[Silence]
>>Okay, so, today
we're raising the dead.
We're not actually going to
raise dead people on stage here,
because I couldn't get a permit
from the Board of Health, so,
if you were hoping for that,
and if you're disappointed,
feel free to play Angry
Birds on your iPhone,
while I spend 15 minutes talking
about something else
raising dead languages
and dead cultures, using
linguistic methods.
So, we're going to start with
the Romance thing, which is,
you all know what Romance
languages are; French, Spanish,
Italian, various other.
Why are they called Romance
languages, again, you know this,
it's not because
they're romantic,
although maybe they are,
[inaudible, foreign language].
So, maybe they work for Romance,
but the reason they're called
Romance language, of course,
is something we can see
with data right here.
So, if we look at words meaning
mother, in Spanish, Madre,
French, mere, Italian, Madre,
dos and duex for two, and dix,
diez and dieci for ten.
You don't have to be
particularly bright to look
at these and say,
"Well, golly gee Maynard,
them sure languages do
look similar to me."
Okay, so, the look similar to
all of us, and we know why,
it's because they are descended
from the language of the Romans,
hence Romance languages,
mainly Latin.
What does that mean, that
languages are descended
from some other language?
Again, I think you know what
that means, it doesn't mean
that Latin ventured into a
tavern in Gael sometimes,
and met a Gaelic speaker
and nine months later
French was born, right?
What it means is that all
languages change over time,
and they develop dialects in
different places, for example,
you may notice that my dialect,
although it somewhat attenuated
as what we call, oh yay,
Minnesotan dialect, so,
probably different
from your dialect.
Given enough time and
political disunity
and various other things like
lack of television, then,
these dialects might develop
into different languages,
which is what happened with
Spanish, French and Italian,
because, again, all
spoken languages change.
So, in this case, we know
that the Romance
languages are all descended
from a single language,
Latin, and Latin was written
down around two thousand
years ago,
so we know exactly
what the Latin words
for mother, two and ten were.
Good. So, we have the Romance
language family and others
that you have heard of; the
Germanic language family,
including English,
German, Dutch, etc.,
the Celtic language family,
Irish, Welsh and some other,
Slavic, I mean, what does
it mean to be a Slav,
that means that you speak
a Slavic language, right,
Russia [inaudible], and so on.
In India, all of these
languages, not just in India,
Urdu, spoken in Pakistan
and in India a little bit,
Romani language of people,
sometimes called gypsies,
spoken all over the world, these
Indic languages are descended
from the ancient
language San Script.
The Iranian Language
is not just in Iran,
Farce is modern Persian,
Kurdish, you know, Pashto,
of course in Afghanistan.
There are some languages that
don't have any close relatives,
you can think of them
as an only child.
I have nine brothers and
sisters, so I feel sad
for Greek, no brothers
and sisters,
must have been lonely
growing up.
So, we have these
language families,
and these are only
some groupings
that we can establish
using the exact same way
that we just established,
the Romance language family.
These are some language
families of Europe and Asia.
Okay, what you might
not realize though,
is if we take those language
families and a few other,
which I haven't put up
here, and look at words for,
let's say mother, two and ten,
in these language families,
we can, in fact, see some
similarity will take Latin
for Romance Latin languages,
ancient Greek, matre,
meaning mother, duex, deca, as
in decagon, ten-sided figure,
San Script, [inaudible,
foreign language], old Irish,
spoken over a thousand years ago
in Ireland, Russian, [inaudible,
foreign language],
as a representative,
Slavic languages, once again, it
does not take a genius to look
at this data and say, "Hmm,
those all look similar to me."
Okay. So, what do
we make of that?
These languages must
be descended
from some ancestral language.
Now, let's think back
to Romance for a minute,
in the case of Romance, we
know the ancestor language.
The ancestor language was Latin.
In the case of Germanic, the
Germanic tribes were not,
in fact, literate, early
in the historical period.
They were too busy
running around the forest,
spearing moose and planning
to overthrow the Roman Empire,
to start writing things
down, nevertheless,
there was a Germanic
language, which is the ancestor
of English, German, Dutch,
etc. German is not the ancestor
of English, they're
both descended
from a common ancestor,
same way that Spanish
and French are descended
from a common ancestor.
When we don't know what the
common ancestor was, exactly,
because it wasn't written
down, we give it a name
like Proto-Germanic, that's
the ancestral language
for the Germanic languages.
These languages, or these
groups, are spoken all the way
from Europe, all the way
East as far as India,
and so we might call those
language, this language family,
Proto-Indo-European, or
PIE, don't call it pie,
I don't know why, but
no one calls it pie.
If you go up to a
linguistic and say,
I'm studying PIE,
they'll say what?
If you say, I'm studying PIE,
they'll say, oh, good for you.
So, I've put the words here.
Now, again, this language
was never written down.
These speakers of this language
were completely illiterate, but,
by using phonetic knowledge
of various sorts and knowledge
of how languages change, we can,
actually, reconstruct the way
that they pronounced
these words.
So, there's an H2 there,
that means there's more
than one different kind of H
in the Proto-Indo-European
language,
this one was pronounced
something like [inaudible],
so that word for mother
was pronounced something
like [inaudible foreign
language],
and 2 is [inaudible
foreign language],
and 10 is [inaudible
foreign language],
and I've put asterisks
in front of them,
not because I love asterisks,
but to show that these are
reconstructed languages,
or reconstructed words,
never written down.
So, that's what the
asterisks in front means.
Okay, so there's our
Proto-Indo-European language
family [inaudible],
includes a wide range
of languages spoken still
today in most of the languages
of Europe, languages of
Iran, languages of India,
Northern India, in particular.
A little side note,
looking at this data,
you notice that the English
word, where English begins
with a T, Latin is
normally going to begin
with a D, and vice versa.
What this means is that the
Indo-European word started
with a D and D turned
into T, in English,
and that shouldn't be too
shocking for you, if you say,
Ta, Da, go ahead and say it,
it won't hurt you, Ta, Da,
feel where the tongue is
hitting the roof of your mouth,
when you do it, Ta, Da,
and you'll see those two sounds
are very similar to each other.
Voltaire said , a few
hundred years ago,
that etymology is a science
in which the consonants count
for little and the
vowels count for nothing.
But, that was true 200 years
ago, or 300 years ago, 250,
I guess, probably when he
said, it's not true anymore.
Nowadays the consonants and the
vowels count for everything,
and so you have to
be very careful,
and the crucial thing here is
that English T has to go along
with Latin D, unless
there's certain other factors
intervening, but English D will
not be the same as Latin D,
so we see this, here,
beginning of the word,
and this can allow us to
find other words that come
from the same ancestor
cognate words.
For example, the
English word tame,
the Latin word meaning
tame is domo,
and there's that T
D correspondence.
English eat and Latin eddo,
there's that T D
correspondence regularity
of sound correspondence.
What this also means is that the
English word day is not cognate,
not related to the
Latin word dia,
or to its Spanish descent dia.
They are just accidental
similarities,
because English D does not equal
Latin D, English D equals some,
actually equals Latin
F, normally.
So, day and dais are
not cognate words.
I'm going to tell
you something else,
which I'm sure you all
realize, before finally getting
to something you don't realize,
which is that there is a lot
of nonsense on the
internet, okay.
Anyone in the world can look at
words and languages like Dias
and day and say, "Whoa,
those must be related."
You can look at words like
the Chinese word for more,
which is whoa and say,
"Hey, that kinds of looks
like [inaudible] in Latin, more
than one, whoa, and or a lot,
[inaudible] is more than .
So, you could say those two
languages are related, no.
So, when you see something
on the internet, be careful,
but you knew that already.
Okay, let's go back to our data.
Up to this stage, I have raised
a dead language, and to me,
as a linguist, that's exciting,
because I can now say the word
for mother was pronounced
something like [inaudible],
in this Proto-Indo-European
language.
Others of you are
looking at your watches,
because you don't care
how they pronounce this.
So, let's go a little
bit farther.
Something else, once you've
developed the language
and figured out what words
are in it, you can do,
figure out things about the
people and their culture.
Now, there are other ways
of figuring out things
about ancient people
and cultures
that never wrote anything down,
you can put on a pith helmet
and get a shovel and go and dig
up their graves and their pots
and so on, that takes a lot
of work, and you'll get hot.
So, instead, what you can do
is you can look at language,
you can go over to the library
and look at the languages,
and its air conditioned in
the summer in the library,
which is nice, because most
of our buildings here are not
air conditioned in the summer,
and you can figure
out things like,
words that we can reconstruct
for Proto-Indo-European,
the word for copper, so they
had copper, that's significant
because it tells us something
about when they lived, that is,
not before the copper age.
Copper doesn't grow on trees,
right, you've got to smelt it
out of the ore, and
so, if they had copper,
then they're not
Neolithic people,
they're after that period.
On the other hand, we can't
reconstruct a word for iron,
so they had not yet figured
out iron working technology,
so that, sort of, puts them at
a certain location and time.
How about a location and space,
okay; they have a word for snow,
okay, so they probably don't
live in Singapore, right?
And, along with that, they don't
have a word for palm tree, okay.
So, not in a tropical area,
probably snow but no palm trees.
They had a word for goose,
but no word for chicken,
to paraphrase Chico Marx, buy a
goose, buy a no chicken, well,
because we know chickens
were originally domesticated
in South East Asia, sometime
several millennia ago,
but they didn't make their
way west for some millennia
after that, so, made
their way to Greek
and Roman culture probably in
the early first millennium BC,
so, the Proto-Indo-Europeans
lived in some place
where chickens had not
yet been introduced.
But, they did have
other kids of animals.
They had collies, and they
had sheep and they have word
for wool, also, so they used the
sheep to make wool, naturally,
and they had word for
horse and a word for wheel,
and the last two are
particularly interesting,
because we know that horses
were domesticated somewhere
in Central Asia or
maybe Southeast Europe,
sometime probably
around six thousand,
seven thousand years ago.
And, we also know that wheeled
vehicles were invented not too
long after that, maybe
a millennium later,
originally when they
domesticated the horses,
they probably ate them .
But, eventually, they figured
out, oh, we can ride on them,
and them, someone figured out,
hey, we can take these wheels
and attach them to cows and
horses and get around faster.
This would be useful
if, for example,
you wanted to move somewhere.
Any of you who have ever moved
somewhere, are probably glad
that you had a wheeled vehicle,
in which to pile all your stuff,
instead of having to carry
it around on your back.
So, the Indo-Europeans,
we know moved a lot,
because wherever they
lived originally,
they weren't spread all the
way from Ireland to India,
they must have lived some
place, some smaller location
and then spread out from there,
probably using their newly
developed wheel technology,
and riding around
on horses, also.
Those of you who've heard of the
Indo-Europeans may know, then,
all their theory that the
Indo-Europeans went around,
charging around in
chariots, conquering people,
which was a nice romantic
story, that's probably not true,
because chariots were
not invented until later,
so they had wheeled
vehicles, like carts.
They may have gone
around conquering people,
that's a shameful habit that
many people are engaged in,
but they weren't using
chariots to do it.
Crucially, all of this
information put together helps
us to locate the Indo-Europeans
in time and space,
that's still a very
controversial topic,
but most linguist would
agree, some don't,
because academics love to
argue about everything,
but most would agree
that, probably,
somewhere in what is now
Ukraine, maybe Eastern Ukraine,
and probably around six
thousand years ago, is where
and when we would locate the
Proto-Indo-European speakers,
speakers of this language.
Okay, so we can, in fact, find
out things about their culture,
their material culture,
they had agriculture
as well as stock breeding.
We can find out all
those things,
but what else can we find out?
We can actually find out things
about their non-material
culture.
We can reconstruct a
Proto-Indo-European,
dios, meaning sky God.
So, this is interesting.
We know that the
Proto-Indo-European's,
and this seems to have been
their chief God, worshiped a God
of the bright sky,
this is, in fact,
related to a word
meaning bright.
The God of the bright sky, and
this should be familiar to you,
if you think, well, you
probably don't know San Script,
[inaudible], but Greek Zeus,
where the deu has turned
into a Zue, and now we
pronounce it Z, but it was Zue,
in Ancient Greek, Zeus.
Or Latin, although it's a
little bit harder to tell,
where the petre means father
and the deu, has turned into a J
in Latin, so we have this father
sky God, who was the chief God
of the Proto-Indo-European
people, and he persisted
into a lot of these cultures.
You may be wondering about
this point, what happened
to this God in English.
You don't see him around
much anymore, right.
Well, let's pause for a minute
and say, if we had this God
by name in English, his name
ought to start with a T, right?
If its Proto-Indo-European D,
then it should be English T.
So I want you to think of some
English T and Thor isn't going
to works, because
that's spelled with T,
but it's not pronounced
ta, that pronounced th,
so that's not Thor, but
Thor does give me an idea,
we do have some days of
the week named for Gods;
today is Sunday, right?
And then, there's Moonday
tomorrow, and then,
later in the week, we have
Woodensday, or [inaudible],
if you're a fan of
[inaudible], right?
And, he's the Chief God
of the Germanic people
and obviously Thorsday, after
that, but right in the middle
of those days, what do we have?
We have a day that
starts with T, Tuesday.
Now you know who T was, so this
is something you might not have
realized, that Tuesday is,
in fact, the day dedicated
to the God whose name is
the same as Zeus and Jupiter
and [inaudible] and
a few other names
in some other Indo-European
Languages.
You don't see Teiwaz
around much anymore,
even in the Germanic period, he
seems to have been supplanted
by Wooden, who was an upstart
who had launched a coup
against him, Wooden is a God
of Magic, and Teiwaz sort of,
got shoved into the background.
So, if you feel sad for
Teiwaz, maybe you can pour
out a libation to him on
Tuesday this week, or something.
But, so that's the,
what we can reconstruct
for Proto-Indo-European culture.
I have focused on
Proto- Indo-European
because that's what I
know the most about,
but some of you might
be saying, "Well,
what about other language
families of the world.
Well, there are some, theirs
Indo-European, obviously,
Semiotic languages like, like
Arabic, Hebrew, Ancient Acadian,
ancient and modern Aramaic,
there's the Sino-Tibetan
languages,
which includes Chinese and
Tibetan and also Burmese
and also about two
hundred other language,
and for any of these
language families,
we can reconstruct the ancestral
form and learn something
about the people
and their culture,
where and when they lived,
and what God's the worshipped
and what they ate and so
on, all without having to go
out into the field and
dig up people's graves.
Austronesia included
language ranging all the way
from Madagascar over to Hawaii,
so the Polynesian languages,
languages of Indonesia,
Niger-Congo languages of Sub-
Saharan and Africa,
including Swahili
and other Bantu languages,
languages of Nigeria,
Algonquian languages, which were
spoken right here, at one time,
in the past, in this
part of the country,
before white people came,
Iroquoian languages,
still spoken in, not too far
away from here, and many other.
So, if you're interested
in learning more
about the pre-history
of the world,
you can do it using linguistics,
you can research and find
out what cultures were like
thousands of years ago,
just by looking at
their languages.
If you're not interested
in that, then I hope you
and your birds defeated
the pigs.
[ Laughter and clapping ]
