16 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2019
In the centuries that followed, these kinds of
comparisons would continue to be collected.
A French scholar, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux,
was the first to identify the similarity between
Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, German, and Russian in
1767, but his findings were largely overlooked
at the time. The first person to attract serious
attention with these kinds of comparisons was
William Jones, a British jurist with a gift for lan-
guages. Before his death in 1794, he had learned
28 languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew,
Arabic, Persian, and Chinese.
In 1783 Jones became a judge of the supreme
court in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. He stud-
ied Sanskrit in preparation for his post and be-
gan to notice similarities between it and several
languages. During his time in India, he found-
ed, and was president of, the Asiatic Society of
Bengal. In a 1786 address to the
membership, Jones suggested
that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin
had common ancestry. His theory
sparked great interest in compara-
tive linguistics, and a new disci-
pline was born.Pieces of PIE
Building on Jones’s hypothesis,
scholars began to compare lan-
guages to each other and work
their way backward into thehistorical record. In the 19th century European
scholars scoured ancient texts and inscriptions
to track the origins of modern languages. The
Germans Franz Bopp and Heinrich Hübsch mann
and the Danish Rasmus Rask were just a few
of the notable scholars who took Jones’s work
and expanded it to draw new conclusions. They
identified new members of the Indo-European
family,such as the Slavic and Baltic languages.
Their work also forged distinct branches for lan-
guages, like Albanian and Tochar ian, previously
grouped with others.
The further back these scholars reached, they
found traces of a mother tongue for the Indo-
European family. This progenitor is called Proto-
Indo-European (PIE). Scholars in the 20th cen-
tury developed this idea into a prominent theory.
The language existed millennia ago among pop-
ulations living in the Caucasus region who then
spread to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. No-
body knows for sure what PIE sounded or looked
like, as no written records have survived; some
conclude that no written language developed
at all. Using material culture and archaeology,HERD
MENTALITY
A first-centuryA.D.
Roman architectural
relief (below) shows
a sheep being led
to sacrifice. The
importance of sheep
across cultures has
helped scholars trace
patterns across Indo-
European culture.BIG SKIES SOAR OVER THE PONTIC-
CASPIAN STEPPE IN MODERN-DAY
UKRAINE, THE SITE THAT SOME BELIEVE
IS THE INDO-EUROPEAN HOMELAND.
O. MITIUKHINA/ALAMY/ACI
ERICH LESSING/ALBUM