Radical innovations evidently took place in what was to become the Indo-
European branch of Indo-Hittite after it diverged from what was to become the
Anatolian branch. In the Anatolian languages nouns for animate beings did not
differentiate between masculine and feminine genders, and in PIE they did.
PIE speakers had a subjunctive and optative mood for their verbs, but Anatolian
speakers had neither. The PIE verb had a future tense and at least three past tenses
(perfect, imperfect, aorist), while the Anatolian verb had only one past tense and
no future tense.^11 The lexicons of the Anatolian languages, so far as they are known,
were very different from that of PIE: in Hittite the word for daughter bears some
resemblance to its parallel in PIE, but the words for son, father, mother, brother
and sister do not. The innovations that produced PIE are so many and so significant
that we must suppose that the bifurcation of Proto-Indo-Hittite occurred a very
long time before the notional date—between 3500 and 3000 BC—of PIE. Although
in the weakest version of the Indo-Hittite theory the time-frame is imagined as
only a few centuries, it is more likely that we are dealing here with a few
millennia.
The fading of folk migrations
Another advance in the study of the origins of PIE and the subsequent expansion
of Indo-European languages is the gradual fading of belief in folk migrations, which
for a long time were central in most discussions about the spread of the Indo-
European languages. Folk migrations have largely been discredited by historians
and archaeologists. Although linguists have been slower to discard the idea of folk
migrations of Indo-European speakers, they may now be ready to do so.^12
Movements of individuals, families or large groups of families occurred
regularly in antiquity, as they do today, and over the course of several generations
a continuing pattern of emigration and immigration could bring about significant
changes in a region’s population and in the language or languages spoken there.
The Amorite infiltration into Mesopotamia in the early second millennium BCis
a case in point, as is the Libyan expansion into Egypt’s western Delta a millennium
later and the Gallic intrusion into northern Italy at about the same time. From the
seventh to the fifth millennium BC, as we shall presently see, Indo-Hittite languages
were brought to many places where they had previously not been heard, and in
the third millennium BCsomething similar seems to have happened with the
expansion of Indo-European languages along the grassland and forest steppe.
Expansions of the sort mentioned above, however, are quite different from the
folk migration that was for a long time imagined by philologists, archaeologists
and historians. In the latter a Volk—an entire nation—simultaneously picks up its
belongings and moves from one land to another, leaving none of its members
behind. Because Indo-European studies grew up in the heyday of nationalism it
is not surprising that nineteenth-century philologists assumed that there had once
been an “Aryan nation,” which gave birth to a constellation of daughter nations
that corresponded to the linguistic subgroups that the philologists had identified:
Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic, Germanic, Keltic, Slavic and Baltic. It was assumed
Origins and spread of Proto-Indo-European 3