How The Language Family Spread

Language family

You can’t really call pets inventions, then again, they are totally man-made. Aside from ants (milking aphids) which other creature willfully farms another creature? So, I decided, if knives are legitimate inventions, eventhough they are but modifications of pre-existing sharp flints, then I am going to consider pets and farm animals inventions, too, even if they already exist in their own right. It's the idea of applying them for human convenience which is the invention!

Aurochs, Lascaux cave

Today, as I was taking another look at the family of Indo-European languages, I decided that the horse was one of the most important human “inventions”. First, we domesticated the ox, also a fantastic invention, but this animal did not really take us that far. We could have done worse and picked the bison for a working animal, but stilll.

A yoke of oxen can pull a cart and plough a field and the going is steady but very slow. Then again, I thought of another great invention: flour. Oxen have played a significant role in the growing of wheat or other cereals.

We take our daily bread pretty much for granted, even if we bake our own. Even if we mill our own flour: who even thought up such a thing!? We are working on borrowed IP (intellectual property). Nowadays they'd patent the milling of flower as a technical fabrication process.

Think about it: would you know intuitively, stranded on your desert island which crops to grow? It’s all good and well to think along Darwinian lines and say, it must have been a long history of trial and error, but how many thousands of plants were there not to pick and taste (and die from)? No point asking our closest relatives the apes: no great bakers, I can think of, amongst them.

Evolution Or Intuition?

Once we picked the horse, we were on the move! And this was integral to the spread of language and its changes. Imagine if we had never made this fortunate choice: what if we had tried to make the rhino or the otter our favorite farm animal next?

How did we ever make these choices? They say the dog more or less sought us out (lured by the scraps) but to go from wolf to companion canine is still a big transition.

Consider how hard it can still be to train your perfect pet; but back in the Stone Age how did it all suddenly come about? Was there one caveman dog-whisperer? Did every tribe happen to have one? What language was there to use in the conversation between dog and man?

Hey there, wolf, I think you and I are going to make the best of friends! Come on in and lay down by my fire.

Now let’s try the cat. Here we find some greater limits in comparison. A reciprocally affectionate relationship is somewhat trickier to achieve. Yet, the Egyptians soon swore by the cat. Must have been all those grain-stores and the mice. Clearly man never went out to pick his cat. The cat sauntered up to him. You can start off with a lion cub and hope for the best, and there are one or two lion videos that turn your heart to goo, but you really need to down-size your feline before you can hope to cohabitate in harmony.

So, the horse prooves to be an inspired choice in the long-shot of domesticating something out there on the plains. I am not sure the zebra or the tapir would have given the same results. Could you go out into herd of mustang to "break one in"? (I was raised by a mother who is panic struck by horses ever since she saw one bite off the finger of the rag and boneman in WWII, so don't ask me, I still carry the vicarious whiff of fear on me.)

tapir

The Family Disperses

Thanks to the horse we brought language to the Bulgarians and the Norwegians and the Celts (the journey is a very complex story with much guesswork although language shifts - in as far as they have been documented [oral traditions add to the challenge] - do leave paper trails and the rest is tracing back to the indo-Iranian roots.)

There remain plenty of mysteries! Where did the Basques get their unique tongue from? And why is Estonian Finnish-Ungaric (and why are these two at all twinned!) but Latvian and Lithuanian is not? This is the amazing story of man's mobility and dynamic decision-making; or as far as spiritual science is concerned, a process of encoding his spiritual meaning in the dance of the physical (with the larnx for feet).