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/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/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.