Indo European Languages Quotes

Archaeological materials are not mute. They speak their own language. And they need to be used for the great source they are to help unravel the spirituality of those of our ancestors who predate the Indo-Europeans by many thousands of years.

Even the name, Celt, is not from their own Indo-European language but from Greek. Keltoi, the name given to them by Greek historians, among them Herodotus, means “one who lives in hiding or under cover.” The Romans, finding them less mysterious, called them Galli or Gauls, also coming from a Greek word, used by Egyptians as well, hal, meaning “salt.” They were the salt people.

Some languages, unlike the Indo-European ones, do not separate subject and verb so that an action is never seen as distinct from the actor.

All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.

As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free of purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like. Originally, being free meant being among friends. ‘Freedom’ and ‘friendship’ have the same root in Indo-European languages. Fundamentally, freedom signifies a relationship. A real feeling of freedom occurs only in a fruitful relationship – when being with others brings happiness. But today’s neoliberal regime leads to utter isolation; as such, it does not really free us at all. Accordingly, the question now is whether we need to redefine freedom – to reinvent it – in order to escape from the fatal dialectic that is changing freedom into coercion.

Racism quickly came to color the English usage of the Sanskrit word arya, the word that the Vedic poets used to refer to themselves, meaning “Us” or “Good Guys,” long before anyone had a concept of race. Properly speaking, “Aryan” (as it became in English) designates a linguistic family, not a racial group (just as Indo-European is basically a linguistic rather than demographic term); there are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, only Aryan-speaking people. Granted, the Sanskrit term does refer to people rather than to a language. But the people who spoke *Indo-European were not a people in the sense of a nation (for they may never have formed a political unity) or a race, but only in the sense of a linguistic community.10 After all those migrations, the blood of several different races had mingled in their veins.

He [Russell] said once, after some contact with the Chinese language, that he was horrified to find that the language of Principia Mathematica was an Indo-European one.

human language is a single phenomenon, and an understanding of one instantiation is automatically a partial understanding of every other.

It was eventually discovered that Indo-European was the mother of most European languages. And it was then discovered that this was also the mother of non-European languages such as Farsi, Hindi and many others.

The Yamnaya—who the genetic data show were closely related to the source of the steppe ancestry in both India and Europe—are obvious candidates for spreading Indo-European languages to both these subcontinents of Eurasia.

Whether the original Indo-European speakers lived in the Near East or in eastern Europe, the Yamnaya, who were the main group responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across a vast span of the globe, were formed by mixture

Interestingly, vinifera is native to the same ara of southwestern Russia as the original Indo-European peoples, whose prehistoric migrations carried the Indo-European language and the vinifera grape to all parts of the ancient world.

The revulsion towards and violent detachment from nature leads to its desecration, to the destruction of the organic conception of the world as a cosmos, as an order of forms reflecting a higher meaning, as the ‘visible manifestation of the invisible’ - a conception (of Indo-European origin) which is an integral part of the Classical view of the world and which also lies at the basis of various forms of knowledge of a different sort compared to profane, modern science.

Just as a linguist penetrates the past to Proto-Indo-European, triangulating from modern languages and from already reconstructed dead languages, we can do the same with modern organisms, comparing either their external characteristics or their protein or DNA sequences.

Within two years Jones published his observations on the Sanskrit language, which pioneered the science of comparative linguistics. In his publications Jones pointed out surprising similarities between Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language that became the sacred tongue of Hindu ritual, and the Greek and Latin languages, as well as similarities between all these languages and Gothic, Celtic, Old Persian, German, French and English. Thus in Sanskrit, ‘mother’ is ‘matar’, in Latin it is ‘mater’, and in Old Celtic it is ‘mathir’. Jones surmised that all these languages must share a common origin, developing from a now-forgotten ancient ancestor. He was thus the first to identify what later came to be called the Indo-European family of languages.

There is a hidden materiality to texts—a word that originally meant “weaving,” a connection seen in “texture.” Forests haunt writing: The English word for “book” is related to “beech tree” by its Germanic root, and “library” comes from the Latin for “the inner bark of trees.” In most Indo-European languages, “writing” comes from carving and cutting. Language carries the memory of words etched into wood tablets, tree trunks, and bones.

firstly, what "really" attracted me to Indo-European, as well as to English, Polish, and Russian philology, wasn't the seductive variety of linguistic forms, or the infinitely picturesque accidents that fill the histories of words and dialects, but rather the fact that these obey lays that can be rigorously described, and that these laws, such as Grimm's Law in Germanic philology, or the principles of Slavic palatalization, which lie behind all those wonderful alveolar fricatives in Russia and the Auvergne, promised to submit the irresistible and etrnal movement of languages no longer to mere chance, but to something that closely resembled calculation; - and that, secondly, and consequently, the noblest aspect of linguistics (and if I had been familiar with Trouetzkoy's phonology and with Jakobson, this conclusion would have been even more obvious) was its power of deduction -- but that there remained something even nobler, which was the terrain of pure deduction, in other words, mathematics. And that it is why I absolutely had to become a mathematician.

In his publications Jones pointed out surprising similarities between Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language that became the sacred tongue of Hindu ritual, and the Greek and Latin languages, as well as similarities between all these languages and Gothic, Celtic, Old Persian, German, French and English. Thus in Sanskrit, ‘mother’ is ‘matar’, in Latin it is ‘mater’, and in Old Celtic it is ‘mathir’. Jones surmised that all these languages must share a common origin, developing from a now-forgotten ancient ancestor. He was thus the first to identify what later came to be called the Indo-European family of languages.

The Hittites called their language Nesili (van de Mieroop 2007, 119), while the Egyptians and Mesopotamians referred to them and their language as “Hittite” and their land as “Hatti” (Faulkner 1999, 198). Technically the Hittites spoke Arzawan (Macqueen 2003, 25), but Arzawa was also the name of a kingdom that neighbored Hatti, and those people also spoke the same language as the Hittites. During the era of the Hittite civilization, there were three written Indo-European languages that coexisted in Anatolia: Hittite/Arzawan, Luwian, and Palic (Anthony 2007, 43). The earliest Hittite inscriptions are dated to around 1900 BCE, which makes the language the oldest written form of any Indo-European language

the Basques. Their language, called Euskara by its speakers, may be the last surviving remnant of the Neolithic languages spoken in Stone Age Europe and later displaced by Indo-European tongues. No one can say. What is certain is that Basque was already old by the time the Celts came to the region. Today it is the native tongue of about 600,000 people in Spain and 100,000 in France in an area around the Bay of Biscay stretching roughly from Bilbao to Bayonne and inland over the Pyrenees to Pamplona. Its remoteness from Indo-European is indicated by its words for the numbers one to five: bat, bi, hirur, laur, bortz. Many authorities believe there is simply no connection between Basque and any other known language.

Behold but One in all things; it is the second that leads you astray. Kabir That this insight into the nature of things and the origin of good and evil is not confined exclusively to the saint, but is recognized obscurely by every human being, is proved by the very structure of our language. For language, as Richard Trench pointed out long ago, is often “wiser, not merely than the vulgar, but even than the wisest of those who speak it. Sometimes it locks up truths which were once well known, but have been forgotten. In other cases it holds the germs of truths which, though they were never plainly discerned, the genius of its framers caught a glimpse of in a happy moment of divination.” For example, how significant it is that in the Indo-European languages, as Darmsteter has pointed out, the root meaning “two” should connote badness. The Greek prefix dys- (as in dyspepsia) and the Latin dis- (as in dishonorable) are both derived from “duo.” The cognate bis- gives a pejorative sense to such modern French words as bévue (“blunder,” literally “two-sight”). Traces of that “second which leads you astray” can be found in “dubious,” “doubt” and Zweifel—for to doubt is to be double-minded. Bunyan has his Mr. Facing-both-ways, and modern American slang its “two-timers.” Obscurely and unconsciously wise, our language confirms the findings of the mystics and proclaims the essential badness of division—a word, incidentally, in which our old enemy “two” makes another decisive appearance.

It may be no more than an intriguing coincidence, but the area of Cro-Magnon’s cave paintings is also the area containing Europe’s oldest and most mysterious ethnic group, the Basques. Their language, called Euskara by its speakers, may be the last surviving remnant of the Neolithic languages spoken in Stone Age Europe and later displaced by Indo-European tongues. No one can say. What is certain is that Basque was already old by the time the Celts came to the region. Today it is the native tongue of about 600,000 people in Spain and 100,000 in France in an area around the Bay of Biscay stretching roughly from Bilbao to Bayonne and inland over the Pyrenees to Pamplona. Its remoteness from Indo-European is indicated by its words for the numbers one to five: bat, bi, hirur, laur, bortz. Many authorities believe there is simply no connection between Basque and any other known language.

Fabric" and "fabricate "share a common Latin root: fabrica "something skillfully produced". Text and textile are similarly related, from the verb texere, "to weave", which in turn derives...from the Indo-European word *teḱs̱  , meaning "to weave".  "Order" comes from the Latin word for setting the warp threads, [ordinare], as does the French word for computer, ordinateur. The French word metier, meaning "trade" or "craft" is also the word for "loom".   Such associations aren't uniquely European.  In the K'iche' Mayan language, the terms for weaving designs and writing hieroglyphics both use the root tz'ibia.  The Sanskrit word sutra, which now refers to a literary aphorism or religious scripture, originally denoted "string" or "thread". The word tantra which refers to a Hindu or Buddhist religious text, is from the Sanskrit tantrum, meaning "warp" or "loom".  The Chinese word Zǔzhī” 组织 meaning "organization" or "arrange" is also the word for "weave", while Chéngjiù 成就 meaning "achievement" or "result" originally meant "twisting fibers together".  

To understand why it is no longer an option for geneticists to lock arms with anthropologists and imply that any differences among human populations are so modest that they can be ignored, go no further than the “genome bloggers.” Since the genome revolution began, the Internet has been alive with discussion of the papers written about human variation, and some genome bloggers have even become skilled analysts of publicly available data. Compared to most academics, the politics of genome bloggers tend to the right—Razib Khan17 and Dienekes Pontikos18 post on findings of average differences across populations in traits including physical appearance and athletic ability. The Eurogenes blog spills over with sometimes as many as one thousand comments in response to postings on the charged topic of which ancient peoples spread Indo-European languages,19 a highly sensitive issue since as discussed in part II, narratives about the expansion of Indo-European speakers have been used as a basis for building national myths,20 and sometimes have been abused as happened in Nazi Germany.21 The genome bloggers’ political beliefs are fueled partly by the view that when it comes to discussion about biological differences across populations, the academics are not honoring the spirit of scientific truth-seeking. The genome bloggers take pleasure in pointing out contradictions between the politically correct messages academics often give about the indis​tingu​ishab​ility of traits across populations and their papers showing that this is not the way the science is heading.

But I believe that the Industrial Revolution, including developments leading to this revolution, barely capture what was unique about Western culture. While other cultures were unique in their own customs, languages, beliefs, and historical experiences, the West was uniquely exceptional in exhibiting in a continuous way the greatest degree of creativity, novelty, and expansionary dynamics. I trace the uniqueness of the West back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers as early as the 4th millennium BC. Their aristocratic libertarian culture was already unique and quite innovative in initiating the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times, starting with the domestication and riding of horses and the invention of chariot warfare. So were the ancient Greeks in their discovery of logos and its link with the order of the world, dialectical reason, the invention of prose, tragedy, citizen politics, and face-to-face infantry battle. The Roman creation of a secular system of republican governance anchored on autonomous principles of judicial reasoning was in and of itself unique. The incessant wars and conquests of the Roman legions, together with their many military innovations and engineering skills, were one of the most vital illustrations of spatial expansionism in history. The fusion of Christianity and the Greco-Roman intellectual and administrative heritage, coupled with the cultivation of Catholicism (the first rational theology in history), was a unique phenomenon. The medieval invention of universities — in which a secular education could flourish and even articles of faith were open to criticism and rational analysis, in an effort to arrive at the truth — was exceptional. The list of epoch-making transformation in Europe is endless: the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution(s), the Military Revolution(s), the Cartographic Revolution, the Spanish Golden Age, the Printing Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Romantic Era, the German Philosophical Revolutions from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Heidegger.

The relationship between thinking and walking is also grained deep into language history, illuminated by perhaps the most wonderful etymology I know. The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning 'to acquire knowledge'. Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornian, 'to get knowledge, to be cultivated.' From leornian the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets of Proto-Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of 'to follow or to find a track' (from the Proto-Indo-European prefix leis-, meaning 'track'). 'To learn' therefore means at root - at route - 'to follow a track.' Who knew?

As the entrepreneur of its own self, the neoliberal subject has no capacity for relationships with others that might be free o f purpose. Nor do entrepreneurs know what purpose-free friendship would even look like. Originally, being free meant being among friends. ‘Freedom’ and ‘friendship’ have the same root in Indo-European languages. Fundamentally, freedom signifies a relationship. A real feeling of freedom occurs only in a fruitful relationship - when being with others brings happiness. But today’s neoliberal regime leads to utter isolation; as such, it does not really free us at all. Accordingly, the question now is whether we need to redefine freedom - to reinvent it - in order to escape from the fatal dialectic that is changing freedom into coercion.

In Anatolia, the Hittite storm God, Tarhunna, was believed to have defeated the sea-serpent, Illuyanka. This narrative seems to have been syncretized almost entirely with the neighboring mythological tradition of the Hurrians, a non-Indo-European people. Nevertheless, the Hurrian thunder God, Teshub, adopted a nearly identical battle against the sea-serpent, Hedammu.21 The Anatolian languages formed a very distinctive clade of Indo-European languages that are widely believed to have separated from the “main” group at an early date. Nevertheless, the relationship to the broader Indo-European language family is not disputed for Hittite, Palaic, or Luwian - all of which seem to have been descended from the same basic “Proto-Anatolian” ancestor language

There is evidence that even some Indo-European language speakers retained this archaic memory of a “Bear Clan” ancestor myth as well. A common element of this type of myth is that ancestral connections to an animal (e.g. a bear) is used to justify some sort of taboo. In the case of the bear, it is common for Siberian and Mongolian peoples to observe a taboo around the speaking of the name of the bear, precisely because it is associated with the cult of ancestors. Indeed, a common term used to avoid speaking the real word for bear in Mongolian is “baabgai” meaning “father.

One interesting observation that has been made about the Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages is that they also seem to have inherited a taboo associated with the name of the bear, which in Proto-Indo-European was something like “*hrktos” (hence Greek Arctos and Latin Ursus). In Northern Europe, however, it seems that the Germanic and Balto-Slavic peoples used circumlocutions or “nicknames” for the bear. Thus, in Germanic languages, the old Indo-European word for bear has been replaced by a circumlocution meaning “The Brown One.” In Slavic languages like Russian, they say “Medved” which means “Honey Eater.” Very similarly, the original word for bear in Lithuanian has been replaced by “Lokys” which may mean “Breaker.

This word ‘Aryan’ was a linguistic term, originally referring to the Indo-European group of languages. Since before the end of the nineteenth century it had already been distorted as a concept by a number of writers, among them Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who gave it racial connotations, and used it to denote superiority over the ‘Semitic’ races. Yet the term ‘Semitic’ itself was originally not a racial but a linguistic term, relating, not to Jews and non-Jews, but to a language group which includes Hebrew and Arabic. None of these refinements troubled the new racialism. For Hitler, ‘Aryan’ was synonymous with ‘pure’, while ‘Semitic’ was synonymous with ‘Jew’, and hence ‘impure’.

Descartes, who tried, or says he tried, to doubt everything, found that he could not doubt the proposition "I think, therefore I am." That was because he lived before the discoveries of 19th Century linguists. Nietzsche, who was trained in that field before becoming a philosopher or a social menace or whatever he became, noted that Descartes couldn't doubt that proposition because he only knew Indo-European languages. It is an Indo-European coding convention that a verb must have a substantive noun before it — that an action must be attributed to some alegedly isolated and allegedly reified Actor. It is this convention which still makes us say "It is raining," even though we no longer believe in Zeus or any other rain-god and would be hard put to say what else the "it" might refer to.

Where was the Indo-European parent originally spoken and when did it begin to break up? It is probable, and only probable, that the speakers of the parent tongue originated somewhere between the Baltic and the Black Sea. It also seems probable that the parent tongue was already breaking into dialects before waves of migrants carried them westward into Europe and eastward into Asia. The first Indo-European literature that we have records of is Hittite, a language spoken in what is now eastern Turkey. The Hittites formed an empire which eventually incorporated Babylonia and even briefly exerted authority over Egypt. Hittite writing emerged from 1900 BC and vanished around 1400 BC. Hittite literature survives on tablets written in cuneiform syllabics which were not deciphered until 1916. Scholars argue that the Celtic dialect of Indo-European, which became the parent of all Celtic languages, emerged at about 2000 BC. The Celtic peoples began to appear as a distinctive culture in the area of the headwaters of the Danube, the Rhine and the Rhône. In other words, in what is now Switzerland and South-West Germany.

Most easily recognisable is the word raj (king) which is cognate with the Irish rí and this word is demonstrated also in the Continental Celtic rix and the Latin rex. Most Indo-European languages, at one time, used this concept. However, the Germanic group developed another word, i.e. cyning, koenig and king.

Containing several hundred languages, among them several world languages, the Indo-European language family is the language family with the most speakers world-wide.

Norwegian scholar J.A. Knudtzon was the first to decipher the Hittite language in 1902, which he termed Arzawan, and it was called as such for some time (Macqueen 2003, 25). Eventually, Arzawan was determined to be an Indo-European language, which proved to be an interesting discovery in itself since most of the neighboring kingdoms spoke languages that were either Semitic or derived from Afro-Asiatic.

According to this scenario, one branch of this group traveled down the east side of the Caspian Sea and continued east through Afghanistan, reaching the Punjab before the middle of the second millennium BCE.9 But to say that the languages formed a family is not to say that the people who spoke them formed a race. There is nothing intrinsically racist about this story of linguistic migration. On the contrary, the eighteenth-century discovery of the Indo-European link was, at first, a preracial discovery of brotherhood; these people are our (linguistic) cousins. But then the nineteenth-century Orientalists, who now had a theory of race to color their perceptions, gave it a distinctly racist thrust. Their attitude to the nineteenth-century inhabitants of India came to something like “Well, they are black, but their skin color is irrelevant; they are white inside, Greek inside, just like us.

Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language that became the sacred tongue of Hindu ritual, and the Greek and Latin languages, as well as similarities between all these languages and Gothic, Celtic, Old Persian, German, French and English. Thus in Sanskrit, ‘mother’ is ‘matar’, in Latin it is ‘mater’, and in Old Celtic it is ‘mathir’. Jones surmised that all these languages must share a common origin, developing from a now-forgotten ancient ancestor. He was thus the first to identify what later came to be called the Indo-European family of languages.

The Tarim Mummies’ (Tarim being the name of the river that once drained the now waterless Tarim basin of eastern Xinjiang) are mostly not of Mongoloid race but of now DNA-certified Caucasoid or Europoid descent. Some had brown hair; at least one stood 2 metres (6.5 feet) tall. They are similar to the Cro-Magnon peoples of eastern Europe. So are their clothes and so probably was their language. It is thought to have been ‘proto-Tocharian’, an early branch of the great Indo-European language family that includes the Celtic, Germanic, Greek and Latin tongues as well as Sanskrit and Early Iranian. But Mair and his disciples would not be content to stop there. Several hundred mummies have now been discovered, their preservation being the result of the region’s extreme aridity and the high alkaline content of the desert sands. The graves span a long period, from c. 2000 BC to AD 300, but the forebears of their inmates are thought most probably to have migrated from the Altai region to the north, where there flourished around 2000 BC another Europoid culture, that of Afanasevo. Such a migration would have consisted of several waves and must have involved contact with Indo-European-speaking Iranian peoples as well as Altaic peoples. Since both were acquainted with basic metallurgy and had domesticated numerous animals, including horses and sheep, the mummy people must themselves have acquired such knowledge and may have passed it on to the cultures of eastern China. According to Mair and his colleagues, therefore, the horse, the sheep, the wheel, the horse-drawn chariot, supplies of uncut jade and probably both bronze and iron technology may have reached ‘core’ China courtesy of these Europoid ‘proto-Tocharians’. By implication, it followed that the Europeans who in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries AD would so embarrass China with their superior technology were not the first. ‘Foreign Devils on the Silk Road’ had been active 4,000 years ago; and thanks to them, China’s ancient civilisation need not be regarded as quite so ‘of itself’. It could in fact be just as derivative, and no more indigenous, than most others. Needless to say, scholars in China have had some difficulty with all this.

The people of the Battle Axe culture arrived in southern Norway from Sweden in about 2800 BC, and their culture and society developed throughout the Bronze Age and the Iron Age over the next 3,500 years. They were most likely the first true Norwegians, a comparatively tall and mostly blond-haired people who spoke an Indo-European language that eventually became known as Germanic.

Latin, the early Indo-European language most learned in modern times, held on to six: nominative, genitive (“of the table”), dative (“to the table”), accusative (table as object), ablative (“by the table”), and vocative (if you were moved to say “Oh, table!!” but more usually, of course, with names), and then some words had a locative (Romae, “in Rome”). The ancestor of today’s Slavic languages, Old Church Slavonic, had seven cases, as Lithuanian still does. Old Irish, an early Celtic language, had five, like Ancient Greek then and Albanian now.

The country occupied by this ancient people of Van was the great table-land which now forms Armenia. The people themselves cannot be connected with the Armenians, for their language presents no characteristics of those of the Indo-European family, and it is equally certain that they are not to be traced to a Semitic origin. It is true that they employed the Assyrian method of writing their inscriptions, and their art differs only in minor points from that of the Assyrians, but in both instances this similarity of culture was directly borrowed at a time when the less civilized race, having its centre at Van, came into direct contact with the Assyrians.

I’m thinking that he could write a fairly simple computer program to run through the data and show us the translations. We’d be able to see in moments whether any direction gives us actual Arabic words. If not, we’ll select some other ancient language, one of the precursors of the Indo-European group perhaps. But my money is on Arabic, or more precisely, Sumerian language expressed in the Arabic script.

The time has come to revise this enigmatic and most important term “Aryan.” It need no longer be flagrantly and prejudiciously bandied by anyone wishing to claim exalted racial status. It need no longer be used as an appellation by those deviants brandishing pseudo-scientific ideologies, and by those who have long misunderstood the facts concerning the origin, identity and fate of the various Indo-European and Semitic races. Importantly, recent discoveries made by Jewish and Gentile investigators alike conclusively prove that the so-called “Israelites” (those arch-enemies of would-be Aryans) were not racially Semitic after all. Like the “Aryans,” they too were racially Indo-European. Their language, Hebrew, was identical with Egyptian. Therefore, in our mind, the term “Semite” must henceforth be dropped as a racial appellation for the Bible’s “Chosen People.” As we show in Volume Two, the terms “Israelite” and “Judite” do not denote races. The terms were religious and theological, and defined cult rather than race. Israelites and Judites were conglomerated groups closely affiliated with and probably blood-related to the Hyksos Pharaohs of old, a fact confirmed by top Jewish historians. Thanks to the researches of Sigmund Freud, Comyns Beaumont, L. A. Waddell, Ahmed Osman, Ralph Ellis and Moustafa Gadalla, the true identity of the Israelites has finally come out into the open. Obviously, the fact that the alleged ancestors of the Jews were racially Indo-European, and of the same racial stock as the antagonists defamed and condemned in the name of spurious racial superiority, has poignant ramifications. It assists us to immediately and swiftly restore the grievously abused term “Aryan.” The term has simply been dragged through the mud by perfidious fools of the same race as the “Israelites” whom they gullibly believe to be inferior. Now that the hydrochloric acid of reason has been applied, now that the term has been thoroughly excavated from its bed of filth, its unadulterated and original meaning may be discerned. They were not an ethnic group or a nation as such, but rather a social category with a common lifestyle – Robert Cornman and J. M. Modrzejewski (The Jews of Egypt: From Rameses II to Emperor Hadrian) Not until Jacob in a somewhat obscure manner was told to call himself Israel was that name adopted and accorded to his twelve “sons:” but if we accept the explanation of Sanchoniathon, a Phoenician of Tyre, Cronus “whom Phoenicians called Israel” was king of Phoenicia, and it signified that these Chaldeo-Phoenician tribes were worshippers of Cronus-Saturn...for Jehovah was a far later importation. The name Israel has subsequently been misappropriated, for those Biblical Christians who term themselves Israelites in fact label themselves followers of a pagan deity – Comyns Beaumont (The Riddle of Prehistoric Britain)

Sanskrita, “polished, complete.” Sanskrit is the elder sister of all Indo-European tongues. Its alphabetical script is called Devanagari; literally, “divine abode.” “Who knows my grammar knows God!” Panini, great philologist of ancient India, paid that tribute to the mathematical and psychological perfection of Sanskrit. He who would track language to its lair must indeed end as omniscient. 2

Of course, no written evidence for Indo-European, widely believed to have been spoken some 6,000 years ago, was available, but on the basis of regularities between its descendant languages, explained in terms of sound laws, a partial reconstruction known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was developed.

The family tree model is a useful presentational tool which has been successfully applied to other language groups, for example Eskimo-Aleut, Sino-Tibetan or Austro-Asiatic, but it is nonetheless misleading in a number of respects. Firstly, it takes far too little account of language contact (see Case study on next page): the dotted arrow in the diagram above is an attempt to represent the very strong lexical influence of (Norman) French on Middle English, which belong to quite separate branches of the Indo-European trunk. The branching works well where there is a physical separation between speaker groups, allowing varieties to develop independently, as in the case of Afrikaans and Dutch, but in most cases the picture is rather messier, with branches often confusingly intertwined.

The Phrygian language was part of the Indo-European dialect,

In which context, it is interesting to note what Professor Mackie has written concerning the language of the early Picts who had more than a passing influence on both the early and later history of the Irish: “The Picts certainly used a form of P-Celtic (the mother of Welsh, Cornish and Breton), with traces of Gaulish forms. However, it is clear, from the few scraps of evidence which survive, that the Picts also used another language, probably unrelated to any ‘Indo-European’ tongue and therefore so different from modern European languages as to be incomprehensible to us.

The twelve branches of Indo-European included most of the languages of Europe (but not Basque, Finnish, Estonian, or Magyar); the Persian language of Iran; Sanskrit and its many modern daughters (most important, Hindi and Urdu); and a number of extinct languages including Hittite in Anatolia (modern Turkey) and Tocharian in the deserts of Xinjiang (northwestern China) (figure 1.2). Modern English, like Yiddish and Swedish, is assigned to the Germanic branch.

Happiness has not always been considered a target worth striving for. The root of the word happiness, in most Indo-European languages, is luck or fate, implying that happiness was originally viewed as something to be given and taken away by the gods, or by chance. It was not thought to be attainable through human effort alone.

via their membership of the ‘Indo-European’ language family

This uncanny ability of Proto-Indo-European to adapt to its environment made Indo-European “the most successful family of languages in history,

Sumerian is unrelated to any other language and has almost nothing in common with the Semitic and Indo-European

Similarly, Basques are assumed to be the most direct descendants of hunter-gatherers, for two reasons. First, the Basque language bears no resemblance to European languages descended from proto–Indo-European, the language family imported into Europe along with farming, and instead appears to date back to the Stone Age. (Several Basque words for tools begin with “aitz,” the word for stone, which suggests that the words date from a time when stone tools were in use.) Second, there are several Basque-specific genetic variations that are not found in other Europeans.

Would it be too much to suggest that this is why we find no term for a division between light and dark in the Basque laminak? Was the original archaic European faerie creature purely ambivalent? Did the change come later than the introduction of Indo European languages? Was it part of the grafting process of Christian to Pagan worldviews?

[...] before different parts of India fell into a pattern of importing horses as well as producing their own, the subcontinent began on an almost clean slate. The native population of wild horses had disappeared by 8000 BCE,10 and it was only the ancestors of the Indian wild ass or ghor khar, particularly associated with northwestern and western India, that survived. The infusion of horses since then can be ascribed to the Indo-Aryans, speakers of an Indo-European language that evolved into Sanskrit, who migrated to the subcontinent from the north and the west in waves from circa 1500 BCE. There is limited evidence of the horse from the earlier, Bronze Age, Harappan or Indus valley civilization. Many of the famous terracotta seals to be recovered from Harappan sites are engraved with various animals, but there is no sign of the horse.

The connection between animals, brothers, and power was the foundation on which new forms of male-centered ritual and politics developed among Indo-European-speaking societies. That is why the cow (and brothers) occupied such a central place in Indo-European myths relating to how the world began.

The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were farmers and stockbreeders: we can reconstruct words for bull, cow, ox, ram, ewe, lamb, pig, and piglet. They had many terms for milk and dairy foods, including sour milk, whey, and curds. When they led their cattle and sheep out to the field they walked with a faithful dog. They knew how to shear wool, which they used to weave textiles (probably on a horizontal band loom). They tilled the earth (or they knew people who did) with a scratch-plow, or ard, which was pulled by oxen wearing a yoke. There are terms for grain and chaff, and perhaps for furrow. They turned their grain into flour by grinding it with a hand pestle, and cooked their food in clay pots (the root is actually for cauldron, but that word in English has been narrowed to refer to a metal cooking vessel). They divided their possessions into two categories: movables and immovables; and the root for movable wealth (*peku-, the ancestor of such English words as pecuniary) became the term for herds in general.10 Finally, they were not averse to increasing their herds at their neighbors’ expense, as we can reconstruct verbs that meant “to drive cattle,” used in Celtic, Italic, and Indo-Iranian with the sense of cattle raiding or “rustling.

The most famous definition of the basic divisions in Proto-Indo-European society was the tripartite scheme of Georges Dumézil, who suggested that there was a fundamental three-part division between the ritual specialist or priest, the warrior, and the ordinary herder/cultivator. Colors might have been associated with these three roles: white for the priest, red for the warrior, and black or blue for the herder/cultivator; and each role might have been assigned a specific type of ritual/legal death: strangulation for the priest, cutting/stabbing for the warrior, and drowning for the herder/cultivator.

in 1868, August Schleicher was able to tell a story in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, called “The Sheep and the Horses,” or Avis akvasas ka. A rewrite in 1939 by Herman Hirt incorporated new interpretations of Proto-Indo-European phonology, and the title became Owis ek’woses-kwe. In 1979 Winfred Lehmann and Ladislav Zgusta suggested only minor new changes in their version, Owis ekwoskwe.

comparisons between most Indo-European languages still yielded replacement rates in the core vocabulary of about 10–20% per thousand years. Comparing the core vocabularies in ninety-five Indo-European languages, Kruskal and Black found that the most frequent date for the first splitting of Proto–Indo–European was about 3000 BCE. Although this estimate cannot be relied on absolutely, it is probably “in the ballpark” and should not be ignored.

The oldest written Indo-European languages belonged to the Anatolian branch. The Anatolian branch had three early stems: Hittite, Luwian, and Palaic.

The third early Anatolian language, Luwian, was spoken by more people over a larger area, and it continued to be spoken after the end of the empire. During the later Hittite empire Luwian was the dominant spoken language even in the Hittite royal court. Luwian did not borrow from Hattic and so might have been spoken originally in western Anatolia, outside the Hattic core region—perhaps even in Troy, where a Luwian inscription was found on a seal in Troy level VI—the Troy of the Trojan War. On the other hand, Luwian did borrow from other, unknown non–Indo-European language(

The Anatolian languages are quite different phonologically and grammatically from all the other known Indo-European daughter languages. They are so peculiar that many specialists think they do not really belong with the other daughters.

In verbs, for example, the Anatolian languages had only two tenses, a present and a past, whereas the other ancient Indo-European languages had as many as six tenses. In nouns, Anatolian had just animate and neuter; it had no feminine case. The other ancient Indo-European languages had feminine, masculine, and neuter cases. The Anatolian languages also lacked the dual, a form that was used in other early Indo-European languages for objects that were doubled like eyes or ears. (Example: Sanskrit dēvas ‘one god’, but dēvau ‘double gods’.) Alexander Lehrman identified ten such traits that probably were innovations in Proto-Indo-European after Pre-Anatolian split away.

Finally we find our way to the primordial caves of the laminak. They are the only type of “faerie” from a non-Indo-European language group that we have explored here. If the laminak are an entirely different type of entity with different characteristics we might safely guess that faeries are a shared Indo-European belief-figure like the mora/mare. The Basque laminak is said to be very beautiful and more of their females make an appearance than males. They are known for spending a lot of time combing their long hair, often with golden combs. It is the laminak who built the Dolmens and all standing stones, according to the Basque tales. Their women are excellent spinners with a spindle and distaff.

Languages are maintained by societies in which individuals for the most part wish to participate without appearing as odd; in western societies of the present, allowance is, however, made for adolescents, who fix on idiosyncratic speech known as slang. Accordingly, changes in language are maintained or rejected in accordance with the prestige of the groups that make those changes.

Brücke was also important as one or the scientists who introduced the methods of chemistry and physics into medical and biological study. His influence in linguistics may have added to the practice of analysing and classifying languages, as well as sets of sounds and forms, much like the objects of study in these sciences.

there had lived on the western frontier of China a people called the Yueh-chih, who had reddish hair and blue eyes and who spoke an Indo-European language similar, at several removes, to Gaelic. The Huns had horribly defeated the

IT IS IMPORTANT to recognize that the term “Aryan” did not mean in the mid-nineteenth century what it means to us today. It had nothing to do with Teutons or fair-haired Nordic types but referred first and foremost to a group of Sanskrit-speaking herders and horsemen who are thought to have migrated from the Iranian Plateau into what is now northern India in the second millennium B.C. These people, who referred to themselves using the Sanskrit word ārya (meaning “noble”) were known to nineteenth-century Europeans as “Indo-Aryans,” or just plain “Aryans.” At the time, Sanskrit was the oldest known language in the Indo-European family (older languages have since been discovered), and the Sanskrit-speaking Aryans were presumed to be the people from whom all the other Indo-Europeans—Greeks, Romans, Celts, Slavs, and so on—had sprung. Thus, “Aryan,” originally a fairly narrow designation of a particular Indic tribe, became synonymous in the nineteenth century with “the mother of modern civilization.

First, the linguistic difficulties. Sumerian is neither a Semitic nor an Indo-European language. It belongs to the so-called agglutinative type of languages exemplified by Turkish, Hungarian, and Finnish.

As the kids discovered these commonalities, I began to feel as though I were watching something like the living embodiment of a linguistic tree. The classroom and the relationships forming inside of it were an almost a perfect map of language proximity around the globe. Generally, students chose to communicate most with others whose home languages shared large numbers of cognates with their own, which meant their first friendships often developed along the same lines as language groupings. As this took place around me, I grew to see my own position on the world’s tree of languages more clearly. English speakers can easily grasp the vast coterminology of all the Indo- European languages— our own limb of the global tree— but we are generally deaf and dumb to the equally large influence of Arabic, Chinese, or Hindi across parts of the globe where English does not dominate. We cannot hear or see the tremendous coterminology that has resulted among various other language families, such as between Arabic and the African languages. It was to our detriment, not understanding how tightly interconnected other parts of the world are. When we make enemies in the Middle East, for example, we alienate whole swaths of Africa, too— often without knowing.

This insight led ultimately to the recognition of what is known as the Indo-European language family, a group of hundreds of historically related languages, both living and dead, covering a geographic range that stretches from the Indian subcontinent to Iceland. It had, of course, long been understood that there were relationships among languages. Latin and Greek show many similarities; the Romance languages are obviously a group; Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages are all clearly related. But the idea that linguistic relationships might go far beyond this and include languages that seem, on the surface, to have no family resemblance whatsoever—Bengali, Manx, and Armenian, for example—was truly electrifying, as was the idea of a single protolanguage from which this great diversity might have sprung. In Europe, this hypothetical ancestral language, known as Proto-Indo-European, was reconstructed during a period of intense linguistic activity in the nineteenth century by scholars in England, Denmark, France, and Germany (among the field’s early pioneers was one of the fairy-tale-collecting Brothers Grimm), using a methodology that is still practiced today.

Although it is pottery that has come to define them, the crowning technological achievement of the Lapita people must have been their canoes. Almost all the islands in the one-thousand-mile chain that begins in the Bismarcks and ends in the Solomons are intervisible, with water gaps generally smaller than forty miles. But from there to the next group of islands, the distance is 250 miles, and it’s 500 miles from there to the group after that. No one has ever uncovered even a scrap of a Lapita canoe—it has been too long, the materials are too perishable, the atmosphere too damp—but words for sail, outrigger, boom, washstrake, rib, caulking, paddle, bailing, and cargo can all be reconstructed in Proto-Oceanic, a hypothetical language (like Proto-Indo-European) that is associated with the Lapita expansion.

If notional definitions are so problematic, it is worth asking why they persist. One reason is that they have a long tradition in English grammar, largely because grammars of English are based on the terminology found in classical Greek and Roman grammars. For instance, the notional definition of a sentence as a “complete thought” can be traced back to Dionysius Thrax’s Greek grammar written ca. 100 BC. Linguists of the modern era have modified this terminology as a result of advances in linguistic science and the need to have terminology that describes languages that are very different from Greek, Latin, English, and other Indo-European languages – the languages upon which traditional grammar is based.

Before the Mauryans  The geographic area known today as “India” is a modern concept that was created by the United Kingdom when the British partitioned south Asia along religious lines in 1947; the predominantly Hindu south became India, while the predominantly Muslim areas became Pakistan. For most of its history, India was divided along religious and ethnic lines with scores of kings and princes claiming authority over relatively small regions. Languages too were widely dispersed, with the north being home to more Indo-European-descended people and the south being home to the Dravidians (Thapar 2002, 13).

For example, English and German were once the same language (‘Proto-Germanic’), as were Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and French (Latin). And we know that Latin and Proto-Germanic were themselves one language some 6,000 years ago, Indo-European.

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.

Learning Old Irish is like mowing the lawn. … It’s not something you do just once. (p. xxxvi)

The people who spoke Pre-Celtic and Pre-Italic lost contact with the eastern and northern groups of Indo-European speakers before the sat∂m and ruki innovations occurred. We cannot yet discuss where the boundaries of these linguistic regions were, but we can say that Pre-Italic and Pre-Celtic departed to form a western regional–chronological block, whereas the ancestors of Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Slavic, and Armenian stayed behind and shared a set of later innovations. Tocharian, the easternmost Indo-European language, spoken in the Silk Road caravan cities of the Tarim Basin in northwestern China, also lacked the sat∂m and ruki innovations, so it seems to have departed equally early to form an eastern branch.

Most Indo-Europeanists now accept that archaic Proto-Indo-European contained laryngeal sounds (probably three different ones, usually transcribed as *h1, *h2, *h3,) that were preserved clearly only in the Anatolian branch.

The snake was a symbol of life energy and regeneration, a most benevolent, not an evil, creature. Even the colors had a different meaning than in the Indo-European symbolic system. Black did not mean death or the underworld; it was the color of fertility, the color of damp caves and rich soil, of the womb of the Goddess where life begins. White, on the other hand, was the color of death, of bones — the opposite of the Indo-European system in which both white and yellow are the colors of the shining sky and the sun.

William Sayers has suggested a similar origin for the word ‘puck’ and its many cognates in Celtic, Germanic and even Baltic languages. According to this interpretation, a term derived ultimately from an Indo-European root *bheug-, meaning ‘to be frightened of’, came to refer to supernatural beings in the aftermath of Christianisation as the church encouraged people to react to godlings of the former belief system with terror and fear.

The speakers of Proto-Indo-European were a cattle-keeping people. Where did the cattle come from? Both cattle and sheep were introduced from outside, probably from the Danube valley (although we also have to consider the possibility of a diffusion route through the Caucasus Mountains). The Neolithic pioneers who imported domesticated cattle and sheep into the Danube valley probably spoke non—Indo-European languages ultimately derived from western Anatolia. Their arrival in the eastern Carpathians, northwest of the Black Sea, around 5800 BCE, created a cultural frontier between the native foragers and the immigrant farmers that persisted for more than two thousand years.

The myth of Man and Twin established the importance of the sacrifice and the priest who regulated it. The myth of the “Third one” defined the role of the warrior, who obtained animals for the people and the gods. Many other themes are also reflected in these two stories: the Indo-European fascination with binary doublings combined with triplets, two’s and three’s, which reappeared again and again, even in the metric structure of Indo-European poetry; the theme of pairs who represented magical and legal power (Twin and Man, Varuna-Mitra, Odin-Tyr); and the partition of society and the cosmos between three great functions or roles: the priest (in both his magical and legal aspects), the warrior (the Third Man), and the herder/cultivator (the cow or cattle).

In Indo-Iranian texts there are references to a mythical tree that drips the immortal fluid Soma/Haoma, but it is not pictured as a mighty cosmic tree uniting upper and lower worlds; in the Veda it is located in the third heaven, in the Avesta it stands in the fabulous but terrestrial lake Vourukaśa from which all rivers flow. According to a later Pahlavi source an evil lizard lurks beneath it, trying to get at the Haoma. There is perhaps an analogue to this in the Hesperides’ tree which grows golden apples,an guardian serpent at its base, and is located close to Atlas who supports the sky.

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In English, the term memoir comes directly from the French for memory, mémoire,” David Shields offers in Reality Hunger. “And yet more deeply rooted in the word memoir…is the ancient Greek, mermeros, an offshoot of the Avestic Persian memara, itself a derivative of the Indo-European for that which we think about but cannot grasp: mermer, ‘to vividly wonder,’ ‘to be anxious,’ ‘to exhaustingly ponder.’ In this darker light of human language, the term suggests a literary form that is much less confident than today’s novelistic memoir, with its effortlessly relayed experiences.

The so-called 'ruki'-law (change of s to sh after i, u, r, k) is valid for a group of the Indo-European languages, including Indo-Aryan. The occurrence of s in this position is, therefore, an indication of foreign origin. Cf. RV bisa-, kIsta-; rbIsa (cf. Panini nibirisa-), busa-, brsaya-.