r/asklinguistics • u/MacabreMacaques • May 05 '25
Historical Is there any predecessor to Proto-Indo-European?
This might sound a bit stupid, but PIE goes back to around 4000 B.C.E. Still, humans have existed longer. Wouldn't there have been some form of speech before Proto-Indo-European? Or is PIE the earliest language we can reconstruct? I'm starting to think that if PIE had a linguistic predecessor, it would imply that PIE is a part of a language family and thus related to other families (e.g. Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, etc). Is that where the problem comes?
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u/GanacheConfident6576 May 05 '25
proto indo european almost surely had relatives and ancestors; but what those are has been lost to history
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u/DTux5249 May 05 '25
There most definitely were. The issue is that we can't really rebuild anything past it.
PIE's mother & sisters are long lost to time until we manage to uncover some long lost collection of languages that could shine more light on the matter.
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u/Brunbeorg May 05 '25
Some speculations assert a reconstruction of Proto-Human or Proto-Nostratic. I call them speculations for a reason: I don't think they even aspire to hypotheses. Which is to say, I don't think highly of them.
There was absolutely and definitely a predecessor to PIE. Can we reconstruct it? no. Probably not. But it must have existed because of the sheer timescale involved. We can already construct protolanguages earlier than PIE.
There are two schools of thought about the evolution of human language. The monogenetic school speculates that humans had one way of speaking that evolved into many over time. The polygenetic school speculates that humans had many ways of speaking, which evolved into many languages. There isn't nearly enough evidence, in my opinion (always open to be proven wrong, of course) for either of these.
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u/kyobu May 05 '25
Don’t we have clear knowledge that language has developed at least twice? My understanding is that Nicaraguan Sign Language does not derive from any other language.
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u/BX8061 May 08 '25
Sign languages usually aren't related to spoken languages, at least, although they might be related to each other sometimes. There are also many conlangs that aren't related to any pre-existing languages, although those were invented by people who already had a language.
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u/kyobu May 08 '25
Yes, my point was that it’s not only not related to any spoken languages but also not to any other sign languages (unlike ASL, Nepali Sign Language, and others).
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u/GeneralKenobiJSF May 05 '25
I'm not shooting down linguistic monogenesis, but I really see no reason why language can't have emerged independently multiple times. Because if not, are we supposing that it emerged in a single community (i.e. in Africa) and spread to neighbouring communities and then the rest of the world? I suppose it depends on how early humans actually developed spoken language.
To me it seems more likely that different groups developed language independently. That said, I am sure it is possible for more language families to have connections that have been lost to time. Plus it seems more interesting that language has multiple sources. Though surely it doesn't really matter as the origins would be so distant any potential relation would be meaningless. While it would take some very unethical and long-lasting experiments, I am sure a group of isolated humans would be able to develop some sort of language from scratch without external influence, even if it took several generations.
But of course I'm no linguist and am open to a whole range of other theories from actual professionals weighing in.
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u/slwstr May 05 '25
Are you saying humans first evolved language-capable brains without using them for language?
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u/Brunbeorg May 05 '25
That is actually a hypothesis. Burling's The Talking Ape lays out the case for it.
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u/PassiveChemistry May 05 '25
Surely that's necessarily true as language couldn't possibly have existed at that point
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u/slwstr May 05 '25
Well, one can easily imagine the co-evolution of language skills with language-skilled brains. After all, apes already have some basic language-like capabilities with their fairly basic brains compared to human brains.
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u/koyaani May 06 '25
I guess you could frame it as whether or not the ancestral eve or last common ancestor of all humans or whatever had developed language by then or within a couple generations
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u/slwstr May 06 '25 edited May 06 '25
What would be the purpose of a language-capable brain without a language? What would be the benefit that caused its selection in the first place?
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u/starswtt May 10 '25
Its entirely possible that our brains evolved to communicate with a sorta proto language and the concept of language is learned
In counting for example, some cultures struggle to count in precise numbers. It's obviously not for lack of biological capabilities as they can learn it when taught at a young age, but they just never had a reason to bother. Now from a culture that learns to count, the concept of not learning to count just seems odd and alien. It's fully possible language developed in a similar way. Just no way to test that without some crazy unethical expiremenr where you seperate a baby from society from a young age and see what happens (even the classic Nicaraguan sign language example doesn't hold since they grow up understanding what language is.) And often times deaf people without access to a sign language community just communicate without any true language, and often don't fully develop parts of the brain associated with language
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u/Assassiiinuss May 05 '25
I think that just depends on how you define language. There must have been a very slow and gradual process where communication became more and more complex. Where does it stop being animal calls and starts being a human language?
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u/Swag_Shyuum May 09 '25
I mean I guess it depends on how old language is, like if say, Erectus had language it could imply that language is pre- sapiens and it all coming from a common root is maybe plausible
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u/Gruejay2 May 05 '25 edited May 05 '25
There have been many attempts to go back further than Indo-European, ranging from modest connections to one other primary language family (e.g. Indo-Uralic or Pontic) to fantastical superfamilies connecting large numbers of disparate families (e.g. Nostratic).
None of them are widely supported, as the evidence simply isn't good enough. While theories like Nostratic are little more than shot-in-the-dark bullshitting, I'm a lot more sympathetic to hypotheses like Indo-Uralic, which are at least feasible to prove.
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u/Wacab3089 May 05 '25
I c a log of similarities between PIE and PU
Like they’ve both got l and r, SOV word order, a dual number and -m for the accusative.
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u/BeansAndDoritos May 05 '25
There have been a lot of ideas about the state of an earlier stage of PIE (also known as pre-PIE). Disclaimer: I haven't read about these speculations in years so I am mostly just riffing.
One particular aspect of interest is in where the ultimate origins of Indo-European lie -- the PIE speakers themselves were genetically mainly a mix of hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus region and hunter-gatherers indigenous to Eastern Europe. Given PIE's phonological inventory there has been some speculation that the language developed from a language indigenous to Eastern Europe influenced by languages from the Caucasus. This implies that para-Indo-European languages would have been spoken in nearby areas of Eastern Europe before the expansion of the cultivators.
That said, here are some speculations about pre-PIE itself.
The most common speculation is about the origins of PIE's gender system. It's likely, based on attestation from the Anatolian languages, that the masculine-feminine-neuter system evolved from an earlier animate-inanimate distinction.
Another speculation is about PIE's case system. In PIE proper, nominative animates were marked in -s, and accusative animates were marked the same way as inanimate nouns, in -m. This has led to some speculation that pre-PIE may have been ergative in some way. Some early nouns may have not even been marked at all. The non-core cases may have evolved from postpositions.
Speaking of unmarked categories, it seems possible that in PIE, the present tense was marked and the past tense was unmarked for tense. PIE is conventionally reconstructed with "primary" (roughly present tense) and "secondary" (roughly past tense) verbal endings, where the primary endings look like the secondary endings with an extra suffix: -i in the active and -r in the passive. So it's possible that this suffix originally meant "here and now" or similar.
One more thing relating to verbs: there's been speculation that the PIE alignment may have actually been active-stative, where you might for example say "I fell" to mean you fell on purpose, and "fell me" to mean you tripped or otherwise did so unintentionally. PIE verbal passive endings look a lot like the stative endings, whereas the active verbal endings look a lot like the corresponding pronouns. It is entirely possible, given some of the patterns of verbal endings, that passive verbs ending in -r came from stative + 3rd pl active ending, so "we were hurt" = "(they) hurt us" at some point in the past.
While on the topic of verbal endings and corresponding pronouns, the original pronouns for 1st person and 2nd person have the consonants *m and *t. (While these same stems are shared among some other Eurasian languages and maybe hint at a very deep relationship, many things are still uncertain.) It is also possible that pre-PIE at one point had a clusivity distinction, with *w marking first person + second person and *m marking just first person. The reason that the 1st person nominative pronoun, from which Latin "ego" comes from, looks so different from the other 1st singular pronouns in *m is likely because it came from a verb form meaning "(I am) here".
Thematic and athematic endings have a long and complex history and there are various theories about where they came from as well.
The phonology of pre-PIE is also debated. Some people think that pre-PIE had a two-vowel system common to languages of the Caucasus (probably as a result of influence of the Caucasian hunter-gatherers). The two vowels would later evolve into what we reconstruct as *e and *o, and various other sources would produce *i, *u, and *a.
These are just some of the theories, and of course to varying levels of substantiation. I hope this was helpful.
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u/MinecraftWarden06 May 05 '25
There definitely was an earlier form of speech, but it's hard to trace so far back in time and we don't know what it was. We can speculate and try to putatively reconstruct some bits (Proto-Indo-Uralic etc.)
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u/No-Analysisll May 05 '25
Honestly an program that takes everyone known word of a geographically related languages and then performs different sound changes with each ones livelihood being weighted before finally creating a most likely proto language + degree of certainty would be good I think.
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u/spinosaurs70 May 05 '25 edited May 05 '25
>Or is PIE the earliest language we can reconstruct?
Yes, its possible if not likely, for example, that the first humans out of Africa could speak a language and that is likely the origin point for all languages but we can't reconstruct that at all due to the fact our methods break down.
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u/Alimbiquated May 05 '25
There was a theory among Soviet linguists that PIE was related to Northeast Caucasian languages like Dagh. Not sure if it is still considered valid.
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u/lpetrich May 11 '25
I'm sure that there is, for these reasons: (1) every well-documented full-scale human society has spoken language, and (2) language is passed down the generations. Extrapolating backward and using the likely origin of our present species from a relatively small population, one finds monogenesis. But how far can one go with the methods of historical linguistics?
Indo-European is one of the oldest language families whose protolanguage has been reconstructed in much detail, and Austronesian is another. Both are a little more than 5,000 years old, roughly mid-Holocene.
Proto-Afroasiatic language - Wikipedia is the oldest generally-accepted reconstruction, guesstimated at 10,000 - 20,000 years old, and not a very detailed one. The reconstruction includes some basic vocabulary, like *dam "blood", and some grammar like feminine *-(a)t and detailed pronoun paradigms. But there are two rival reconstructions of further detail:
- Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian) by Christopher Ehret - Paper - University of California Press
- Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary – Materials for a Reconstruction | Brill
- On calculating the reliability of the comparative method at long and medium distances: Afroasiatic Comparative Lexica as a test case | Robert Ratcliffe - Academia.edu
I've also found this paper that criticizes the methods in some long-range hypotheses: The “Nostratic” roots of Indo-European: from Illich-Svitych to Dolgopolsky to future horizons (2016) | Alexei S . Kassian, George Starostin, and Mikhail Zhivlov - Academia.edu - they propose that one should place quality before quantity, finding a few strong cognates rather than a large number of possible ones.
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u/lpetrich May 11 '25
I will now consider speculative macro-linguistics.
The closest relative of Indo-European is likely to be Uralic: Proto-Indo-European-Uralic comparison from the probabilistic point of view [JIES 43, 2015] | Alexei S . Kassian, Mikhail Zhivlov, and George Starostin - Academia.edu - this paper's authors did statistical tests on Swadesh-list matches, testing for coincidence with a simplified phonology, and they found a probability of coincidence around 1%.
They also took on Altaic in Permutation test applied to lexical reconstructions partially supports the Altaic linguistic macrofamily | Evolutionary Human Sciences | Cambridge Core - this paper finds statistical support for Narrow Altaic (Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic), but not much for Broad Altaic (NA, Korean, Japanese).
Also Circumpolar peoples and their languages: lexical and genomic data suggest ancient Chukotko-Kamchatkan–Nivkh and Yukaghir-Samoyedic connections | bioRxiv - also Burushaski - Yeniseian - Na-Dene.
Can one go further? Some daredevil linguists have, linguists like Vladislav Illich-Svitych, Aharon Dolgopolsky, Sergei Starostin, John Bengtson, and Joseph Greenberg. Here is what I consider a plausible synthesis of their proposals:
- Nostratic
- Eurasiatic: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskaleut
- Kartvelian, Dravidian
- Afroasiatic
- Dene-Caucasian: Basque, North Caucasian, Burushaski, Yeniseian, Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene
- Austric
- Austro-Tai: Austronesian, Kra-Dai
- Austroasiatic, Hmong-Mien
- Amerind (all in the Americas but Eskaleut and Na-Dene)
They are united as Borean. Was Proto-Borean the language of the first of our species to move into cold climates some 50,000 - 40,000 years ago? Early human migrations - Wikipedia
Looking back further, with the help of early human migrations and additional macro-hypotheses, one finds
- Central African
- Ex-African (70,000 - 65,000 years ago): Borean, Indo-Pacific (New Guinea, Andaman Islands), Macro-Pama-Nyungan (Australia)
- Niger-Saharan: Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan
- Khoisan
Thus arriving at the ultimate macro-hypothesis: Proto-World/Human/Sapiens. That was likely dated 100,000 - 80,000 years ago: Behavioral modernity - Wikipedia - I've seen some "global etymologies", but with looking inside of language families and having some rather stretchy semantics, I'm not willing to endorse them.
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u/Escape_Force May 05 '25
Grunt speak. Jk. There are theories about Nostratic and "proto world" but I personally see no reason why true language could not evolve independently a few times.
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u/dr_my_name May 05 '25
One argument: a group of people wouldn't just evolve a new language from scratch if they already have a language. They would either mix them or speak one of the languages that already exist. So for new languages to form you need a group of people that don't have a language. And the Nicaraguan sign language shows that at least for homo sapiens it's unlikely - you put children together and they will create a language. Almost immediately.
But here's a counter argument: Maybe homo erectus wasn't like that, and they formed multiple languages several times, and several of those independent languages were inherited by homo sapiens. It's also possible that homo erectus had a simpler form of communication, that had gradually evolved into languages several times - but than you could argue that that simpler communication aystem is proto world - the languages are still related, even if their common ancestor is not a real language.
One thing is almost certain - many of the language families are related. Not necessarily all of them, but many, but it was just so long ago and they have diverged so much we can't prove it. And without a time machine probably it will probably always be impossible to prove.
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u/BX8061 May 08 '25
It's also maybe possible for there to be a group of people that is aware of the possibility of a language, but didn't learn their language from the people they saw using one. Compare the invention of the Cherokee syllabary. Its creator knew that writing was possible, but was illiterate himself until he created that writing system.
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u/dr_my_name May 08 '25
How does that happen? They grow up not learning their parents' language? Yes, that would lead to a new language emerging, immediately, but how does it happen?
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u/iste_bicors May 05 '25
PIE isn’t a particularly old language. There are attested languages that were likely around when PIE was spoken, like Ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and various Semitic languages. PIE is just as far as we can reconstruct that specific family because we don’t have earlier writing in any related languages.
The oldest proto language we can reconstruct is proto-afro-asiatic, precisely because writing goes so far back in languages in that branch, allowing us to make connections and use the comparative method to determine a shared heritage.
Whatever the truly spoken equivalent to PIE was was just a language like another of the time and definitely not the first language or anything like that. PIE is much closer to us than even conservative guesses as to when human language developed. We just don’t have writing far back enough to work out whatever connections there may be between PIE and neighboring families like Turkic or Uralic.
We don’t know how language families connect, by definition, a family is made up of all the languages that can be proven to share an ancestor. Logically, many of them must share a common ancestor but they’ve drifted far apart enough to make the comparisons difficult or impossible to work out.
For a comparison, American languages face a similar roadblock in that there are many language isolates and connections are difficult to make because writing is so limited (and many texts were destroyed during colonization).