Proto Indo-European Language
The Proto Indo-European language is a hypothetical, reconstructed language that was never written, but that linguists have good reason to believe was spoken in areas of Eurasia about 5,000 years ago.
This proto language has also been called Aryan, Indo-Teutonic, and Indo-Germanic. Linguists have reconstructed this language with a fair degree of confidence even though there is not one shred of manuscript evidence that it ever existed.
Origin of the idea
William Jones, a British linguist born thirty years before the American War for Independence, was the first to note seriously the number of similarities between far-removed languages like German, Greek, and Sanskrit. The study of languages had attracted Jones from his youth, and he learned many, including Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, and some Chinese. While serving as a British government judge in India, he learned Sanskrit, the language of the texts considered sacred by Hinduism. At that time it has been estimated that he knew about a dozen languages fluently, and had deeply studied about 28 more.[1]
As Jones studied these various languages, he recognized that they were so similar that they must be related in some way. Yet his study did not seem to indicate that Sanskrit, for example, had grown out of any of the other languages. Jones began to wonder whether the languages he was studying might not be related as parent to child, but as sibling to sibling. He guessed that they might all be descended from one parent, and postulated that the parent language might be one no longer spoken.[2]
From the time Jones first suggested the rudiments of the Indo-European hypothesis, linguists began collecting word similarities and other linguistic evidence to see if it would support the hypothesis. Groups of words that seemed to be "sibling-related" were gathered and studied. Often the linguists reconstructed words which they felt could have been the parent of all the known "sibling-related" words, using known principles of linguistic change observed in living languages.[3]
Linguists tried to determine the basic vocabulary of what they conceived to be the parent language. They also postulated where they believed this language must have been spoken millennia ago. Since all Indo-European languages a word for the beech tree, linguists assumed it must have been spoken somewhere where those trees grew ca. 5,000 years ago. Paleobotanists, studying the remains of trees in rock, said that the beech tree grew in central Europe, its eastern limit stretching in a line from the Baltic to the Black Sea. All the languages also had a word for turtle. Turtles at that time had a northern limit, paleozoologists believed, which excluded Scandinavia and limited the hypothetical parent tongue to central Europe.[4] Many other plants and animals were traced in a similar manner, all to the same general geographical region.
Linguists noticed, however, that not all plant and animal names could be similarly traced. They assumed that when an animal or plant name occurred only in some languages or language groups but not in others, that the speakers of those languages must have encountered those plants and animals later in their history after moving away from the parent homeland to wider areas. They reasoned that the speakers of those languages must have added the new names to their vocabularies either by borrowing words from other languages or by inventing new words as their encountered the plants and animals that were new to them.[5]
Connection with the Biblical Japheth
There seems to be adequate linguistic evidence to indicate that a proto Indo-European language could indeed have existed. It is was not written, as many languages even today are not, there could have been no manuscript evidence for its existence. Some creationist linguists have proposed that the language might well have been spoken by Jspheth or his early descendants, whom most Bible scholars believe populated Europe following the dispersion at the Biblical Tower of Babel.[6] If this scenario is correct, creationist Lorella Rouster has suggested that we might even call it the "Japhethitic" language, in analogy with "Semitic" and "Hamitic", other well-known language groups going back to about the same time.[7] There are presently nine language families that have been identified by linguists—Indo-European, Finno-Ugrian, Semitic, Hamitic, Indo-Chinese, Mayo-Polynesian, Turco-Tartar, Dravidian, and Bantu, with about a hundred language groups that have not yet been classified. These groups provide adequate base for the dispersion of languages at Babel.[8]
Evolutionary linguists place the hypothetical Indo-European language at the time they believe was the last recession of the "Ice Age", at the dawn of European culture and history. Language historian Albert Baugh wrote that "it is customary to place the end of their common existence somewhere between 3500 and 2000 B.C. If this is true, the proto Indo-European language must have been spoken from around 5,000 to 3500 or 2000 B.C. He says that the Indo-European proto tongue had already become divided and scattered before the dawn of recorded history.[9]
References
- ↑ Lorella Rouster, The Hypothetical Indo-European Language, Creation Science & Humanities Quarterly, Vol. I. No. 3, Spring 1979, reprinted Winter 1983
- ↑ Franklin Folsom, The Language Book, New York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1963, p. 99, 104-106
- ↑ Folsom, p. 106
- ↑ Folsom, p. 99, 106-107
- ↑ Folsom, p. 107
- ↑ Lorella Rouster, The Hypothetical Indo-European Language, Creation Science & Humanities Quarterly, Vol. I. No. 3, Spring 1979, reprinted Winter 1983, p. 15
- ↑ Lorella Rouster, The Hypothetical Indo-European Language, Creation Science & Humanities Quarterly, Vol. I. No. 3, Spring 1979, reprinted Winter 1983, p. 15.
- ↑ Frederick Bodmer, The Loom of Language, New York, W.W Norton Co., 1944, p 187-188
- ↑ Baugh, p. 22
