Proto How one ancient language went global

Journalist and novelist Spinney (Pale Rider) explains how a single language family spread across the world in this astute account. Combining the discoveries of linguists, archaeologists, and geneticists--"barbarians to each other" in their mutual unintelligibility--Spinney aims to take the most holistic approach yet to the topic. The Proto-Indo-European language emerged 6,000 years ago around the Black Sea when the Yamnaya, a group of nomadic herders, shifted into mining and farming--and interacted with others who pioneered those arts--before migrating outward. Spinney traces these early years before considering each major branch, including the extinct Tocharian line (which penetrated into China); the Western European mix of Latin, Celtic, and Germanic; and the Indo-Iranian offshoot (seeded by a return migration eastward during a climate crisis). Each academic specialty provides fascinating insights, among them a stunning genetic discovery from 2020 revealing remains of cousins buried 2,000 miles apart 5,000 years ago, proving migration could have been very rapid; deconstructions of vocabularies that reveal migratory patterns (for instance, since the first Proto-Indo-European speakers were herders, later coastal dwelling speakers had to borrow seafaring terms from other languages); and new interpretations of myths that question whether violent conquest was behind the spread as opposed to marrying outward or mass migration. Impressively weaving raw data and disparate academic conjectures into a sweeping saga, this rivets. (May)

Tracking the linguistic predecessor to languages now spoken by billions of people across the globe. Spinney's goal is to explain the "Big Bang of the Indo-European languages," the series of events that led Proto-Indo-European to stem into languages of antiquity and ultimately into the Spanish, Farsi, and English we can recognize today. Her meticulous research synthesizes the work of archaeologists, linguistic historians, and, crucially, geneticists who have sequenced ancient DNA. Findings from these fields have built a case for the speakers of Proto-Indo-European having been the Yamnaya people of the steppe region north of the Black Sea, the world's first fully nomadic pastoralists. The text tracks the probable migratory paths of the Yamnaya from modern-day Ukraine across Europe and Central Asia, their intersections with other ancient societies and cultures, their governance and trades, and the way that those meetings spurred and cultivated new branches of Indo-European. The methods for reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language involve a complex system for comparing lexicons, grammatical rules, and theories on sound laws; while Spinney includes and attempts to translate these processes, they often seem merely a side story to the vivid theoretical detail with which she shades the movements, relationships, and mythologies of Indo-European ancestors. The text is organized around the evolutions of individual branches of Indo-European, which can be confusing as time weaves in and out of prehistory with different migrations and intertwinements. But this back-and-forth underscores the stakes involved in how we understand such massive dissemination and transformation and the tensions they fuel; indeed, Spinney concludes, there is a potential reflecting pool for the trajectory of Proto-Indo-European in our current moment, as global languages confront the primacy of English, shared written text through 21st-century media and technology, and new migration patterns. A smart, dense, detailed account. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.