The parent language: Proto-Indo-European

Lexicon and culture

Much less is known about the parent language’s vocabulary than about its phonology and grammar. Sounds and grammatical categories do not easily disappear or undergo radical change in so many daughter languages that their former existence can no longer be detected. It is relatively easy, however, for an individual word to disappear or shift meaning in so many daughter languages that its existence or meaning in the parent language cannot be confidently inferred. Hence, from the linguistic evidence alone, scholars can never say that Proto-Indo-European lacked a word for any particular concept; they can only state the probability that certain items did exist and from these items make inferences about the culture and location in time and space of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European.

Thus is it supposed that the Proto-Indo-European community knew and talked about dogs (*ḱwón-), horses (*H₁éḱwo-), sheep (*H₃éwi-), and almost certainly cows (*g^wów-) and pigs (*súH-). Probably all these animals were domesticated. At least one cereal grain was known (*yéwo-), and at least one metal (*H₂éyos). There were vehicles (*wóǵho-) with wheels (*k^wék^wlo-), pulled by teams joined by yokes (*yugó-). Honey was known, and it probably formed the basis of an alcoholic drink (*mélit-, *médhu) related to the English mead. Numerals up through 100 (*ḱm̥tóm) were in use. All this suggests a people with a well-developed Neolithic (characterized by simple agriculture and polished stone tools) or even Chalcolithic (copper- or bronze-using) technology.

The divergence of Indo-European languages

Linguists have not found a reliable and precise way to determine from linguistic evidence alone the date at which any set of related languages must have begun diverging. Computational methods for calculating the “time depths” of language families have been proposed, but they have not been shown to yield reliable results. The best that can be done is to estimate the degree of difference between the languages in question, taking into account all that is known about them, and then compare this estimate with the estimated degrees of difference within families of languages—such as the Romance family—whose actual time of divergence is approximately known. Using this sort of “dead reckoning,” most linguists agree that the earliest attested Indo-European languages—Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, and Greek—are different enough that the parent language must have been split into several distinct languages before 3000 bce, but similar enough that the first split into separate languages is not likely to have been much earlier than about 4500 bce.

For further progress the linguistic findings must be correlated with archaeological evidence. Linguistic, historical, and geographic considerations suggest that the speakers of Proto-Indo-European were a relatively small and homogeneous Eurasian population group that underwent significant expansion and fragmentation in the period around 4000 bce. Many scholars identify the Indo-Europeans with the bearers of what has been called the “Kurgan (Barrow) culture” of the Black Sea and the Caucasus and west of the Urals. The Kurgan culture, however, was only one of a number of related steppe cultures extending across the entire Black Sea–Caspian Sea region, an area that was transformed after 4000 bce by the advent of horse-drawn wheeled vehicles and related innovations. It is probably best, therefore, to follow J.P. Mallory (In Search of the Indo-Europeans [1989]) in locating the speakers of Proto-Indo-European among the populations of this region but not to attempt a more precise identification until further evidence is available. A radically different theory, according to which the Indo-European spread began in Asia Minor about 7000 bce, is difficult to square with the linguistic facts.

A remote relationship of Indo-European to the Uralic languages is possible. Geographically, the earliest reconstructible locations of the two families are contiguous; there are strong resemblances in a number of basic grammatical elements, including personal, demonstrative, interrogative, and relative pronouns, personal endings of verbs, the accusative case ending -m, and a very few words, such as those for ‘water’ and ‘name’; typologically, the families are fairly similar—e.g., both have many suffixes, but few or no prefixes or infixes (elements inserted within words). On the whole, however, the lexical resemblances between Indo-European and Uralic are very sparse; the two families, if they are related at all, must have separated thousands of years before the breakup of Proto-Indo-European.

If Indo-European is related to other language families—e.g., to Afro-Asiatic (which includes the Semitic languages) or to Kartvelian (which includes Georgian)—it must have diverged from them much earlier than it diverged from Uralic, because the number of cogent resemblances is still smaller. There is no significant evidence at present for a “Nostratic” superfamily embracing these and other groups.