Chinese characters provide only indirect evidence of
pronunciation, and even today the characters in the ancient
and classical language are read with the phonetic values of
the modern languages. Chinese characters have been de-
scribed as originally “pictographic,” writing characterized
by pictorial signs and symbols of objects; as “ideographic,”
writing that depicts concepts or ideas but not sounds; or as
“logographic,” writing that stands for words of the spoken
language. Although the latter description is now preferred
in linguistics, there is no doubt that most characters began
as representative depictions, and sometimes characters take
on a conceptual life of their own, independent of the spoken
language. Th us, all the descriptions of the characters are ap-
propriate in varying degrees. Ancient Chinese as a spoken
language, however, is a matter of reconstruction, inference,
and speculation, calling on the full skills of modern linguis-
tic science, with the help of some ancient testimony by the
Chinese themselves. Th e results involve great measures of
uncertainty and are the subject of dispute. Th us the study
of the ancient language can focus with greatest certainty on
the grammar of the language and on the development of the
system of writing.
In Southeast Asia there was only one literate culture in
ancient times, and that was in Vietnam. Vietnamese is a mem-
ber of the Austroasiatic family of languages, which is divided
into the Mon-Khmer branch, whose principal representative
is Cambodian, and the Vietnamese languages. Evidence of
Mon-Khmer languages dates to the Middle Ages. Written
Vietnamese, however, originally was expressed by writing
Chinese (as was Korean) or by using Chinese characters to
represent the Vietnamese language. Th e word Vietnam itself
is simply the Vietnamese pronunciation of the name that
would be Yu e n a n in modern Mandarin or Yütnam in mod-
ern Cantonese. Th e earliest Vietnamese state, Annam, was
contemporaneous with the Chinese Qin Dynasty (221–207
b.c.e.), but by 111 b.c.e. it had been absorbed by Han China.
Annam was not independent again until 544 c.e. A phonetic
system, as in Korea or Japan, was never developed to write
Vietnamese. Th e modern language is written in a form of the
Latin alphabet.
Th ere is no evidence from ancient times of the other
major language family of Southeast Asia, the Th ai-Lao,
Kadai, or Daic languages. Th is family seems to have origi-
nated in southwestern China, where some members, such as
Zhuang and Dai, still exist, and then moved down through
Burma (where today the Shan people live) into Southeast
Asia. But this dispersal did not happen until as late as the
13th century c.e.
Before European exploration the most extensively dis-
tributed language family in the world was the Austronesian
family, which spread southeast from Asia and across the Pa-
cifi c. None of the languages of this family was a written lan-
guage in ancient times, and none would ever be written until
writing systems from India, Islam, or the West were intro-
duced in the Middle Ages or later.
EUROPE
BY AMY HACKNEY BLACKWELL
Almost all ancient European languages were part of the Indo-
European language family that includes English, German
and Germanic languages, Celtic languages, Greek, Latin and
the Romance languages, Armenian, Iranian, and the Slavic
tongues. Scholars believe that these languages all evolved
from a single ancient tongue called Proto-Indo-European,
which originated between 6500 and 4500 b.c.e., either in the
region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea or in Ana-
tolia. Proto-Indo-European gradually traveled east through
India and west through Europe and evolved into distinct
tongues.
Th e people who lived in ancient Europe north and west
of Greece and Rome spoke languages from two Indo-Euro-
pean branches, Celtic and Germanic. People in eastern Eu-
rope spoke Th racian languages. Scholars do not know much
about the languages that these ancient people actually spoke.
Most ancient Europeans could not write, and so they did not
record their own history or write grammars or dictionaries
of their own languages. Written evidence of ancient Euro-
pean tongues comes from a small number of inscriptions that
survive on stone, ceramics, and coins. Modern linguists have
reconstructed parts of ancient European languages by com-
paring words that appear in many languages and by applying
linguistic rules to more recent forms of a language to restore
the older forms of the same language.
Th e Celtic languages evolved from a common Indo-
European ancestor called Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic.
Proto-Celtic was closely related to Italic, which evolved into
Latin. Proto-Celtic emerged in Europe around 1000 b.c.e.
and seems to have been centered in central Europe in the area
of the Alps. By 400 b.c.e. most people in northwest Europe
and the British Isles spoke Celtic languages. As Proto-Celtic
spread across Europe, it split into several subfamilies, includ-
ing Gaulish, Brythonic, Goidelic, and Celtiberian. Gaulish,
named by scholars for the people of Roman Gaul, was spoken
from France and Belgium to Italy and as far east as Turkey.
Historians have reconstructed Gaulish from inscriptions on
stone and pots found throughout Roman Gaul. Th e earliest
inscriptions date to the sixth century b.c.e. Gaulish inscrip-
tion writers used both Italic and Greek letters. People were
still speaking Gaulish in the area that is now France as late
as the 500s c.e. Gaulish was related to the languages called
Lepontic and Galatian. Speakers of Galatian settled in Asia
Minor around the third century b.c.e. but gradually stopped
using their Celtic language in favor of Greek. Lepontic, which
was spoken in what is modern-day northern Italy, seems to
have died out around 400 b.c.e.
Brythonic languages, which include Breton, Welsh, Cor-
n i s h , a nd p o s sibly P ic t i s h , we re s p ok en i n Br it t a ny, Wa le s , a nd
Cornwall, and they developed in Britain around the sixth and
fi ft h centuries b.c.e. Brythonic languages adopted numerous
Latin words during the Roman occupation of Britain in thelanguage: Europe 615