Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney

Our book for November 8 is Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney

For those who are interested, here is the link to the detailed results from the voting.

The book traces how a single prehistoric language became the ancestor of languages now spoken by nearly half the world, including English, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, and Persian. That language, Proto-Indo-European, was never written down, and linguists have rebuilt parts of it by comparing its descendants, work that began when an eighteenth-century British judge in India noticed that Sanskrit resembled Latin and Greek. Laura Spinney, a science journalist whose previous book, Pale Rider, covered the Spanish flu, writes for a general audience and combines the linguistic record with archaeology and ancient DNA. She places the language's speakers among the Yamnaya, herders on the grasslands north of the Black Sea who began migrating outward about five thousand years ago, and she covers the newer view that the Anatolian languages, such as Hittite, split from an older parent language before the Yamnaya expansion, making them a sister branch rather than a descendant.

The book opens with a history of the field, including how the idea of an original Aryan people was used to support theories of racial superiority. After chapters on where the language began and what can be reconstructed of it, Spinney gives a chapter to each major branch: Anatolian; Tocharian, once spoken in what is now western China; Celtic, Germanic, and Italic; Indo-Iranian; Baltic and Slavic; and Albanian, Armenian, and Greek. Along the way she covers what shared vocabulary suggests about the speakers' myths, herding, metalwork, and trade, and considers whether disease, along with conflict, drove the large population turnover in prehistoric Europe. The history is interwoven with visits to the linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists doing the research, and the book closes on what this story means for present-day questions of language and migration.

This event will be hybrid. I will host the meeting in person at my house in Berkeley which is near the intersection of College Ave and Woolsey St. I will email people the address the Saturday before the meeting.

Here are the Google Meet details:
Google Meet link: https://meet.google.com/zem-xnbw-tuh
Or dial: ‪(US) +1 641-854-0146‬ PIN: ‪637 012 874‬