# Musical instruments in proto languages



## dihydrogen monoxide

As far as I know, I may be wrong, only Proto-Semitic has reconstructed words for musical instruments, are there any other proto-languages with that same feature. I can't recall if there is a reconstructed word for the verb 'to sing' in PIE?


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## Awwal12

A proto-language is an extremely broad term. Family-level proto-languages, like Proto-Semitic or Proto-Indo-European, are one thing, group-level proto-languages are another thing, and even on the same level proto-languages don't have a close age (compare Proto-Slavic, which existed about 13 centuries ago, to Proto-Finno-Ugric, which existed 5 millennia ago). Latin is, technically, a proto-language which you don't even need to reconstruct, and so on.

For Proto-Slavic you could reconstruct *duda, but it could've been a lot of different wind instruments.


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## araoro

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> I can't recall if there is a reconstructed word for the verb 'to sing' in PIE?


There is _**sengʷʰ- *_Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/sengʷʰ- - Wiktionary.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Awwal12 said:


> A proto-language is an extremely broad term. Family-level proto-languages, like Proto-Semitic or Proto-Indo-European, are one thing, group-level proto-languages are another thing, and even on the same level proto-languages don't have a close age (compare Proto-Slavic, which existed about 13 centuries ago, to Proto-Finno-Ugric, which existed 5 millennia ago). Latin is, technically, a proto-language which you don't even need to reconstruct, and so on.
> 
> For Proto-Slavic you could reconstruct *duda, but it could've been a lot of different wind instruments.



I'm talking about family-level proto-languages. Usually for instruments in Proto-Slavic, Proto-Italic etc. are either onomatopeias and borrowed. The same goes for greek, hittite and sanskrit.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

araoro said:


> There is _**sengʷʰ- *_Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/sengʷʰ- - Wiktionary.



Didn't know about this? However, there isn't a word for sing that had remnants in other proto-languages, so far it's only preserved in Proto-Germanic. I don't know if there is a word 'to sing' like there is for 'water', that has remnants in all daughter languages.


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## Delvo

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Proto-Semitic has reconstructed words for musical instruments


What are those?


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## Abaye

Delvo said:


> What are those?


Maybe kinnār. Or ŝab. And zamar is also related.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

So, then it is possible that only proto-semitic culture used any sort of musical instruments at least according to linguistic evidence.


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## Hulalessar

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> So, then it is possible that only proto-semitic culture used any sort of musical instruments...



I do not think that that follows. Musical instruments may take their name from what they are made of or their appearance or some notable characteristic. A historical example is "oboe" which comes French "haut bois" meaning "high wood." "Flute" may come ultimately from Latin "flare" meaning "to blow" = PIE *bhle-. "Piano" is short for "pianoforte" which is Italian for "soft-loud" emphasising that it could play both soft and loud unlike the harpischord. "Drum" is probably imitative.



dihydrogen monoxide said:


> ...at least according to linguistic evidence.



"Linguistic evidence" has to be treated with the utmost caution. It needs to be corroborated by other evidence.


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## Awwal12

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> So, then it is possible that only proto-semitic culture used any sort of musical instruments at least according to linguistic evidence.


We know for sure that humans already used wind instruments thousands of centuries ago, much earlier than any of the existing language families. Moreover, to my knowledge we have no attested culture which would lack musical instruments completely. The lack of the reconstructible terms in the earliest proto-languages must be attributed to other factors.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Hulalessar said:


> I do not think that that follows. Musical instruments may take their name from what they are made of or their appearance or some notable characteristic. A historical example is "oboe" which comes French "haut bois" meaning "high wood." "Flute" may come ultimately from Latin "flare" meaning "to blow" = PIE *bhle-. "Piano" is short for "pianoforte" which is Italian for "soft-loud" emphasising that it could play both soft and loud unlike the harpischord. "Drum" is probably imitative.
> 
> 
> What I mean is having words for musical instruments in PIE that would be inherited in daughter languages? These words happened well after PIE.
> 
> 
> 
> "Linguistic evidence" has to be treated with the utmost caution. It needs to be corroborated by other evidence.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Awwal12 said:


> We know for sure that humans already used wind instruments thousands of centuries ago, much earlier than any of the existing language families. Moreover, to my knowledge we have no attested culture which would lack musical instruments completely. The lack of the reconstructible terms in the earliest proto-languages must be attributed to other factors.



If we go by archeological evidence then all cultures had some sort of musical instruments. Linguistic evidence would be if the names of those instruments could be reconstructed just like in Proto-Semitic.


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## muhahaa

araoro said:


> There is _**sengʷʰ- *_Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/sengʷʰ- - Wiktionary.


*kan- ? Latin canere / cantare, Germanic words for hen.
*kantlom would be the instrument derivative, but is that Baltic (*kankles) only?


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## Awwal12

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> If we go by archeological evidence then all cultures had some sort of musical instruments. Linguistic evidence would be if the names of those instruments could be reconstructed just like in Proto-Semitic.


Except we don't really need linguistic evidence in that regard. Archaeology and cultural typology are sufficient.


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## pollohispanizado

It is very much possible that a culture passed on its instruments but not its language: the former is far more flexible in cross-cultural expression. Plus tens of thousands of years ago, it was probably easy to change the name of something like an instrument, which was not a necessary tool for survival, and likely held certain cultural or mystic significance which would open up the possibilities of euphemism, semantic shift, etc. thus obfuscating the etymology. Muscial instruments at their heart are fairly simple and likely were first made after observing the sounds in nature, so it would not be at all odd for the same instrument to appear in different places with no contact, even if they speak languages that are related, or for the same type of instrument to be introduced by two different sources and therefore with two names.

Either way, linguistic reconstruction by way of the comparative method is messy. The fact that all the languages in a family have a word doesn't necessarily mean that it wasn't a loan at some point, just like the fact that having no shared word for a certain thing in a family doesn't mean that it didn't exist among them.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Archaeologists and linguists are almost always in disagreement in regards to proto-languages/cultures. One case would be if archaeologists found sunglasses then they would say we've found this proto-culture while the linguists would say our proto-culture didn't have the word for sunglasses, therefore it isn't our proto-culture.

Therefore I think that archaeologists and linguists view proto-societies in different ways. Archaeologists by what objects they find and linguists by words alone and for linguists the society is only what we could get with words themselves. Linguistically speaking there are no musical instruments, archaeologically speaking there are instruments, but no words for them. Linguistics-archaeology reminds me a bit of Sapir-Whorf.


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## pollohispanizado

I don't think linguists actually count out the existence of something just because there is no reconstructed root in a "proto"-language. It is common knowledge that linguistic reconstruction is not a perfect science at all; it's just the best method that we have. The problem arrises when people take minimal evidence or pure conjecture and then try to extrapolate it to create a model (ex. "there are no reconstructed roots for musical instruments, therefore they must have not existed".) Human existence has never been straight forward. If this were the case, the hypothesized proto-IE peoples would have never left the steppes of Central Asia and mixed their culture and language/dialects with those of the lands they arrived at after their many migrations, for example.

The fact that there is so much disagreement among experts just goes to show that nobody has (nor will they ever have) _the_ answer. The best we can do is adopt an agnostic view of ancient history, and try not to fill in the blanks too much with our own biases.


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## Delvo

The main problem with trying to find words for musical instruments from that long ago is that practically no musical instruments that we have today existed that long ago. They're perpetually getting replaced with new ones, and the new ones are given new names describing how they're different from (or similar to but not quite identical with) the previous ones. And most languages we know anything about, including "proto-languages", simply aren't ancient enough to predate the era in which these replacements have been constantly happening. For example...

An ophicleide was literally a "serpent with keys (buttons)" because its nearest predecessor was called a "serpent" and the advanced new system of keys/buttons (for covering & uncovering holes too far apart or too numerous to control with just fingers) had just been invented. Why was the previous thing called a "serpent"? Because its shape waved back & forth and its smaller counterparts were straighter. And ophicleides would end up getting replaced with newer brass instruments with newer names.
"Piano" famously comes from "piano-forte" meaning "quiet-loud" because it was being contrasted with an earlier keyboard instrument with only one volume. That earlier keyboard instrument had been called "harpsichord" because it had a row of strings along a single frame with a curved/slanted shape to accommodate the strings' different lengths, like the chords (strings) on a harp. "Harp" comes from a verb meaning something like "bend/twist" or "strike/attack", referring to either the shape of its frame or a method for playing it, comparing it with even earlier string instruments which either weren't made the same way or weren't played the same way. A closer analog of the harpsichord than the harp might be the dulcimer, meaning "sweet melody" because whoever named it that thought it sounded sweeter than other instruments.
"Oboe" comes from a compound word meaning "high wood(wind)" because it was being compared with bigger, lower-pitched woodwinds; its bigger, lower-pitched counterpart, "bassoon", was named for being bigger and lower-pitched.
That used the same suffix which made a "trombone" a "big tromba/trumba/trumpa", while "et" suffix made a "trumpet" a "small" one, both based on a Germanic root for some kind of sound or the act of making sound, which apparently also yielded "drum", which must have somehow replaced previous words for older types of drums.
Bugles/trumpets were named "clarino" in Italian, meaning "little thing that shouts really loud" because it could be louder than other instruments including bigger ones... which led to "clarinet", meaning "little clarino" because the original version could have a louder, more piercing sound than most other instruments, making it comparable to a trumpet, but was shorter (in straight-line length).
Saxophones and sousaphones were named after their inventors/popularizers, Adolphe Sax and John Phillip Sousa.
Violins & violas are named after a word for "calf", the animal from which part of the original instrument of that type was made, in contrast with other instruments which weren't made that way.

And it's not just European instrument names that work like this.

The typical standard wooden flute in Japanese tradition is a "shakuhachi", which describes its length in units called "shaku", because it was originally being contrasted with something else that was similar but a different length.
"Lute" comes from Arabic for "wood" because it was originally being compared with something else that hadn't been made of wood or at least hadn't had a wooden resonating chamber.
Persian "setar" means "three strings", indicating that it was named in contrast with something else with a different number of strings.
African "talking drums" have a pile of different names in different African languages, even in languages that are closely related to each other, with each name describing the drums in its own way.
And Indian drum I can't recall the name of right now, similar to Africa's talking drums, has a name made from the local words for "clay" and "arm", because its frame is made from clay and it's about the length of an arm; it was named in contrast with other drums that weren't made of clay or weren't arm-length.
Another similar Indian drum used in religious ceremonies while held between the people and an idol or icon seems to have been named after a word meaning "middle" or "between" because that's just the position you hold it in while using it.
Japanese "taiko" get their name from a compound word that originally meant "big drum", named for being the biggest kind of drum around, but the word has come to apply to a full set of drums of the same style including smaller ones, and sometimes simply all kinds of drums, even though it has a previous word for "drum" built in.

There are a few cases in which an instrument name gets imported to a new language where the original meaning doesn't apply anymore. But I don't know of any that date back to proto-languages because they seem to have been invented during the time of certain recorded languages, not just their reconstructed ancestral languages.

Sanskrit "sitar" came from from Persian "setar", which mean "three strings" in Persian but nothing in particular in Sanskrit, where they didn't already have any other name for it because the instrument was different enough from anything they had before. Then, because it didn't specify any number of strings in Sanskrit, it stuck while the number of strings increased over the years.
"Lyre" and "guitar" both first enter known history in Greek but can't be traced beyond that, indicating that the Greeks imported the names when they imported the instruments, because they seemed different enough from anything else the Greeks had at the time.

There are just a few instrument names in Indo-European languages dating back to before almost any instrument still in modern use was invented yet, thus predating the rule of a constant supply of new inventions getting named as new inventions. And for those oldest, lowest-tech instruments, which were more likely to last longer without getting replaced yet, the rule seems to be that they were simply called whatever the same thing would be called when not used for making sound.

A horn is a horn, whether you've cut it off to make sounds with it or it's still attached to an animal's head. (And the Latin cognate of "horn", plus a suffix meaning "small", gives us "cornet"; "small horn".) And this seems to be the case not only in IE languages but also with Hebrew "shofar".
"Tuba", which was Latin for something related to trumpets & bugles, is simply a tube, and a tube is a tube whether you're using it to make sounds or not. And where did the word for "tube/tuba" come from? From the one thing that could be found in nature that was already the most tube-like, and from which the earliest tubes were probably made: leg bones (tibia); and again, a leg bone was just a leg bone whether you used it to make sounds or not.


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## Abaye

Delvo said:


> The main problem with trying to find words for musical instruments from that long ago is that practically no musical instruments that we have today existed that long ago. They're perpetually getting replaced with new ones, and the new ones are given new names


We saw up in this thread kinnār, a musical instrument whose name is attested some 4300 years ago and Semitic languages share therefore assumed to be present in proto-Semitic, maybe as a borrowing. Still in use today.


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