Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

by Laura Spinney

The epic tale of how one ancient language went global, and the scientific quest to trace it back to its roots, from the celebrated author of Pale Rider.

As the planet emerged from the last ice age, a language was born between Europe and Asia, by the Black Sea. This ancient tongue, which we call Proto-Indo-European, soon exploded out of its cradle, changing and fragmenting as it went, until its offspring were spoken from Scotland to China. Today those descendants constitute the world's largest language family, the thread that connects disparate Dante's Inferno to the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings to the love poetry of Rumi. Indo-European languages are spoken by nearly half of humanity. How did this happen?

Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the silk roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings—the ancient peoples who spread these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve the lost languages and their speakers: the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed this ancient diaspora. What they have learned has vital implications for our modern world, as people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Language, Linguistics, Science, Audiobook, Anthropology

352 pages, Hardcover

First published April 24, 2025

Reviews

[Rick Riordan]

As someone who loves language and makes my living from the written word, I found this book a mind-blowing revelation. Spinney does an incredible job retracing the origins of Indo-European languages back to a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European, by examining both linguistic and archaeological evidence, and she does so in a highly readable way.

My first thought was, "Wow, anthropology and archaeology have come a LONG way since I was a history student back in the 1980s." It's amazing how much we've been able to piece together about prehistoric societies (meaning those without the written word) from genetic evidence and examination of the earliest human settlements. I was particularly struck by how much of the story of Proto-Indo-European is tied to the Ukraine, and how war there has interfered with the ability of archaeologists to study and preserve valuable sites (along with all the other miseries of war).

From the Caucasus, Spinney described how early societies spread across Eurasia, their languages changing and evolving as they went, but still anchored in their common origin. As Spinney puts it, "their psychic universes overlapped. From the Scottish isles to the Himalaya, there existed a chain of societies that was deeply interconnected through trade, custom, language and mythology."

One of the more awe-inspiring things, for me, is how Proto myths can be reconstructed, showing just how many echoes there are in later versions of mythology. Here, for instance, is one Proto-Indo-European creation myth:

"A primordial Man (* Manu) conjures the world from his Twin (* Yemo). After journeying through the cosmos in the company of a primordial cow, Man and Twin decide to make the world. To do this Man must sacrifice Twin and cow so that he can build it from their dismembered parts. The sky gods and goddesses help him, and once the world exists Man becomes the first priest, overseeing ritual sacrifice. The gods then create Third Man (* Trito), to whom they give cattle, but a monster serpent steals the cattle. The name of the serpent is *Ngwhi, which is a literal negation: ‘not’. Fortified by an intoxicating beverage and assisted by a god, Trito overcomes the serpent and frees the sequestered cattle. He then makes a gift of cows to Man the priest, so that the sacrifices may continue and cosmic order be restored. Trito is the first warrior, and that first cattle raid is his initiation into manhood."

Aside from the history lessons, which are fascinating in themselves, I especially enjoyed the exploration of what language *is* and how it functions beyond just a vehicle for communication. As language changes, it becomes one of the major markers of cultural identity. If you speak my language, you are like me. If not, you are an outsider.

Embedded in this idea is a feeling of mistrust around migration which is still with us today: "Migration is considered a major if not the main motor of language change, because it drives a wedge between dialects and brings them into contact with different languages."

People want to belong, and they want to distinguish between "us" and "them." Because of this, we want to believe that our language is somehow pure and unchanging, and we want to resist anything that might "infect" it with foreign influences. Spinney even says that 'barbarians' are literally those whom we cannot understand, and that the word barbarian was "probably inspired by the sound people registered when they heard an unintelligible stream of speech: bar-bar or blah-blah or rhubarb. But everyone heard blah-blah when foreigners spoke."

A similar concept lurks behind the Latin words for guest and enemy. "Hospes (host, guest) and hostis (stranger, enemy). Hospes underlies the word ‘hospitality’ while hostis is the root of ‘hostility’, via Latin loans to English. These two words seem antithetical in their meaning, but they were once linked by the concept of a stranger, that passer-by whom a good welcome might turn into a friend and a bad one into a foe." So that "the moment a newcomer opens their mouth, they reveal whether they belong to ‘us’ or ‘them’."

Stepping back and taking macro view, however, the idea of an isolated, unadulterated language is nonsensical. "There is no such thing as a pure language. Its peculiar mix of archaisms and innovations reflects the periods of calm that it has known, as well as the periods of upheaval, and the other languages that it has brushed with along the way."

Spinney also ties our obsession to cultural monolingual to the rise of the European nation states in the 18th century. "From that time on languages and dialects other than the national ones were repressed. Before that, however, Europe was as multilingual as the rest of the world, and as our species for most of its past."

Again, this is grounded in the need to distinguish between 'us' and 'them.' "Understandably, a lot of people find it unnerving to think of their languages being transformed by the arrival of new ones, or even dying. But underpinning that fear is a false impression that they have remained static in the past. Throughout humanity’s long existence, languages have have never ceased to absorb and change each other."

A few other random tidbits that I found fascinating:

One of the early poetic devices used by bards when relating oral epic stories was the refer to a hero as someone who "urinates standing up." I've been asked to define the word 'hero' many times, but that was never in my top ten list of descriptors.

The idea of the Golden Fleece may have come from the ancient people of the Balkans (in the area of Colchis, where Jason and the Argonauts go) who actually used sheepskins to pan for gold in the rivers, leaving behind glittering fleeces as evidence.

To believe in something means to put your heart into it. "*k’erd-, the root of both ‘cardio’ and ‘heart’, sometimes occurred in the context of an expression, *k’red dheh1-. Literally meaning ‘to put your heart’, this became śrad dhā-in Sanskrit (believe) and crēdō in Latin (I believe)."

Writing is magic. The Ancient Egyptians certainly believed this, but so did most early societies. And when you think about what a radical thing the written word is, this makes sense. "Imagine being shown a scratch on a mossy log and told that it’s your ‘name’. It has no head, arms or legs, yet others who see it will think only of you. When you consider all that writing made possible, from seducing and defrauding people over long distances, to keeping track of complex transactions and claiming property and kinship after your death, it’s not hard to believe that people felt reverence for it; that in their minds it could alter a person’s destiny."

All in all, a wonderful illuminating read, expanding the story of humanity more broadly than I'd ever appreciated. I'll end with this lovely Russian proverb, reminding us that history can teach and guide us, but should not make us nostalgic for some perfect golden past that never existed: "The past is a lighthouse, not a port."

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book (exhaustively) explores the origins and evolution of Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the common ancestor of a vast family of languages that spread across Europe and Asia. Through linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence, the book traces how PIE speakers migrated from the Eurasian steppe and Anatolia, carrying their language with them.

Over millennia, PIE fractured into various branches, such as the Germanic, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages, influencing the development of modern languages like English, Hindi, and Spanish. The book examines key events, such as the rise of agriculture, the domestication of the horse, and the expansion of empires, which played crucial roles in spreading these languages. Ultimately, it shows how the legacy of PIE endures today in the global reach of its descendant languages.

Proto-Indo-European is the ancient ancestral language of a vast family of languages across Europe and Asia. Languages as different as Sanskrit, Persian, Swedish, Welsh, Russian, Latin and Greek are all PIE languages. It is presumed to have start in either Anatolia (Turkey) 7,000 years ago, or on the Eurasian steppe (6,000 years ago) that is now parts of Ukraine, Russia and Kazakhstan. It spread along with people settling or invading new areas, aided by the horse. The horse meant people could travel at speed to and from areas, helping with the interchange as well as expansion of language.

So all of this has been written about in quite a few books on Proto-Indo-European that I've read. All the research was done by archeology. Similar items in different places means a shared culture or a trading partnership for which a mutual language was necessary. Written language in the PIE areas only goes back to about 3000 BCE.

In either case, this book adds an element that makes it more interesting: DNA. DNA retrieved from ancient skeletons shows which group was related to others in a different place closer to the presumed original Proto-Indo-European site. It shows where people travelled to, where there was back-and-forth interaction - such as trading, or families visiting. There are very few ancient skeletons to be explored in this way so a lot of it is guesswork. But it's a bit like a tree. PIE is the trunk and then DNA traces the branches which are the languages. But not the twigs.

So how are the 'twigs', the words identified as PIE? Firstly by looking at words that sound similar: English - mother, Latin - mater, Sanskrit - matr, Greek - meter, German - mutter and Russian - maht. Then looking at what the words have in common - they all begin with M and despite the vowel shifts, sometimes because a letter in pronounced a certain way in one language and another in a different one, or because over time, words change their sound. It is hard to read Chaucer's English, and the sound of it is quite different from our own. Then, looking at what is constant and reconstructing the vowel shift according to knowledge of history of that language, linguists attempt to construct the original root, the PIE word. So, for mother, based on the above and their consistent sound patterns the PIE root has been constructed as 'mehter'.
__________

I didn't finish the book. There is only so much different you can say about the spread of PIE from other books, so once I had the DNA connection, I felt I had the main element that made the book unique.

[Emma Deplores Goodreads Censorship · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing, for several reasons. First, I expected a book about linguistics, which this isn’t; the author is a general science writer whose last book was about the Spanish flu, while this one is mostly about archaeology and genetic research and what they reveal about the migrations and lifestyles of ancient groups. Which can be interesting, but the connection to language is tenuous. Most of these groups are being profiled because they might have spoken Proto-Indo-European or an early version of one of its descendants, based on the fact that they lived around the same time linguists guess (based on rates of language evolution) that these were spoken. But we don’t know for sure, and the details about their lives generally seem unrelated to any thesis about language.

Relatedly, there’s the style. I notice several reviewers calling it dense or the material especially difficult, but I don’t think either is true—Spinney is a journalist and her style can be downright breezy, while I don’t typically find books about prehistory difficult to understand. The problem is that she does a poor job of connecting the details she’s providing to the big picture and the arguments she’s making. Without the author connecting the dots, it’s easy for the reader to get confused as to what these details mean and why we’re talking about this particular group or aspect of their culture at all.

Also, many of the arguments need more fleshing out or are downright bizarre. For instance, at one point, in a footnote (because there’s so little linguistics in the actual book), Spinney provides, as evidence that the Italic and Celtic branches are more closely related to each other than either is to Germanic, the fact that superlatives in Italian end in -ssimo, in Irish in -is, and in Proto-Germanic probably something like -isto-, leading to English -est. It is not self-evident to me that “isto” is the outlier here; an explanation of why linguists think so would have been appreciated. Or you get truly bizarre passages, like this one arguing that a massive genetic replacement, particularly of men, in ancient Europe (most of the genetic material and almost all Y-chromosomes of the earlier people were wiped out) might have been something other than the obvious:

“And there is another reason why [the Yamnaya] may have been able to expand their territories peacefully. A German anthropologist called Martin Trautmann has argued that their physical presence would have been intimidating enough. Ancient historians recount that the Germani and Celts were on average six centimetres (just over two inches) taller than Roman centurions – enough, they implied, to give the barbarians a psychological advantage. Yamnaya men were on average ten centimetres taller than the male farmers they encountered. They would have had a noticeably heavier build and deeper voices. Their facial features – lantern jaw, prominent nose, deep-set eyes – can’t have failed to impress their slenderer, lighter-boned interlocutors, and they may have heightened the effect by sporting tattoos on their foreheads. Traces of the dyes they used have been found on their skulls.” (emphasis in original)

So, basically, the speakers of Proto-Indo-European were so physically big and scary-looking that the indigenous inhabitants of Europe (specifically the males, because a decent amount of DNA remained – just not Y-chromosomes) gave up their land without a fight, slunk away, and died? (Or at least never had sex again?) Keep in mind we are talking about humans here. As far as I know, we are not a species in which the males’ testes shrivel up when confronted by a more dominant specimen. The accompanying argument is that perhaps there was a plague that hit one population harder than the other (specifically, the indigenous men?), which while perhaps not quite as unlikely as the “death by lantern jaws” theory, still isn’t a plausible explanation on its own. It’s unclear that any elements were present that would’ve caused one group to have much stronger resistance than the other, not to mention the sex disparity. And even in recorded history where some groups have been especially vulnerable to diseases carried by another (for reasons not seemingly present here, what with everyone involved having lived on the same continent since forever, and the indigenous group being farmers while the invaders were nomads), the diseases never wiped out everybody, they just provided an opportunity for conquerors to give it their best shot. Genocide (along with enslavement of surviving women) is certainly the blindingly obvious explanation here for anyone familiar with humanity, leaving me wondering why the author is working so hard to deny it.

In the end, I finished this book not really knowing any more about why Indo-European languages wound up covering so much of Eurasia than I did when I began. (They didn’t kill everyone everywhere, that seems to have mostly been northern Europe.) The author throws out a few other suggestions—maybe fostering of sons deepened ties between families to the point of creating a more durable culture? Maybe everybody else just really loved Indo-European drinking culture, enough to switch to their languages?—but these arguments aren’t fleshed out enough to make much sense of them, nor is it clear how different early Indo-Europeans were from their neighbors in these respects. In the end, we have only “right place-ish, right time-ish” to suggest who spoke Indo-European at all.

So that was mostly a lot of nothing, though it was kind of fun to learn a bit about ancient cultures and how much scientists can now learn about their lifestyles by recovering ancient DNA, analyzing tooth composition, etc. Still, I wouldn’t recommend.

[Fred Jenkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spinney aims at a general audience and mostly does a pretty good job, although it might be a bit challenging for those who don't have a background in languages/linguistics. I already knew a little about Proto Indo-European (IE) but it is largely tangential to my academic training in classical philology. Still, it helps to know most of the terminology.

Unlike older books that focus primarily on historical linguistics and archaeology, Spinney includes the results of recent DNA studies of IE remains which have helped clarify things, bolstering some theories and disposing of others. She starts with a general introduction to IE and its origins. This includes a number of connections with mythology. In a chapter called Genesis, appropriately enough, she discusses massive flooding of the Black Sea (due to melting glaciers) something like 10,000 years ago as a possible origin for the flood myth in Gilgamesh, Genesis, etc. In the Caucasus,the Colchis of the Greeks, sheep fleeces were used to pan for gold. Even for those not particularly into languages, there is a lot of interest. She identifies the nomadic Yamnaya people of the steppes of Central Asia as the original IE speakers. Horsemen, metal workers, and general purveyors of language and myth to the world. There is a fair amount of evidence, including DNA, to support this. But Spinney's greatest weakness is her tendency to pick her theory and stick with it, not always giving full attention to the others.

She then proceeds to address each major IE family in its linguistic and geographic context: Anatolian; Tocharian; Celtic, Germanic, Italic; Indo-Iranian; Baltic and Slavic; Albanian, Armenian, and Greek. It ends up being a wide-ranging cultural survey of prehistoric peoples, edging into historical periods for the modern linguistic descendants of IE. She brings in some of the history of Indo-European studies and some of the personalities of the field.

I enjoyed the book, not that I agree with everything in it. It reminded me of things I used to know and introduced a number that I didn't know. And I now have a list of other books to read when I get around to it.

[Alysa H. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, well-researched book. In Proto, author Laura Spinney (with assists from the various other academicians she mentions by name throughout) takes a sweeping, multidisciplinary approach to historical linguistics, attempting to trace the origin, spread, and evolution of the vast Indo-European language family from its ancient beginnings through to modern times. Because of the sometimes meandering nature of the writing -- and the topic itself -- I occasionally had a hard time keeping track of which bits are solid fact (such as DNA analysis of human remains from different archaeological sites), which bits are widely-accepted points of agreement, and which bits are still mainly theoretical, but I was thoroughly engrossed and learned things I never knew I needed to know about the history of Eurasia. I've been both entertained and educated!


** I received a Review Copy of this book via NetGalley **
(May 2025 Bloomsbury edition)

[Olivia Swindler · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was fascinating and extremely well researched. Overall, it was a little too academic and in the weeds for me. I love languages and history, but at times this felt too granular. There were a lot of interesting tidbits that I will remember!

Thank you to libro.fm for my ALC.

[Irena Pasvinter · Rating 3 out of 5]

According to Goodreads ratings two stars is "it was OK", and three stars is "I liked it". I can't say I liked this book. On the other hand, popular science books about Proto-Indo-European are rare, and this one is definitely much better than the time-wasting The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. So once I got past the Introduction with its annoying inaccuracies and oversimplifications, I felt like giving Proto an additional star for actually saying quite a lot about how and what we know about Proto-Indo-European language and its numerous linguistic offsprings.

As Wikipedia informs us:
Laura Spinney [...] is a British science journalist, novelist, and non-fiction writer whose 2017 book Pale Rider is an account of the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Spinney graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Sciences[...].

I would prefer if this book were written not by a journalist with degree in Natural Sciences but by a professional linguist, or at least by an amateur-enthusiast with a life-long interest in languages and linguistics. Apparently, Proto-Indo-European professionals have better things to do than writing PIE tales for general audience. As Proto tells us in some intriguing detail, the linguists are quite busy with reassembling the puzzle of PIE and its descendants, by bits and pieces: they deduce and apply sound change laws; reconstruct original PIE roots; compare PIE descendants to figure out who split where and when; gain insight into ancient cultures and their language through archaeological findings, and, most recently, also through DNA analysis.

These latest DNA analysis insights are main focus of the book, with the author travelling to many of the key archaeological sites, discussing the latest findings with archaeologists and linguists.

I liked that the book's structure mirrors the family tree of PIE descendants, with each chapter telling about a different branch.

I felt much better about the book as I glanced at the Table of Contents upon finishing the Introduction:

Prologue
Introduction: Ariomania
1: GENESIS
Lingua obscura
2: SACRED SPRING
Proto-Indo-European
3: FIRST AMONG EQUALS
Anatolian
4: OVER THE RANGE
Tocharian
5: LARK RISING
Celtic, Germanic, Italic
6: THE WANDERING HORSE
Indo-Iranian
7: NORTHERN IDYLL
Baltic and Slavic
8: THEY CAME FROM STEEP WILUSA
Albanian, Armenian, Greek
Conclusion: Shibboleth

Proto was published in 2025, and the author mentions visiting archeological sites in Russia and meeting Russian scientists in 2023. She was near Rostov-on-Don just as Prigozhin, whom she calls a rebel, took Rostov-on-Don and continued marching on Moscow (stopped half-way, unfortunately, especially for himself;)). The author visited different archaeological sites in Russia and none in Ukraine (too dangerous, I suppose). If memory serves, the only Ukrainian scientist she spoke to was actually an American scientist of Ukrainian origin, who left Ukraine some 20 years ago or more.

My impression is that the author tried to "stay objective", balancing between Russia and Ukraine without taking sides, so that nobody would be offended or upset, which is more or less like trying to stay dry amidst torrential rain by waltzing between the drops. And with her many personal encounters with the Russian scientists, the author's balance might have still tilted towards Russian narrative.

For example, in Conclusion:Shibboleth the author mentions паляниця (palyanytsia) -- the Ukrainian shibboleth word, which during the war became a litmus test for Russian soldiers and spies. Russian speakers are usually unable to pronounce it correctly, unless they are local Russian speakers who grew up in Ukraine and are familiar with how Ukrainian is pronounced. So, the author accompanies this story with something like "Russians and Ukrainians used to leave in peace. Before the war, paying attention to dialectal differences wasn't important." And of course, that's exactly what the Russian narrative says: "Ukrainian is just another dialect of Russian, inferior and mispronounced." But no matter what the author's Russian counterparts or whoever it was might have told her, Ukrainian is a language, not a dialect of Russian, same as Spanish is not a dialect of Italian.

The narrator of the audiobook version deserves a special mention. Almost every foreign language word is mispronounced. For example, if you expect to actually hear r in Latin pater, mater and frater, lower your unreasonable expectations.

Also, the narrator feels quite sure that any Slavic word longer than two syllables has to be stressed on a penultimate one. Why? Gut feeling, I suppose. Always trust your gut--don't bother to verify stresses, even when the correct stress is only one Wikipedia browse away. That's how we end up with Yamnaya culture being stressed on the second syllable instead of the first one. And as Yamnaya is one of the most ancient and the most important sites and cultures in the history of the Proto-Indo-European language, we only get to hear this word about hundred times. Anyway, who cares? Well, I did, especially after I heard that Yamnaya culture was named after the word that means pit grave. Wait, I thought, Russian word for pit is yama, with the stress on the first syllable. So is this actually YAmnaya culture (not YamNAya)? Indeed, it is. Once again, who cares? The narrator's Yamnaya rhymes with pariah, so what's not to like? Well, it's my review, and a hundred of mis-stressed Yamnaya didn't endear me to the narrator, in spite of her careful articulation and even cadence, perfect for a night time children story. I won't bother you with other examples of creative word-stresses.



Indo-European expansions, based on Anthony (2007), Nordqvist & Heyd (2020), Narasimhan (2019). (Image credit: Background: Map created from DEMIS Mapserver, which are public domain. Koba-chanDrawings: पाटलिपुत्र, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

To summarize, if you always wanted to know more about Proto-Indo-European but were afraid to ask, go ahead and read this book. If it's your first ever book on pre-history and linguistics, you might even adore it. If not, you might still find it interesting.

[Hank · Rating 4 out of 5]

And the last of my reviews I have to catch up on after my laptop died because I can't type this many words on my phone.

Could I have an intelligent conversation at a cocktail party about languages and how they evolved after reading this? Absolutely not but that isn't Spinney's fault. Can I remember even a few of the the super interesting facts she laid out about languages? Also no. Did I completely enjoy just listening to her talk about language origins, the many, many ways they spread, how they influence cultures and lots of other tidbits? Definitely yes!

Truly a fun book to listen to. Thank you once again LibroFM for the ALC

[Stan Prager · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in 2011, I was visiting Philly, where my daughter lived in those days, but the timing of my trip was all about the opening day of the exhibit of the Tarim Basin mummies at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Fans of the history of the storied Silk Road know of the Tarim Basin as once hosting a number of oases that serviced caravans in the otherwise forbidding Taklamakan Desert, now located in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region in the People’s Republic of China. Naturally mummified, the collection of desiccated remains that was scheduled for display at the museum that day are incredibly old—some dating back about four thousand years—but what’s more astonishing is their ancestry: an isolated population of Ancient North Eurasians that once spoke Tocharian, an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family. To put that in perspective, these days in excess of forty percent of the world—more than three billion people—speak some kind of Indo-European language, including German, Italian, Russian, French, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Persian, Greek, Irish, Albanian, Lithuanian, Armenian, and the English employed in the writing of this review. Tocharian was once part of that family! It is believed that all these languages (and hundreds of others) are descended from what once was a common tongue called Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
There is no extant record of PIE, but its elements have been partially identified through linguistic reconstruction, which is a remarkable tale in itself, although perhaps a far more extraordinary one lies in tracing how it is that descendants of this proto-language are spoken today by billions of people at such distant geographies. In Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global [2025], both stories are expertly woven together in a fast-moving, well-written, if sometimes flawed narrative by science journalist Laura Spinney, which serves as a solid introduction to the global implications of Proto-Indo-European for the past and the present.
I first became intrigued by the Indo-European languages some years ago during my deep dive into the classics and the Bronze Age Mycenaean Greeks who peopled Homer’s Iliad. The Mycenaean script was first discovered (if not identified at the time) in the ruins of the Minoan Palace of Knossos on Crete in 1900 by British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, on tablets tagged as Linear B to distinguish it from the other, earlier script found on other tablets that were labeled as Linear A. Linear B also turned up elsewhere on the Greek mainland, but no one could decipher the strange symbols. More than a half century later, Michael Ventris and John Chadwick cracked the code and determined that Linear B was in fact a form of ancient Greek, in use by the Mycenaeans who conquered the Minoans. The Linear B syllabic script seems to have evolved from the still undeciphered Linear A, which was almost certainly Minoan and probably unrelated to Greek, and thus likely a non-Indo-European language.
There are important lessons here that have global implications. First, while the ancient Minoans and Greeks for a time utilized similar scripts, the languages recorded by these scripts were different. Second, and perhaps of even greater significance, that the Minoans learned to speak and write the Greek language of their conquerors does not imply that the two distinct peoples were otherwise related. When Greek written language reemerged after a kind of dark age that followed the collapse of the Bronze Age—one of the earliest literary works recorded was The Iliad—they wrote it down in an alphabetic script borrowed from the Phoenicians, an unrelated people who spoke Canaanite, a Semitic, non-Indo-European language. Thus, the populations that today speak Hindi, French, Albanian, or English are not by necessity genetically related to those who at one time may have overrun them and imposed an Indo-European language upon them, although they may be, and in some cases we can determine that they definitely are.
But long before this—long before there were Greeks—their Indo-European ancestors walked the earth, presumably speaking PIE. Where did they come from? We cannot be certain, but the most widely accepted theory is based upon the Kurgan hypothesis, proposed by Marija Gimbutas, which holds that nomadic pastoralists from the Pontic-Caspian steppe (now southern Ukraine and Russia) moved south and west in the 4th millennium BCE and imposed their culture and language on Neolithic farmers in their paths. Kurgans are the ancient burial mounds archaeologists have linked to these steppe nomads. (Gimbutas’ later reputation suffered due to her fixation on a belief in an "Old Europe" matriarchal civilization dominated by a life-affirming Mother Goddess, which has been panned by archaeologists for lacking evidence, but the central tenets of the Kurgan hypothesis have withstood vigorous scrutiny in subsequent studies.)
Her work was revised and refined by anthropologist David Anthony, whose magnificent book—The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World [2007]—I read some years ago. Anthony argues that steppe nomad warriors, armed with domesticated horses and the advanced technology of wheeled vehicles, dominated Neolithic cultures in Europe, Anatolia, and beyond, spreading the proto-Indo-European language across continents. Paleogenetics has confirmed the likelihood that Gimbutas and Anthony were on to something, as DNA analysis has demonstrated the presence of a signature Y-chromosome (passed down by males) in modern Europeans, notably the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b that is traceable to steppe nomads. Evidence of mtDNA (the mitochondrial DNA passed down by females) in contemporary populations indicate that migrations of women from the steppes also occurred. Modern Indians are of mixed ancestry, but there too there is no mistaking the paternally inherited Y-chromosome that steppe nomads introduced thousands of years ago.
This was of course not the last time that steppe nomads put their mark on civilizations east and west—think Scythians, Huns, Turks, and Mongols—which certainly puts a lie to the “great man” historiography that dominated the textbooks of my youth, and solidly rebukes the likes of Will Durant, who with some arrogance once pronounced that civilizations rise on stoicism and fall on epicureanism. Really? How about climate change, pandemics—and invasions by steppe nomads?
Spinney deserves high marks for her review of the Kurgan hypothesis and competing theories. She is also on solid ground as she walks the reader through how it is that linguists can be certain that more than four hundred languages spoken by billions of people today—as well as a number of extinct branches of the Indo-European language family—are indeed related and must have descended from the PIE originally spoken by steppe nomads. To that end, she walks the reader through the homology of Indo-European languages to identify their linguistic kinship and common ancestry with PIE, including the correspondence of sounds, similar grammatical structures, and especially the shared vocabulary found, for instance, in ancient Sanskrit and Latin, and their modern descendants like Hindi and French.
Vocabulary that shares common ancestor words from PIE—but may sound altered today due to regular sound changes—are called Indo-European cognates. A popular example is the English “mother,” which is in Latin mater, Greek mētēr, Sanskrit mātṛ, German Mutter, Russian mat'—which share the “*mater-” PIE root. There are many other examples, including “father” which has the PIE root “*pater-” and appears as Latin pater, Sanskrit pitṛ́, Greek patḗr, French père, Spanish padre, Armenian hayr, and Irish athair. A hint of how these two words might have been pronounced in the very distant past may be detected in today’s Lithuanian—the most archaic living Indo-European language with the least sound changes, considered closest to the original PIE—with mother rendered as “motina” and father as “tėvas,” preserving in this “conservative” East Baltic tongue older sounds that changed, for instance, in Latin and English. It is not surprising that words like “mother” and “father” should remain closer to their ancient PIE roots, but there are many other examples of such cognates, although due to sound changes over thousands of years, some may not correspond as elegantly as others.
Indo-European languages are divided into either centum or satem languages according to how the sounds of the dorsal consonants ("K,” "G," and "Y") evolved. At one time, it was believed that there was a neat divide between western and eastern languages with centum and satem, respectively, but then Tocharian was discovered and it turned out to be something like a centum tongue, even if it’s a kind of special case. It’s complicated.
Indo-European is further categorized by its branches, and language divergence began very early on with the oldest branches of Anatolian (Hittite) and Tocharian, and later splits into Hellenic (Greek) and Indo-Iranian (Vedic Sanskrit). To my mind, perhaps most fascinating is the number of extinct languages that were once derived from PIE. The Tocharian of Central Asia is one, of course, which has no modern descendants, and actually the whole Tocharian branch is defunct. Another is its earliest, Hittite, which dates back to 1750 BCE. The Hittites, who once dominated Anatolia, modern Turkey, are famously referenced in the Hebrew Torah, and are notable in the archaeological record for the massive chariot warfare that occurred circa 1274 BCE between armies led by Hittite King Muwatalli II and the Egyptian Pharoah Ramesses II at the Battle of Kadesh, located in modern day Syria, which ended in stalemate and the world's first recorded peace treaty! The Hittite Empire fell with the collapse of the Bronze Age, and eventually their language disappeared, as well.
Like Tocharian, the entire Anatolian branch—that once included Hittite as well as other tongues such as Luwian, Lydian, and Lycian—is entirely extinct, with no successor languages. Surviving main branches—many of which also include now vanished languages—are Indo-Iranian, Germanic, Italic, Hellenic, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Armenian, and Albanian. Of these, the largest belongs to the 1.7 billion who speak Hindi, Persian, Urdu, and Kurdish, among the more than three hundred Indo-Iranian languages. While reading Proto, I got a kick out of the fact that the guys I buy beer from at my local package store hail from the Indian state of Gujarat, and speak Gujarati—an Indo-European language! There are close to four hundred fifty living languages in the Indo-European family today, but also more than eight hundred others that no longer exist.
Proto serves as a fine introductory course on Indo-European languages and their shared PIE ancestry, although it turns into a kind of travelogue as Spinney takes the reader on a journey to various spots across the globe where IE tongues are spoken, looking to the past and present with captivating excursions into history, archaeology, linguistics, genetics, and culture. On the one hand, this makes the book far more readable—she is a very talented writer—but will leave some wanting more, especially as she exercises the author’s prerogative to devote more emphasis to certain branches of IE than to others.
There are, unfortunately, a couple of glaring errors. The first is when she repeats the discredited notion that the volcanic eruption circa 1628 BCE of Thera (modern Santorini) brought on the collapse of the Minoan civilization, and opened the door to the Mycenean Greeks [p238]. Classicists know that while the catastrophe at Thera significantly weakened the Minoan thalassocracy, Mycenaeans did not conquer Crete until circa 1450 BCE—nearly 180 years later! Worse, Spinny repeats the long-debunked canard that the Egyptian pyramids were constructed by slaves [p.195] rather than skilled, paid laborers—a notion imagined in technicolor by Cecil B. DeMille but repudiated by historians. These are, of course, just two blemishes on an otherwise fine work, but nevertheless made me want to fact-check some of her other material.
Still, those of us who thrive on breaking news in science and history will derive a great deal of enjoyment from Proto, which balances content with readability such that there is an appeal to an academic as well as a general audience—which is an achievement worth an underscore! But those with a focus on politics rather than scholarship might not be on board. Hindu nationalists firmly reject any connection to outside cultural influences, and vehemently deny that Sanskrit and Hindi are Indo-European in origin. Perhaps they share the conceit of the ancient Athenians, who likewise imagined themselves as autochthonous?
There are political sensitivities in the People’s Republic of China, as well. Turning back to my visit to Philadelphia for the opening day exhibit of “Secrets of the Silk Road” and the Tarim mummies: in the end, at the very last minute, to my great disappointment, the Chinese government yanked permission to display the mummies; paper cut-outs of the body forms were substituted. It was never stated out loud, but we all knew the reasons were purely political. The region where the Tocharian-speaking North Eurasians once roamed was now home to the often persecuted Muslim Uyghur minority population. Any challenge to the myth of the homogeneity of a single ancient Chinese people and culture in the wider geography of the PRC is a source of anxiety to the totalitarian regime. Apparently, the double-whammy of Turkic speaking Uyghurs and archaic Indo-Europeans was just too much for the Chinese Communist Party, and they pulled the plug on showcasing the Tocharian mummies.
Later, there was a change of heart, and the mummies were restored to their exhibit cases, but by then I was hundreds of miles away and never got to see them. Yet, that episode hardly dulled my interest in the Tarim mummies, nor the Indo-European language family, and in the last fifteen years I have read fairly deeply about both. Proto is only my latest!



Latest Book Review & Podcast ... Review of: Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, by Laura Spinney https://regarp.com/2026/01/24/review-...

[Annikky · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

I have a strange obsession with the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language and its origins. Well, to be more precise, in some ways it's not strange at all, as I love pre-history and I find languages fascinating. On the other hand, however, I am not the biggest fan of Indo-Europeans (I am speaking very generally and historically here, but they seem too fond of hierarchy, war, glory and their cows) and frankly the European languages* are absolutely the least interesting for me personally. Despite this, I find the story of the Yamnaya and the search of the original 'homeland' of PIE absolutely thrilling. I plowed through David Anthony's The Horse, the Wheel, and Language which covers some similar ground to Proto, but in much more detail, and devoured David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here - Reich's work provides much of the genetic evidence underlying this book. (Both men are amply quoted in Proto.)

I am telling you all this to manage your expectations: if you do not like the topic as much as I do, you will perhaps not enjoy the book as much as I did. Then again, all this amazing stuff about the cultures that gave us PIE, the twelve language families, the recent genetic findings and reconstructions of old words will be new and exciting for you. I have seen some people complain that the book is dense - I do not agree, I think it is very well written and accessible, certainly easier to read than Anthony or Reich. However, the fact that a lot of the info here is familiar to me definitely makes things less difficult to follow, so keep that in mind. Also, there were a few places in the text where I did lose the thread or where things could have been explained more clearly (for example the early chapter on the lingua franca, where it was not super clear who was who and how they were connected). Partly, this reflects the underlying complexity and the inevitable need to speculate, but occasionally it also seemed like an editing issue. Spinney is clearly a great writer and has a very good grasp on the substance, so I suspect something got lost in the revision process. But honestly, this is the only complaint I have and the reason why this isn't a full five stars.

What I was most impressed by in this book was the abundance and freshness of the sources, the research here is really up-to-date, often referencing things published in 2024. It is especially relevant for this topic, as the field is moving very quickly, in particular when it comes to genetics, so things date fast**. Spinney is a journalist by profession, but she seems to have read every relevant scientific paper. She even quotes some Estonian researchers (I can tell you, as an Estonian, that this is rare) and Estonian is not an IE language! In the context of the book, the Uralic languages are relevant only as far as they interact with the IE languages, but Spinney still gives them their due. Somewhat surprisingly, the chapter on Slavic and Baltic languages turned out to be one of my favourites - I'm usually much more interested in the Anatolian and Tocharian branches, for example. Then again, considering that the chapter covered two of my other obsessions - Marija Gimbutas and the Novgorod Republic - it is perhaps not that surprising after all.

Anyway, all this rambling is to say that if you have any interest in this topic specifically or early history/language development more generally, this is a good read.


*I am fully aware that there are branches of IE that are spoken outside of Europe and these are, indeed, much more interesting. But I am generalising here from a very personal, unscientific perspective.
**This of course also means that things in this book will date and some theories that Spinney covers may be proven wrong. I think Spinney makes that clear, but inevitably, much of the nuance of the scientific debate is lost in a 300-page book.

[R Adrien · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was excited to read this book and wanted to like it but found the disquisition a little too non-linear, asif the author wanted to envelope surprises and details into the prose instead of laying things out as plainly as possible.

The history of the Indo-European languages is very complex for sure, so this book should have been laid things out using a more logical structure - like presenting more general details and then moving into specifics, and without interleaving multiple hypotheses in such a convoluted way.

This book has to be read very, very slowly.. or you will end up putting it down or completely skimming it.

A missed opportunity to present an easier read on a fascinating history but still a worthwhile read if the subject matter interests you as much as it does me.

[Brok3n · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where Indo-European languages came from

Here are some useful facts from the Introduction of Laura Spinney's Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

Now, eight billion humans speak around seven thousand languages. Those languages fall into about a hundred and forty families, but most of us speak languages that belong to just five of them: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Among those five, two behemoths stand out: Indo-European, whose major representative is English, and Sino-Tibetan, which includes Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin has more native speakers than English, but Indo-European has more native speakers than Sino-Tibetan. If you include second or subsequent language-speakers, Indo-European is by far the largest language family the world has ever known. That remains true if you measure it by geographical spread. Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European.

By definition, all Indo-European languages derive from a single language called Proto-Indo-European, spoken some 5000-7000 years ago by some small (probably) group of people who lived -- no one is quite sure where.

Spinney credits Dante Alighieri with being the first to realize that different languages evolved from ancient ancestors by descent with modification, an idea that Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace would centuries later bring to biology. Later historical linguists/philologists (two names for one discipline) eventually convinced themselves that European languages were related by common ancestry to Indian languages such as Sanskrit, and the family now includes some seven subfamilies, as well as a handful of isolated languages that haven't been assigned to a larger group.

Who the speakers of Proto were, where they lived, and when are unsettled questions, although the most likely answers have become clearer in the last few decades. Probably they lived in the north, where Europe gives way to Asia and forest gives way to steppe, in regions that are now Ukraine, Georgia, and Turkiye. (I remember how surprised I was on hearing this some 20 years ago. One typically assumes that human things originated in Africa, where humans evolved, or the Fertile Crescent, where civilization first arose.)

Spinney tells this story in the right way, not by telling us what happened, but by telling us what the evidence is. The evidence is of three types. Historical linguists compare written records of extant and historical languages and attempt to deduce from the things they share what the ancestral language might have looked like. Archaeologists compare the material leavings of ancient peoples. The New Kid on the Block is ancient genetics. In about 2000 it became possible to sequence DNA from well-preserved corpses. This information can be used to trace relationships among peoples and to work out who moved where. It appears that Proto was spread far and wide by the Yamnaya people who originated in and near what is now Ukraine.

Proto does not contain an author biography. Spinney does have a Wikipedia Page, which describes her as a science journalist. Science journalists are not always good at science. Spinney clearly knows her stuff, though. One gets the impression that she would be right at home on a dig. She is comfortable explaining comparative linguistics, and she seems to understand enough genetics to make sense of the revelations of ancient DNA.

Also, she puts the science and scholarship first. She doesn't attempt to make her book a "human story" by telling irrelevant spicy anecdotes about the researchers. She seems to understand that her readers are really interested in languages and how they came to be. Furthermore, she understands that any story about language is inherently a "human story" already, and that her real job is to tell us everything she plausibly can about those ancient peoples.

I thoroughly enjoyed Proto.

Blog review.

[R-K · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many decades ago, in my fourteenth year, I chose the option at school of studying Latin. I was mesmerized by the fact that learning Latin was something more than just learning new words. Besides the vocabulary, I had to learn about noun case (nominative, genitive, dative etc), gender, verb conjugations and much, much more. As well, Mrs Smith taught about the history of Rome and the wanderings of the Latin speaking peoples. This in turn led to links to all of the Romance languages and loan words into English.

Unfortunately, after two years of Latin, my father was transferred to a military base in the middle of the Canadian prairies where the only Latin was on the hat badges of the gunners in the artillery units. But my fascination with language was set. I took a few linguistics courses at university and eventually learned two Romance languages, French and Spanish. Then last year, while reading several books on Indian Buddhism, I started to see similarities between various European languages and Sanskrit. (Sanskrit prefix “dvi-“ = German “zwei”, Sanskrit “tri-“ German “drei”, Sanskrit “catur”= Spanish “cuatro” and on). As I read, I made something of a game of it and suddenly made sense of the term Indo-European languages. And I started boring friends and neighbours with my discoveries. Which led to a discussion that my wife had with one of her walking buddies about a book she had heard reviewed on the radio that she thought I might like, Proto, about the Proto-Indo-European language.

I ordered the book with some misgivings that the book might be pop-linguistics that would put me off or overly academic that would leave me awash in terminology beyond my ken. The first option here seemed to be confirmed by the blurb on the book which described author Laura Spinney as a “journalist “ whose last book was about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918. No academic accomplishments were mentioned. But I ordered the book and started to read the Introduction. I thereafter had trouble putting the book down. This was a book written for me. Laura Spinney may not be an academic but she has definitely done her homework on the Proto- European language and its many daughter languages. In the process she has learned much about archaeology, linguistics and genetics as well history, mythology and geography. She is also a master writer who managed to express many complicated theories and processes in clear language. For myself, I can only say that I learned a great deal and will want to reread the book in the future.

Spinney has structured Proto in such a way as to build each chapter on what she has explained earlier. (She has very thoughtfully provided the reader with a map of the area of Indo-Europe being discussed for each chapter.) The first two chapters set the stage for everything that follows. There, after meeting various archaeologists and geneticists, the reader is presented with the result of their researches that beginning some 5,500 years ago there was a culture of nomadic herders who inhabited an area basically north of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea in an area which today lies in southern Russia, Ukrainia, and Bulgaria. Archaeologists have located numerous graves from that time which reveal the remains of individuals, along with grave goods, whose graves reveal similar rituals and unique methods of constructing the graves. These people have come to be known as Yamnaya from a Russian expression referencing the “pit graves”.

DNA scientists have been able to confirm the relationship of these people to the point where they can tell us things about the general appearance of the Yamnaya. “The Yamnaya were typically brown-haired and brown-eyed … with a complexion somewhere between fair and dark. They were extremely tall for their time, over a metre eighty or six foot in the case of some men. The women … were tall too.” As time passed, the Yamnaya people grew in number and started to spread out, going both west and east, carrying their genetic material and culture with them, part of that culture being their language. The big question is, how was it possible to identify that language with the so-called Proto-European language. The Yamnaya people left no written record behind.

Linguists have known for centuries that languages are related to each other, for much the same reason that I was able to see the link between Sanskrit and European languages. The existence of the Proto-Indo-European language was a given, but the association with the language of the Yamnaya remained to be shown. This required some detective work. As the peoples of world started to leave a written record behind of their spoken languages, they left a history behind of their cultures and their languages. Modern day linguists have been able to make links between ancient written languages and mythologies. They have discovered rules of language change, made linkages between languages and been able to distinguish the flow of languages across the Indo-European land mass. By following the genetic and historical records they have been able to confirm that the Proto-Indo-European originated in the early homelands of the Yamnaya.

Historic linguists have, to date, established some sixteen hundred words that they believe were spoken by Yamnaya people over 5,000 years ago. Of course, the linguists, archaeologists and scientists do not all agree on every detail of their work, but as Laura Spinney demonstrates, they continue to make progress and are willing to change their theories as new information becomes available. Through the following six chapters, she explicates another eleven language groups that are part of the Proto-European languages: Anatolian and Tocharian, two languages that have gone extinct; Celtic, Germanic, Italic; Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Armenian and Greek.

The book is fascinating as it gives dozens of examples of words shifting between the languages. Here is an example of proposed reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European words:

“Take *dhughter, which has been reconstructed from English ‘daughter’ and its counterparts ‘duhitár’ in Sanskrit, ’thugátēr’ in Greek, ‘duster’ in Armenian and ‘duktė’ in Lithuanian. it joins*phter- (father), *mehter- (mother), *bhrehter, brother, *swesor- (sister) *suHnu- (son) to make up the nuclear family.”

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recommended by John McWhorter, NY Times: "finally a book for the curious lay reader" . He pointed to this review:
https://slate.com/culture/2025/05/eng...
Excerpt:
"The explosion of Proto-Indo-European from its origins in Eastern Ukraine—the subject of science journalist Laura Spinney’s beguiling and revelatory new book ... is, according to Spinney, “easily the most important event of the last five millennia in the Old World.” ...
Spinney is a stylish and erudite writer; it’s the rare science book that quotes Keats, Seamus Heaney, and Ismail Kadare. She also has a keen sense of the romance of her subject."

I read and finished this book some time ago. I thought I had kept notes, but if so they have gone astray. Lots of interesting stuff: the history and (especially) linguistics got confusing. Overall, this was a 3.5 star book for me, and I'm rounding down.

I might get it out from the library again sometime and do a quick check-reread to refresh my memory. Or not. Parts were TMI for me. Cautiously recommended for those interested in migration history and language. Plenty of other reviews to check too, if you are so inclined.

[Patricia]

Didn't finish, so not rated. The style and topic were fun. The discussion of what is now possible with DNA analysis was amazing. But when she asserts that "Modern English-speakers can understand the Middle English of Shakespeare" (17), I had to wonder how trustworthy the rest of the research and editing might be. Middle English is earlier, and it includes a number of variations that send modern readers to a good glossary at least. Shakespeare's early modern English is quite different. It's a little slip in a book that the author worked hard on. Still, it's a basic thing people learn in history of the language and medieval classes and I am feeling down about the stuff we don't think it's important to know anymore.

[Awais Ahmed · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was “history in a microcosm” as a reviewer pointed out! Delightful read that left me slightly better informed about the pre historic and early historic Eurasia. How migrations happened, how languages morphed, how mythologies spread.

[Simon Goldenson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mostly an ok book. More archeology than linguistics, not that that's a problem though. The AI-saviourism at the end, with the strange claim that humans could never compare languages for grammar and sound, but only shared vocabulary (??) and that somehow chatyipiti will somehow "unlock" this nonexistent puzzle was unnecessary and off-putting.

[Wciągam Książki Nosem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wspaniała książka!

Opowieść o zamierzchłych czasach, gdy nasi praprzodkowie przemierzali euroazjatyckie stepy i wykluwał się praindoeuropejski, który w toku ewolucji doprowadził do powstania języków z rodziny indoeuropejskiej. Czyli łapiąca ten niemalże mistyczny moment, gdy dopiero rodziły się pierwsze języki.

Niesamowita podróż do źródeł pierwszych cywilizacji. To jak opowiedziana ze swadą historia ludzkości, do tego przywołująca dawno wymarłe kultury czy nieznane szerzej grupy etniczne, które miały ogromny wpływ na rozwój języków. Robi wrażenie, jak mobilni byli często nasi praprzodkowie, jak w tamtych trudnych warunkach kilka tysięcy lat temu potrafili przemierzać rozległe terytoria, przy okazji doprowadzając do spotkań różnych kultur, które wzajemnie na siebie oddziaływały i wzajemnie od siebie czerpały.

Autorka korzysta z najnowszej wiedzy naukowej, do tego często jeździ na miejsca wykopalisk archeologicznych i przeprowadza rozmowy ze specjalistami w tej dziedzinie. Wykorzystuje odkrycia językoznawców, archeologów i genetyków (badanie DNA kopalnego - te kawałki są zawsze dla mnie szczególnie interesujące!)

Czytało mi się ten reportaż jak wciągająco napisany zapis śledztwa w arcyciekawej sprawie.

Spinney nie unika trudnych, spornych tematów i do tego, co bardzo mi się podoba, nie zajmuje się tylko prehistorią i dawnymi czasami, ale nawiązuje do teraźniejszości i nie boi się jasno wyrażać swoich opinii. Cenię tę cechę u ludzi, szczególnie jeśli mam podobne zdanie xD

To książka, która po raz kolejny udowadnia, że nie ma czegoś takiego jak "czysty język". Prawdziwy jedynie słuszny polski, angielski, duński czy perski (na pohybel nacjonalistom, próbującym manipulować tymi kwestiami do udowadniania swoich nierzadko ksenofobicznych teorii). Wszystkie języki są kundlami. Nie powstały w próżni, nasiąkały obcymi wpływami i czerpały z innych języków. A do tego na przestrzeni czasu ewoluowały. I dopóki istnieją, będą się zmieniać, "zanieczyszczać" xD Czy się to komuś podoba czy nie.


Dziekuję wydawnictwu Znak Horyzont za egzemplarz recenzencki.

[Stetson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Proto is an admirable attempt to turn the "Steppe Hypothesis" (or Kurgan theory) of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language into a serious-yet-still-popular trade book. The historically controversial steppe hypothesis proposes that PIE originated in the Pontic-Caspian steppe circa 3000–4000 BC. The original theory was pioneered in the late 19th/early 20th century by Otto Schrader (1883) and V. Gordon Childe (1926) but underwent significant systematization and popularization in the 1950s thanks to the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. Since then, it languished as the eminent Colin Renfrew developed and popularized the Anatolian hypothesis (or Sedentary Farmer Theory), which proposed an earlier (8,000–9,500 years ago rather than 5000-6000 years ago) spread of Indo-European languages from Anatolia (modern Turkey) tracking with the expansion of agriculture. The archaeological data appeared to support Renfrew's theory for awhile, though the bold anthropologist David Anthony challenged it persuasively in The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World in 2007 using an argument dependent on linguistics and archaeology. The debate continued until 2015, when ancient DNA (aDNA) techniques sufficiently matured and lent enormous support to the steppe hypothesis (see PMID: 26595274). For most experts in the field, including the late Renfrew, the steppe theory has become an emerging consensus, and the expanding insights from aDNA catalogued in David Reich's Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past have only continued to reaffirm it.

Laura Spinney recapitulates many of these findings with her own particular spin in Proto so there isn't a lot that's new to those who have already been following these discussions in intellectual discourse and the primary literature. For those who are readers of Razib Kahn, like myself, are unlikely to find much that is new and may finds some bones to pick with particular claims. For instance, Spinney is not eager to argue that the Steppe migration through western Eurasia, the third and latest major peopling of Europe, was characterized by genocidal violence and sexual bondage despite the aDNA evidence increasing the likelihood of such a history. She presents an alternative theory dependent on an asymmetric mortality rates to plague between the migrating herders and the farmers and the dynamics of patrilinealism. Modeling works suggests that such dynamics may have accounted for the observed Y chromosomal signatures, but our priors about human behavior should also play a role here.

Her primary argument is premised on lining up linguistic and mythological similarities with archaeological and aDNA observations and elucidating a model that adds meat to the bones of the steppe theory. This includes tracing the fragmentation of PIE into major branches: Anatolian (extinct), Tocharian (Xinjiang), Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Hellenic, Armenian, Albanian. Each of these branches receives their own chapter-length treatment.

The work will likely be a bit dry to most readers who aren't already deeply interested in the topic. There is little effort to account for why scholars have been so interested in this question beyond some surface-level observations about how massive the demographic change to Eurasia was due to the steppe migration and that Indo-European languages have colonized the globe. Plus, the vocabulary that attends these discussions is usually opaque because it requires the use of names for populations and place that no longer exist or no longer go by those names. A diligent new reader will have to accompany his reader with maps and frequent googling. Further, Spinney could have done a great deal more synthesis for readers even one familiar with this research. Sometimes she's just reproducing the observations or findings of others but does little to contextualize and situated those facts for readers. She does cover some scholarly debates, but this is done too breezily.

In my view, I think this is a competent work that may have missed an opportunity. I'm also not sure what it adds beyond what can be found on the internet. Even David Reich's chapter on the subject in his book could be viewed as sufficient coverage of the issue for most general interest readers. So mileage will vary.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm hoping that my biggest challenge/disappointment with this book is simply because I read an eARC and will be corrected in print: where are the maps?? It was difficult tracking this or that ancient culture and their travels without them.

The author does not take one of those dry, academic looks at the topic, which helps. It would have been nice had there been more examples of how this or that word translated into more modern languages. There are times when she does that, but far too often we learn that the word for [item] is found in these three languages without being shown how that actually looks. Again, that might be present in the print/finished edition.

I also wanted more about some of the lesser known languages, like Basque. The Romani exit from India to Europe is touched on several times but never really followed through on (eg., they pass through Persia before certain words enter Farsi, but then pretty much disappear from the book). There's a lot of time spent on the genetics and the "lifestyle" differences (hunter-gatherers vs farmers, arts, etc.) and less on the actual language and how it spread.

For those interested in linguistics, this is a good starter book.

eARC provided by publisher via Edelweiss.

[Alissa BC · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 I have an interest in the topics of early human history and language development and found the data in this book compelling and digestible, but the presentation and organization did not blow me away. Especially in audio format, I found myself zoning out when there weren’t clear and consistent connections made to thread the two topics of culture and language. Still, an enjoyable experience, though unfortunately not one I will likely remember long-term.

Thank you to libro.fm for the free educator ALC.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Journalist Laura Spinney examines the origin points of Proto-Indo-European, the ancient reconstructed language considered by many to be the root of many languages spoken today, from English to Sanskrit to Greek to Russian. She looks not only at linguistic connections, but also archeological and genetic evidence, much of which comes from the last 20 years, piecing together cultural migrations, invasions, peaceful intermingling, and reasons language and its grammatical structure takes hold.

I've been fascinated with the links between languages for decades. I took a seminar in college on India and Greece, and the cultural and linguistic ties between the two ancient civilizations, and it stuck with me. Give me root words across multiple languages and I start looking for connections. So this book was written for me. While some of this was familiar to me, a lot of the research Spinney uses to link these theories is more recent than when I was in college - some of the archeological discoveries are even as recent as 2023. Using more than just linguistic roots, she builds a compelling case.

I appreciated that Spinney is careful to point out where language and identity are tied, especially in the cases of the conquerors vs the vanquished, colonizers vs indigenous populations, and nationalism and f@scist political ideologies. (I was nervous to pick up the book in the first place, because the way an author addresses those issues can make or break my respect for their linguistic scholarship.)

I listened to the audiobook, which I found fascinating. The narrator, Emma Spurgin-Hussey, took careful note of pronunciations, and I enjoyed listening to her recite the root words together. I do think that anyone reading this would benefit from a multi-format approach, because most readers will find it helpful to see the written words as well as hear them.

It's been a hot minute since I could get my brain to connect to a nonfiction book, and I'm so glad this was the one I picked up. It stays at a journalistic level, rather than diving deeper into an academic level, so for most readers, even without prior knowledge of PIE and linguistics, you should be able to follow, and for those familiar with the field, this will likely feel broad but helpful.

Thank you to LibroFM for an ALC. Proto is out now.

[Caitlin Fisher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting factoids here in a certain sense but my reading comprehension was only operating at 30% bc by nature of the subject of the history of proto indo-European language, this book is a bit dense. I liked the parallel between languages spreading like diseases!
I got lost with most of the names and places here but still gleaned how universally important horses are to humanity. Felt like staring at a landscape painting at a museum when fundamentally I’m a portrait painting kinda person

[Chad D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really glad I read it. The relevant information in one place. Wide linguistic reading, distilled. It's got a chapter each for major PIE language families/groupings, and activates them over time, so we can see them expanding (mostly, although sometimes contracting and sometimes retracing their steps or should I say steppes?). It's a good time to write such a book, because the genetic science filling in our linguistic reconstructions has exploded over the last decade; fresh knowledge is pouring out by the year. A very exciting time.

I'm not sure it's possible to write a satisfactory book on this subject. It covered a lot of time and space, and three academic disciplines (linguistics, archaeology, and genetics). The maps for every chapter were essential, and yet, not quite enough to keep everything organised (in my head at least). Sometimes the storytelling was vivid, and sometimes it just read like a summary arranging names and events into sentences without the reader invested enough in the names and events for the sentences to come to life. Every once in a while, the author drops un a vignette featuring a contemporary linguist. These were welcome when they began, so I think someone figured out the book needed some sort of living people walking around, but they didn't pay off, really, either in plot or character.

I don't think the book WORKED, really, as a rider of the border between popular nonfiction and academic precision. And yet, it pulled together a lot of crucial information about What We Now Know about PIE. It's reasonably accessible to the general reader with a bit of linguistic knowledge, which is more accessible than most linguistics. If you care about the topic, go for it.

[Ali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like many people, I have been fascinated with the idea that Proto-IndoEuropean somehow encapsulates the core values that have dominated Europe for the last several thousand years. And Spinney's book is a thorough survey of the current state of research, which is slowly reducing ambiguity around questions such as where the language developed and how it spread. But ultimately, here, I found myself wondering if this really does all matter quite so much. PIE languages are surrounded by non-PIE languages for all their existance. And in the end, what comes through here, is that societies continue to evolve and change as part of a massive mosaic that is more marked by change than continuity. And no story of a single linguistic tradition can encompass the vastness of humanity, even the European kind. It is also hard not to acknowledge that for some, the idea of a piure steppe culture, feels like a fantasy attractive to those who want to avoid the realities of our multiworld. Spinney emphasises that the world has always been multi, but I found myself wanting a bigger, broader story.

[Cheesecat777 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably one of the best archaeology books I’ve read so far. Highly recommend if you’re interested in how languages have evolved or if you are interested in archaeology. Endlessly fascinating for sure. I think my favorite chapter was chapter 4, about Tocharian, a language I have never heard of before. Definitely one of my favorite books of this year.

[katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 ⭐️ this was interesting but at times i was getting confused cause geography is not my strong suit and played into this more than i thought (lots of map consulting). i liked learning about the actual changes that languages go through and the role of current ancient DNA studies which i wasn’t expecting to be included in this book

[Tim Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The fundamental question of Indo-European Studies is, which came first: the Yamnaya (steppe nomads in Ukraine) or the Hittites (a farms-and-cities culture in Anatolia). The orthodox view (including this book) says the Yamnaya came first, but I'm always seeing articles saying "fresh evidence from Anatolia overturns Yamnaya hypothesis", so it's not quite a done deal. What is not in dispute, is that almost everyone today speaks a Yamnaya-derived language and no one at all speaks Hittite.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Archeology? Anthropology? History? Genetics? Mythology? Obscure cultural populations? Linguistics? This book had it all. It was dense and somewhat dry but I really enjoyed being in it and couldn’t put it down.

[Kenzie O’Neill · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was super interesting but I did not have the background knowledge to keep up most of the time. Trying not to take it too personally :/