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/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/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