Proto-Indo-European is spoken
The reconstructed ancestor of the Indo-European languages was spoken by a real community at a date conventionally placed in the fourth to third millennium BCE, and in a place that remains the most argued question in the field. The linguistic evidence for the date is indirect and derives from the reconstructed vocabulary: securely recoverable terms for wheeled transport and for wool and dairying place the proto-language after those technologies existed, giving an earliest bound that archaeology can supply. Both the date and the location are stated here as contested, not resolved; the catalogue timeline for this Journey gives the same approximate date with the same caveat.
Uncertain — sources disagree, or the dating is contested. Stated here, not resolved.
Subjects
- Proto-Indo-European · model · not located
- The Pontic–Caspian steppe · region · Eastern Europe and western Central Asia
- Indo-European · concept · Europe, western and southern Asia; by later colonisation, worldwide · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
The Horse, the Wheel and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
Supports the steppe hypothesis as argued from reconstructed wheeled-vehicle and wool vocabulary, the archaeology of the Pontic–Caspian region, and the Indo-Iranian loanword strata in Uralic. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. No page is cited and no reconstructed form is quoted from the book; the date of horse domestication, which the book discusses and which has been revised since, is deliberately not stated anywhere in this pack.
Princeton University Press · 2007 · Partly verified
Anthony, D. W., The Horse, the Wheel and Language (Princeton University Press, 2007)
Recorded on Proto-Indo-European
- Proto-Indo-European is spoken
- Jones states the Indo-European hypothesis in Calcutta
- Saussure posits consonants no language attests
- Hrozný identifies Hittite as an Indo-European language
- Kuryłowicz matches Hittite h to Saussure's coefficients
- A Bayesian phylogeny dates Indo-European to the Anatolian Neolithic
- Phylogeography puts the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia
- Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe
- A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- A hybrid model is proposed for the Indo-European origin · 2023
- Ancient DNA finds a mass movement from the steppe into Europe · 2015
- Phylogeography puts the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia · 2012
- A Bayesian phylogeny dates Indo-European to the Anatolian Neolithic · 2003
- Kuryłowicz matches Hittite h to Saussure's coefficients · 1927
- Hrozný identifies Hittite as an Indo-European language · 1915
- Saussure posits consonants no language attests · 1879
- Jones states the Indo-European hypothesis in Calcutta · 1786-02-02