Proto
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That's the title of a brand new (3/13/25) book by Laura Spinney, author of Pale Rider, a noteworthy volume on the 1918 influenza pandemic. Here she is interviewed (6/7/25) by Colin Gorrie (the interview is too long [58:14] to post directly on Language Log):
Proto-Indo-European Origins: A Conversation with Laura Spinney
Follow along with the interview by using the transcript (available on the YouTube site; it shows up on the right side).
The whole title of Spinney's remarkable tome is Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. As Gorrie explains:
This book integrates linguistics, archaeology, and genetics to give us an up-to-date overview of Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancient language that English and many other languages ultimately descend from. Our conversation is wide-ranging, touching not only on the linguistics but also on what we can reconstruct of the culture of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and the light it sheds on later history and literature.
Blurb:from the publisher (Bloomsbury)
Daughter. Duhitár-. Dustr. Dukte. Listen to these English, Sanskrit, Armenian and Lithuanian words, all meaning the same thing, and you hear echoes of one of history's most unlikely journeys. All four languages-along with hundreds of others, from French and Gaelic, to Persian and Polish-trace their origins to an ancient tongue spoken as the last ice age receded. This language, which we call Proto-Indo-European, was born between Europe and Asia and exploded out of its cradle, fragmenting as it spread east and west. Its last speaker died thousands of years ago, yet Proto-Indo-European lives on in its myriad linguistic offspring and in some of our best loved works of literature, including Dante's Inferno and the Rig Veda, The Lord of the Rings and the love poetry of Rumi. How did this happen?
Acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney set out to answer that question, retracing the Indo-European odyssey across continents and millennia. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the silk roads and the Hindu Kush. We retrace the epic journeys of nomads and monks, warriors and kings – the ancient peoples who carried these languages far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the scientists on a thrilling mission to retrieve the lost languages and their speakers: the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists who have reconstructed that ancient diaspora. What they have learned has profound implications for our modern world, because people and their languages are on the move again. Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.
Tocharian
Spinney does a particularly good job on Tocharian. Incidentally, in the chapter on Tocharian in the book, she quotes and discusses my favorite "love poem".
See "Tocharian love poem" (4/1/20) — with transcription (and photograph of the manuscript), translation, and lengthy bibliography
Selected readings
- "Where did the PIEs come from; when was that?" (7/28/23)
- "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe" (1/6/09) — classic post by Don Ringe
- "Horse and wheel in the early history of Indo-European" (1/10/09)
- "Indo-European "cow" and Old Sinitic reconstructions: awesome" (2/16/20) — with lengthy bibliography
- "More on IE wheels and horses" (1/10/09)
- "Inheritance versus lexical borrowing: a case with decisive sound-change evidence" (1/13/09)
- "The linguistic history of horses, gods, and wheeled vehicles" (1/13/09)
- "Some Wanderwörter in Indo-European languages" (1/16/09)
- "Don Ringe ties up some loose ends" (2/20/09)
- "The place and time of Proto-Indo-European: Another round" (8/24/12)
- "Proto-Indo-European laks- > Modern English 'lox'" (12/26/20)
- "'Skin' and 'hide' ('pelt') in Old Sinitic and Proto-Indo-European" (11/7/20) — with a very lengthy bibliography
- "Proto-Indo-European in Prometheus?" (6/8/12)
- "The burgeoning of Indo-European and the withering of many other languages" (4/29/25)
- "PIE *gene- *gwen-" (8/10/23) –with implications for "gender"
- "Proto by Laura Spinney review – how Indo-European languages went global: The fascinating story of the ancient words that survive in the mouths of billions of speakers today", Henry Oliver, The Guardian (4/10/25)
- [Thanks to Hiroshi Kumamoto]
GH said,
June 9, 2025 @ 12:42 am
I read* this recently. I was immediately disconcerted by this dubious passage in the first paragraph of the introduction:
As far as I am aware, the evidence for any association whatsoever between Týr/Tiu and thunder or weather is nonexistent.
But after this I didn't notice any major blunders (though that could be my own ignorance). I appreciate that the author acknowledges uncertainty and lack of academic consensus on a number of points in her storyline. It is engagingly told.
(* To be more accurate, I listened to it as an audiobook. The benefit is to hear all the words in the various IE languages spoken, with demonstrations of sounds not present in English. The reader and producers have evidently gone to some efforts to get this tolerably correct. However, this is not worth the tradeoff of the loss of the maps and figures.)
Victor Mair said,
June 9, 2025 @ 5:55 am
She must have been thinking of Thursday.
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Thor (from Old Norse: Þórr) is a prominent god in Germanic paganism. In Norse mythology, he is a hammer-wielding god associated with lightning, thunder, storms, sacred groves and trees, strength, the protection of humankind, hallowing, and fertility. Besides Old Norse Þórr, the deity occurs in Old English as Thunor, in Old Frisian as Thuner, in Old Saxon as Thunar, and in Old High German as Donar, all ultimately stemming from the Proto-Germanic theonym *Þun(a)raz, meaning 'Thunder'.
…
The name Thor is derived from Norse mythology. Its medieval Germanic equivalents or cognates are Donar (Old High German), Þunor (Old English), Thuner (Old Frisian), Thunar (Old Saxon), and Þórr (Old Norse),[2] the latter of which inspired the modern English form Thor.[3]
Though Old Norse Þórr has only one syllable, it comes from an earlier Proto-Norse two-syllable form which can be reconstructed as *Þonarr (from an earlier *Þunaraz) and/or *Þunurr (from *Þunuraz), evidenced by the poems Hymiskviða and Þórsdrápa, and modern Elfdalian tųosdag 'Thursday', through the common Old Norse development of the sequence -unr- to -ór-.[4]
All Germanic forms of Thor's name descend from Proto-Germanic, but there is debate as to precisely what form the name took at that early stage. The form *Þunuraz is suggested by Elfdalian tųosdag ('Thursday') and by a runic inscription from around 700 from Hallbjäns in Sundre, Gotland, which includes the sequence þunurþurus.[4]: 709–11 Alternatively, the form *Þunaraz is attractive because it is identical to the name of the ancient Celtic god Taranus (by metathesis—switch of sounds—of an earlier *Tonaros, attested in the dative tanaro and the Gaulish river name Tanarus).[5][6][4] Finally, the form *Þunraz has also been suggested by Hjalmar Lindroth (1917) and has the attraction of clearly containing the sequence -unr-, needed to explain the later form Þórr, although the similarity with Celtic theonym *Tonaros is lost.[4]: 708 According to John T. Koch, the form *Þunraz is from earlier pre-Germanic stage that predates Grim's Law.[7]
=====
The Wikipedia article from which I have taken these excerpts provides much more data myth, legend, narrative, literature, and language for studying Thor's name in history and prehistory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thor
As for Tuesday, here's a thumbnail introduction:
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The English name is derived from Middle English Tewesday, from Old English Tiwesdæg meaning "Tīw's Day", the day of Tiw or Týr, the god of single combat, law, and justice in Norse mythology. Tiw was equated with Mars in the interpretatio germanica, and the name of the day is a translation of Latin dies Martis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuesday
GH said,
June 9, 2025 @ 8:37 am
In her introduction, Spinney sets out to demonstrate the cultural and linguistic links between various Indo-European peoples by taking the famous example of the PIE "Shining Sky Father" *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr:
The parallel breaks apart because, although the name "Týr" is etymologically a reflex of PIE *Dyḗus, Týr/Tiu serves neither as sky-god nor all-father in the Norse or Anglo-Saxon pantheon – those functions being filled by Thor/Thunor and Odin/Wotan respectively. (His function as a god of war or victory in battle is briefly attested in Norse sources, and is supported by his identification with the Roman god Mars.)
There are two leading explanations for this discrepancy. Either that Týr (Proto-Germanic form reconstructed as *Tīwaz) did have these functions at some earlier, unattested period (which must predate Tacitus), but his position in the pantheon was usurped; or that the god known to us by this name originally had a different one, and *tīwaz (meaning "god") was just a generic epithet that became associated with him, similar to how Freyr and Freyja ("Lord" and "Lady") largely replaced the earlier names of two other Norse divinities. (This second explanation leaves the fate of the original Sky Father in Germanic mythology unaccounted for.)
All of this would be too much of a digression to go into in the introduction, but by blithely calling Týr a god of thunder and weather Spinney is either making an elementary error by conflating Týr and Thor, or trying to gloss over the problems with the Norse "sky father" case and hoping readers will conflate them. Neither possibility inspires much confidence at the outset.
GH said,
June 9, 2025 @ 8:41 am
(That should of course be Woden, not Wotan, as the Old English form of Odin.)
Coby said,
June 9, 2025 @ 10:56 am
This is classic: A journalist (or novelist, for that matter — LS is both) takes a crash course in a subject they are writing a book about, reads lots of books, consults lots of authorities, but a little detail reveals the lack of deep background knowledge.
I just recently read a novel taking place in Pennsylvania Dutch country, with lots of detail about the Amish and so on, but a reference to the Philadelphia Symphony (as opposed to the Philadelphia Orchestra) showed that the writer doesn't really know the area.
cameron said,
June 9, 2025 @ 5:13 pm
at about 45 minutes in she discusses the migration of the ancestors of the Tocharians, and she mentions a couple of times that they had to "cross the Urals". there are some pretty serious mountains between the steppe and where the Tocharians settled, but the Urals are somewhere else entirely
David Marjanović said,
June 10, 2025 @ 8:46 am
This looks like a multilayered misunderstanding. Grimm's law is where *þ [θ] comes from in the first place; it didn't exist before that. I bet Koch merely said *þunraz "thunder, and god thereof" has cognates outside Germanic.
David Marjanović said,
June 10, 2025 @ 8:47 am
You might say she opened Tür und Tor "door and gate" to confusion…
Daniel Barkalow said,
June 10, 2025 @ 4:02 pm
I'm a bit disappointed with that blurb making it sound like descendants of PIE are only found in occasional great works of literature, rather than including our mundane writing as well, if only because it means the author missed the chance to list the blurb for Proto as an example.