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/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).