Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
For centuries, polyglots and the linguistically curious have pointed out the similarities between certain languages of the Eurasian continent. Dante stirred controversy when he first posited that all the Romance languages—Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian—derived from Latin. But by 1786, the British judge and philologist Sir William “Oriental” Jones was applauded when he famously asserted that Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek had “sprung from some common source.” Some 450 years later, linguists and archaeologists have filled in many of the gaps in our knowledge of this common source, called Proto-Indo-European, and sketched out its family tree, the branches of which extend from Scotland to China. But over the past two decades, the study of paleogenetics has radically advanced our understanding of this language—and the people who spoke it some 5,000 years ago. In her new book, Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, science journalist Laura Spinney tells their story, and that of their linguistic—and in some cases, genetic—offspring, which constitute the world’s largest language family.
Go beyond the episode:
Tune in every (other) week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Subscribe: iTunes/Apple • Amazon • Google • Acast • Pandora • RSS Feed
Have suggestions for projects you’d like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes!
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.