In this week’s bonus, we continue our conversation with Laura Spinney, author of “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global.” We look at how Persian loanwords for honey, pear, and donkey help trace the Roma people’s long migration from India, and how river names like the Neckar hint at where the Celtic languages may have begun. Then we look at how climate change and disease shaped which languages thrived, and how softer food from farming may have changed our bite and made “f” and “v” sounds easier to say.
In this week’s bonus, we continue our conversation with Laura Spinney, author of “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global.” We look at how Persian loanwords for honey, pear, and donkey help trace the Roma people’s long migration from India, and how river names like the Neckar hint at where the Celtic languages may have begun. Then we look at how climate change and disease shaped which languages thrived, and how softer food from farming may have changed our bite and made “f” and “v” sounds easier to say.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Greetings, Grammarpaloozians, I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today we are here with Laura Spinney, the author of this fabulous book "Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global," named one of the best books, by both The Guardian and Scientific American. I loved it. Laura, thank you so much for being here today.
Laura Spinney: My great pleasure. And it's about to come out in paperback, by the way, in the States.
Mignon Fogarty: Yes, absolutely! That's why we're doing this now. You're so lucky that if you didn't get it before, you can get it now on paperback.
So Proto-Indo-European is the putative ancestor language that gave rise to more than half the languages spoken in the world today, including English, all other Germanic languages, the Romance languages, Persian, Hindi, Polish, and more; it goes on and on. But its existence predates all surviving writing, so nobody has ever seen it written down, and researchers have become pretty creative detectives when they're looking for answers. And Laura has tons of these stories in the book. So first of all, I loved how you referred to linguists using loanwords as a tracer dye to study language and migration.
Laura Spinney: Yeah. So, I suppose taking one step back, languages change by inheritance—they can be related by inheritance or they can be related through loans. Ao languages are always loaning to each other words, sounds, grammatical devices, and so on. The inheritance, the vertical transmission, if you like, is really interesting because it tells you if languages belong to the same family, but the horizontal transmission of loans between languages is also really useful because it can tell you about languages that were historically in contact with each other.
One of the examples I give in the book is of the Roma people, who were pejoratively called for a long time in the 19th and 20th centuries "Gypsies" because they were thought to have come from Egypt—we don't call them that anymore, of course—but they did not come from Egypt, that's one of the reasons we don't call them that, not the main one, but they came from India. And they basically came towards Europe over about a thousand years, a massive and slow and long exodus.
As they moved across that space, their language, which we call today Common Romani—exists in different, various variations, but Common Romani came into contact with the languages whose territories it crossed, if you like, and it picked up loans from them and probably made loans to them as well. So we know because it contains Persian loanwords, for example, for things like honey, pear, donkey, but it doesn't contain any Arabic loanwords, so that helps us date its traversing of Persia, because it must have crossed Persia before the Muslim conquests of Persia in the 7th century CE. So that's a sort of example of how loanwords can be really helpful in dating events in the history of languages, especially languages that weren't ever written down.
Mignon Fogarty: That is so—it's so clever, I love it! And what about—so I imagine the Roma traversing all these locations, and place names are another clue that researchers use to figure out language.
Laura Spinney: Yeah. So, if you think about the Celtic languages, today only really spoken in Ireland, parts of Britain, Brittany in northwestern France, but once thought to have been spoken in a huge swath across Europe and even as far east at one point as modern Turkey. If you think about the football team, for any football fans out there, Galatasaray, that actually means "Palace of the Celts," and there was a Celtic-speaking community in Turkey at one point.
So, it was a huge language area, Celtic, and people have tried for a very long time to try and work out where in that huge area Proto-Celtic, so the mother language of the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family, arose. And various theories have been put forward: some people pin it on the Atlantic sea wall in the far west of the European region, some people say it arose in the Austrian Alps much further east, because there are archaeological cultures there that have Celtic art, for example, in metalwork, and some people, in fact the leading theory today, puts the origin of the Celtic languages, the place where Proto-Celtic was spoken in the last couple of thousand years, on the modern French-German border.
One of the reasons for doing that is because that part of Europe is very rich in Celtic place names and particularly river names. So for example, the river Main, an important tributary of the Rhine—I always get confused between Rhine and Rhône—of the Rhine, if you think of Frankfurt am Main, or the Merse, both of those rivers are named for Celtic deities; the Neckar, another important tributary of the Rhine, probably comes from the root nik-, which is a Celtic word, Celtic word meaning wild water. And the idea is that because place names serve a useful function as signposts, they tend to be rather resistant to change. That doesn't always work, and it's a slightly controversial argument, but it often works, and it's the basis for arguing that that's where Celtic languages arose in the last couple of thousand years.
Mignon Fogarty: Great. You know, I was surprised to learn that Celtic was so widespread, because I've always heard that Celtic, you know, left a pretty small imprint on modern languages, and we talked in the main episode, we talked about the Yamnaya and how only 100 of them maybe gave rise to this huge spread of language, and then you hear about the Celtic people and they were so widespread and there were so many of them, and then in a lot of ways that has really shrunk. Like, why do you think that the Celtic language sort of shrank as opposed to growing?
Laura Spinney: Yeah. I mean, if you were to look at the whole planet in terms of its languages in a sort of time-lapse movie of how they've shrunk and expanded over time, you'd just see this amazing sort of flowering and shrinking and flowering and shrinking. And that's because the languages that we speak depend on who's on top and who's underneath, and historical events shape that. I mean, if you wipe out a certain people who are the only people who speak a certain language through warfare or through a pandemic, you know, that language will die.
But more often what happens is you get sort of climate change, which triggers migrations, and then you get new mixings of people and then the languages mix. The idea of a birth or a death of a language is a very complex notion, in fact, because more often what happens is that maybe one language comes out of an entanglement on top, but the other one never really vanishes, it leaves its trace there.
So French is very much a daughter of Latin, but it's very much shaped also by Gaulish, which was the Celtic language spoken in France at the time that Rome was expanding, the Roman Empire was expanding and the Romans came and trounced the Gauls. So, the Roman Empire expanded at the expense of the Celtic-speaking. The Latin-speaking world expanded at the expense of the Celtic-speaking one in that particular instance, but Gaulish didn't die and neither did the other Celtic languages completely; they left their trace in a sort of substrate to that language that came in. France is… French is not the same as Latin because it was shaped by those other influences, including the Celtic speakers who were still there.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, you mentioned climate change, and I was struck by the role that it did play in the distribution of language, you know, the Ice Age and the Black Sea changing, and was the Ice Age the most significant of all the climate change events that influenced early language in the time of Proto-Indo-European?
Laura Spinney: I mean, there have been periodic Ice Ages, of course, throughout time. What Ice Ages do to humans is that they wipe a lot of them out, and then they cause the survivors to shrink into small pockets who tend to be isolated from each other. So when the last Ice Age came to an end, the glaciers started receding, let’s say 14,000 years ago after a particularly cold snap, you see human beings moving out again of those refuges where they survived, and for example, inventing farming because the world is getting warmer and you can grow things, and then the populations grow, and the languages grow, and so that's when you see this flowering.
So yes, climate change is tightly related to language, the language landscape, if you like, and the way it's molded and the way it evolves over time, by often the intermediary of migration. That is, when a new climate event happens that places a population under stress, you're going to see some of those people moving and then they will take their languages with them.
So, for example, yes, the Ice Age was a massive climate event, of course, and a very long-lasting one. But if you look within the period that we know the Indo-European languages were spoken, there was another, much smaller climate event around 2200 BC, where large parts of Europe grew colder and drier, and that hit the farmers very hard and benefited nomads, because it meant the grasslands expanded, rivers were fordable for longer. And so a climate change event tends to benefit some people, put other people in a more difficult position, you see migrations between one and the other, and then you see languages expanding and others shrinking. That's one way in which climate change has an impact on language. It can be mediated by disease, of course. So if you have a climate change event, you're going to be probably seeing a shift in the disease landscape as well, which will impact on human populations and therefore on their languages.
Mignon Fogarty: That's exactly where I was going! So, you have another book about the flu called "Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World," and in "Proto," you talked about how the plague may have contributed to the rise or success of Proto-Indo-European.
Laura Spinney: Yeah, exactly. And so there is a disease theme through the two of them. There was an America, a famous American anthropologist called James C. Scott who talked about infectious diseases as the loudest silence in the archaeological record, you know, because of the impact it would have had on populations that we couldn't necessarily see before we were able to read ancient DNA and particularly ancient microbial DNA.
Now, as I mentioned in the main episode, you know, scientists are beginning to reconstruct ancient epidemics and cross-reference them with what they know was happening in human populations in prehistory, and getting a much better sense of the importance of infectious disease in shaping human populations and their cultures and the languages that they speak. So all of that is coming out much more clearly now.
But there are other parallels as well between these stories. For example, one of the approaches to understanding the evolution of language is to think of a language as a virus, at least the inherited component, the part that gets transmitted vertically. You know, it evolves, you get new strains, dialects, and there is a school of thought that you can model a language as if it behaved like a virus and as if it changed through time and produced new strains. So that's been a very fruitful, if somewhat controversial, line of research. So, yeah. There are lots of parallels between the two stories.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. You mentioned that linguists don't always like the language being referred to as a virus.
Laura Spinney: And of course, it's much more than that, but there is a component of it which I think can be reasonably compared.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, it makes sense. I think the last thing I want to talk about in this section is the amazing role that diet may have changed in shaping language or at least the sounds that we can make.
Laura Spinney: Yeah, so that was a really interesting idea about, that comes from a group mainly at University of Zurich, if I remember correctly, which suggested that as the European population became more reliant on farming as opposed to hunter-gathering as their main economy, their main way of surviving, their diet changed, foods became softer, the anatomy of the jaw changed, and you got more overbite, to put it simply.
So you got, you didn't need such a muscular underjaw, and with overbite, it became easier to make sounds like "f" and "v," where you're pressing your teeth, your upper teeth against your lower lip, and the idea is that those sounds would have arisen by chance to begin with, and then become sort of fixed in the linguistic pool, and that they entered our speech in that way through natural processes of evolution.
So the idea is that that would have become more common around the time that perhaps a little bit before the nomads, but also with the nomads, because when the nomads came into Europe, they also to some extent settled down, they became less nomadic, and that would have resulted in a subtle change in the speech landscape, the way that languages sound overall.
Mignon Fogarty: Isn't that amazing how all the puzzle pieces come together? Just fascinating.
Laura Spinney: It is fascinating.
Mignon Fogarty: The book is "Proto" by Laura Spinney. You want to read this one first, honestly, you do. But we're at the wonderful part of our show where we get the guest's book recommendations. So Laura, what are your three recommendations for us after we have read "Proto"?
Laura Spinney: Yeah, after "Proto," of course! Okay, so "Dying Words," I believe, was the first edition; now I don't know why, but he's changed the title and it's now called "Words of Wonder," the new edition. But it's an amazing book packed with such fascinating facts and anecdotes, some of which I confess found their way into "Proto." He came up with one of the estimates for the number of languages that humanity has ever spoken, and his estimate was in the region of half a million, which is quite mind-boggling when you think about it and we've only got 7,000 and shrinking left. So I highly recommend that book.
The second book I wanted to recommend,this was the book that blew my mind a few years ago, non-fiction, "Invisible Child" by the American journalist Andrea Elliott. It's the… it’s a reportage, essentially; it's the story of a young girl called Dasani who grows up in New York, and it's what it means to grow up young, poor, and Black in New York City today. It's absolutely fascinating, filled with despair and hope, and it has a tiny little bit of overlap with the subjects that interest me in the sense that Andrea Elliott links Dasani's story back to her legacy of slavery and migration from Africa and how these things leave their scars in populations today. So that's where it overlaps with my story of language and migration.
And the third book I thought… Yeah, I highly recommend “Invisible Child.” It won a Pulitzer Prize. The third book I really wanted to recommend some fiction, and I could, I am spoiled for choice, but I recently read John Steinbeck's "East of Eden" and was completely blown away by it.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. I mean, that was one other thing that struck me as the book—it's a journey. I pictured you doing all this research and traveling and talking to archaeologists and pulling the story together from all the different sources, and it was exciting from that standpoint, too. I really loved it.
Laura Spinney: Thank you, it was exciting to write!
Mignon Fogarty: I bet! I bet. Well, thank you so much for being here. One last time, the book is "Proto" by Laura Spinney. Where can people find you?
Laura Spinney: At my website, lauraspinney.com, is probably the best. I write for lots of journals and magazines too, but it's mainly collected there.
Mignon Fogarty: Fabulous. Thanks so much.