Evolution of the Indo-European Languages - Ancient Civilizations DOCUMENTARY

Portugal and India share a lot of common history  ever since Vasco Da Gama’s voyage, but what may come as a surprise is that the Portuguese language  already shared many similarities to the numerous languages spoken in India, including inflection,  word structure, pronunciation, and vocabulary. Languages constantly change and adapt, but in the  case of Portuguese, Hindi, Farsi, Latin, Greek, English, Polish, and many others, there is only  one common ancestor, which binds them all into a single

family. Welcome to the first video on  the evolution of the Indo-European languages. Wait, did you know you can watch this  video in Spanish and in 4 other languages? You can simply change the audio  track in the video settings. We generated these audio tracks using Aloud. Aloud  lets creators translate their videos. At no cost and no special skills needed. We have been using  Aloud for months already and we see that it brings value to our viewers. If you think more creators  should make videos

available in other languages, check out the link in the pinned comment. Let’s  overcome the language barrier in videos together. For millions of years, evolution was  the main pathway of human development, as genetic information was passed down from one  generation to the next. It was that same force, which gave humans very unique tools, which we used  to climb the food chain, such as opposable thumbs, sweating, and larger brains. Then suddenly  the ability to make complex sounds and more import

antly, the acute sensitivity to comprehend  speech ushered in the development of languages, which allowed us to pass knowledge at a  speed that dramatically surpassed evolution. Languages to this day remain an essential part of  our everyday life, as they help us communicate, express ourselves and define our identity.  Over the years thousands of languages have gone extinct, and yet there are still over 7100 of them  divided into 142 families. The largest among them, spoken by 3.2 billion people

or 46% of the world’s  population is the Indo-European language family. The story begins with the incredibly influential  Yamnaya culture at around 4000 BC in the Pontic Steppe of modern day Ukraine. Its people were  semi-nomadic pastoralists who domesticated cattle, dogs, and above all horses. This is where the  oldest discovered wheels were uncovered, as well as burial sites that show one of the earliest  forms of ownership. Compared to the widespread communal tombs we find in most societies,

the  Yamnaya burial pits belonged to clans, families, or even individuals, sometimes buried with entire  wagons. Combined with the fact that they were one of the first bronze age cultures, this allowed the  Yamnaya to spread across Eurasia on their horses. This expansion was swift and aggressive, and  rather than developing their own colonies, they interbred with the local neolithic  cultures spreading their genes, as well as their Proto Indo-European language. In time, the speakers of this la

nguage became isolated from each other and regional dialects  developed into their own daughter languages, a process that continues to this day. Using the  comparative method, linguists and archeologists were able to reconstruct the original ancestor  vocabulary, despite the fact that it was never written down. In fact, the words for writing,  sea, and iron are vastly different across the many Indo-European languages, since those  concepts arose after the original migration. However, the words t

hat were commonly used  by the Yamnaya people, were nearly identical across Latin, Germanic, Ancient Greek,  Hittite, Slavonic, Avestan, and Sanskrit. On your screen, you can see how the cognate  words for family remained mostly the same across Indo-European sister languages, including words  for family members: Mother -Father-Brother-Sister. This is also the case for various verbs  describing actions that were fundumental to the lifestyle of the Yamnaya people, like  Sew-Cloth-Eat-Drink-Carry-G

ive-Die. The same can be said about various objects, animals,  and particularly the word wine, among them: Tooth-Bone-Eye-Night-God-Water-Fire-Tree-New-Young-Pig-Sheep-Beaver -Honey-Brew -Wine . One of the very first things  we learn in a new language are the pronouns and basic numbers and yet again we see that both are  shared throughout the various different cultures: I-You-We- As well as the  numbers from one to ten. Languages and pronunciations changed as they  grew apart and interacted with

each other, as well as other languages outside the  Indo-European family, adding and exporting loan words, but the writing that these various  cultures developed hints at their shared origin. The comparisons between the Greek god Zeus  and Roman god Jupiter are often discussed, but in reality, both of those gods are adaptations  of the original Yamnaya god Perkwunos the Striker, a concept also shared in Hittite culture as  Tarhuna, in the Thracian tribes as Zibelthiurdos, while Dacian tribes kn

ew him as Gebeleizis,  Albanian culture groups knew him as Perendi. Baltic mythology has Perkunas, Slavic people  knew him as Perun, Celtic tribes as Taranis, while the Norse people split the singular concept  into Thor and Odin, Anglo-Saxon mythology knew him as Thunor, and Hindu people initially believed  that Indra was the king of the heaven and thunder. Additionally, the very concept of an  overarching conflict between Rain and the Sun, Water and Fire, Man versus Beast most likely  arose fro

m the Proto-Indo European legends. While it is easier to imagine the various  subgroups of the Proto Indo-European as separate branches, it is more accurate to  view them as waves, that constantly moved and interacted with each other and others. That being  said, the first major branch we will look at is Italic, a language that spread alongside Celtic,  until the Alps split the two around 1500 BC. By 300 BC the language was fighting for  survival against its Celtic, Illyrian and Greek neighbors

who dominated the north and  even eliminated the Sicel branch in Sicily, with only Faliscian, Umbrian, Oscan, and Venetic  remaining. And then suddenly the Roman Republic rose from obscurity and spread the Latin language  across the Mediterranean and western Europe like wildfire, obliterating all other Italic and  most of the Celtic languages in the process. The Latin language itself had two variants,  classical Latin, which was the formal language and Vulgar Latin, which Cicero describes as  “t

he speech of the masses”. A standardized and universal language in the Empire, one that  brought status and economic opportunity was one of the tools that allowed the Romans to establish  themselves as a military and cultural powerhouse. However due to the size of the Empire, many  regions began developing a distinct dialect, unique to the province and when Rome fell,  those dialects evolved into their own languages, ushering in the dawn of the Romance languages. The  subdivisions of Romance inc

lude the now-extinct British, Pannonian, and African Romance languages,  Sardinian which is an incredibly conservative language, Romanian , and finally one of the most  dominant subdivisions: Western Romance, featuring Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. To simplify what could be its own video, each of these languages underwent significant  changes throughout the middle ages, as various feudal states and dynasties struggled  for power internally and externally. This resulted in dozens of

dialects within each  language , but if we draw a line between any two points between these countries, the further  you go, the harder it is to understand the local language. But as the middle ages came  to a close and states became more centralized, rulers selected the dialect of their hometown and  emphasized its use, a process mirrored in every other branch. The Castillian kings choose  Castillian as the foundation for Spanish, discouraging the use of Galician, Leonese, Basque  , and Catalan,

and eliminating Mozarabic, and this process was finalized by the so-called Catholic  monarchs - Ferdinand and Isabella, who understood the efficiency of using just one language to rule  their realm. The French kings ruling from Paris chose the langue d'oïl, spoken in the north,  rather than Occitan or Franco-Provencal, as king Francis I formalized this in 1539 with  the Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts , which was also aimed against the power of the  Occitan nobles and Catholic church. The unific

ation of Italy occurred  much later, but a similar process ensued after the Tuscan dialect was  chosen as the foundation of Italian. Modern day Italy could give us a glimpse  of what other countries looked like as there are numerous local dialects with  varying degrees of differences between them. For example, an Italian from Florence is more  likely to understand a person speaking in Spanish rather than another Italian from Sicily .  Nationalism, education and literature are always major driver

s of standardization and helped shape  languages within a certain state, but given enough time and isolation, speech can alter dramatically,  even if the writing system remains the same. That is exactly what we see in the colonies of  the Romance languages: Mexico, Quebec, and Brazil all share the languages of their founders, but  they also developed their own unique features. The next major branch we will review is  Proto-Greek , which arrived in northern Greece around the 3rd millennium BC. Th

e first  stage of its evolution saw the rise of Mycenaean Greek as the dominant language of the region, with  its very own writing, which we now call Linear B. But neither would survive the fall of the  Mycenaean civilization in the 12th century BC, instead around the same time the Greek alphabet  was created, based on the Phoenician alphabet, with a few added letters. It was this same  alphabet, which would deeply influence the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic and Gothic alphabets. Armed  with one of th

e first written systems, Greek colonists settled the coasts of France, Italy,  Anatolia, and the entire Black Sea, but despite using the alphabet, rival dialects competed for  dominance. As you may have guessed this rivalry was mostly between the Greek city-states of Athens  and Sparta. Despite the popularity of the Spartan Doric Greek in the mainland, Crete, and Sicily  and military victory over Athens, the Ionic Greek won the cultural war, thanks to the works of  Homer, Plato, Socrates, Aristo

tle, and others. And thus Classical Greek became the staple of  Greek culture and would contribute to numerous loan words, present in many other languages  today. The next crucial figure in this story is Alexander the Great himself, who spread the  common version of the language called Koine with his conquests and firmly established it in Greece,  as well as inner Anatolia, Egypt, and India. This was the language in which the New Testament  was written. Despite centuries under Roman rule, the pr

estige of the language with its deeply  embedded written form, allowed it to avoid the Celtic fate, and when the West collapsed  Koine Greek transformed into Medieval Greek, spoken in the Eastern Roman Empire. By this point,  there was a huge disparity between the Classic and spoken versions of the language, with the  former being used primarily in court and writing. The fall of Constantinople, triggered many  events, one of which was the transformation of both of these languages. The spoken Med

ieval Greek  turned into Demotic Greek meaning by the people and the written language called Katharevousa,  which added some elements of the spoken language, but mostly resembles Classical Greek. The  substantial differences in both languages made daily transactions incredibly confusing and  this problem persisted for centuries, until it was finally solved in 1976, when Demotic Greek  was made the official language still used today. As for Doric Greek, it is spoken by only a few  hundred elderly

people in Southern Greece and is expected to become extinct in the coming years. It took a significant amount of time for Proto-Germanic to expand beyond a small area  in North Europe, during which it already split into three distinct dialect s: East, West and  North . We know very little about the early stage of this branch, as it used a runic  writing system, usually carved on trees. But as the Roman Empire fell, the most famous  language from the eastern dialect spread all over Europe. Goth

ic was incredibly influential and  left a lasting mark on the continent, despite the fact that it would eventually become extinct.  The North dialect, which we now call Old Norse was also very popular due to the Viking era. It  would create west and east variants of its own from which modern Icelandic, Norwegian,  and then Danish and Swedish descended. It is important to note that Icelandic stands out  as a very conservative language, which has more in common with Old Norse than any of them, onc

e  again outlining the important role of geography. During the first millenium BC, Celtic was the  lingua franca of Western and Central Europe, largely due to the dominant Urnfield culture.  As the branch spread it split into various other forms like Lepontic, Celtiberian, Gaulish,  Galatian and others. However the rise of the Roman Republic would lead to the extinction of all  continental Celtic languages. The few surviving speakers migrated to the British isles, forming  what is known as the I

nsular Celtic languages, further divided in Goedelic languages, featuring  Irish, Scottish and Manx Gaelic and Brythonic languages, featuring Breton , Cornish and Welsh.  Despite being so closely connected to each other, the two groups are not intelligible. Each  of these languages struggled to endure the centuries of deliberate censorship and  oppression from various states. In total there are just under 1 million speakers of the  Celtic languages, with half of them being Welsh. In the 19th cen

tury Cornish came very close  to joining Pictish and Cumbric in extinction, but has since undergone a revival and now boasts  a few hundred speakers. The Celtic language group stands as a clear example of how politics can  affect culture in incredibly impactful ways. Lastly, we have West Germanic, which spread  towards areas disconnected from each other by forests, mountains, wide rivers, and the English  channel. Naturally, this split the language into four notable branches: Old High German, Ol

d Low  German, Old Low Franconian, and Anglo-Frisian, which will inevitably form German, Dutch and  English. The evolution, development and spread of each of these languages are very interesting,  but extends far beyond the scope of this video, so we will just share one interesting  fact about each of them. The Gutenberg printing press and the Luther Bible set the  foundation of a standardized German language, which was essential in the later unification  process. When we look at places like Ice

land, Albania or Sardinia it is easy to understand  why those languages are conservative, yet despite having few natural defenses and  being surrounded by more powerful states, the Dutch language is incredibly conservative.  English is a member of the Germanic language family, yet only 26% of its vocabulary is  Germanic, 29% of it is French, and 29% is Latin. Alongside these four major branches, there are  several others, which we would love to cover in futures videos including the Balto-Slavic,

  Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Albanian, not to mention the now extinct Anatolian, Phrygian, Dacian,  and Tocharian. Each of these language groups has a fascinating story as it changed throughout  the years and under different regimes. The languages spread around the world, while other  language groups left a lasting impact on them, particularly Arabic, Turkic, and Hungarian. Like  this video and share it with your friends if you want us to delve deeper into the field of  historical linguistics and t

ell us which branch or language family deserves an entire  video with more details.