On the Trail of the Indo-Europeans: From Neolithic Steppe Nomads to Early Civilisations

INTRODUCTION: THE MYSTERY OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS

Two thirds of the world’s population speak Indo-European languages today, as their primary language, as a second language, as a lingua franca, as the language of education or as a country’s official language. The spectrum of around 440 individual languages ranges from major languages such as Hindi with around 550 million speakers (of which around 430 million are primary speakers) to minor languages such as Vedda in the mountains of Sri Lanka with fewer than 300 speakers.

Most historical and modern world languages, i.e. languages with global communication potential, belong genealogically to the Indo-European language family: Greek and Latin in antiquity; and in more recent times, Spanish, Portuguese, French and English (in chronological order since the 16th century). The holy scriptures of various world religions have been recorded in Indo-European languages: Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Pali, among others. How did Indo-European languages become so successful? Where did they originate?

In search of linguistic affinities

The relationships between languages and the reasons for their differences have been contemplated since the times of the earliest civilisations; however, this did not produce any systematic research. In the Middle Ages scholars first identified the Romance and Germanic language groups, yet they failed to recognise that there was also a relationship between these two groups. In De rebus Hispaniae, written in 1243, Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada noted that the languages of Europe were divided into three main groups: Romance, Slavic and Germanic. It was not until the 17th century, however, that the first serious attempts were made to identify the overarching language families.

The impetus for this came from the Europeans’ deep preoccupation with the languages and culture of India from the early modern era. The first samples of the Sanskrit language to be conveyed to Europe, the text of a religious invocation (Om Srii naraina nama), appeared in a letter written in 1544 by the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, who knew Greek and Latin. Thomas Stevens (1583) and Filippo Sassetti (1585) were the first to make comparisons between Sanskrit and European languages. This led to the development of more comprehensive collections of samples from many different languages. Among the earliest endeavours to catalogue and classify the world’s languages are the works of Theodor Bibliander (De ratione communi omnium linguarum, 1548) and Conrad Gesner (Mithridates, 1555). Gesner based his collections of language material on translations of the Lord’s Prayer.

About 150 years later Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646–1716) proposed to Tsar Peter I that he should compile a list of the languages of his empire, but this suggestion was not taken up until later, when the German-born Tsarina Catherine II (ruled 1762–1796) ordered it to be undertaken. She was deeply committed to language research and fostered an imperial-scale project to collect language samples from her multi-ethnic state as well as from around the world. For the purpose of expanding her collections, Catherine also corresponded with George Washington, who subsequently commissioned a researcher to draw up an inventory of the North American Indian languages. The collections were collated by the German scholar Peter Simon Pallas in two volumes entitled Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa (1786, 1789) (Adelung 1815, Haarmann 1999). This approach to collecting languages reached its climax in the four-volume monumental work Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde (1806–1817), which was started by Johann Christoph Adelung and continued and completed by Johann Severin Vater. The main purpose of these documentation projects was to classify the languages of the world according to language branches or language families.

The first scholar to succeed in delineating the contours of what two centuries later became known as the ‘Indo-Germanic language family’ was Marcus van Boxhorn from Leiden. Around the middle of the 17th century, he made comparisons between Latin, Greek, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Persian and Sanskrit, and for the first time he also took morphology into account, i.e. the grammatical structure of the languages. He was convinced that all these languages had a common origin, which he called ‘Scythian’ in reference to Herodotus’ description of the steppe inhabitants of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (Beekes 2011: 12).

Further treatises on linguistic affinities were written in the 18th century, facilitated by the interest which Jesuit missionaries took in the languages and cultures of Asia. The Jesuit Gaston Coeurdoux not only made systematic comparisons of words in different languages (e.g. Sanskrit padam ‘foot’ – Latin pes, pedis – Greek pous, podis), but also found that both Sanskrit and Greek had the grammatical category of dual (in addition to singular and plural), and he discovered similarities in numerals and pronouns. He also saw how the verb ‘to be’ and its many different forms were related across the languages he compared. However, the manuscript that Coeurdoux presented to the Institut Français in 1767 did not receive the attention it deserved. The work was not printed until 1808.

During the 18th century, speculations on the concept of a ‘primordial language’ gained in prominence and the search for the origins of the known ancient languages came to be pursued with ever increasing intensity. At that time, the only point of reference for the development of languages was still the biblical myth of the Tower of Babel and the ‘Confusion of Tongues’. The search for the ‘pre-Babylonian’ primordial language resulted in many fanciful theories. For example, Catherine II was convinced, in line with a growing language-based nationalism in Russia, that the primordial language must have been Old Slavonic, since it was such a venerable, dignified language. In autumn 1784 she tried to “impress Grimm with the confidential news that she had identified geographical names in France, Spain and Scotland, in India and America and the names of Merovingian, Vandalic and even ancient Babylonian rulers as being Slavic in origin” (Scharf 1995: 270). In her conversations with Pallas, however, Catherine’s enthusiasm for Slavic as the primordial language soon waned. The French court was of a different opinion. Voltaire reports that a lady of the court spoke to him about the primordial language, which of course must be French, because the whole world had been blessed with this most civilised of languages (Voltaire’s letter to Catherine of 26 May 1767).

The search for the primordial language was also taken up by serious scholars. The Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro published a multi-volume language encyclopaedia (Catalogo delle lingue conosciute, 1784, Trattato dell’origine … dell’idiomi, 1785, Aritmetica di quasi tutte le nazioni conosciute, 1785, Divisione del tempo fra le nazioni Orientali, 1786, Vocabolario poligloto, 1787, Saggio pratico delle lingue, 1787). He noticed that the wide diversity of languages could not be explained by a single primordial language. He suspected that there were several primordial languages in different regions of the world, which he called matrices. Thus he stood in contradiction to the Bible, according to which there was only one pre-Babylonian primordial language, and he was considered to be a heretic. Hervás feared that he would attract the displeasure of the Catholic Church, so he left Italy and went into exile in Spain (Haarmann 1997).

Endeavours to explore the relationship of Sanskrit to the languages of Europe were less dramatic. The scattered observations of Sanskrit’s linguistic affinity with European languages (Greek and Latin) were taken to a new level when in 1786, in a lecture to the Asiatic Society he founded, William Jones, Chief Magistrate of Calcutta, explained Sanskrit’s affinity with various other ancient languages: “The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia” (Quoted in Mallory/Adams 2006: 5). Jones himself did not elaborate on his observations, but they were pointing in the right direction. Others continued his work.

The discovery of the kinship of Sanskrit with other Asian languages (Persian) and with the languages of ancient European cultures (Greek and Latin) triggered a research boom that not only brought ever deeper insights into the manifold branches of the Indo-European language...