Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global

 

I heard about Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney after listening to a radio interview with the author. Spinney captivated my attention throughout the entire broadcast as she mapped the spread of our common Proto-Indo-European ancestor throughout Eurasia. Scientific advancements such as DNA analysis have enabled linguists to discern with more accuracy the migration patterns of various tribes, and established more precise times when peoples moved about. Thus the timeline of Indo-European evolution can be set in stone in some regards, where we know with certainty which migrations and thus which languages must have entered a certain area first. Archeological discoveries also aid in the ordering of these events. These details were the foundation for the subtitle of this book.

Language nerd that I am, yet I found it hard to get into this book at first. The enthusiasm I felt after listening to Spinney’s radio interview did not translate to my experience with the printed page. While I do read theses and academic texts on language–knowing full well what I’m getting myself into–Proto was not, as I was led to believe, an “accessible” introduction into the greatest-grandparent of our common language families. It was a slow read, which for me meant six days to cover its 325 pages. I am glad Spinney did not write a language history full of exclamation points and pop culture references, yet from the interview and praise on the back cover I expected this to be an easier read, since one of the critics stated that it was “lightly written”. What made it less accessible was its scientific structures, which entailed long sentences that always required me, ever the perspicacious reader, to stop reading once I finally encountered the final period, gather together all the clauses and endnote addenda from each sentence, then piece them together to read through them again in an unbroken free flow of text. That’s just the way I read; I do not stumble through a sentence where I treat each break independently, whether it’s a dependent clause or a footnote interruption. Each interruption is dealt with then the entire sentence is reread as it should be, in one continuous string of information. For those readers who are expecting a “lightly written” history of our language’s common ancestor, they will be disappointed. Proto is closer to an academic read than a transcript of Spinney’s radio interview.

Spinney divided the book into eight chapters where the first two dealt with the origin of Proto-Indo-European and the remaining six with specific Indo-European language branches. I enjoyed the chapter on Tocharian, the easternmost branch of the family, the most. The final chapter dealt with Albanian, which linguists believe must be the last member of a specific branch whose siblings and cousins have all died out.

The author provided maps that showed migrations and the languages each tribe brought and left behind. She hardly touched on non-Indo-European languages, naturally, but did devote a few pages to the Uralic family, which includes Finnish and Hungarian. Modern research now shows that the tribes that eventually settled in Hungary then moved on to Finland originated closer to Siberia than in central Asia as was previously thought.

I was surprised by the end of my read that I barely wrote down any notes to inspire my own further research. The reason could be that Spinney’s research was so thorough that she dealt with any anticipated supplementary questions and explanations in the form of 21 pages of endnotes as well as footnotes. Surely one ought to pick one form of notation over the other, and not use both.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue