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A review by bioniclib
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony
2.0
It started off right in my, a-hem, wheelhouse. Then it got to chapter 6.
After Chapter 6 the focus shifted to archeology and anthropology. I’m interested in both, well, perhaps not the former, it’s too pottery-shard focused, but I was looking for philology and etymology, so I put it down
But the first 5 chapters had some really fascinating stuff. My notes are below:
Because England made a colony of India, it needed laws. Those laws needed to take into account both English law and Hindy law. I know, how magnanimous of the colonizers, right? Sir William Jones, one of three Justices, was picked to learn the native language to better understand points of conflict between the two legal systems. Since the laws were written in English owed much to Latin and the those of Hindu much to Sanskrit, there were four languages more languages he could compare; adding to Persian, Welsh, and Gothic that he already knew for various reasons. When he started to see similarities among them, he postulated a common ancestor. Thus, the Proto-Indo-European was “discovered” because the British needed to settle legal disputes in a country they were occupying for financial gain. (7)
The original Aryans “lived in Iran and eastward into the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India.” It achieved its racist superiority from Madison Grant’s book The Passing of a Great Race (1916), wherein he warned that the “superior American ‘Aryan’ blood” was being tainted by such “races” as “Poles, Czechs, and Italians as well as Jews…” (9)
It’s amazing linguists were able to discover Proto-Indo-European because its native speakers were illiterate and never wrote any of it down. (14)
The Hopi language requires you to use indicate, with a grammatical marker, whether you witnessed what you’re talking about or not. I think this would go a long way to combat Fake News. Also, I hate that the despicable man has forever altered the English Language. (19)
One guess puts 3000 BCE as the first splitting of PIE, based on the resistance to change of core vocabulary; think body parts, basic needs (eat, sleep, etc), kinship, stuff like that. Also using this resistance, the lifespan of the language is estimated at 2000 years. Given that Vulgar Latin begat the Romance Languages in but 1000, that estimate is probably too long. (42)
Wheel and wool vocabulary help put the estimated start of PEI at sometime after 4000-3500 BCE (59)
“Sheep with long wooly coats are genetic mutants bred for just that trait.” (59)
The shorter coats could be the source of the wool vocab, so using such words as the early date isn’t as sure a thing as using wheel words. That means the start date goes back to 4000 BCE because before that there aren’t any mentions (on pottery and such) of wheeled words. (63)
Just as the English dictionary is not, really, the English language, PIE reconstructed words are not PIE. So to say that there is no PIE people’s homelands is correct but besides the point. (85)
Native American tribes and/or tribal confederations may have only been formed after the Europeans gave them something to unite against. (102)
The Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages came about because Denmark wanted to create the first Museum of Antiquities in Europe. Christian Thomsen sorted through artifacts and arranged them by those that were only stone, those that had bronze in them, and those with iron. (123)
After Chapter 6 the focus shifted to archeology and anthropology. I’m interested in both, well, perhaps not the former, it’s too pottery-shard focused, but I was looking for philology and etymology, so I put it down
But the first 5 chapters had some really fascinating stuff. My notes are below:
Because England made a colony of India, it needed laws. Those laws needed to take into account both English law and Hindy law. I know, how magnanimous of the colonizers, right? Sir William Jones, one of three Justices, was picked to learn the native language to better understand points of conflict between the two legal systems. Since the laws were written in English owed much to Latin and the those of Hindu much to Sanskrit, there were four languages more languages he could compare; adding to Persian, Welsh, and Gothic that he already knew for various reasons. When he started to see similarities among them, he postulated a common ancestor. Thus, the Proto-Indo-European was “discovered” because the British needed to settle legal disputes in a country they were occupying for financial gain. (7)
The original Aryans “lived in Iran and eastward into the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India.” It achieved its racist superiority from Madison Grant’s book The Passing of a Great Race (1916), wherein he warned that the “superior American ‘Aryan’ blood” was being tainted by such “races” as “Poles, Czechs, and Italians as well as Jews…” (9)
It’s amazing linguists were able to discover Proto-Indo-European because its native speakers were illiterate and never wrote any of it down. (14)
The Hopi language requires you to use indicate, with a grammatical marker, whether you witnessed what you’re talking about or not. I think this would go a long way to combat Fake News. Also, I hate that the despicable man has forever altered the English Language. (19)
One guess puts 3000 BCE as the first splitting of PIE, based on the resistance to change of core vocabulary; think body parts, basic needs (eat, sleep, etc), kinship, stuff like that. Also using this resistance, the lifespan of the language is estimated at 2000 years. Given that Vulgar Latin begat the Romance Languages in but 1000, that estimate is probably too long. (42)
Wheel and wool vocabulary help put the estimated start of PEI at sometime after 4000-3500 BCE (59)
“Sheep with long wooly coats are genetic mutants bred for just that trait.” (59)
The shorter coats could be the source of the wool vocab, so using such words as the early date isn’t as sure a thing as using wheel words. That means the start date goes back to 4000 BCE because before that there aren’t any mentions (on pottery and such) of wheeled words. (63)
Just as the English dictionary is not, really, the English language, PIE reconstructed words are not PIE. So to say that there is no PIE people’s homelands is correct but besides the point. (85)
Native American tribes and/or tribal confederations may have only been formed after the Europeans gave them something to unite against. (102)
The Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages came about because Denmark wanted to create the first Museum of Antiquities in Europe. Christian Thomsen sorted through artifacts and arranged them by those that were only stone, those that had bronze in them, and those with iron. (123)