 Proto-Indo-European comes up a lot in my videos. Peck, my very first two videos were both about PIE, but in case you don't know, linguists believe that a huge group of the world's languages are all descended from one common ancestor. This group includes almost all of the languages of Europe and like a third of the languages of Asia, mostly around Iran and India, so the group of languages are collectively called the Indo-European languages. And the language that they're all descended from is called Proto-Indo-European. Thing is, linguists don't believe any of this because we have written records of PIE. They believe it because and only because all of the languages of this region are so similar that it's the only reasonable explanation. The original Proto-Indo-Europeans didn't leave anything behind. Well, okay, they probably did, but they might have been any number of ancient groups of people who left behind a bunch of pottery and stuff. And all you have to do to start a fight between linguists is ask them whether the original Proto-Indo-Europeans lived in modern-day Russia or Turkey. And yet, that doesn't at all mean that we don't know anything about who these people were. Linguists will love telling you how important language is to culture and human society and how it's a reflection of how we see the world. But I don't think there's any better example of this than how we figured out so much about the Proto-Indo-European people just based on their language. For instance, if you remember my last video, you'll know that, in general, English words with an h-h-h sound tend to correspond to Spanish words with a k-k-th sound. Because early in the history of English, all k-k-th sounds turned into h-h-h sounds. But the word computer corresponds to the only barely different Spanish computadora, indicating that one language came up with the term and then it spread to the other after English went through that change. Which means the word computer had to be created after the change English went through, which means the Proto-Indo-Europeans probably didn't have computers. Meanwhile, the Spanish word casa corresponds to the English word house, suggesting that the Proto-Indo-Europeans probably did have a word for house and therefore probably had houses. Now, those two things are pretty obvious, but we can actually use similar strategies to figure out a lot about Proto-Indo-European culture. At the very least, we can figure out what kind of technology they had. We can successfully reconstruct PIE words for wheel, hub, and axle, indicating that they had wheeled vehicles like wagons and such. They also had words for yoke and fill, and also words for cow, steer, ox, and bull, indicating that they had domesticated cattle and that they used them to plow their fields. And yes, we also know that they could farm. They had words for field, for wheat, for barley, and also words for threshing and grinding grain. We also know that they used their cattle for dairy, as they had words for milk, butter, and curds. Although those dairy products might also have come from goats, because they also had a word for goat, as well as sheep, ram, lamb, dog, and horse. They also had words for wool, as well as a verb for to weave, indicating that they knew how to make their own textiles out of wool. We don't know too much about what they would have eaten, but they did have words for oven, to cook, to bake, and to boil, so we know they were making something out of something. They also had words for to brew and a word for mead, so we also know that they were definitely drinking something or another. Interestingly, they had a word for door, but in the daughter languages, the word door usually comes in the form that words take when you're talking about two of something, which indicates that their doors might have usually come in pairs of two. They definitely had words for houses and buildings, but we don't know much about what they would have been like. We do know one thing about them, though, because their word for roof also became verbs, meaning to thatch in some daughter languages, suggesting that they might have tended to have thatched roofs. Also, we can reconstruct two different PIE words that both meant to fart, one that meant to fart loudly, and the other that meant to fart softly. The last one doesn't actually have anything to do with anything. I just thought it was kind of funny. Okay, so we can learn about their material culture through the vocabulary, but can we also maybe learn about the way they saw the world through their language? The ancient Greeks had a word, I knew my, that meant to take, and it's pretty clearly a cognate with the Tocharian I to give. Also, the ancient Greek nemetai, to a lot, is a cognate with the German nemen to take. You find examples of this kind of thing a fair amount in Indo-European languages, where words that mean to take in one language have a common ancestor with words that mean to give in another. This is pretty hard to explain until you consider one intriguing possibility. What if the Proto-Indo-Europeans thought of the two as the same? Many modern linguists believe that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had this idea of mutual gift-giving, the idea that when one person gives someone else something, both of them expect that the receiver will have to give something back to the giver in return, to the extent that neither action can really be viewed separately, and that they are, in fact, two aspects of the same event. But that's just the first thing we can figure out about how the Proto-Indo-Europeans envisioned their own society. The Proto-Indo-Europeans had words for close family relations, just like any other language. Father, mother, brother, sister, etc. They also had words that meant son's wife and brother's wife, but not words for daughter's husband or sister's husband. They also had words for husband's father, husband's mother, and husband's brother, but not words for wife's father, wife's mother, or wife's sister. All this indicates that the way they saw things, when a woman marries a man, she is now a family member to his whole family, but the husband isn't a family member to her family. But when a marriage occurs, the wife leaves her family to go to her husband's family, not the other way around. Now, this doesn't necessarily mean that their society was incredibly patriarchal, or at least it wouldn't if not for the fact that there is a very clear, easily reconstructable Proto-Indo-European word for bride price. And when you combine that with the Proto-Indo-European idea of reciprocity and mutual gift-giving, you can kind of start to see the whole thing as two aspects of one exchange and get a bit of a sense for how the Proto-Indo-Europeans probably viewed women. On a less chauvinistic note, my favorite part of all this is how we can get an idea of how they viewed the place of humans in the universe. Many words for human and Indo-European languages originate from a Proto-Indo-European word, meaning earth or land, indicating that they thought of humans as fundamentally earthly. Furthermore, Indo-European cultures widely use the same word to mean both human and mortal, indicating that the Proto-Indo-Europeans thought of humans as also inherently mortal. Both of these things are likely meant to be in contrast with things that are neither mortal nor earthly, as in gods. Now, we can't reconstruct too much about Proto-Indo-European religion. Most Indo-European societies originally believed in a pantheon of many gods, so the Proto-Indo-Europeans probably did too. But beyond that, we don't have too much to go on. Here's one interesting tidbit, though. The speakers of Vedic Sanskrit believed in a powerful entity they called Dieus Peter. The Greeks originally referred to Zeus by the name Zeu-Pater, and the Romans originally called their god Jupiter by the name Eupeter. All of these phrases can confidently be said to have come from a single name for a supreme god in Proto-Indo-European religion, a god whose name literally translates as Skyfather. Keep in mind how patriarchal Proto-Indo-European society was. Given how they saw women, you can bet that the father of the household was the household's head, so the idea that the universe was headed by an entity who was a sort of father to the whole world and who resided in the sky must have made sense to them, as if the cosmos was a sort of macrocosm of the home. Now, if you take other stuff into account, you can infer even more about Proto-Indo-European society. For instance, many scholars have noticed how numerous Proto-Indo-European people divide their societies into three groups, the warriors, the priests, and the commoners, and have suggested that the Proto-Indo-Europeans probably also had such a division. However, others think that this division might have originally just been a sort of idea or a conceptualization of their own society, that at the time didn't actually affect their day-to-day behavior. Either way, though, I just think it's one of the coolest achievements of modern linguistics that we've managed to learn so much about these people. That despite the fact that we have almost no idea where they might have lived or when, despite the fact that we have no written records or pictures or even pottery or ruins that we can confidently associate with them, despite all that, we've managed to look only at the words they left behind for us, and we've used those words as a window into their thoughts and feelings in a way clay pots or brick houses never could have. Catch me later for more linguistics videos! Quiet, you get back...