I'm delighted to be able to speak to Laura Spinney, whose book Pale Rider, about the Spanish flu, which came out I think in twenty seventeen or twenty eighteen, was perhaps one of the best books I've ever read about that kind of medical historical event.

And so when I saw that she'd written a book called Proto, and I saw the subtitle how One Ancient Language Went Global, said, got to have that.

Got to have that.

And those of you who've listened to me over the years will know how much I love the English language, how much I enjoy subverting it and sending it up and playing with it and trying to understand it.

And I find myself listening to the radio or listening to a conversation and hearing a word, and even though I know the word, suddenly it strikes me, where did that word come from?

And then I go down this wonderful rabbit hole of trying to find the etymology, the deep etymology of that word.

But I've never given much thought to kind of where English came from, and not only English, but four hundred or so languages.

According to Laura Spaneze, excavation of the research which has been done on this issue.

About four hundred languages English, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Norse, many others, all derived from something called Proto Indo European Pie.

And we're talking about six thousand years ago in the lands to the west of the Black Sea and which is now part of Ukraine under attack from Russia.

Laura, A very very good afternoon to you.

Thank you for your time, thank you for inviting me.

It's pleasure to be here.

Six thousand years ago there were what fifty people speaking Pie, and now there are eight not eight eight billion, divided by two four billion, four billion speaking the languages that derive from that language.

Of one thousand to two thousand words being spoken two thousand years sorry, six thousand years.

Ago, it's pretty amazing, isn't it.

Nearly half of humanity today and possibly no more than a couple of dozen people at the beginning that that early date is a little bit vague, but let's say the mother of all the living Indo European language today we're spoken about five thousand years on the steps north of the Black Sea, so there where there is war raging now, as you say.

And where would that language have come from?

What's the sort of history of pie.

You go straight to the hardest question.

I mean, there is a sense in which you can trace all languages back to the very first ones, right, And though it's a big debate, I think the consensus would be now that Homo sapiens has been speaking since the beginning in some form or other, so three hundred thousand years.

But there is this big flowering of language after the last Ice Age, and particularly with the Neolithic Revolution of you know that got underwear about twelve thousand years ago, when we found new ways of making food and our populations grew and we could, you know, put more people on the same bit of earth because we were able to extract more energy essentially from that earth.

That's when we became farmers.

And so with these populations grew our languages.

And you've got this, as I say, big flowering sort of expansion, radiation of these languages into families, many of which you know, sort of are still spoken today, and Indo European being one of the biggest of them.

And so you're right that the vocabulary at the time that you are talking about is somewhere between one thousand and two thousand words.

And that's also something that's quite hard to grab onto.

If Homo sapiens had been using language in one form or another from three hundred thousand years ago, and in two hundred and ninety four thousand years they had evolved a vocabulary of maybe two thousand did the maximum, and we've gone over the last six thousand years from anywhere you know, estimates put it between six hundred thousand and a million words in English.

And that's just in English, not the other language which is derived from Pie.

Well, just to take a little step back, proto Indo European is the name that we give, or rather historical linguists give to a hypothetical language.

And the reason I say it's hypothetical is that they think there must have been this language, this common ancestor of all the four hundred or so Indo European languages that we know about from which they diverged.

But because it predated writing, was never written down and it hasn't been preserved.

So the way that we know anything at all about it is because those historical linguists have managed to extrapolate backwards from the living descendants, and actually not just the living ones, but also the ones that we know we're spoken once in the past and are now dead, things like Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Latin, and they can compare those languages and try to rebuild, reconstruct this ancient languag which including its ancient lexicon, its ancient vocabulary.

Now, as you rightly say, they have reconstructed roughly sixteen hundred words of that vocabulary, or strictly speaking stems, so you can change the grammatical endings and come up with a number of words from each stem.

But that is really only a skeleton of the language as it was spoken.

The language as it was spoken, of course, it would have lacked many of the words for the technologies that have been developed since, but it would have been as rich in many other ways as our own today would have described the word that the world that those people inhabited just as flexibly as any modern language does.

And part of the reason for the expansion of language, expansion of vocabulary, and the expansion of the language away from the seed bed west of the Black Sea was that they were starting to do things that they hadn't done before, and they needed words for those things.

You write about the copper being smithed those lands and I quote, an aura of magic must have hovered around the early smiths who drew this gleaming marvel from blue green rock.

So you need language for that process.

And then you take that product out into the world, and you need new words in order to describe what you are doing and to be able to communicate with the people you're coming into contact with with this new technology, with this new thing, this new substance, this new product.

Absolutely so, I mean, you know, you can imagine we're talking about the Copper Age, the end of the Neolithic, the first of the metal ages, if you like, when stone gives way to other matters that we can work with and make tools and weapons out of.

So it's a huge leap technologically speaking.

And yes, they needed new words.

They needed really a new understanding.

I mean, as I hinted at and as you hinted at there, to the people who were observing all this happening, it must have seen magical, mystical, you know, phaps even you know, having sort of tinges of spirituality.

And we can see that, you know, traces of that understanding and some of the stories, some of the myths that have been reconstructed from that time because it's not just language, it's also understanding that we're reconstructing at the same time in a fragmentary sense, but we are, and so yes, new concepts require new words, and often the technologies travel with the words.

So right, so the neighbors neighboring people who haven't invented that technology may borrow it because it's useful, and then they'll borrow the words with it.

But very often you see also a recycling of words, so that the very simple example I give in the book is is the Latin word moose, which came into English becoming mouse and initially obviously meant to all of us a sort of small fairy rodent, But of course mouse today to us has a second meaning of the thing that you use to move the curse around your computer screen.

It definitely didn't mean that to the Romans.

So there is this also, this recycling, which is fascinating and a kind of indication of endless human adaptability.

But also, you know a reason to be wary when reconstructing languages backwards, languages that are long dead and haven't been written down, because obviously the words that you're reconstructing can have various meanings.

So I mean, also I found really fascinating was the range of disciplines that are needed to be applied in order to arrive at the story that you tell so captivating lee in proto, and perhaps chief amongst them is DNA analysis.

So without DNA analysis, probably not have been able to tell the story in the way that you do well.

So it's a hugely important point, which is that because we're talking about time before history, we literally by definition have no written texts, so we can't go and look up the text and say what was happening in the world at that time.

That would, you know, we'd explain this vast diaspora, radiation of languages out of the you know, the Black Sea steps.

So we had to use other tools, and for a couple of hundred years, the linguists have been collaborating with archaeologists.

You know, the archaeologists pull things out of the ground which tell them about the material culture at that time, the ways of life of people in certain parts of the world, even the things they believed, you know, from their burial rights and so on.

And that's all really useful.

But what DNA adds, and particularly the ability to read ancient DNA to take DNA out of ancient remains and to you know, clear out the modern contamination.

Read what it's telling us from the ancient world about how people were related, for example, in cemeteries thousands of kilometers apart.

What that means is that we can now try to now begin to piece together at prehistoric migrations.

And when people migrated in the past, which they did an awful lot, they tended to take their languages with them, at least to begin with.

Now those languages might then have changed as they came into contact with other languages.

In fact, we think migration is a major, if not the main, motor of language change.

But now we can s see those people moving.

That's another huge source of information.

And that ancient DNA has only been available really for about ten years in a properly accessible fashion.

So it's a revolution in biology that has transformed the story of the indioe European and in fact all languages.

Perhaps there is one of the words that you describe and the sort of back formation of that you particularly like, that you could share with.

Us, Avid, There are so many.

I do love the word for star, the word for star, the word that Odysseus would have used when he was stirring his way back home, navigating by the stars, would have been astere.

That's the ancient Greek.

If you go to the Icelandic, another Indo European language relative of Greek, but obviously spoken a long way away, it becomes Stiana.

And the Sobdian merchants who traveled to silk routs in medieval times way over towards Cha their words were Their word was is Stardi.

So these I think you can see quite easily share a roots.

And in fact, the historical linguists have reconstructed that root to something that sounded a bit like stare, with the guttural h sound at the front.

Again thought I thought, I thought the oom connection broke down, So do it again.

I know that it's coming there.

There's a lot of guttural hs in this language.

And so you know what that tell What does that tell us?

It tells us that people have been pointing their fingers at the stars for millennia and calling them pretty by pretty much the same word, and you know, and that they were important to them.

You know, it tends to be the case that the words that are important, the concepts that are important, are the ones that don't change that much over time.

So there are words which change quite a lot of the over time, so that to the extent that you know, they're not recognizable now from their ancient roots, but that one is one that has stayed steady, as if we always needed to be sure about it, you know.

And there are you know, people who say that the concept of you know that the people who for whom the stars mattered were those first people to come out of Africa even longer before sixty thousand years ago, and who did so, who found where they were going by the stars, So you know, it's it's just it opens up a world, quite a romantic world, but a way that we can connect ourselves with those ancient people through the ways we think about the universe.

I'm making a bad joke about the Issy languages.

So they would have said is he star?

They would have pointed up and said, is he Starzulu?

Thank you very much.

Lauris Spinney wonderful book proto how one ancient language went global