton of them, and also studying some of them(I love languages obviously), and speaking a few, is that when you're studying them, you get the basics. But that's just a part of it. But it's not just about the understanding of the language. It's also about the feel/expression, cultural and religious significance of that specific language. Just a thought! Much Love Ps. I'm not an academian so I'm not the best with academic words!

[@TokiDokiNara728]

This stuff is my jam. If I had endless money, I'd go back to school for historical linguistics. Your videos are always super interesting - thank you!

[@yerdasellsavon9232]

Please do a video on the linguistics of the Celtic languages.

[@benedyktjaworski9877]

A good modern piece of literature on the dating process, arguing for the kurgan hypothesis, and also trying to date and map some of the major migrations and dialectal diversification events of PIE into major branches (like Anatolian, Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Hellenic) is **The Horse, the Wheel, and Language** by David Anthony. The book is written by an archaeologist and focuses on archaeological evidence, but it also presents and explains the linguistic data supporting the archaeological argument. Also, if I remember correctly, Anthony dates the archaic PIE even a bit earlier than you do, claiming that Anatolian speakers left the Caspian-Pontic community already about 4000 BCE (so ~6000 years ago), but then the late PIE stage (with Anatolian and Tocharian already separated, perhaps Italic and Celtic too) would be about 3000-2500 BCE. There is a nice brief summary of the timeline presented by Anthony on Wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Horse,_the_Wheel,_and_Language#Chapter_Six:_The_Archaeology_of_Language

[@paulohagan3309]

Yes, just finished reading it. Absolutely crammed with information from so many viewpoints. Though with the latest research coming in, it looks like the timeline has to be rewritten to over 8000 years ago no less. And the steppe hypothesis has just been revised too: kzbin.info/www/bejne/p3LMgKptj952Z9U&ab_channel=AncientInsights

[@mytube001]

If I ever start a band, it's going to be called "Complicated Consonant Clusters"! :D

[@celtofcanaanesurix2245]

Well I’m not sure if you look into the genetic news or evidence, but the Pontic Caspian steppe or Kurgan hypotheses is also backed up by genetic evidence, as not long after PIE was predicted to have been spoken a huge influx of people genetically similar to and likely descended from western steppe peoples replaced up to 60-70% of the DNA of Northern Europe and around 20-40% of the DNA of Southern Europe (though in Sicily and Sardinia, it’s only around 10%) as well as 10-20% of the dna of modern Indians with some isolated groups and people descended from the Brahman caste having as much as 50%

[@cravenmorehead7717]

I’m Brahmin and look very fair and have light eyes, and always had questions about dna. If I took a test would this hypothetical lineage show up alongside Indian dna?

[@MaureenLycaon]

@@cravenmorehead7717 The steppe people DNA? Yes, it should.

[@ShubhamMishrabro]

Bruh these caste dna stats is bullshit. It was taken for few people and you can't apply it for whole population.

[@ShubhamMishrabro]

@@cravenmorehead7717 nah these are very old theory and is not good. It was made to divide people. I'm brahmin but I'm brown. The thinking brahmin are more fair is bullshit

[@Haru23a]

@@ShubhamMishrabro So its likely ure ancestors was sudras or dalits but they just decided 2 call themselfes Brahmin. As we all know, what's going on in Hindustan is just messed up and unless ure BJP or Shiv Sena then why worry if ure ancestors was brown Dalits? (I am so fair I look European cos I am 24% Greek DNA btw)

[@davestockbridgeAWE]

Thank you mate. another great video.

[@ajax337]

Brilliant Simon! I can't believe you know this much at such a young age. I was born in West Virginia, USA. Then I learned spanish fluently as a 19 year old and now Russian in my 40s. This has sparked my interest in linguistics and it's become undeniable over my lifetime that these were once one language.. But it has taken years drip by drip. You've processed a fire hydrant level of information with an intellect that rivals Isaac Newton. It makes me proud to see such brilliance from a fellow Anglo Saxon. Keep bringing it!

[@mehdi-abdelalidahmani9744]

Could you do Proto-Afro-Asiatic one day? Glad I found your channel BTW. :)

[@aubemilagrosa6074]

Thoughtful as always, enjoyed the video! That being said, I wonder if anybody has some recommendations on literature tracing back the development from today's Indo-European languages to PIE (or even some hypothetical Proto-World), maybe together with some bits of history/archaeological evidence. If there isn't anything of this kind, well, somehow I feel that Simon (or the folks around him) could just be the ones to write this particular book, e. g. tracing back all the way from some obscure Cumbrian variety to PIE. Should you ever need a project to keep you busy for the next few years, feel free to use this one.

[@paulfisker]

I love this channel. So many questions answered. I am Polish, but speak also English and Norwegian. It helps to understand old languages and dialects presented here.

[@chiar0scur0]

Could you comment on the language of the nation of Georgia? I was part of a choir group in college headed by a professor whose thesis was on Georgian folk music, and we visited there for a tour. Apparently it's an exceptionally isolated and old European language, with few links to other Slavic or mainstream indo-european roots.

[@tipsydog3]

Georgian is not PIE, but Asian in origin.

[@1DMapler18]

georgian is part of the Kartvelian language family (situated mostly in the caucasus region) and it is not part of the indo european language family

[@belstar1128]

That region has many isolated unique languages that are not related to each other very strange.

[@jared_bowden]

@@belstar1128 I mean the Caucasus are a bunch of mountains, and difficult terrains like mountain ranges tend to develop lots of isolates and other "weird" languages due to difficulty transversing. Also rainforests (Papua New Guinea, the Amazon) and deserts (Central Australia, South-Central Africa).

[@sarad6627]

Excellent video and fabulous channel.

[@jenniferstone2975]

Digging the sideburns! Very nice!

[@sitas9827]

The lighting in the video was beautiful

[@ArturoStojanoff]

People who think Proto-Indoeruopean has too many consonant clusters and difficult consonants don't know about the languages of the Caucasus, which, to be honest, PIE was geographically close to in its early stages.

[@ANTSEMUT1]

Heck don't even have to go that far, many of the slavic languages have sizeable consonant clusters.

[@bacicinvatteneaca]

You're talking about people that pronounce xylo as zailo, ptero as tero, tsunami as sunami, knight as nait, psycho as saico, stein as stiin

[@jenniferschmitzer299]

and? i like pie. apple is my favourite

[@MaureenLycaon]

Which is one hypothesis why PIE has all these consonant clusters -- influence from ancient Caucasian languages. But that involves at least two assumptions: that ancient Caucasian languages were as consonant-rich as their modern descendants, *and* that the speakers of PIE were in close contact with the speakers of these languages.

[@ANTSEMUT1]

@@jenniferschmitzer299 lol.

[@lagomoof]

The R sound is the sound that seems to me to be preserved best from PIE to its modern descendents. For example, the name of the number 4 generally still has an R in it whichever modern Indo-European language it is one might speak.

[@intrograted792]

Most non-American English accents are non-rhotic though. The R in a lot of words, like four, isn't pronounced.

[@vukashin88]

N in one is pretty much preserved in most all indoeuropean languages.

[@Nosirrbro]

@@intrograted792 It still exists phonemically as vowel length in the majority of those dialects

[@1DMapler18]

@@intrograted792 considering the history of english, the non rhotic R is a pretty recent phenomenon

[@simonroper9218]

@@Nosirrbro I'd say that sort of depends on how you analyse it. At least in southern English accents, you could argue for a court-caught merger in which the disappearance of the rhotic in 'court' is phonemicised. I would say that in that case, there's little reason to analyse the rhotic as still being there, other than orthographic/etymological reasons. Having said that, you could argue that speaker perception factors into it, and that many people might still analyse it as having an 'r' in it in speech. Word-finally, it's made abit more complicated by the linking R in some non-rhotic dialects.

[@nurmihusa7780]

So you’re getting your degree in a different field and yet you talk a great deal and knowledgably about historical linguistics. This is not a problem. You may someday discover that linguistics is going to be your major area of interest - or not. You’re young and you just keep learning everything that interests you and at the age of 60 you might discover you’re an expert in some yet unknown field. This is a good thing. And. How. It’s. Supposed. To. Be.

[@harveypotts2432]

Archaeology and linguistics don't seem to be so disparate to be honest. Maybe he'll discover an ancient dictionary

[@flannerypedley840]

I found this really helpful to think of protoeuropean as being a point in time and place

[@mananself]

I’d like to see a “proto Romance language” that’s reconstructed from the Romance languages, and how that compares with the historically documented dialects. Has this need done? Any reference?

[@samgyeopsal569]

Bruh proto Romance language is literally just vulgar Latin 💀 And it’s already pretty well documented.

[@oldfrend]

romance in this case doesn't mean kisses and poems - it means 'of the Romans' and of course they spoke Latin. so proto-romance is literally just common latin.

[@mananself]

@@samgyeopsal569 thanks for replying. The point here is not to learn the Latin language. If we want to learn Latin, we can learn from the well documented version. The point is that we can use the comparative reconstruction method to get the latest common ancestor of the existing Romance languages. That’s what I mean by Proto romance. Then we can check if this theoretically constructed language is close to the historically documented one or not. The purpose is to validate the reconstruction method. After I made my comment above, I found the Wikipedia page called “Proto-Romance language” and its meaning is exactly what I said. Researchers did this study and have been updating it based on new comparative methods. One can go check there if they are interested.

[@davib.franco7857]

That's exactly what I was thinking since the latin is probably the most preserved ancient language that has roots with a modern language. Thanks for sharing this information

[@abruemmer77]

How many people you think were speaking the last common PE language and when did the later languages split from it?

[@robertgotschall1246]

I have no formal background in linguistics. I was a biology major intrested in evolution primarily. I only began to study PIE while on a newsgroup called TALK.ORIGINS that discussed evolution versus creationism. The evolution of languages was often used to explain how orginisms evolved. It is interesting that the arguments brought up here seem to resemble the kinds of things creationist used.

[@GSteel-rh9iu]

Simon's voice is like a healing balm on the ears! Hunter gatherers could have vast ranges (pre-contact Shoshone people the whole Great Basin area); people can choose their prestige language and forget others: the Mughals in India adopted Persian in court and forgot about Uzbeck. Language is always changing. All these things put together make it hard to wrap ones head around. Thank you Simon!

[@mattparker9726]

0:19 oh good! Those are my favorite.

[@chrissammis3521]

Hey Simon! I have a bit of a request/ suggestion for a video that I know would help myself and at least some of your subscribers. I was thinking of a sort of “linguistics vocabulary and terminology list” where you could hopefully get into the definitions and relevance of terms like pharyngeal fricatives, syntax, phonology, palatalization, dialect vs. accent etc. I am familiar with some of these concepts per my limited voice and diction training as an (American) actor, though I know these definitions would be useful to me in understanding some of the concepts you cover. I think that would be great! Am I just being lazy? Anyway, many thanks for all you do, I am always looking forward to the next video. Peace

[@jayarava]

I would have thought that historical comparative linguistics was more focussed on grammar than phonology. Noun and Verb endings in Latin, Greek, Old Indic, and Old Iranian were the first clues to a common mother tongue. The cognate words were just the icing on the cake (and are often obscured).

[@goosegirl941]

That golden hour lighting 👌 very nice

[@earlystrings1]

Exceeding interesting and thank you! An interesting follow on would be ways that Indo-European languages have been written. Why, for example are we using a Semitic writing system and what others of different origins do we know of?

[@jared_bowden]

I've been taken into researching the evolution of alphabets recently; from what I can tell, writing is something that is really non-intuitive and takes a long time to develop, but once it's around it can be adopted by another language easily: this means that writing tends to spread out from a central point rather than evolve on its own; even when alphabets _are_ invented from scratch, they tend to be done by people who already know that writing is, at least, a thing you can do. The earliest writings in an IE language are that of Hittite, which was written in cuneiform that was common in the middle-east at the time; cuneiform originates from the isolate Sumerian language. I guess the reason why the Phoenician alphabet and its children became so dominate is that they are relatively simple, with only around 2 dozen symbols that can be adopted to other sounds as a language sees fit.

[@cathjj840]

@@jared_bowden Thank you ,Jared. I love how you explained this, fleshing out some much vaguer musings on my part. I often say (because I'm a pedant and tend to interject such things into ordinary conversations), that just about anyone can be taught to read, but inventing writing, is quite another matter (a whole 'nother kettle of fish (pesce, if you prefer)). To conceive of such a thing, even perceive a need for it, must necessarily have been a very rare occurence, dependent on both particular persons' aptitudes and particular contexts of their lives and societies, both uncommon alone much less concommittant. And then, it has to stick!

[@wiros8101]

I've searched all your videos, but couldn't find the answer to my questions, such as: how did you learn PIE, how much do PIE experts know? Could we learn enough to be considered fluent( I believe 5,000 words is fluency)? Of course if a passing fellow subscriber sees this I'd like your take.

[@PrenonNon0]

Please turn on the automatic subtitles again!

[@scimatarpictures]

Absolutely smashing channel 👍🏻 thanks

[@martinpugh972]

Loving your county flag pic 👍

[@scimatarpictures]

@@martinpugh972 thank you! I think it’s a cracking piece of design

[@BluJean6692]

I never understood why it was written that way thank you!

[@joshuahillerup4290]

What gets me is we actually have writing from other languages that were around well before PIE was a thing.

[@vukashin88]

Being a pastoral semi-nomadic warrior culture does that to your culture.

[@belstar1128]

Fun fact there are still a few languages today that are still spoken but where never written down.

[@jared_bowden]

This is why The Afro-Asiatic Family is so much older than all the other known Language families: a lot of those earliest writings that we understand were in Afro-Asiatic Languages (like ancient Akkadian and especially Ancient Egyptian, which itself is probably older than PIE), which gives them enough data to be able to extrapolate Proto-Afro-Asiatic back to about 10,000 years old. Even the top-level branches of Afro-Asiatic (like Semitic) are significantly older than PIE and other Proto-Languages. The Earliest writing we have in an Indo-European language is Hittite and Luwian, about 4,000 years old, not too terribly far off from when PIE was still spoken. After that, I think the next oldest writings are Mycenaean Greek, not sure.

[@joshuahillerup4290]

@@jared_bowden Mycenaean Greek goes back about 3500 years

[@joshuahillerup4290]

@@jared_bowden it is interesting that we can't link any other language to Sumerian though. Makes me wonder if there were a lot of languages back then that are in completely dead families now.

[@markt4110]

Fascinating channel.

[@richern2717]

An interesting question is who split from whom where ? Looking at the Corded Ware and Fatyanovo Culture Samples and the similarities between Sintashta and some Irish samples...Western Ukraine or Poland the split between Western and Eastern IE. ?

[@MartinAhlman]

This is so fascinating, language history was my favourite thing at uni. I really wish I had continued studying just that. That and a lot of other languages :-D

[@little_forest]

Nice... The last question triggered a question for me: Does the origin and then the spread of proto-indo-european match to archeological data, e.g. the development of agriculture throughout Europe or something like that?

[@bothnianwaves7483]

Agriculture must have spread to Europe long before the Indo-European languages. The spread of Indo-European is commonly associated with the Corded Ware culture.

[@MaureenLycaon]

It's hard to tell from archaeological sites alone. The spread of sheep and wool, or artifacts associated with working wool, may show the spread of the steppe pastoralists who were supposed to be the PIE speakers (or the people partly descended from them, who also inherited their culture). You can read David Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel, and Language for more details about this. The strongest evidence has been from the new field of paleogenomics, oddly enough. Scientists have found strong genetic evidence that before 8000 years ago, northwestern Europe was inhabited by people they call the Western Hunter-Gatherers. Starting 8000 years ago, farmers from Anatolia began moving into Europe, and they ended up replacing the WHG's everywhere. Then around 7000 years ago, steppe pastoralists started moving into Europe, rather slowly, genetically mixing with the farmers as they went. (Modern northwestern Europeans, OVERALL, average about 10 percent WHG, 50 percent steppe pastoralist, and the rest Anatolian farmer, genetically. Remember that that's an average; the proportions vary hugely all over Europe.) A lot of linguists, archaeologists, and paleogeneticists think that the steppe pastoralists were the original speakers of PIE. Why? The place is right, the material culture is right, and the timing is right, too. So the spread of steppe pastoralist genes may also track the spread of PIE languages throughout Europe. Maybe India, too. You can track the spread of these genetic groups through northwest Europe with this clever map: homeland.ku.dk/ The magenta/red dots are WHG, the yellow dots are Anatolian farmers, and the orange/red dots are steppe pastoralists. The important research paper: "Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day Europeans", doi.org/10.1038/nature13673 That's about the best anyone can give you, I think.

[@vojdanradevski16zyzz]

Agriculture came to Europe with Anatolian farmers in the Neolithic ,with carriers of haplogroups J1 and E1b1b,while the spread of Indo-European came from the Yamnaya Culture in present day eastern Ukraine/southwestern Russia,firmly backed by archaeology as you asked.They are the ancestors of all Indo-Europeans,the source of haplogroups R1a and R1b,which split off from R1 in the Yamnayans.Just for the record yama means pit in Slavic languages.

[@andreafalconiero9089]

If I remember correctly, Jared Diamond argues in _The Third Chimpanzee_ that *horse domestication* was probably the the key technology that led to the steamroller of Indo-European languages and culture from central Asia across most of Europe. Aside from a couple of language isolates like Basque and Finnish/Hungarian, all the rest are ultimately derived from PIE.

[@vojdanradevski16zyzz]

@@andreafalconiero9089 Finnish and Hungarian are not language isolates lol.They are members of the Uralic language family which originated in the lower Ob and Irtysh river basins,in swampy areas.Basque on other hand,well anything Basque{language,ethnic group,culture,traditions,DNA}is unique and isolated.What's even more interesting is that the Basque language is an isolated ''primary'' language,meaning that it's not the same case as Albanian,Armenian or Greek,who are language isolates,but in the sense that they don't share the same branch with any other language,but are part of a language family(all of the aforementioned are part of the Indo-European language family),basically Basque s on the same level as Indo-European.There have been attempts to link Basque with Georgian and in general with the Kartvelian primary language family,but unsuccessfully

[@thatgirl3960]

Simon,I am loving your videos!

[@TroyYounts]

Hallo Ich bin schon wieder da! Hello I am back! I am browsing through you videos. Everything seems very interesting. I am nt a linguist either but, I do speak modern Frankisch German fairly fluently.

[@salvatoreventre8193]

Amazing video. My compliments. Greetings from Italy.

[@Louisianabayou]

could you possibly talk about poto-afro-asiatic or a lesser talked about proto language?

[@richardsleep2045]

Ok if the Krugan culture were PIE speakers in 3rd millenium bc somewhere around modern Ukraine (?), I wonder what language the builders of Stonehenge (or any of the north Atlantic coastal megalith builders) spoke - maybe Basque or another language isolate? Fascinating, thanks.

[@richienyhus]

We have so little details about pre-Proto Indo-European languages, we don't even know if Basque and the Tyrsenian languages were related. We're really lucky that the Basque language is still spoken today, so we can try and piece together the words and fragments we have from the other non-indo-european languages to see if they fit.

[@richardsleep2045]

@@richienyhus Yes that's interesting, thanks.

[@richardsleep2045]

@@richienyhus That's quite humbling, in just a few thousand years (compared to 250k yrs of hom sap?) how languages and populations have changed so "fast". It's easy to think "race" but in the scale of things, maybe we are all pretty closely related?

[@Leo-us4wd]

Coming here after the sky father documentary

[@TaiFerret]

I wonder if PIE e and o may have been more open. The a sound may have only been allophonic with e, so they were probably close to each other, and the use of e versus o originally seemed to have depended on some kind of stress pattern or tone system, so they could have originally also been allophonic. A three vowel system is typically a,i,u.

[@percivalyracanth1528]

One weird but amazing thing I saw while going through some Old Norse and Proto-Norse was how much that bough of the Germanic family looked like Latin. Another thing is how many words in Albanian and Germanic speeches that are either almost exactly the same or damn near each other in shape and pronunciation. Crazy

[@richienyhus]

Maybe the Albanian and Germanic languages have a substrate of the language spoken by Y-DNA I1 & I2 folk? The idea the the Germanic languages have a substrate of a pre-existing language was pretty popular until recently.

[@percivalyracanth1528]

@@richienyhus Yeah I see talk of a substrate a lot too, often with weird words like 'goat'

[@owenwilliams8698]

There must have been sister languages of PIE, similar languages spoken by similar groups around the general area at the time. Why don't these languages have any descendants?

[@pesnevim1626]

Thank you. Also, love the sideys.

[@PRKLGaming]

Xidnaf. That's a name I haven't heard in a long time.

[@daviddesalvo623]

imagine being one of the two people who disliked this video. low energy people

[@samharper5881]

Imagine being one of the people who focused on those people.

[@daviddesalvo623]

@@samharper5881 I don't have to! and may I just say, I'm loving life even as such a person

[@EmTheBem]

Do you have any recommendations for books on linguistics? Quite interested in PIE but to be honest would just love a book that's accessible to non-linguists and interesting.

[@timknowles7690]

Bill Bryson's 'Mother Tongue' is a good read. After that you might want to try 'A History of the English Language' by Albert C. Baugh & Thomas Cable. It's pretty comprehensive, works right through from PIE to modern English, covers a lot of linguistics stuff along the way. *Claims* to be aimed primarily at college students, but it doesn't seem to assume much pre-existing knowledge (if any) - it explains everything pretty well to beginners, then builds from there. I first came across it as a complete noob on a very introductory linguistics course so could be worth a look.

[@harry_page]

Thinking about 9:18, could PIE be similar to the most recent common ancestor of a population of people? That person could've also lived in any location and been of any social status. Just like how PIE could've been a dialect of any number of properties like location and prestige

[@DanielDem87]

I am Armenian from a kurdish speaking region in Turkey and I have discovered many hundreds of words in both Armenian and Kurdish who are very similar or exactly the same as words in Latin or germanic languages. Will never forget the first day I took a Latin course and learned that "you are" is "Du es" which is exactly the same in standard eastern armenian.

[@jonjohnson2844]

What camera are you using? It gives a great picture.

[@d0r1an06]

Regarding the vocabulary you mention at the end of the video, read David Anthony's book "The Horse, The Wheel, and Language." It is the most concise and readable explanation of how we know what we know about that vocabulary and what it can tell us about Indo-European culture. It's really a fantastic read, although his general thesis about the nature of the migration has been disproved. Anthony was writing right at the crest of the hill before genetic evidence really took off. At that time it was the fad to lump Gimbutas' work in with all the other wacky theories about the Indo-Europeans nestled in the historical academic dustbin. Then the genetic data came along and vindicated her. Huzzah!

[@memofromessex]

Hey great stuff! Can you do a video about non-Indo-European words in Germany? I have read a few books on Anglo-Saxon and they mention that Germanic may have had strong non-Indo-European influences

[@spcxplrr]

another thing with proto-indo-european pronounciation is that we'll never know how it was pronounced. there could definitely be 5 more laryngeals that have no distinguishable reflex in any descendant language. (nearby proto-northwest caucasian had like 20 back sounds, including the majestic qˤʷʲʼ (according to wikipedia))

[@anthonyappleyard5688]

Laryngeals: To me, h1 was the glottal stop; h2 was the sound of the Arabic letter ح ħ); h3 was the sound of the Arabic letter ع(ayin). If there was a second h1 sound, then it was 'h' as in 'horse'.

[@patty_victor]

Hey man, great video! I have one question: when you said that the romantic languages come from the Vulgar Latin and not from the Classic Latin, is it not the case that the Vulgar Latin also came from the Classic Latin? Since the Classic Latin was the prestigious language spoken by upper classes in Rome while the Vulgar Latin was spoken elsewhere through the Empire? Or it is precisely the other way round, where the Classic Latin is just an 'standartization' of Vulgar Latin? I'm a newbie in this, thanks for the good content!

[@andreafalconiero9089]

The way I like to think about this is analogous to biological evolution. What Simon's talking about is the _most recent common ancestor_ of all modern romance languages. If the divergence of romance in different parts of the empire occurred _after_ the classical period, then the *most recent* common ancestor would be that particular dialect of vulgar latin, even though classical latin is still *a* common ancestor farther back within the "family tree" of romance languages. An analogy from biology would be that species X is the most recent common ancestor of _Homo sapiens_ and _Pan troglodytes_ that lived ~ 7 mya, but there are even older ancestral species of both humans *and* chimpanzees (such as the proto-primate, or proto-mammal, or proto-tetrapod, or proto-vertebrate,...) that go right back to the origin of life several billion years ago.

[@cigh7445]

Of modern Indo European languages, which are phonologically the most and least conservative?

[@nikolayordanov3115]

Hey Simon, are you interested in the germanic substrate hypothesis? Would you make a video about it?

[@letosvet1]

In that first sentence which you read out at 4:42, the first part seems to be in the passive voice and I was wondering whether "h1iosméi" could be a cognate of whom in English and wem in German, the sentence then reading literally "a sheep (to) whom no wool is" or a sheep to which there is no wool, in a more normal English syntax. Or is that a completely different word ?

[@markmatzeder6208]

I enjoy your videos so much!

[@divarachelenvy]

fascinating as always .

[@HMCVideos777]

I love your videos and I hope you make some more about slang words!

[@Fnetix-8tjuan]

Wonderful insight for laymen and experts alike. The ‘non-linguist disclaimer’ should go. The work on the North East dialectal phonology is also of the highest order.

[@billpotter7162]

As an Appalachian English speaker I understand every word in this video by an Englishman and I wonder if modern technology and interaction will eventually lead to Indo European languages or at least Germanic languages eventually Re-Merging?

[@xander1052]

I wonder Simon, do we have any knowledge of if there was a form on Vulgar Latin in Brittania, or if people just stook to Celtic languages for the most part?

[@tonio103683]

I believe there are evidence of Vulgar Latin being spoken in Brittania because we have found Latin inscriptions there that reflect some of the characteristics of Vulgar Latin. Another stray of evidence are some Latin loans in Brittonic that seem to not be from classical.

[@xander1052]

@@tonio103683 interesting

[@faithlesshound5621]

There must have been. Tacitus, in his life of his father-in-law Agricola, sneers at the Romanised Britons who wore the toga when they went to the gymnasium and forum. "What they thought of as civilization ("humanitas") was just the badge of their slavery."

[@zeroxox777]

These strange non-English phrases come out of my mouth (I have a strange, non-ordinary condition) and I recognized a few of the words from Sanskrit: maya, aum, ma, perhaps others, but I had no idea that there was such a closeness between Sanskrit and ancient European languages. I'm going to try and reconstruct some of the phrases that emerge out of my mouth usually in a semi-conscious state, but I'm dyslexic in English, let alone a language whose origins I don't know. The first in this series of phrases to come out was (spelt phonetically): "Ommee Iyma Hey Iyma Hoi Iyma Hom, Ziamahay ohm", then "Ohmmee Iyma Hey Ohm" Then (something something) "oooh I ziamahay ohm" - and they come out like mantras, the same phrases repeating. Years before I had another different non-ordinary language experience where I spoke fluently an unknown language, and I definitely recognized one word in it - Elohim - it was a mythical spiritual brotherhood that was supposed to live in the mountains of Tibet, and it was pronounced in a way I never would have pronounced it but that made allot more sene then if I had tried to pronounce it. I wish I could remember more of the language but unless it has happened within the last half hour I tend just to forget most of the words. If it happens then for a while I can suddenly remember much more of the words. Also I feel a sense of the meaning of some of the words - Hey means negative energy, hoi means positive energy, and hom is embodied energy. Ull means hell. Ma means Mother Earth energy. Ohm is like the Sanksrit Ohm and I assume means divine principle or something. Ney means no. Neya mahoy is another one. Just spilling this out for unknown reasons. Perhaps you'll tell me what it all means! Perhaps I'd have to tell you what these non-ordinary things are which I can't. It isn't psychosis although that's what a psychiatrist might call it.