The Horse, the Wheel and Language by David Anthony
June 10th 2008 06:40
This is an impressive book of scholarship. A book of vast erudition written in accesible, lucid prose that even a lay person with no prior knowledge of lingusitics or arachaeology can follow with little effort.
Sir William Jones, a British functionary,first noticed the amazing simliarity between Greek, Latin, Persian and Sanskrit and postulated that they originated form the same parent language called Indo-European. Today, scholars recognise around 12 main Indo-European lanague families, represented by everything from English and French in the west, to Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali in the East. Over 3 billion people are thought to be speakers of these languages. Not only all these languages derived from a common ancestral language, all the people who spoke them had some disitinctive simliarities in their cultures and religions as well. At one point of time in history, they all descended from a single cultural-linguistic ancestor.
Does a linguistic ancestor also imply a common racial inheritance? Once the existence of Indo-European was postulated, many people jumped to just that conclusion and the study of Indo-European became a minefield of controversies and cultish fads.
Anthony rescues the Proto-Indo-European language scholarship from the morass surrounding it. Anthony despatches with the idea of common racial inheritance at once. A common linguistic and cultural ancestor does not imply a common racial inheritance. Speakers of Sanskrit, Tocharian, Latin and Celtic may share the same language pool but not the same gene pool.
Once the politicising aspects are despatched away, the author calmly but eloquently begins to explain how Indo-European was reconstructed from the daughter languages. Several candidates have been proposed for the homeland of the original language but Anthony chooses the most obvious one, the Caspian-Pontic steppes of modern Ukraine, and makes an unimpeachable case for it. The Indo-European people originated somehwere in this vast steppe. They may not have invented the wheels but they quickly learned to how to design them. With the domestication of horse, the invention of wagons and later chariots, Indo-Europeans quickly mastered the hitherto impenetrable steppe and quickly spread around the world and became the people we know from history: Vedic Indians, Greeks, Celtics, Germans etc. They primarily spread through migrations rather than invasions.
Anthony also describes how the lifestyle of these ancestors can be deduced from a lexicon of a few hundred reconstructed words. They were a caste based people with a warrior caste and a priestly class for whom poetry was quite important. They worshipped a sky god and followed a patriarchal life style.
This is one amazing piece of scholarship. I was hooked onto it from the start. For an interested, head-scratching amateur like me, this book was a godsend. For a casual reader, it should be a revelation.
Sir William Jones, a British functionary,first noticed the amazing simliarity between Greek, Latin, Persian and Sanskrit and postulated that they originated form the same parent language called Indo-European. Today, scholars recognise around 12 main Indo-European lanague families, represented by everything from English and French in the west, to Sanskrit, Hindi and Bengali in the East. Over 3 billion people are thought to be speakers of these languages. Not only all these languages derived from a common ancestral language, all the people who spoke them had some disitinctive simliarities in their cultures and religions as well. At one point of time in history, they all descended from a single cultural-linguistic ancestor.
Does a linguistic ancestor also imply a common racial inheritance? Once the existence of Indo-European was postulated, many people jumped to just that conclusion and the study of Indo-European became a minefield of controversies and cultish fads.
Anthony rescues the Proto-Indo-European language scholarship from the morass surrounding it. Anthony despatches with the idea of common racial inheritance at once. A common linguistic and cultural ancestor does not imply a common racial inheritance. Speakers of Sanskrit, Tocharian, Latin and Celtic may share the same language pool but not the same gene pool.
Once the politicising aspects are despatched away, the author calmly but eloquently begins to explain how Indo-European was reconstructed from the daughter languages. Several candidates have been proposed for the homeland of the original language but Anthony chooses the most obvious one, the Caspian-Pontic steppes of modern Ukraine, and makes an unimpeachable case for it. The Indo-European people originated somehwere in this vast steppe. They may not have invented the wheels but they quickly learned to how to design them. With the domestication of horse, the invention of wagons and later chariots, Indo-Europeans quickly mastered the hitherto impenetrable steppe and quickly spread around the world and became the people we know from history: Vedic Indians, Greeks, Celtics, Germans etc. They primarily spread through migrations rather than invasions.
Anthony also describes how the lifestyle of these ancestors can be deduced from a lexicon of a few hundred reconstructed words. They were a caste based people with a warrior caste and a priestly class for whom poetry was quite important. They worshipped a sky god and followed a patriarchal life style.
This is one amazing piece of scholarship. I was hooked onto it from the start. For an interested, head-scratching amateur like me, this book was a godsend. For a casual reader, it should be a revelation.
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