Indo-European

Gerald Cohen gcohen at UMR.EDU
Tue Feb 12 02:37:59 UTC 2002


>I am an 8th grade teacher, and I am planning a unit on the evolution
>of the English language.  I have a couple books with some ideas.  The
>books talk about the ancestor of English (and all western languages?),
>Indo-European.  It seems (Am I right here?) that the idea of the
>Indo-European language is a hypothesis.  Since Indo-European was a
>prehistoric language, there is no written record of this language, and
>certainly no recording of this language.  How do linguists know anything
>about the Indo-European language when there is no record of the language?
>Before I start this unit in March, I'd like more information.  I don't
>want to give my students false information, and I sure want to be able to
>explain where the idea of the Indo-European language came from.
>Feel free to answer me off-list.  I don't know if my question is so
>elementary that I should be embarrassed to ask you all.
><write at scn.org>
>Thank you,
>Jan Kammert


     The questions are all good ones. Here are a few general observations:

1) What you are referring to is best called "Proto-Indo-European"
(PIE) since the languages such as Russian, German, Greek, French,
Iranian (etc. etc.) are all Indo-European languages and are still
very much with us.

2) PIE may best be described to students as the great-grandaddy (or
grandma, if you prefer) of modern languages such as German, Russian,
etc. And you may make the following analogy. Imagine that a group of,
say, seven brothers and sisters look very much alike and that their
parents are no longer alive. We can see  children who look so similar
that they must have had the same parents. That's pretty much the
situation with the attested Indo-European languages and the parent
they sprang from (PIE). That's how we know it existed.

3) You may also compare the reconstructing of PIE with a detective's
reconstructing of a crime scene, where various clues are present.
Some facts may be reconstructed with certainty; others may be
reconstructed with less certainty; and others may remain forever
unknown. That's about the same situation with reconstructing PIE.

4) Years ago I used to watch a detective program "Mannix" on TV.
Mannix was a super detective. On the basis of just a few threads of
evidence he always managed in the last three minutes of the program
to reconstruct a complicated, convoluted plot, and the criminal
always obliging admitted his guilt.  I remember thinking at the end
of some of those programs: "Pretty good, Mannix.  Now let's see what
you can do with Proto-Indo-European"?

5) Actually, only the latest stage of Proto-Indo-European can be
reconstructed with any degree of certainty. As one goes further back,
the degree of speculation rises exponentially.

6) Tell your students that the study of languages is like putting a
huge jigsaw puzzle together. And by seeing where something comes
from, we can best understand it.

---Gerald Cohen
    Professor of Foreign Languages
    University of Missouri-Rolla



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