Talk Proto-Indo-European to me, darling

Around five thousand years ago, along the northern bank of the Black Sea where the soil was rich and feather grass plentiful, the nomadic Yamnaya people sang songs about the heroes who slayed dragons. A warrior named Trito is given cattle by the gods, but this most helpful of gifts is stolen by a three-headed serpent. Fortified by an intoxicating potion supplied by the Sky-Father, Dyeus, Trito is victorious over the snake and regains his cattle. A familiar story. In the Rig Veda, the nearly 3500-year-old Sanskrit scripture, the hero Indra « slewest Vrtra the Dragon who enclosed the waters ». In the Bibliotheca, a compendium of Greek myth from the first or second century AD, Hercules « chopped off the immortal head » of the serpentine Hydra, « and buried it, and put a heavy rock on it, beside the road that leads through Lerna to Elaeus. » Snorri Sturluson in the thirteenth-century Icelandic Prose Edda describes Thor’s tussles with a serpent who « spits out poison and stares straight back from below. » The hero of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, « who may win glory before death », defeats the fearsome Grendel; St. George killed his dragon, too.

The philologist Calvert Watkins, in How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (1995), used « the serpent or dragon slaying myth » to identify a common Indo-European poetics that has spread from present-day Ukraine to India and Ireland. That a variety of seemingly disparate tongues are related, from English to Urdu, has been a linguistic mainstay for generations, but that these tongues often repeated the same stories remains a wondrous fact. For centuries, scholars have speculated about these shadow storytellers at the West’s origins, but today’s advances in genetics and archaeology seem to have told us who they were and where and how they lived. And yet: there’s data, and then there are the stories we ourselves tell to interpret that data, and thereby understand where we come from. Hypothesizing a language called « Proto-Indo-European » — and then imagining a people to be called « Proto-Indo-Europeans » — has always involved myth. A disciplined mythography traces those dragons across seemingly distant and distinct cultures, to powerful effect. The imagined anthropology of these original peoples, though, has a bit of constructed fabulism about it as well.

What do the Proto-Indo-Europeans mean to us today?

The discovery and subsequent restoration of a Proto-Indo-European language that was the origin of everything from Sanskrit to Gaelic, Farsi to Welsh, Icelandic to Greek, Polish to Sardinian, Yiddish to Romani, Occitan to Norwegian, Anatolian to Catalan, is among the greatest intellectual victories of the last few centuries. Much of what’s been discovered since the nineteenth century is standard in any comparative linguistics course, but there is still something wondrous about a chain, at once evolutionary and transcendent, binding an English or Dutch-speaker back to a now-forgotten Bronze Age culture, and to a common language whose last living speaker died six millennia ago and of which there are no written records. It was a philological revolution — a revolution in the scientific sense, analogous to Copernican theory in astronomy and Darwinian natural selection in biology, with implications just as radical for how we understand our place in the world.

Like Copernican heliocentrism, the idea of a common language challenged the Book of Genesis’ assertion that the scattered languages of man derived from God’s punishment of human hubris in constructing the Tower of Babel. In the Babel myth, the various tongues all emerge ex nihilo and were (by punitive design) mutually incomprehensible. Of course the mythic-ness of Babel was already intuitive: after all, an ancient Roman and his Gaulish enemy would cry out on the battlefield respectively to mater and mathir, and a Sanskrit priest might think of his fellow initiates as being brotherly bhraters, and the stranger welcomed into a Neolithic Black Sea yurt was a gostis, while to an English-speaker they’d be a guest. The relationships are encoded into the syllables. There are thousands of such cognates across the Indo-European languages that demonstrate morphological descent.