Theseus Mosaic, discovered in the floor of a Roman villa at the Loigerfelder near Salzburg (Austria) in 1815, 4th century AD, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Austria (photo by Carole Raddato). In the Theseus story, the hero used a thread to find his way out of the labyrinth.
Do you have rizz, or are you guilty of occasionally acting sus? These Gen Z expressions didn’t exist a decade ago and they could entirely disappear from use as quickly. On the other hand, they could also come into such common use that they could one day become what some people call “proper” English. Who decides? The answer sounds sus itself: no one. Languages aren’t controlled by a special group of individuals. They evolve naturally, changing incrementally every year until eventually they don’t sound or look similar enough to be called the same language.
Take this English sentence from about a thousand years ago: “Eac swylce seo næddre wæs geapre ðonne ealle ða oðre nytenu ðe God geworhte ofer eorðan.” The sentence was written by the scholar Aelfric of Eynsham (a village in England). If you asked Aelfric what language it was, he would say it was English. Languages change quickly enough for people to notice–if they didn't, elders wouldn’t complain about the language of the youth–but slowly enough that we typically can read and understand writing from at least a few centuries ago with basic education. When it comes to Aelfric’s English, that of a thousand or more years ago, one needs to study and do the translating that one would have to do with a foreign language.
English is a Germanic language (along with German, Dutch, Danish and others). All of the Germanic languages evolved from a single language in the same way the Romance languages all evolved from Latin. Latin evolved into French, Spanish, Italian and other languages when Latin speakers started moving further away from one another or lost regular contact with each other. Each group’s version of the original language changed in different ways and eventually the different groups spoke versions of the original language that were so different that the groups could no longer understand each other.
Our Ancestor Language
Speakers of English and Danish could have basic conversations a thousand years ago because their languages were not as different as they are today. Turn the clock back as many as five thousand years ago and most of the languages of Europe, as well as some in the Persian plateau and Indian subcontinent, were a single language. Speakers of English, Irish, Spanish, Russian, Greek and Hindi (and many others) speak descendant languages of a great ancestor language we call Proto Indo-European.
The linguist recognized for helping us determine that languages as far-flung as Irish and Hindi were related noticed similarities between the classical languages of Europe, Greek and Latin, and the classical language of India, Sanskrit. William Jones, a British scholar who had studied ancient Greek and Latin, was then stationed in India where he became interested in Sanskrit. In 1786, he wrote of the three languages that: “no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists” (Wikipedia). The study of languages, particularly old ones, at that time, was called philology.
Indo-European language number comparison (with non-Indo-European languages for comparison, Razib Khan.)
Notable similarities exist between languages descended from Proto Indo-European in vocabulary and grammatical structure. Examples often cited are words for the numbers one through ten, words for parts of the body (feet, head) and the words for immediate family members, but there are thousands of others. The common Indo-European cognate words are those words that the prehistoric speakers of Proto Indo-European would have used. These include words for animals and plants and technology and relationships. The leading theory is that this group lived in an area that is today mostly in parts of Ukraine and Russia. This is based on PIE vocabulary for plants, animals and geography common to that area. Cognate: words from different languages that descended from the same ancestor language.
Indo-European Migration Theory
Based on common cognates for plants and animals, the grassy steppes of Ukraine are considered a leading homeland for the Proto Indo-European speakers (Notes From the Underground).
Why Study The History of Languages
Understanding where your language came from, where it has been and how it was spoken and written, helps you understand certain oddities in modern English. Understanding that spelling in English was formalized at a time when all the letters in words were pronounced might help you understand why our spelling is sometimes so different from our modern pronunciation. There was a time when knight and night were pronounced differently and neither sounded like nite. Many features of older forms of our language persisted into modern usage and these tend to be the most confusing parts of our language. The use of the word “would” to express desire (“I would that I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart…” Much Ado About Nothing, 1.1.124-125) is easier to understand if you know that English promoted its verb for desire (will) to become its future tense and that the ancestor of “would” (spelled wolde–the L and the E were pronounced!) simply meant “wanted.”
Then there is the wonder of what we can use linguistic rules (like Grimm’s Law) and language comparison to understand about history before history was written. None of what we know about Proto Indo-European was determined using physical or written records (although archaeological record has corroborated certain details). These people didn’t write. But by studying the cognates in our languages, we can track when certain groups migrated away from the rest. For example, the PIE language Hittite (a dead ancient language spoken in what is now the country of Turkey) has the largest number of common (cognate) vocabulary with the other groups so we can surmise that it was the closest language to our original ancestral language and that the Hittite speakers were the first to split off of the original group of Proto Indo-European speakers.
A comparison of "Sky Father" gods from various Indo-European languages (starkeycomics.com).
Because of language study we also know more about our extremely ancient ancestors and how our culture came to be. Without a piece of physical evidence (only linguistic evidence) we know that our common ancestors had invented the wheel, domesticated horses and used them to pull wagons. We know that they worshiped a sky god based on the names of various mythological figures like Zeus, whose name (a cognate of Jupiter) originally meant “sky” or “father” god. We can even compare the earliest myths of our sister languages to know that these long gone people told a story of a battle between that god and a great serpent or dragon.
Understanding that English shares a history with so many different languages might make the world seem a little smaller and people a little closer. Cultures that might have seemed foreign might seem less so, and knowing that so many diverse cultures sprang from one group of people might help us see that peoples all over the world have things in common even when they seem quite different.
(I wrote this article to introduce high school age students to language change after failing to find an age-appropriate explanation. It could be used to start a short unit of study or as a non-fiction article.)
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