As scholars of ancient texts well know, the recovery of lost material is controversial. For example, critics find in ancient Hebrew and not-so-ancient Christian biblical texts the remains of many earlier texts, which sometimes appear to have been pieced together by careless editors. These original texts, complete or otherwise, do not exist anywhere in physical form. These must be inferred from the traces they left behind, such as features of diction and syntax, stylistic and thematic preferences.
The study of ancient languages ​​is similar, but since oral cultures are much older than written ones, exploring the ancestry of languages ​​can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to a time when no one remembers or records and is only glimpsed vaguely through scant archaeological evidence and observable auditory similarities between vastly different languages. The theoretical development of the Indo-European languages ​​as a language family was similarly a slow process that took several centuries to integrate into the modern language tree as we know it today.
The observation that there are significant similarities between Sanskrit and ancient European languages ​​such as Greek and Latin was first recorded by Thomas Stephens, a Jesuit missionary in Goa, in the 16th century, but remained largely unexplored until about 100 years later. A major breakthrough occurred in the mid-19th century, when German linguists august schleicherpublished his writings under the influence of Hegel. Compendium of Comparative Indo-European Grammar. Schleicher therefore undertook an extensive attempt to reconstruct the language believed to have originated from Proto-Indo-European, or PIE (for short), the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages. somewhere in eastern europe,However, this guess is a guess.
As an example of what language was like, Schleicher created the fable “The Sheep and the Horse” as an “acoustic experiment.” Since then, the story has been “regularly updated” and used, it wrote. Eric Powell archeology“to reflect the most up-to-date understanding of what this extinct language sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago.” Without access to documents written in Proto-Indo-European (which may or may not have existed) and of course speakers of that language, linguists disagree quite a bit about what it should have sounded like. “No single version can be considered definitive.”
However, since Schleicher’s time, the theory has become considerably more sophisticated. At the top of the post you can hear one such improvement based on the research of: UCLA Professor H. Craig Melchert And I read Linguist Andrew Bird. Please see below for a translation of Schleicher’s story “Sheep and Horses”.
One woolless sheep sawed horses, one pulled heavy carts, one carried large loads, and one quickly carried people. The sheep said to the horses, “It hurts when I see people driving horses.” “Listen, sheep, this breaks our hearts when we see this. Man, the master, uses the sheep’s wool to make warm clothing for himself, and the sheep have no wool.” When the sheep heard this, they fled to the plains.
Bird also read another fictional Indo-European story, “Kings and Gods,” using “pronunciation based on the latest insights into PIE.”
look Here is Mr. Powell’s article: archeology For transcriptions of both the Schleicher and Melchert/Byrd versions of PIE, see below. To learn about the archaeological evidence, here’s his article This theoretical common linguistic ancestor for Bronze Age speakers.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on the site in 2017.
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josh jones I’m a writer and musician based in Durham, North Carolina. please follow him @jdmagness
Source: Open Culture – www.openculture.com
