Spring 2016 Intern
During
my junior year of college I took a course on the history of the English
language in which I was one of about five students. When we got to the lesson
on phonology, we spent over an hour saying different words and
trying to decipher their origins based on how we said them. Since there were only a few of us, we
each had one-on-one time analyzing the sounds of words. I learned that words
actually get labeled depending on which parts of your mouth you use to
pronounce them, and I learned to appreciate the importance of pronunciation,
since similarities in sound or spelling can be used to trace not only the
origin of a single word, but also the origin of an entire language.
The English language is a member of
one of the ten branches of the Indo-European
family of languages spoken in most of Europe and in
places of European settlement (as well as in much of Southwest and South Asia)[1]. It derives from a mother tongue, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), that was
spoken from 4500 to 2500 BCE. Although specialists
disagree about the origins of PIE, many believe it was a spoken
language used by an extinct tribal culture in Eurasia[2].
One
of those scientists, evolutionary biologist Quentin Atkinson, conducted a study
on 103 languages using statistical likelihood to calculate the likeliest
pathways of distribution from an origin; he and his team developed a computer
program to manage all the data they collected, and their results support an Anatolian
origin—rather than the origin in the steppes above the Black Sea that other
researchers have considered. But geographical origin isn’t the only aspect of
this ancient language on which scientists and researchers have disagreed.
Because
speakers of PIE did not leave written texts, there is no record of what the
language might have looked like and linguists have long disagreed about what the
language may have sounded like. Different renditions have been developed over
the years and two in particular have been periodically updated since their
rendition[3].
In
1868, German linguist August Schleicher wrote a fable using reconstructed
Proto-Indo-European vocabulary in order to demonstrate how it sounded when it
was spoken 6,000 years ago. His fable, “Avis akvÄsas ka” (“The Sheep and the Horses”),
has since been updated to incorporate new sounds added by modern linguists. Schleicher’s
fable as well as a more recent fable—“The King and the God”—created by
historical linguists in the 1990s can be read in their English translations or experienced
in their PIE vocabulary. You can read the three different renditions of these
fables and even listen to linguists recite them here.
Did You Know?
Proto-Indo-European isn’t just being
reimagined in fables: The
latest version of the Far Cry video
game, Far
Cry Primal, is set
in the Stone Age, and retains its authenticity by employing voice actors who
speak their lines in a rendition of Proto-Indo-European. The game, which
was released on February 23 from Ubisoft, gives gamers a taste of this extinct
language during gameplay.
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