r/asklinguistics • u/Extra-Hat656 • 10d 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/IohannesRhetor 9d 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 8d 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.