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language spread north to Scandanavia, east to
India, south to the Mediterranean and west to Europe.
The IE family is divided into twelve branches, two
of which are now extinct. From the Indic branch
comes Hindi and Urdu, from the Iranian, Persian,
Farsi and Pashto and from the Slavic branch most of
the Eastern European languages, Bulgarian, Russian,
Polish etc. The Thracian branch has one single
surviving language – Armenian as do the Illryic
branch with Albanian and the Hellenic branch with
Greek. The Latin branch gave rise to the Romance
languages: Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French etc.
Celtic is the smallest branch of the IE family. These
languages originated in Central Europe and by about
4000 BC dominated Western Europe. It was these
people that migrated to the British Isles but when the
Germanic speaking Anglo-Saxons arrived they were
pushed to the margins of the islands and the Celtic
language survives today in Welsh, and Irish and
Scottish Gaelic. One group of Celts made it back to
the Brittany region of France where they speak
Breton but other Celtic languages eventually became
extinct including Cumbrian, Manx and Cornish.
Chesten Marchant, the last mono-glot Cornish
speaker, that is to say one who spoke no other tongue,
died in 1676. The Celts had themselves conquered
and absorbed an even earlier aboriginal population of
the British Isles of whom the Picts of Scotland (who
may have been related to the Basques of Spain) might
have been the last survivors. Although no British
aboriginal languages have survived we do know that
some words like Britain and Ireland are of pre-Celtic
aboriginal origin as may be girl, boy and dog.
Conversations with Cavemen
Meanwhile linguists at Stanford University and the
Santa Fe Institute analysed some 2,200 languages,
dead and alive, and based on the premise that all
human languages descend from a single form that was
spoken in East Africa 50,000 years ago. They decided
that the earliest languages used what is known as SOV
ordering, subject-object-verb
I you like
rather than
the SVO ordering used in English subject-verb-object,
I like you
. Which boils down to this. Early man spoke
like the little green Jedi warrior from Star Wars –
Yoda. But as for the accent? A clue, they have not.
Earlier this year Professor of Evolutionary Biology
Mark Pagel and his team at Reading University
published a list of twenty three words they believe
people used in Europe during the Ice Age 15,000
years ago. They arrived at the list by using statistical
models to predict which words in use today would
have changed most slowly. The list includes words
like mother, ashes, spit, worm and fire. The Professor
believes that although the words would have sounded
a bit different they would not sound so different that
we couldn’t sit round the fire with a group of cave
men and hold a simple conversation. However with no
words about weather on that list it might take a while
for the conversation to get going.
Indo-European Cousins
The Indo-European (IE) Family of languages, once
thought to have originated in the Ukraine forests north
of the Black Sea during the Neolithic period around
7000 BC is now thought to come from Anatolia or
modern day Turkey. Like Boris Johnson. When
people began to migrate about 4000 years ago the