Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans by Calvert Watkins

Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans by Calvert Watkins The Comparative Method Indo-European is the name given for geographic reasons to the large and well-defined linguistic family that includes most of the languages of Europe, past and present, as well as those found in a vast area extending across Iran and Afghanistan to the northern half of the Indian subcontinent. In modern times the family has spread by colonization throughout the Western Hemisphere. A curious byproduct of the age of colonialism and mercantilism was the introduction of Sanskrit in the 18th century to European intellectuals and scholars long familiar with Latin and Greek and with the European languages of culture — Romance, Germanic, and Slavic. The comparison of the classical language of India with the two classical languages of Europe revolutionized the perception of linguistic relationships. Speaking to the Asiatick Society in Calcutta on February 2, 1786, the English Orientalist and jurist Sir William Jones (1746-1794) uttered his now famous pronouncement: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. Of course, the fact that certain languages present similarities among themselves does not necessarily mean they are related. Some similarities may be accidental: the Greek verb “to breathe,” “blow,” has a root pneu-, and in the language of the Klamath of Oregon the verb “to blow” is pniw-, but these languages are not remotely related. Other similarities may reflect universal or near-universal features of human language: in the languages of most countries where the bird is known, the cuckoo has a name derived from the noise it makes. A vast number of languages around the globe have “baby talk” words like mama and papa. Finally, languages commonly borrow words and other features from one another, in a whole gamut of ways ranging from casual or chance contact to learned coinages of the kind that English systematically makes from Latin and Greek. But where all of these possibilities must be excluded, the comparatist assumes genetic filiation: descent from a common ancestor. In the case of Indo-European, as Sir William Jones surmised over two centuries ago, that ancestor no longer exists. It has been rightly said that the comparatist has one fact and one hypothesis. The one fact is that certain languages present similarities among themselves so numerous and so precise that they cannot be attributed to chance and of such a kind that they cannot be explained as borrowings or as universal features. The one hypothesis is that these languages must then be the result of descent from a common original. In the early part of the 19th century, scholars set about systematically exploring the similarities observable among the principal languages spoken now or formerly in the regions from Iceland and Ireland in the west to India in the east and from Scandinavia in the north to Italy and Greece in the south. They were able to group these languages into a family that they called Indo-European (the term first occurs in English in 1813, though in a sense slightly different from today’s). The similarities among the different Indo-European languages require us to assume that they are the continuation of a single prehistoric language, a language we call Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European. In the words of the greatest Indo-Europeanist of his age, the French scholar Antoine Meillet (1866-1936), “We will term Indo-European language every language which at any time whatever, in any place whatever, and however altered, is a form taken by this ancestor language, and which thus continues by an uninterrupted tradition the use of Indo-European.” The dialects or branches of Indo-European still represented today by one or more languages are Indic and 1 Iranian, Greek, Armenian, Slavic, Baltic, Albanian, Celtic, Italic, and Germanic. The present century has seen the addition of two branches to the family, both of which are extinct: Hittite and other Anatolian languages, the earliest attested in the Indo-European family, spoken in what is now Turkey in the second and first millennia B.C.; and the two Tocharian languages, the easternmost of Indo-European dialects, spoken in Chinese Turkistan (modern Xinjiang Uygur) in the first millennium A.D. English is the most prevalent member of the Indo-European family, the native language of nearly 350 million people and the most important second language in the world. It is one of many direct descendants of Indo-European, one of whose dialects became prehistoric Common Germanic, which subdivided into dialects of which one was West Germanic; this in turn broke up into further dialects, one of which emerged into documentary attestation as Old English. From Old English we can follow the development of the language directly, in texts, down to the present day. This history is our linguistic heritage; our ancestors, in a real cultural sense, are our linguistic ancestors. But it must be stressed that linguistic heritage, while it may tend to correspond with cultural continuity, does not imply genetic or biological descent. Linguists use the phrase “genetically related” to refer simply to languages descended from a common ancestor. The transmission of language by conquest, assimilation, migration, or any other ethnic movement is a complex and enigmatic process that this discussion does not propose to examine—beyond the general proposition that in the case of Indo-European no genetic conclusions can or should be drawn. Although English is a member of the Germanic branch of Indo-European and retains much of the basic structure of its origin, it has an exceptionally mixed lexicon. During the 1400 years of its documented history, it has borrowed extensively and systematically from its Germanic and Romance neighbors and from Latin and Greek, as well as more sporadically from other languages (compare the Appendix of Semitic Roots in English below, pages 2062-2068). At the same time, it has lost the great bulk of its original Old English vocabulary. However, the inherited vocabulary, though now numerically a small proportion of the total, remains the genuine core of the language; all of the 100 words shown to be the most frequent in the Corpus of Present-Day American English, also known as the Brown Corpus, are native words; and of the second 100, 83 are native. A children’s tale like The Little Red Hen, for example, contains virtually no loanwords. Yet precisely because of its propensity to borrow from ancient and modern Indo-European languages, especially those mentioned above but including nearly every other member of the family, English has in a way replaced much of the Indo-European lexicon it lost. Thus, while the distinction between native and borrowed vocabulary remains fundamentally important, more than 50 percent of the basic roots of Indo-European as represented in Julius Pokorny’s Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch [Indo-European Etymological Dictionary] (Bern, 1959) are represented in Modern English by one means or the other. Indo-European therefore looms doubly large in the background of our language. ... The comparative method—what we have called the comparatist’s “one fact and one hypothesis”—remains today the most powerful device for elucidating linguistic history. When it is carried to a successful conclusion, the comparative method leads not merely to the assumption of the previous existence of an antecedent common language but to a reconstruction of all the salient features of that language. In the best circumstances, as with Indo-European, we can reconstruct the sounds, forms, words, even the structure of sentences—in short, both grammar and lexicon—of a language spoken before the human race had invented the art of writing. It is worth reflecting on this accomplishment. A reconstructed grammar and dictionary cannot claim any sort of completeness, to be sure, and the reconstruction may always be changed because of new data or better analysis. But it remains true, as one distinguished scholar has put it, that a reconstructed protolanguage is “a glorious artifact, one which is far more precious than anything an archaeologist can ever hope to unearth.” 2 An Example of Reconstruction Before proceeding with a survey of the lexicon and culture of the Indo-Europeans, it may be helpful to give a concrete illustration of the method used to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary and a brief description of some of the main features of the Proto-Indo-European language. The example will serve as an introduction to the comparative method and indicate as well the high degree of precision that the techniques of reconstruction permit. A number of Indo-European languages show a similar word for the kinship term “daughter-in-law”: Sanskrit snu, Old English snoru, Old Church Slavonic snkha (Russian snokhá), Latin nurus, Greek nuós, and Armenian nu. All of these forms, called cognates, provide evidence for the phonetic shape of the prehistoric Indo-European word for “daughter-in-law” that is their common ancestor. Sanskrit, Germanic, and Slavic agree in showing an Indo-European word that began with sn-. We know that an Indo-European s was lost before n in other words in Latin, Greek, and Armenian, so we can confidently assume that Latin nurus, Greek nuós, and Armenian nu also go back to an Indo-European *sn-.

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