Lecture Three

The Prehistory of English:

The Indo-European Context

Scope: This lecture formally begins our historical study of English by looking at the mix of languages from which English ultimately emerged: Indo-European. By examining some of the features of the different surviving Indo-European (IE) languages, linguists can reconstruct the sounds and the possible meanings of a language spoken by a group of agricultural peoples approximately five or six thousand years ago. By exploring some of these features, we can see how words and concepts are related in various speech communities. We can also come to understand the ways in which languages are classified and studied.

In many ways, Indo-European is a discovery of the nineteenth century, and part of this and the following lecture will illustrate some of the high points in the history of historical linguistics itself. In the process, we may come to a better sense of what it means to study language, what it means to associate languages with political or ethnic populations, and what it means to trace changes in pronunciation and meaning over long stretches of time.

Objectives: Upon completion of this lecture, you should be able to:

1. Describe the current scholarly consensus on who the IE peoples were and when and where they lived.

2. Explain how relationships among the IE languages were discovered.

3. Describe some of the key examples of cognates in the IE languages and what they tell us about the history of the different language groups.

Outline

I. By the term Indo-European, we mean that postulated “language” or group of dialects out of which the Western and Eastern European, Indian, and Iranian languages developed. Some language groups, like Hittite, have not survived.

A. Who were the “Indo-Europeans”? It is generally believed that they probably lived in Southeastern Europe in the fourth millennium B.C. Recent archaeological discoveries have suggested that they buried their dead and that they moved into central Europe in about the third millennium B.C. and into Asia Minor and Indo-Iranian areas after about 3400 B.C. A series of later migrations brought them to Mediterranean and Northern Europe.

B. It is believed, too, that they were primarily an agricultural population

C. All the IE languages have shared words for certain animals, plants, topographical formations, and certain meteorological phenomena. Such words help us geographically locate the IE peoples. They almost all have a word for snow, corn, and wolf.

II. Why study Indo-European?

A. Of course, some shared words can be illusory. All the IE languages have shared or cognate words for wind, heart, lung, foot, night, sun, moon, and so on—implying that the IE peoples all had hearts, lungs, and feet, and that they all lived on Earth. These words tend to be conservative, constituting a core vocabulary.

B. The real point is to see how we can trace the origins of words back to shared roots, and in the process, to reconstruct something of the social or intellectual structure of IE civilization. More importantly, we want to see how words of seemingly different sound and sense in modern languages go back to shared originals.

III. The Origins of the Idea of Indo-European.

A. Scholars posted to colonial positions in the British empire began to notice something recognizable in the exotic languages they encountered.

B. At the end of the eighteenth century, the English scholar and diplomat William Jones, working in India, noticed certain features in the vocabulary and grammar of Sanskrit (the ancient classical language of India) that were shared with Latin and Greek and the modern European languages.

1. In particular, he noticed certain words, like Sanskrit raj, Latin rex, German reich, and Celtic rix, that seemed similar in sound and meaning (they were all words for king or ruler).

2. He also noticed certain grammatical features, like forms of the verb to be, that were shared in the different languages.

3. Jones posited that these various languages must have descended from an original tongue. In 1799, he identified the tongue as Sanskrit, thus subscribing to the myth of language decay.

C. In the nineteenth century, following up on Jones’s discovery, language scholars began to develop the study of comparative grammar.

1. Scholars, particularly in Germany, began to codify relationships of sounds among different languages.

2. They also proposed lines of descent among the different languages, introducing the metaphor of the “language tree.”

D. In the nineteenth century, scholars made the development of language the subject of linguistics. By the 1870s, scholars had formulated a series of sound relationships among the languages that were recognized as having historical meaning: i.e., they showed not only among living languages, but also lines of descent from earlier forms of the languages.

1. These came to be known as sound laws. One of these, Grimm’s Law, offers much valuable empirical evidence in spite of its imperfections.

2. The historical study of language (what we call diachronic linguistics) came to dominate the scholarly side of linguistic inquiry.

E. The IE languages preserve certain words that are clearly not from IE. Such words tell us something about the patterns of migration and the kinds of people the IE peoples absorbed.