Language - Human Geography: People, Place and Culture - page 185

language would give us the hearth of ancient Latin,
Greek, and Sanskrit. A single Proto-Indo-European hearth
would link modern languages from Scandinavia to North
Africa and from North America through parts of Asia
to Australia. Several research tasks followed from this
hypothesis. First, the vocabulary of the proposed ancestral
language had to be reconstructed. Second, the hearth of
the language had to be located. Third, the routes of diffu-
sion needed to be traced.

and Finnish, Turkish and Mongolian), the Dravidian lan-
guages of India, and the Afro-Asiatic language family, in
which Arabic is dominant (Fig. 6.8).

Locating the Hearth of Proto-Indo-European
German linguist August Schleicher was the fi rst to com-
pare the world's language families to the branches of a tree
(Fig. 6.9). In the mid-nineteenth century, he suggested
that new languages form through language divergence ,
which occurs when spatial interaction among speakers of
a language breaks down and the language fragments fi rst
into dialects and then into discrete tongues. The process
of language divergence has happened between Spanish
and Portuguese and is now happening with Quebecois
French. Each new language becomes a new leaf on a tree,
its branches leading back to the hearth, the trunk of the
tree. Through backward reconstruction, linguists and lin-
guistic geographers can fi nd how languages fi t together and
where the branches were once joined. Tracing backward far
enough, researchers can fi nd the hearth of a language family.
If linguists and linguistic geographers can fi nd
the hearth of the Proto-Indo-European language, they
will fi nd a major part of the tree's trunk. Finding the
trunk is a daunting task, for reconstructing even a small
branch of the language tree is complicated. Languages
do not change only through divergence (the splitting of
branches); they also change through convergence and
extinction. If peoples with different languages have con-
sistent spatial interaction, language convergence can
take place, collapsing two languages into one. Instances
of language convergence create special problems for
researchers because the rules of reconstruction may not
apply or may be unreliable.
Language extinction creates branches on the tree
with dead ends, representing a halt in interaction between
the extinct language and languages that continued
(Fig. 6.10). Languages become extinct either when all
descendants perish (which can happen when an entire peo-
ple succumb to disease or invaders) or when descendants
choose to use another language, abandoning the language
of their ancestors. The process of language extinction does
not occur overnight; typically, it takes place across genera-
tions, with degrees of bilingualism occurring in the interim.
Tracking the divergence, convergence, extinction,
and locations of the languages derived from Proto-Indo-
European, linguists theorize that the hearth of the Proto-
Indo-European language was somewhere in the vicinity
of the Black Sea or east-central Europe. From this hearth,
Proto-Indo-European speakers dispersed, vocabularies
grew, and linguistic divergence occurred, spurring new
languages. By analyzing the vocabulary of the Proto-Indo-
European language, linguists and geographers can discern
the environment and physical geography of the language's
hearth and also deduce aspects of the peoples' culture and

Reconstructing the Vocabulary of Proto
Indo-European and Its Ancient Ancestor
Linguists use a technique called backward reconstruc-
tion to track sound shifts and hardening of consonants
“backward” toward the original language. If it is possible
to deduce a large part of the vocabulary of an extinct lan-
guage , a language without any native speakers, it may be
feasible to go even further and re-create the language that
preceded it. This technique, called deep reconstruction ,
has yielded some important results.
The work of two Russian scholars in particular has
had great impact on the deep reconstruction of the Proto-
Indo-European language and even the ancestral language
of the Proto-Indo-European language. Vladislav Illich-
Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky began working in the
1960s, each using deep reconstruction to re-create ancient
languages. Using words they assumed to be the most sta-
ble and dependable parts of a language's vocabulary, such
as those identifying arms, legs, feet, hands, and other body
parts, and terms for the sun, moon, and other elements of
the natural environment, they reconstructed an inventory
of several hundred words. Remarkably, they worked inde-
pendently, each unaware of the other's work for many years.
When they fi nally met and compared their inventories,
they found that the inventories were amazingly similar. The
scholars agreed that they had established some key charac-
teristics not only of the Proto-Indo-European language but
also of its ancient ancestor, the Nostratic language.
The Nostratic vocabulary the researchers recon-
structed revealed much about the lives and environments
of its speakers. Apparently, they had no names for domesti-
cated plants or animals, so Nostratic speakers were hunter-
gatherers, not farmers. The Nostratic words for dog and
wolf turned out to be the same, suggesting that the domes-
tication of wolves may have been occurring at the time
people were speaking Nostratic. The oldest known bones
of dogs excavated at archaeological sites date from about
14,000 years ago, so Nostratic may have been in use at about
that time, well before the First Agricultural Revolution.
Nostratic is believed to be the ancestral language
not only of Proto-Indo-European, and thus the Indo-
European language family as a whole, but also of the
Kartvelian languages of the southern Caucasus region,
the Uralic-Altaic languages (which include Hungarian