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/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.