Indo-European and Two Famous Linguists
Announcement: if any of you mean to be registered in 360 to fill your writing requirement, please tell Norma Wells immediately! Currently, we show no-one taking this as a writing req., so she's going to cancel that section.
Today's lecture focused on what we know about the Proto-Indo-Europeans, their language, and their culture. We will also discuss how we have any of this knowledge, since they left no written record.
First, some web links:
Mark Damen's terrific web page on Indo-European. He also talks about Jakob Grimm.
Here are some pictures of Corded Ware pottery.
Another web page that gives more detail about IE.
Here is a map of modern-day Europe. It shows the Black Sea.
Lecture notes from today. Focus on knowing Grimm, Ventris, and what they did. Also know that Indo-European is the ultimate parent langauge for modern English.
Lecture:
I. We can reconstruct IE words from existing (or defunct but written) IE languages. This was facilitated in the early 19th century by the formulation of Grimm’s law.
Jakob Grimm—who’s heard of this guy? Who’s heard of the fairy tales? Seen that wretched movie? In fact, Grimm was primarily a philologist—a scholar of old languages.
Grimm wrote, among other things, a 2-volume Geschichte der deutschen Sprache in 1848.
Grimm wanted to find out what he could about old German words and forms, so he went to regions that used dialect. The people didn’t particularly want to talk to him, so he started asked them to just tell stories. He didn’t even start out interested in Fairy Tales!
Grimm realized that Germanic consonants began shifting as the language fragmented from IE, but before East, West, and North Germanic separated themselves. Once he had figured out the pattern of change, he could predict what the ancient Germanic forms had been, many of them closer to Latin or other IE languages.
This made it easier to assess which words the original Indo-European peoples had in their language, and from that, we can make some surmises about their culture.
II. What we can deduce about the IE people (often called the Proto-IndoEuropeans to distinguish them from modern IE language speakers)?
They probably originated in the central steppes of modern-day Russia, perhaps north and east of the Black Sea. They don’t seem to have had a word for “ocean,” which suggests that they were inland people. They had a word for snow, and none for vine, so were probably not Mediterranean. Perhaps they were the Kurgan peoples.
They were patriarchal and patrilineal (names from the dads)
They were polytheistic, with a “Day-father” (deus-pater)—a sun god?
They had plows and pottery. They had wheeled carts but no spoked-wheel chariots. Some scholars have suggested that the original IE people produced “Corded Ware,” a very beautiful early pottery.
They liked threes. They had 3 elements, 3 “classes” of people (priest, warriors, farmers). We still preserve this in our culture—why 3 points in a 5-paragraph essay, rather than 2 or 4? Why do we do things on “the count of 3”? We divide such complex things as socio-economic class into Upper, Middle, Lower. Blame the Indo-Europeans.
We know they began to move into Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent pretty early. We aren’t sure if this was a migration in search of arable land, or a military invasion.
The Dorian invasions about 2000 BCE in ancient Greece were certainly IE peoples. But who did they drive out? If it was a native peoples, that would imply that IE invasions were mostly military in origin.
III. Linear B
Arthur Evans in the early 1900s had found a site on Crete, called Knossos, which had several inscriptions in it in a language he called “Linear B.” Examples of it were also found on the Greek mainland. Evans postulated a “Minoan” culture (after the Greek legend of King Minos—him with the labyrinth and the Minotaur) that had conquered Greece and spread its highly technical and artistic culture over the natives, until the IE peoples conquered them).
But no one could read Linear B! It’s not an alphabet, but a syllable-based language.
Then, beginning in the late 30s, a young architect named Michael Ventris started working on the problem. Ventris wasn’t a linguist, but he was phenomenally gifted at languages. He had been fascinated by Linear B since he was 14, when he had met Evans on a school trip. Hearing that the tablets hadn’t been deciphered, he became obsessed with them.
Ventris had worked for years to relate Linear B to Etruscan, a non-IE language spoken on the Italian pennisula. He did not want Linear B to be an IE language—he wanted the Bronze Age culture to have been produced by another culture, to put paid to the notion of European superiority that had crystallized in Nazi Germany.
However, Greek it was. In 1952, Ventris announced on the BBC that he’d cracked Linear B. The Dorian invasions were driving under a group of IE peoples who’d already been there for centuries!
Linear B is now the oldest known European language.
IV. Why is it important to know this? What sort of trends do we observe about languages based on what we read about IE?
Today's lecture focused on what we know about the Proto-Indo-Europeans, their language, and their culture. We will also discuss how we have any of this knowledge, since they left no written record.
First, some web links:
Mark Damen's terrific web page on Indo-European. He also talks about Jakob Grimm.
Here are some pictures of Corded Ware pottery.
Another web page that gives more detail about IE.
Here is a map of modern-day Europe. It shows the Black Sea.
Lecture notes from today. Focus on knowing Grimm, Ventris, and what they did. Also know that Indo-European is the ultimate parent langauge for modern English.
Lecture:
I. We can reconstruct IE words from existing (or defunct but written) IE languages. This was facilitated in the early 19th century by the formulation of Grimm’s law.
Jakob Grimm—who’s heard of this guy? Who’s heard of the fairy tales? Seen that wretched movie? In fact, Grimm was primarily a philologist—a scholar of old languages.
Grimm wrote, among other things, a 2-volume Geschichte der deutschen Sprache in 1848.
Grimm wanted to find out what he could about old German words and forms, so he went to regions that used dialect. The people didn’t particularly want to talk to him, so he started asked them to just tell stories. He didn’t even start out interested in Fairy Tales!
Grimm realized that Germanic consonants began shifting as the language fragmented from IE, but before East, West, and North Germanic separated themselves. Once he had figured out the pattern of change, he could predict what the ancient Germanic forms had been, many of them closer to Latin or other IE languages.
This made it easier to assess which words the original Indo-European peoples had in their language, and from that, we can make some surmises about their culture.
II. What we can deduce about the IE people (often called the Proto-IndoEuropeans to distinguish them from modern IE language speakers)?
They probably originated in the central steppes of modern-day Russia, perhaps north and east of the Black Sea. They don’t seem to have had a word for “ocean,” which suggests that they were inland people. They had a word for snow, and none for vine, so were probably not Mediterranean. Perhaps they were the Kurgan peoples.
They were patriarchal and patrilineal (names from the dads)
They were polytheistic, with a “Day-father” (deus-pater)—a sun god?
They had plows and pottery. They had wheeled carts but no spoked-wheel chariots. Some scholars have suggested that the original IE people produced “Corded Ware,” a very beautiful early pottery.
They liked threes. They had 3 elements, 3 “classes” of people (priest, warriors, farmers). We still preserve this in our culture—why 3 points in a 5-paragraph essay, rather than 2 or 4? Why do we do things on “the count of 3”? We divide such complex things as socio-economic class into Upper, Middle, Lower. Blame the Indo-Europeans.
We know they began to move into Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent pretty early. We aren’t sure if this was a migration in search of arable land, or a military invasion.
The Dorian invasions about 2000 BCE in ancient Greece were certainly IE peoples. But who did they drive out? If it was a native peoples, that would imply that IE invasions were mostly military in origin.
III. Linear B
Arthur Evans in the early 1900s had found a site on Crete, called Knossos, which had several inscriptions in it in a language he called “Linear B.” Examples of it were also found on the Greek mainland. Evans postulated a “Minoan” culture (after the Greek legend of King Minos—him with the labyrinth and the Minotaur) that had conquered Greece and spread its highly technical and artistic culture over the natives, until the IE peoples conquered them).
But no one could read Linear B! It’s not an alphabet, but a syllable-based language.
Then, beginning in the late 30s, a young architect named Michael Ventris started working on the problem. Ventris wasn’t a linguist, but he was phenomenally gifted at languages. He had been fascinated by Linear B since he was 14, when he had met Evans on a school trip. Hearing that the tablets hadn’t been deciphered, he became obsessed with them.
Ventris had worked for years to relate Linear B to Etruscan, a non-IE language spoken on the Italian pennisula. He did not want Linear B to be an IE language—he wanted the Bronze Age culture to have been produced by another culture, to put paid to the notion of European superiority that had crystallized in Nazi Germany.
However, Greek it was. In 1952, Ventris announced on the BBC that he’d cracked Linear B. The Dorian invasions were driving under a group of IE peoples who’d already been there for centuries!
Linear B is now the oldest known European language.
IV. Why is it important to know this? What sort of trends do we observe about languages based on what we read about IE?
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