Chapter 3: Indo-European Roots of English

Video Lecture

Figure 3.1: Image of Tower of Babel

Source: Wikipedia

Attribution: Pieter Brueghel the Elder

License: Public Domain

Link: here

A First Language?

One of the most popular stories in the Old Testament is the Tower of Babel. In this story, “the whole earth had one language and the same words” (Genesis 11:1). However, the people in the story began to build a tower that would reach to the heavens, and this arrogance angered God. As punishment for their pride, God takes away their common language. The people of the earth are no longer able to communicate with one language.

This ancient story attempts to answer a very ancient question. Why are there so many languages in the word? Would it not be logical that as humanity interacted through the millennia that separate languages coalesced into one language? From an evolutionary standpoint, this would make sense. Or if there had only been one language to start with, is it not counterintuitive that this one language subsequently divided into mutually unintelligible languages? Recall from chapter one that linguists know that languages change for somewhat unknown reasons, but the question remains: why would languages change so much that they become new and separate languages?

These are philosophical questions that are impossible to answer with certainty. But here are some facts. Currently there are between 5,000–7,000 languages in the world. No one knows if all languages sprang from one original language or if there were multiple languages on the earth in different locations that developed simultaneously. Despite these unknowns, linguists are able to trace the roots of many languages to a common language ancestor.

The Indo-Europeans

Since we are concerned with the history of English, we will explore the language ancestor of English. This is known as Indo-European. Like the writers and audience of the “Tower of Babel” story in Genesis, linguists have been concerned with finding a common language or languages that were spoken by our ancestors. The truth of the matter is that without a time machine, it is impossible to determine which language (or languages) was (or were) the first language(s) spoken. However, due to some linguistic detective work, linguists have been able to determine that the language family known as Indo-European was the source of many languages in the world, including English.

Traditionally, linguists acknowledge that there are ten language families which have their origin in Indo-European. Figure 3.2 shows the ten language families of the Indo-European group. This figure does not show all the languages that are part of the Indo-European group of languages. There are roughly 440 surviving languages that descend from Indo-European. Most languages in Europe are Indo-European, but there are some exceptions: Basque, Hungarian, Finish, and Estonian. Also please note that Indo-European is not the source of all the world’s languages. Japanese, Navajo, and Quechua (among thousands of others) are not Indo-European languages. However, English (and many European languages) are descended from this language family.

Figure 3.2: Language Families from Indo-European.

Let’s explore the Indo-European story a bit more because it is very important in the history of English. The Indo-Europeans were a nomadic group that inhabited the Eurasian Steppes about 5,000 years ago. Figure 3.3 shows the original homeland of this group, although there has been debate as to the exact location.

Figure 3.3: Indo-European Homeland

Source: The History of English Podcast

Attribution: Louis Henwood

License: Used with Permission

Link: here

Figure 3.4 gives another perspective on the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans. It also shows the vast influence of this language as it spread throughout the world. The light green area shows the language influence, and if we were to include North America and South America (English and Spanish), we can see that the influence was very large.

Figure 3.4: Influence of Indo-European Language

Source: Wikipedia

Attribution: Joe Roe

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Link: here

The story of the Indo-European language often starts with the man who is credited for that discovery, Sir William Jones. In presenting a history of English, it’s important to begin at this point. Many histories of English began with the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain in the 5^th century AD. But modern English is a combination and blend of several languages: Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Latin, Greek, Old Norse, languages of Scandinavia, and even some Celtic influences. But all of those languages have at least one thing in common. They all evolved from the same ancient source, the language of the so-called Indo-Europeans, which was spoken several thousand years ago. This is very significant in modern English. For example, English, unlike many other languages, has multiple words for almost everything. Take the word father. We can use the word father and we can make a lot of other words with it, like fatherland, father-in-law, stepfather, fatherhood, founding father, and so on. We can even make it into a verb, as in He fathered three children. The word father is a Germanic Anglo-Saxon word which comes to us from the old English word fæder. 

But we also have other words that mean father. For example, the words paternal, paternity, paternalistic, and patriarch also mean “father” or relate to some aspect of fatherness. Those words come to us via French from Latin. More specifically, these words come from the Latin word pater, which meant “father” in Latin. This is an example of why English has such a large vocabulary and how it pulls from multiple sources in creating words. For many basic words in English, we have a Germanic root word and an alternate Latin word. But here's the thing that may surprise you. The English word father from Old English and the Latin word pater are both derived from the same original word spoken by this tribe of nomads living on the Eurasian steppes about 5,000 years ago. 

That original word was likely very close to the pater used by Latin. For reasons that will be explored later, the /p/ sound shifted to an /f/ sound in the Germanic languages and ultimately became father in modern English. So, all of the words—father, fatherland, brotherhood, paternal, paternity, paternalistic, and patriarch—are interconnected and come from the same single root word. Linguists say that all of these words are cognates. 

For another example, consider the English word foot. This again is a Germanic word from Old English. From it we get lots of other words: football, foothill, foothold, footing. But we also have another group of words which relate to feet: pedestrian, pedicure, pedal, pedometer. Even the word pedigree which comes from the fact that a genealogical family tree resembles a crane's foot. Do you notice a common theme? All of these words begin with ped, which was the

Latin word for foot. Again, the English word foot and the Latin word ped were once the same

word in this ancient common language. The same shift from the /p/ sound to the /f/ sound which

distinguishes English father from Latin pater is also at work here. In Latin, the word retains its original /p/ sound and becomes ped, while in the Germanic languages, like English, it shifts to an /f/ sound and becomes foot. 

The point here is that English did not just borrow words from Latin and other languages. It often borrowed words that were ultimately just another version of the words that English already had. So that’s why it’s important to begin the history of English at the point of this ancient common language known as Proto-Indo-European, rather than with the arrival of Anglo-Saxons in Britain, because it’s important to understand that the history of English begins before the Anglo-Saxons, and before we have a language or dialect that we actually call English. It’s also important to understand that all of the languages which have come together to create modern English are not completely separate languages, but are in fact part of a larger, interconnected language family. To put it another way, English, Latin, Greek, and the Celtic languages are ultimately all cousins within the same language family, and similarities between the languages can be found through all of them. 

Searching for the Origins of Indo-European?

But the idea that all of those languages evolved from a common ancestral language didn’t really come into play until the late 1700s. When the discovery was made, however, it wasn’t made in Europe. It was actually made in India, a continent away. The story of how this discovery was made involves European imperialism, private armies, and attacks on tea, which led to the loss of Britain colonies in America and the unintentional acquisition of a new colony in India. The story begins with the arrival of European traders in India in the 1600s. 

Initially, the Europeans arrived in India not as colonizers but as traders. India’s silks, spices, dyes and tea were irresistible to Europeans and all of the major powers of Europe established private trading companies to trade European money and goods for Indian products. The British East India Company was chartered in 1600 and it soon established trading ports with the Mughal Empire, which ruled India at the time. 

Figure 3.4: Coat of Arms of British East India Company

Source: Wikipedia

Attribution: Trajan 117

License: CC BY-SA 3.0

Link: here

One of those British trading ports was Calcutta, in the territory of Bengal in northeastern India. The British East India Company and its rival companies, established by other European powers, made vast amounts of money during this period. But the Mughal Empire began to fall apart in the 1700s and India fell into a state of unrest and civil conflict. Now this was not good for business. In fact, the unrest was enough to cause the Dutch and Portuguese to leave the country altogether. That left the French and British, and neither wanted to abandon India or leave the Indian market to their competitor. In order to stick it out in India, the British trading companies were going to have to find a way to survive the unrest and protect their own interests. The best way to do that is to have your own private army, and that's exactly what happened. By the mid-1700s, the British East India Company was operating with a private army staffed largely with native Indians led by British officers. 

However, there were legal and translation issues that needed to be resolved. Into this judicial dilemma arrived the key figure in Indo-European debate, William Jones. 

Figure 3.5: Portrait of Sir William Jones

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Attribution: James Posselwhite

License: Public Domain

Link: here

Jones was not only a jurist and a scholar. He was also an expert in languages, including the Persian language, which was related to Sanskrit. Jones had been born in London in 1746 to a Welsh family. As a student at Oxford, he had studied a wide variety of languages, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and many others. In fact, it’s difficult to know how many languages Jones actually mastered. Some accounts suggest he knew as many as 28 languages. Regardless, he was very proficient in the study of languages. He also studied law and became a barrister, befriending other influential scholars and thinkers of the day, one of whom was Benjamin Franklin who resided in London for many years before the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War. 

The Supreme Court in Calcutta had a vacancy and Jones was more than qualified, given his interest in Asia and his vast knowledge of languages, including Persian. Jones ultimately received the appointment to the court on March 4^th, 1783. Now part of Jones's mission in India was to translate the ancient Hindu legal codes from Sanskrit to English. But Jones didn't actually speak or know Sanskrit. So, soon after arriving in Bengal, he embarked on the study of the language so he could translate traditional Hindu laws and customs. 

What he quickly discovered is that Sanskrit, this ancient Indian language, shared many similarities with Greek and Latin. These similarities were much the same as those found in other European languages, as well as Persian. But here is the key. Similarities among European languages could be explained as being the result of long-term borrowing between neighboring peoples. For example, the Latin speaking Romans interacted with the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine for centuries before the Roman Empire collapsed, and the Germanic tribes poured into Roman territory. So linguistic borrowing was an accepted fact within the various European languages. But that couldn’t explain the similarities with Sanskrit. How could the Germanic speakers from the icy climes of Scandinavia borrow such a large number of words from the ancient residents of India? There had to be another explanation. 

In 1786, Jones gave a lecture to the newly formed Asiatic Society, which he had helped to establish. In the lecture he highlighted the close similarities between three apparently dead languages: ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. He announced that Sanskrit derived from the same source as Greek and Latin. He also believed that the three were related to Gothic, a Germanic language spoken in Europe at a time before the Anglo Saxons had found their way to Britain. He also concluded that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek were all related to Persian as well. The following quote from Jones’s Lecture is often cited as the first formal statement that there was an ancient Indo-European language:

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 the verbs and in the forms of grammar than could possibly have been produced by accident. So strong, indeed, that no philology could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists.

Years of subsequent research has confirmed that Jones was correct in all of those assertions.  Now, to be completely fair, I should note at this point that there were others who were reaching the same conclusions as William Jones around the same time. In fact, about 20 years earlier, a French Jesuit named Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux had identified similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, German, and Russian. But it is Jones who is most often credited for this discovery.

This discovery sparked a dramatic increase in the study of ancient languages throughout Europe. Connections between ancient Sanskrit and European languages may have been noticed before Jones, but it was only after Jones that people began to take the connections seriously and began to study them in detail. In fact, the entire discipline of linguistics was developed in the 1800s, in large part to determine which languages belong to the Indo-European family and which do not. 

So, in case you're curious, what type of similarities was Jones seeing as he compared these various languages? Let me give you an example. You will recall that earlier I mentioned that English has the word father and Latin has the word pater, and both words came from the same original source word. The Greek version of the word is very similar to Latin and is also pronounced patera. The Sanskrit version of the word is pitar. In Spanish, it is padre. You can start to see how linguists realized that the /p/ sound shifted to an /f/ sound in the Germanic languages, but let's hold off on that for now.

In addition to having a very similar word for father in all of these languages, they also shared a common word for God. In Indo-European the word is déiwo. Sanskrit’s word devá is derived from that Indo-European word. The Old Irish word is día. The Latin word is deus, from which English derives divine and divinity, and the Spanish word is diós.

The word form “mother” shares a similar pattern:

• Indo-European: mātér
• Sanskrit: mātār
• Latin: mater
• Old Irish: māthair
• Russian: mati
• German: mutter
• French: mère
• Spanish: mader

So let's go back to William Jones for a minute. He had announced an original source language,

but pretty much left it at that. He identified the languages which he thought were part of this larger family of languages. It would be left to others to sort out how the languages fit together and which ones evolved from the others. In other words, further research would provide us with a family tree of languages which we still use today. 

So far, I have referred to the language as the Indo-European language–technically, the Proto-Indo-European language. Just to be clear in that regard, Indo-European is sort of the family name or surname of the languages. Proto-Indo-European is the technical name for the original language. If you imagine a family tree which begins with an ancestor named John Smith, all of the members of the family might be called Smith. But the original ancestor was John Smith. The same thing applies for the Indo-European languages. All of the languages within the family are called Indo-European languages, but the full name, the original source language, is Proto-Indo-European, meaning the first Indo European language. The basis of the name Indo-European should be self-explanatory at this point. The language family is located throughout Europe and all the way into India. But the term Indo-European was introduced later. Jones developed his own term for the language. He noticed within Sanskrit and Persian literature that there were persons who spoke those languages and called themselves Aryans. The term Aryan meant noble in Sanskrit. So, since these were the earliest documented speakers of this family of languages, he called the original speakers the Aryans, and the language became known as the Aryan language. I bring this to your attention because the term is still used in some older literature. I think you can probably see why the term Indo-European is preferred today instead of Aryan. At the time Jones coined the term, it was not meant to refer to blonde haired, blue-eyed northern Europeans. In fact, it was presumed that these Aryans, whoever they were, lived in Asia in the vicinity of Ancient Persia, which is modern day Iran. In fact, the name Iran comes from the Persian word meaning “home of the Aryans.” 

It was much later that this term came to be used by European Nazis and other racists to refer to a supposedly “ideal race” of Europeans. But until then, it was a more or less innocent term used to describe a specific ancient linguistic group of central Asia. During the 20^th century, when the term came to be used as a racist term, it was largely discarded by linguists and Indo-European became the standard term which is still used today. 

The Migration of Indo-Europeans

There are many theories of how and where these people spread out from their original homeland. The most accepted theory is known as the Kurgan theory (or the Steppe theory). It postulates that the people of a Kurgan culture in the Pontic steppe north of the Black Sea were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). The term is derived from the Russian kurgan (курга́н), meaning tumulus or burial mound. This Kurgan theory states that Indo-Europeans migrated out from their homeland and settled new territories including, as we’ve seen, Persia, northern India, and all of Europe. Here is a video that gives a good overview of how the Indo-Europeans spread and how their languages splintered into today’s language families. Figure 3.6 shows dates and a possible migration pattern.

Figure 3.6: Migration Patterns of Indo-Europeans

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Attribution: James Posselwhite

License: GNU Free Documentation License

Link: here

There are two factors that might have helped the Indo-Europeans as they spread through Europe (the focus of our study in the history of English). First, they seem to have established an early use of domesticated horses for travel and goods transport via wagon. This would have greatly aided in their expansion. In addition, there is speculation by Cochran and Harpending (2009) that certain pre-historic groups developed the ability to digest milk past puberty. Most modern-day Europeans can digest milk, so there is speculation that the Indo-Europeans were one of these lactose tolerant groups. If so, they had nutritional advantage over the previous inhabitants of Europe. It allowed them to grow stronger, taller, and survive famine periods more easily. This may or may not have been the case; however, one thing remains clear. The Indo-Europeans were able to supplant other groups in Europe (be it by conquest, sheer numbers, domesticated horses, or nutritional advantages), and this forever changed the linguistic landscape of Europe and ultimately gave rise to English.

Grimm’s Law

I’ve mentioned several times that certain consonant shifts occurred in the Germanic family of languages. This began to distinguish the Germanic languages from other Indo-European languages. This is an important concept that should be covered in a text on the history of English language. This shifting of certain consonants in the Germanic languages became known as Grimm’s law, named after the philologist and folklorist Jacob Grimm. He did not discover this shift, but he was the first to describe it in detail.

Figure 3.7: Image of Jacob Grimm

Source: Wikipedia

License: Public Domain

Link: here

What Grimm noticed is that there was a pattern of consistent change in consonants. It happened in three phases and over several centuries. These phases were as follows:

1. The voiceless stops in Indo-European changed to voiceless stops in Germanic languages.
2. The voiced stops in Indo-European changed to voiceless stops in Germanic languages.
3. The voiced aspirated stops change to voiced stops in Germanic languages.

Table 3.1 gives an overview of these changes and examples from Latin (a non-German language) and PDE (a Germanic language).

Table 3.1 Sound Changes from Indo-European to Germanic Languages

It is important to understand these changes happened over centuries. Speakers of the early Germanic languages would most likely not have noticed. Also, this was a chain shift as linguists like to say. There was a sort of domino effect. In addition, you may notice that the /t/ became /θ/, but in time, the /t/ was re-introduced after coming from the /d/ sound.

There are two reasons to discuss Grimm’s law. First, it is a well-known principle in the history of English. Second, it illustrates that language change happens in a principled manner. But the exact origins and reasons remain somewhat mysterious.

Conclusion

The basic premise of this chapter is that English had its origin in Indo-European. Through a series of sound changes and grammatical changes, the Indo-European language splintered, first into dialects and then into languages. While William Jones did not “discover” this, he was the first to promulgate this far and wide.

Key Concepts from Chapter 3:

• The Indo-Europeans originated from the Eurasian Steppes.
• Most European languages descended from the Indo-European languages.
• Sir William Jones “discovered” a common source of the Indo-European language families.
• The Germanic family of languages began to differentiate from other Indo-European languages. A Germanic language eventually supplanted other languages in England in the 5^th century AD.

Key Terms from Chapter 3:

• Indo-Europeans
• Proto-Indo-European
• Eurasian Steppes
• Cognates
• Language Families
• Grimm’s Law

Materials for Chapter 3 adapted from the following:

Stroud, Kevin. The History of English Podcast. (Material was used and adapted with permission.)

Works Cited for Chapter 3:

Cochran, G. & Harending, H. (2009). The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution. New York: Basic Books.