One of six · Historical linguistics
Nobody knows anything at all about the people who spoke the languages that English and
Hindi and Greek all came from. They left no buildings, no graves anybody can identify, and
no writing.
But the words survived, passed mouth to mouth for five thousand years, and it turns out
that if you sort those words carefully enough they will tell you where those people lived
and what they had invented.
French, Spanish and Italian are related to one another. You knew that before you opened this, and you probably know roughly why. The Roman empire covered all three countries, and these languages are what became of Latin in each of them after Rome stopped running things.
Nobody finds that suspicious, and nobody should. These are not five similar languages that happen to resemble each other. They are one language — Latin — in five different states of having changed, because every generation speaks a little differently from the one before it, and two thousand years of a little adds up.
That is what a language family is. Not a resemblance, and not one language borrowing a word from another. A group of languages that are all the same language, further along.
The first is that relatives need not be recognisable to each other. A Portuguese speaker and a Romanian speaker cannot hold a conversation, despite the fact that both of them are speaking Latin.
The second is about luck. Latin happens to be sitting in a library. We have it. We can look at the parent and check the children against it. Almost no other family of languages in the world comes with its parent still available, and the actual work of this subject is recovering a parent that nobody ever wrote down.
Which raises a perfectly fair objection, and you should hold onto it as you read on. A great many words in completely unrelated languages resemble one another by pure chance. So resemblance on its own cannot possibly be the test. Something else has to be.
Taboo and tattoo. Captain Cook's crews picked them up in the Pacific in the seventeen-sixties and seventies and carried them home, and they have been sitting in the English language ever since, doing perfectly ordinary work and looking entirely English.
They belong to a family of about twelve hundred languages, spread across the Pacific and Indian oceans. That family is nothing like the Romance one. There is no Latin sitting in a library. Nobody wrote the parent language down, nobody recorded an empire, and there was no empire.
So on what grounds is anybody entitled to say these languages are related? Here is the answer, and it is the answer to the objection from the last section.
The test is not whether the words look alike. The test is whether the differences between them are consistent. If one language has a k in every single place where its neighbours have a t, word after word after word, that is not a resemblance. That is a rule, being applied without exception by people who had no idea they were applying it.
Chance does not produce rules like that. Borrowing does not either, because borrowed words arrive one at a time and do not reshape an entire vocabulary in step. Watch for the rule in the tables below.
The button underneath each table brings up the next one. There are three, and each adds languages further away than the last.
English borrowed this word from Tongan in the 1770s and spelled it taboo. Now look at the last line. Hawaiian has a k where all four of the others have a t. On its own, that means nothing whatsoever. Two words can begin differently by pure accident. The question worth asking is whether it happens again.
The obvious way to think about a language is as a set of names for things that were already out there in the world, with translation being a matter of swapping one label for another.
That is not quite how it works. Every language has settled on which distinctions are worth building into its words, and different languages have settled differently. Some of those decisions are optional, in the sense that you can always add more words if you want to be precise. Others are compulsory: the grammar will not let you finish the sentence until you have chosen a side.
Before the examples, one question. Answer it quickly.
How many basic colours are there between the sky on a clear day and deep water at dusk?
Four examples follow. The first two come from languages you probably do not speak. The last two are in the one you are reading now.
Each of these is a question. Tap one to open the answer, and tap it again to close it.
Take a community that left no farms anybody has found, no tools, no graves that can be identified as theirs, and not one line of writing. Nothing survives of them at all except the language, and even that only in the form of its descendants, thousands of years later.
You can still find out what they grew, what animals they kept, and what they had invented. The reasoning runs in four steps, and each one is small.
A word turns up right across a family of languages. In each branch it obeys that branch's own sound rules exactly, which is how you know it was inherited from the parent rather than borrowed from a neighbour later on. Therefore the shared ancestor must have had the word. And if the ancestor had a word for a thing, the ancestor had the thing.
Which turns a list of words into an archaeological site, for a people who left no pottery anybody can point at.
Each entry below opens with the surviving words you can go and check for yourself, and the reconstructed ancestor sits above them, marked with an asterisk to show that nobody ever wrote it down.
Nobody sat down and invented the future tense. No committee decided that English needed a way to mark politeness, or that French required two separate words in order to say no.
What happens instead is erosion. An ordinary word gets used in one particular position so often that people stop noticing it. It loses its original meaning, wears down in the mouth, and ends up as a piece of grammatical machinery with no content of its own. The process takes centuries, which is long enough that nobody living through it can see it happening, and short enough that the written record catches the whole thing.
Here is one complete cycle, from beginning to end, in French.
The button brings up the next stage. There are three, and they cover roughly eight hundred years.
Everything above rests on reconstruction, and reconstruction is exactly the sort of thing a person could talk themselves into. You look at some words, you decide what the ancestor must have been, and there is nobody available to contradict you.
There is one family where you can check the working, and it is the one from the very first section. The Romance languages descend from Latin, and Latin is sitting in the library.
So do it properly. Reconstruct the ancestor from the children alone, without looking. Then look.
Spanish and Portuguese are missing from this second list on purpose. They replaced the verb entirely, with hablar and falar, which come down from a different Latin word again. A family is under no obligation to keep every word it inherits, and you reconstruct from the branches that did keep it.
Every method on this page needs at least two survivors. You compare them, you find the rules, and you run the rules backwards. Take away the relatives and there is nothing to compare, and the whole machinery has nothing to bite on.
These languages have no relatives.
Basque is spoken by about three quarters of a million people across the western Pyrenees, on both sides of the border between Spain and France. It is the only language of western Europe that was already there before the Indo-European languages arrived, and that is still being used today to order a coffee.
That is the part worth sitting with for a moment. Basque is not strange for being alone. It is a perfectly ordinary language, behaving in perfectly ordinary ways. It is simply the last one.
Everything it was once related to is gone. Not badly recorded, not partially preserved: gone, without a wordlist, without a cousin, without a name. Western Europe before Indo-European was full of languages, and Basque is the only one anybody will ever be able to hear.
There is nothing to open in this section. The comparisons are lost forever.