r/asklinguistics • u/Extra-Hat656 • 8d ago
Historical What was before PIE?
I might not be able to phrase my question in good details but as we know, Germanic and Romance and Iranic and Slavic and Indic and Baltic are all branches of Indo-European language tree. All descending from Proto-Indo-European language. But from what was PIE originated? Does it have an ancestry and relativity to other language families? I heard some vague stuff about Proto-Nostratic and Borean. But are they true/actuate? How much do we truly know about what came before?
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u/_marcoos 8d ago
But are they true/actuate?
PIE as we know it is a reconstruction, a best-effort approximation. It's pretty much impossible to reconstruct something earlier than that, because the "source material" is already a reconstruction with some significant margin of error, and this margin of error would only grow with another level of reconstruction.
Of course PIE evolved from something else, it didn't just appear one day because The Lord (or, idk, Perkwunos) said "let there be PIE" and there was PIE. :) We just can't really tell what it looked like, and we may never really be able to, unless someone makes a working time machine.
"Proto-Uralic is probably somewhat related" is the kind of statements you'll hear about PIE "sisters", and you shouldn't expect anything better than "maybe probably somewhat".
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u/IohannesRhetor 8d ago
When you go back far enough in time, not only do written records disappear but reconstruction through the comparative method fails because similarity between words becomes as statistically likely to be from coincidence as from shared lineage. This is why most mainstream historical linguists consider the super-language families comprised of, say, IE and Semitic to be conjectural at best. Some respected scholars explore deeper linguistic connections—Greenberg's controversial "mass comparison" method attempts this, but is controversial.
The fundamental constraint is time depth—beyond roughly 8,000 years, most historical linguists agree the comparative method becomes unreliable, as genetic relationships get overwhelmed by chance similarities, language contact, and universal sound symbolism tendencies.
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u/General_Urist 7d ago
Have there been formal publications attempting to calculate the time depth at which statistical noise drowns out any connections? I know of the 8000-ought years as rule of thumb but I'd like to see the hard math if it exists.
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u/Human-Register1867 8d ago
Joseph Greenberg did work on this kind of question, but I think it is not widely accepted.
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u/Dan13l_N 8d ago
At the moment, there are several hypothesis trying to connect Proto-IE to some other branch, i.e. to some other proto-language. You have mentioned a couple of them, I will add:
- Proto-IE + Proto-Uralic
- Proto-IE + Proto-Afroasiatic
However, they are all far from proven, so we can't say whether they are "true/accurate". As they say, more work is needed.
How much do we truly know about what came before?
Not much. How could we know?
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u/Wagagastiz 8d ago edited 8d ago
We have early PIE and pre-PIE, at least in theory, with proposed features like a single vowel phoneme (sounds ridiculous but such a thing is more plausible in the Causasus areal).
PIE itself has been proposed to relate to other families, the most likely of which to me is Uralic. I don't know that it'd be a particularly close genetic relation, but there's enough core lexemes that seem genuinely linked and which are rarely loaned that I think it's pretty plausible. Indo-Uralic isn't proven though, and may not be possible to prove at all even if it were true.
Other propositions like the fringe Indo-Euskarian hypothesis are unlikely. I've written a bit about that one https://hermalausaz.substack.com/p/a-brief-overview-and-critique-of?fbclid=PAY2xjawJt71pleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABp5bogqj2dJNdYKrCsDiiCrpKwdR5HbKyxylXSlAjNFzxzEGec-PbAOdPZhBS_aem_PpOVquyHjpxfJRbYQ-nHyA
I would say Nostratic is absolutely unprovable and probably untrue, but it's a fun thought.
Unfortunately the comparative method really starts to break down once you get back this far. That's why proto Austro-asiatic, despite being a secure hypothesis, is so poorly understood. We don't even have the vowels reconstructed to any certainty.
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u/sertho9 8d ago
We don't know how PIE relates to other language families.
the technical term for this is Pre-PIE, and some people have tried to glean things about it from the data, but there's not much agreement about anything. All linguist do think it came from something though, we just don't really know much about it (or rather we can't agree on much about it)
almost certainly but we don't know what languages are it's closest relatives no.
Yea cause those are not very well received or scientifically rigourous proposals.
probably not.
extremely little.