# Proto-languages spoken during the time of PIE



## dihydrogen monoxide

Maybe a bit of a basic question:

During the time PIE was spoken in southern steppes, what other proto-languages were spoken around the world at that time? I know that proto-uralic was spoken at that time, I don't know about other proto-languages.


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## ahvalj

I think the term “proto-languages” is misleading in this context: the only characteristic of a proto-language is that it gave rise to two or more daughter tongues, otherwise it is a language like any other. Assuming Proto-Indo-European was still spoken around 3000 BC, this was the time of the Old Kingdom in Egypt and hence a time when Ancient Egyptian was spoken and began to be used in writing. Sumerian was already spoken and attested in writing too. (Both languages didn't split into separate daughter lineages, thus they were not proto-languages in this sense). So, it's not a deep pre-history: if somebody in Uruk could travel north to the Pontic–Caspian steppe (which was logistically quite possible), he could find living Proto-Indo-Europeans and hear them speaking (and even compile a Sumerian–Proto-Indo-European phrasebook).


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## Treaty

ahvalj said:


> the only characteristic of a proto-language


Isn't it also not directly attested (otherwise it would have just be known by its name, rather than "proto-"). Hence, Proto-Romance is different from Latin, despite possibly being descended from. This probably narrows things down.

In around 5-6000 years ago or so, Proto-Semitic and Proto-Pama-Nyungan were spoken.


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## ahvalj

Then perhaps we should ask water what was his~her definition of “proto-language”.

One thing I'd like to add for the correct perspective is that expanding language families spread over areas previously occupied by other languages. For example, Italy in the middle 1st millennium BC was inhabited by speakers of dozens of idioms belonging to several language families (Etruscan, North Picene, Indo-European, Sardinian, Sicanian, perhaps more) and within Indo-European to different groups (Italic, Celtic, Greek, Messapic, Venetic). Now it all is covered by descendants of Latin alone, which at the dawn of history was an endangered language from a dying branch (Latin-Faliscan being displaced by Sabellic speakers) spoken in an area of several hundred square kilometers by perhaps several dozens of thousands of speakers.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

I mean at the time of PIE when PIE didn't split up and was still one large community. So, if Etruscan was spoken at that time that would mean that the Etruscan split off from a now unknown community.  The definition of a proto-language would be reconstructed and unattested and it would also give rise to other languages. I would ask for a time where there was no Proto-Slavic, Proto-Italic, Proto-Greek but just PIE and other proto-languages at that time. I don't know how Ancient Egyptian since it was mentioned is in Proto-Afro-Asiatic which also include Bantu languages, that would mean that Ancient Egyptian and Bantu are related. Proto-languages before branching into other proto-languages.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

I would guess at the time PIE was spoken, Proto-Afro-Asiatic split up already into other branches giving Proto-Semitic, Proto-Bantu and so on.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

But the picture before that split, so PIE and Proto-Afro-Asiatic before becoming separate families and also with other language groups. What about Indochina, Japan and America at that time.


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## ahvalj

But Bantu is not demonstrably related to Afro-Asiatic…

I have a feeling that you imagine the pre-historical landscape as consisting of predecessors of attested language families, but in reality, as I tried to illustrate in #4, these proto-languages occupied just some areas separated by countless other languages from which we have no traces left.


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## Abaye

I guess whatever point in time one looks at, it's the same picture: some languages are about to die, other are about to evolve into a language/dialect family, and some other will remain stable in terms of audience. For example in the Semitic world, Arabic of the prophet's time will be regarded as "proto-Arabic" by future linguists, Hebrew may remain a one-dialect-one-people language, Neo-Aramaic is doomed.


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## berndf

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> The definition of a proto-language would be reconstructed and unattested


Not really. Proto-XXX where XXX is a group of languages simply means the youngest common ancestor of all members of this group. If, e.g., we define BrE and AmE as a group of languages and assume the two separated in the mid 18th century then English of 1750 would be the proto language of that group. If attested or not doesn't matter.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

What I'm asking is if you were to map out the languages spoken around the world during the time of PIE what would they be? How many of proto-languages have separated from their proto-language-groups at that time? If I guess correctly, probably at the time of PIE, there was only Proto-Uralic and not Proto-Finno-Ugric, that would be only when they started to separate each other from the Proto-Uralic family. 

What is the way of thinking:
a) that at the time of let's say Proto-Uralic we already had Proto-Sami, Proto-Finno-Ugric alongside Proto-Uralic
b) that Proto-Sami, Proto-Finno-Ugric are a result of separating from Proto-Uralic


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## berndf

If Sami is a true sub group of Uralic then, simply by the definition of the terms, proto-Uralic refers to an earlier development stage then proto-Sami.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

I've always seen Sami languages referenced when they discuss Proto-Uralic cognates. I don't know that there are any languages belonging to Proto-Uralic that are problematic for that proto-group inclusion. 

I would hazard a guess, although we will never know this, that speakers of PIE were fluent in Proto-Uralic.


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## Penyafort

In my neck of the woods, the South-West of Europe, I'd say there were probably several languages or dialects, mainly related to three large cultures:

1) "Atlantic" or "Western" pre-IE culture in the west and north, probably the more aboriginal of the three, from which Aquitanian-Basque mught be the only known modern descendant.​2) the Cardial "Mediterranean" post Neolithic pre-IE culture along eastern Iberia. One might feel tempted to associate the Iberian language with them but in my opinion Iberian is more related to 1 than to whatever Afrasiatic family might have been spread by those early seafarers from the Levant.​3) the "Andalusian post Neolithic" culture in the south, which could quite likely be related to the Afrasiatic phylum, although perhaps more with Northern Africa -maybe the Capsians?- than with the Levant.​
Obviously these assumptions are partly personal and considering that the distinction in cultures is associated to languages, which could be far from the truth.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Since you mention Basque, I don't know why so many now believe that Basque should be classified as PIE.


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## entangledbank

Who on earth believes that? I've never heard that even as a fringe theory guess.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

There was an article linking Basque to Celtic languages. The Journal of Proto-Indo-european Studies published an edition claiming Basque was PIE and only two articles mentioned that Basque was not PIE.

Last one on Basque, why can't linguists accept the idea that an isolated language is an isolated language? If you can't find its origin, origin is uknown, don't connect anything and everything.


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## Treaty

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> so many





dihydrogen monoxide said:


> an edition


One would expect when you say "so *many*", you have more than just "*an *edition/article" to cite.


dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Last one on Basque, why can't linguists accept the idea that an isolated language is an isolated language? If you can't find its origin, origin is uknown, don't connect anything and everything


Linguists have accepted and they don't connect it to other languages. Just one apparently, Forni, is proposing a (genetic) connection between Basque  and IE. By the way, he does not have a formal background in linguistics, history, or a related discipline.


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## Delvo

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> I mean at the time of PIE when PIE didn't split up and was still one large community. So, if Etruscan was spoken at that time that would mean that the Etruscan split off from a now unknown community.


Yes, Etruscan could have had relatives still alive back then. But there's no way for us to know anything about them because they were unwritten.



dihydrogen monoxide said:


> I would ask for a time where there was no Proto-Slavic, Proto-Italic, Proto-Greek but just PIE and other proto-languages at that time.


There was never a time that only proto-languages were spoken. There were just languages. A few of the languages that were spoken at any time might end up as "proto" later in history, but most didn't.

I could show you a picture of my father from the late 1040s or 1050s and tell you it's my father, but he wasn't a father yet. He was a kid. "Father" is a word I can only apply to the kid in that picture now because I know that kid ended up becoming a father later. Your question is the equivalent of looking at a lot of different people's pictures taken at the same time and referring to all of those people as parents. Some are parents, some will be but that isn't known yet when the pictures are taken, and some won't be but that isn't known yet when the pictures are taken either.

At the time of PIE, just like today, there must have been hundreds, probably thousands, of languages. We don't have names for most of them or know anything else about them. Most language families don't get as big as IE has gotten, and most don't have as much history of being written as IE languages have, so there just isn't as much information about them.



dihydrogen monoxide said:


> I don't know how Ancient Egyptian since it was mentioned is in Proto-Afro-Asiatic which also include Bantu languages, that would mean that Ancient Egyptian and Bantu are related.


The Bantu languages are not part of the Proto-Afro-Asiatic family. You might have misinterpreted the name as meaning it includes all languages of Africa and Asia, but it actually just means it straddles the Africa-Asia border area and has representative languages on both sides. Afro-Asiatic languages in Africa are spoken in the areas along the northern Nile River (Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea) and the northern coast, north of the Sahara Desert. Bantu languages are spoken south of the Sahara Desert. They mostly don't even come within hundreds of miles of each other.



dihydrogen monoxide said:


> I would guess at the time PIE was spoken, Proto-Afro-Asiatic split up already into other branches giving Proto-Semitic, Proto-Bantu and so on.


Yes, Proto-Semitic is usually thought of as slightly older than PIE, and PAA must be even older than PS. At PIE's time, the Semitic languages had probably started splitting, at least into sub-branches like Northwest Semitic and East Semitic, even if not to recognizable languages within those groups yet. And each branch was a single language when they originally separated from each other, before splitting into multiple languages per branch themselves. Akkadian, an East Semitic language, would be written roughly a thousand years after PIE, at which time it was more distinct from any of the Northwest Semitic languages than the Northwest Semitic languages were from each other. So the protos for the branches of Semitic, like Proto-Northwest-Semitic and Proto-East-Semitic, were probably spoken about when PIE was, and some of PIE's first branches were probably spoken about when Akkadian was.

But Proto-Bantu has nothing to do with any of that. It's more recent, mostly thousands of miles away, and so unrelated to any of those languages that it gets left out of even the wildest Nostratic/Altaic-like attempts at language family unification in Eurasia. The Proto-Bantu language itself is recent enough that we can definitely say, even without any pre-Colonial written form of its descendants, that it was one language in a family called "Niger-Congo"... and _Proto-Niger-Congo_, the ancestor of Proto-Bantu among others, might have been spoken at roughly the same time as PIE.



dihydrogen monoxide said:


> But the picture before that split, so PIE and Proto-Afro-Asiatic before becoming separate families and also with other language groups. What about Indochina, Japan and America at that time.


Proto-Dravidian seems to date back about as long ago as PIE. That's the only other one I know of that seems close chronologically. Proto-Turkic is too late. Proto-Sino-Tibetan is too early; even its first two branches, the one including modern Tibetan & Burmese and the one including modern Cantonese & Mandarin, seem too early. Anything that can be securely reconstructed in North America or South America is too recent.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Since a lot of proto-language-groups migrate and then settle somewhere else, I don't think Kartvelian languages migrated.

Is Joseph Greenberg's classification reliable to any extent. 

Why do they want to lump Proto-Uralic together with any other language group and say there was no Proto-Uralic, but Proto-(insert anything)-Uralic? I've also read that Proto-Finno-Ugric should be a seperate branch that doesn't belong to Proto-Uralic.

If I understand Altaic family well, can I relate Altaic family as if out of all PIE languages only Pictic and Hittite survived and I try to establish the relation between the two, ie so much time has passed that any known connection is lost through time.


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## bearded

Delvo said:


> I could show you a picture of my father from the late 1040s or 1050s


Could you really?


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## Hulalessar

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Is Joseph Greenberg's classification reliable to any extent.



You can ask about the extent to which anyone's classification is reliable. If you are not an expert the best you can do is ask what the majority expert opinion is. Even that may not take you very far because majority expert opinion can change. Bear in mind that experts do not necessarily agree how living languages relate to each other. If you are going back and comparing one proto-language with another you are starting to get on very shaky ground because you are comparing two hypotheses either or both of which may be way off or incomplete. 

To get back to your opening question, the first point to make is that no one is certain where the Indo-European homeland is. A while ago I read a book on the Indo-Europeans which started off by saying that the only certain thing known about the Indo-Europeans is that they spoke Indo-European.  Compared to most other language families Indo-European has a long written history.  Proto-Indo-European goes back a lot further than Proto-Uralic leaving it unlikely that both were spoken at the same time. Yours is another "who spoke what where and when" question difficult, if not impossible, to answer - but still interesting and worth asking.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

That's new to me that the only thing we know about Indo-Europeans is that they spoke Indo-European. Regarding the homeland I thought it was a settled science, ie. stepes of Southern Russia. 
Linguists already said a lot about PIE lifestyle.


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## ahvalj

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> That's new to me that the only thing we know about Indo-Europeans is that they spoke Indo-European. Regarding the homeland I thought it was a settled science, ie. stepes of Southern Russia.


Some posters are less enthusiastic about the advancements of historical linguistics and read books that support this restraint…

By the way, the basic evidence of population movement from the area between the Afro-American and Caspian seas comes historically from archeology and now from genetics: linguistics just has found that its data fit well to this picture — that is, archeology and genetics have a prehistoric nation and linguistics has a language for it.


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## Hulalessar

ahvalj said:


> Some posters are less enthusiastic about the advancements of historical linguistics and read books that support this restraint…
> 
> By the way, the basic evidence of population movement from the area between the Afro-American and Caspian seas comes historically from archeology and now from genetics: linguistics just has found that its data fit well to this picture — that is, archeology and genetics have a prehistoric nation and linguistics has a language for it.



I have no axe to grind on the issue, neither do I have sufficient expertise to assess and comment on any particular theory. The book I read I chose simply for its title and without knowing what its position was. In fact it covered all the theories without expressing a preference.

A combination of archaeology, anthropology and genetics may be able to provide reasonable evidence that a certain group of people were at one time in one place and later in another. Historical linguistics may be able to make a contribution which appears to confirm what archaeology, anthropology and genetics are saying, but confirmation bias is a real danger, quite apart from the fact that the material available to historical linguists is incomplete and open to varying interpretations. The most basic point is if group A speaking language X moved into an area peopled by group B speaking language Y, we cannot be certain if group A ended up speaking language Y or group B ended up speaking language X, or if both groups ended up speaking some sort of a mixture of the two languages.

Historical linguists saw that languages spoken across Europe and parts of Asia were related and formulated PIE. The actual language (as opposed to the reconstruction) must have been spoken by someone and since it was not known exactly who they were they were designated  "Indo-Europeans". That is why it it is certain that Indo-Europeans spoke Indo-European! A consideration of the reconstructed language and known Indo-European languages led to speculation about where they started out. It may be concluded after such consideration what animals the Indo-Europeans domesticated, what trees grew round about and that they had the wheel, but the conclusion cannot be more than a hypothesis.

There can only be some degree of certainty about who spoke what, where and when with advent of writing.


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