PROTO

Tracking the linguistic predecessor to languages now spoken by billions of people across the globe.

Spinney’s goal is to explain the “Big Bang of the Indo-European languages,” the series of events that led Proto-Indo-European to stem into languages of antiquity and ultimately into the Spanish, Farsi, and English we can recognize today. Her meticulous research synthesizes the work of archaeologists, linguistic historians, and, crucially, geneticists who have sequenced ancient DNA. Findings from these fields have built a case for the speakers of Proto-Indo-European having been the Yamnaya people of the steppe region north of the Black Sea, the world's first fully nomadic pastoralists. The text tracks the probable migratory paths of the Yamnaya from modern-day Ukraine across Europe and Central Asia, their intersections with other ancient societies and cultures, their governance and trades, and the way that those meetings spurred and cultivated new branches of Indo-European. The methods for reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language involve a complex system for comparing lexicons, grammatical rules, and theories on sound laws; while Spinney includes and attempts to translate these processes, they often seem merely a side story to the vivid theoretical detail with which she shades the movements, relationships, and mythologies of Indo-European ancestors. The text is organized around the evolutions of individual branches of Indo-European, which can be confusing as time weaves in and out of prehistory with different migrations and intertwinements. But this back-and-forth underscores the stakes involved in how we understand such massive dissemination and transformation and the tensions they fuel; indeed, Spinney concludes, there is a potential reflecting pool for the trajectory of Proto-Indo-European in our current moment, as global languages confront the primacy of English, shared written text through 21st-century media and technology, and new migration patterns.

A smart, dense, detailed account.