YouSaid · the spoken record

Laura Spinney

lines on the record: 38
first: 2025-04-21
most recent: 2025-04-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Britain. I mean, we can have an argument about whether the Normans sometime later managed to impose a Romance language. But the consensus amongst linguists is that English essentially remains a Germanic language that got a huge sort of infusion of Norman terms and grammar and phonology at that point. So, you know, there are all these wonderful, there's a wonderful variety of possible outcomes. And we're going to begin to understand why there is that variety.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a very good question. I think this story will never be settled entirely. There will always be new work shining on it. But I think that it would be fair to say that the main lines are written in place now. I'm not sure that anything will change in a major, major way. But what we're doing now is filling out the all important detail, you know, trying to understand the mechanisms. What was it about people moving from one place to another that enabled them to impose their languages or not? Why is it that when the Mongols came to Ukraine, they did not impose their language, but when the Indo-Europeans came earlier, they did. Why is it that the Romans were able to impose Latin over so much of continental Europe, but never managed it?”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sort of the last few centuries, the modern period that we have had this notion of a single official language in one country.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And I mean, linguists today will tell you that that's very hard to predict. But I wonder if AI, you know, for all its risks and benefits, double-edged sword and so on, I think that AI is going to transform this task. It might actually help us begin to see the kinds of rules of language change and help us to predict at least in a general way what might happen in the future, which is a fascinating, exciting prospect. But I also wanted to say that, you know, The idea that we have in many European countries and not only also the states and many of the former colonies of our European countries, if you like, is that to be monolingual, like we officially are, is a sort of somehow the right or natural state of humanity, not at all for the vast majority of our history and prehistory. We were multilingual. And it's only from”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's obviously a hot potato, it's obviously a sensitive subject, but which of these is not? And the point is that languages have never stood still. That, I suppose, is one of the overriding messages that comes out of my book. They never will stand still. And when languages stand still, they die. So it is a constantly moving, very dynamic picture, and it's likely to become even more so in the decades and centuries ahead of us.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think this is fascinating because if you think about it, so the current understanding, to put it in a nutshell about how the Indo-European languages arrived in Europe, though of course they went east as well, is that it was associated with the migration. Now, that migration may have involved violence, it may have involved plague, but it was multifaceted and very complicated and it involved social mechanisms and decisions made by the host populations in Europe as well as those coming in. So it was a very complicated picture. And that obviously has relevance for our modern world, especially as the climate crisis intensifies and people start to moving in greater numbers. What will be the linguistic impact of that? I think that's a fascinating question and it's not one we've really thought about. I mean, we have talked about the demographic, the economic, the cultural impact of migration, but not the linguistic ones.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“a sort of dialect of it and you know that the sort of Russian culture was dominant and the others were splinters so it's another example of how the story has been bashed out of shape in order to support certain agendas and no doubt that will continue but it's it's a huge irony of the current state of affairs”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a huge irony that as far as we can tell, as far as the archaeologists and the geneticists can tell, the sort of cradle of Proto-Indo-European in the sense of where those people, the Amnihila lived, when they were first speaking these languages is essentially in that piece of the world that is being contested by the Ukrainians and the Russians or that was invaded by the Russians a few years ago and that the Ukrainians are defending between those two countries. And, you know, there's even a linguistic dimension to the war, not that anybody really thinks that it's about language, but when Vladimir Putin wrote his public essay a few years ago explaining as he saw it the history of the region, one of his points was that Russian was a language and Ukrainian was”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And sometimes they've done it with very damaging effects. So there was a nationalist movement in archaeology starting in the late 19th century, which spilled into the 20th century, which wanted to claim the homeland of these languages was in Central Europe and that this was associated with the Aryan concept, whereas Aryan, in fact, is a word that comes up first in ancient Indian and Persian texts and refers to those peoples. So there's always been this distortion going on and it's still happening today. People have taken this story when it suits them to justify their political agendas. It has always happened. It will always happen. I think that the best sort of response to that is to keep researching to be as scientific as possible about trying to find answers to what is a genuine problem.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so I suppose I have to start this answer by saying that language is inherently political. Even the definition of language, I mean, there's an expression that most people will have heard, which is that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And it's often said, and there's a very great deal of truth in it because languages are not defined neatly. Just to give an example, southern and northern Germans don't understand each other. But they all speak German, whereas Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are distinct languages, and yet those people can very often understand each other. So these definitions are to some extent arbitrary, not entirely. There are rules and political. And so for as long as people have been curious and tried to understand the Indo-European problem, they've also politicized.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Introduction with is that of the most powerful god in the ancient Indian pantheon who was called Diao Pita literally means we would say father sky but it literally means sky father and in ancient Greek the same name becomes transformed into short zeus in Latin it becomes the first word Diao in Sanskrit is transformed in Old Norse to become Tir who's a god of weather and war and in old Are clearly could not have been coincidental. There is, so it's been a very long time that there has been awareness that there is a link between East and West that needs explaining. We may never explain it fully, but we're getting closer and we are closer than we have been in a very long time.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, first of all, I suppose this is one of the points of wonder that was my entry to this story, which is if you think about a sort of a Victorian Britain or European realizing that Sanskrit and Latin words look and sound like each other, it must have been a quite extraordinary sort of shock to think how on earth could, you know, I mean, okay, in Victorian times, people have more than a heavy old wagon rumbling along, but they didn't move nearly as much as we do today. To a Victorian in Britain, India was an immensely distant place, even if there were already colonizing it. But it was a long way away. So these were extraordinary thoughts, and they still are to some extent. I mean, the example that I open my...”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's what we see from the invention of the wagon, from the domestication of the horse. You start to see people moving these very long journeys, sometimes individual people otherwise people's over generations, generations of incremental migration, and the very strong likelihood is that they were carrying their dialects and their languages with them.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hugely, hugely. I think so. So as far as we can see, or as far as the archaeologists can tell, that invention, who, as you say, we don't know who was responsible for it, but it emerged in the context of what was already an international trade network centered on the Black Sea. So people were already trading in metals, in copper, in bronze, in amber, in coral. They were trading in all kinds of things, probably in human beings as well. And once you've got a means of transport, everything changes. Everything becomes bigger and faster. And you can go further. And so it basically intensifies all the connections. And this has an impact in language because you can go further, you take your dialects further, more of you can travel, larger journeys become envisageable.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now know that plague was present in Europe, in the late Neolithic, so at the time that people came into Europe, they may even have brought it. It may not have looked like plague as plague looked in the Middle Ages, but that's an open question. It may not have been quite as lethal, but it probably did a great deal of damage. It probably killed a significant proportion of the farmers who were in Europe at that time and who were already living in relatively dense settlements, so the plague could spread. So it may be that the plague did some of the work for the invaders, for them, in terms of clearing the landscape before them as they advance.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That maintain their identity and that allowed them to function socially. And among those are fosterage. They fostered children. They probably had a rather fluid system of marriage where a man might have more than one wife. They were very strong and hospitality. So if you moved, you expected to be received in your host's place and vice versa. Hospitality was assumed to be reciprocal. So there were all these kinds of social conventions which meant that they could stay together, maintain their identity over space and time and enabled them to move into a new place, to adapt to a new place and to bring others into their world and into their linguistic sphere as well, if you like. wasn't as violent as we think it was probably. There may have been external factors as well. For example, we know”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the press, because they did get a lot of press attention, was very much that these were violent people who came in, who imposed their genes and their language. So they raped and murdered, and that's how their languages took hold. The thinking has changed very much since then. And the picture has become very, much more complicated. There may have been some violence. There surely was some violence. But it looks to have been mainly social mechanisms that allowed them to impose their languages. So, for example, because these were people who were nomadic pastoralists, they moved a lot, they were often separated from each other over long spaces and long periods of times.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Into Europe 8,000 years ago, i.e. much earlier, and when Europe was much less populated. So that is at the crux of this question. But then the ancient DNA showed us pretty much exactly 10 years ago there were two major papers in nature that showed this very clearly, that there was a major influx of step ancestry to Europe 5,000 years ago. So somehow they managed to impose themselves both genetically and presumably given the Indo-European domination of Europe and the fact that the relationship between those languages suggests that they have been spoken in Europe for at least that length of time did stem from that step invasion. Now, invasion is a loaded word. When those papers came out in 2015, the spin put on them, if you like,”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there were, we estimate, about seven million of them. Okay, so if the Yamnaya come to Europe at that time, how on earth did they impose their language on 7 million farmers to produce the heavily Indo-European dominated linguistic landscape that we see today in Europe? It's a problem because we're talking about a time when wheeled transport is pretty new. They probably did have wagons, but that's all they had. Maybe there were tens of thousands of them at a maximum at the peak of their migration into Europe, but tens of thousands versus a seven million. It's a difficult calculation. And that's the main reason why the archaeologist Colin Remfrew died recently and who was the sort of main progenitor of the Anatolian theory, said that it was unlikely to have happened that way. It was much more likely that it was the farmers themselves who brought the Indo-European language.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a really important question because it's also at the crux of these tool rival theories of how the Indo-European languages originated and spread. So one of the sort of inherent problems that you might think about with the step hypothesis is that 5,000 years ago the farmers had already come into Europe.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Patriarchally, in the sense that men ruled the hierarchies. And the language, for example, the reconstructed language has many words for a woman's in-laws, but none for a man's in-laws, which you would expect in a patriarchal society because she moves to live with her husband and his family. So in these sorts of ways, you can start to piece together that, yes, this was the language spoken by a patriarchy local people, a patriarchal people, and also by a very mobile people, for example. They had words for wealth, but they had many words for theft, for retribution, for blood price. And we know that nomadic people tend to be more violent. Ethnographers give us that kind of information from the modern world than more sedentary peoples because their wealth is mobile. So these are all ways in which the archaeology and the linguistics”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, in a way this is one of the areas where the archaeology and the language, the historical linguist dovetail, if you like. I'll give you an example. One thing we know about the Yamnaya and their descendant cultures is that they were patriocal, patriarchal, patrilocal, meaning that women moved into their husbands, homes and families.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That has worked at some extent to our advantage in the sense that ancient DNA has a very distinctive profile because of the time that it's been around. And so that profile allowed the geneticists to separate it out from modern DNA and solve the problem of contamination and that begin to understand, begin to read those ancient DNA profiles and therefore track people through space. If you think about it, you can now excavate a burial mound or a burial in one place, a burial mound in another, and you can begin to ask if those people are related, if so, how closely related, did they share diseases, what did they look like. You can start, you basically open up a whole world of information that wasn't accessible to us before.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so up until about 20 years ago, the study of genetics had already been applied to the study of prehistory, but the way that it was done was that people were looking at the genetics of modern populations. And then, if you like, extrapolating back to say, to see what kind of mixings and movements had happened in the past to bring about that modern composition. What's happened in the last 20 years that's been so revolutionary and transformational is that the scientists have worked out how to extract ancient DNA from ancient bones and to read it. And for a long time, that was, it was thought that that wouldn't be possible. Contamination was a major problem. Also the fact that ancient DNA, I mean, DNA degrades over time, so often ancient DNAs and pretty lamentable state and unreadable.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those prehistoric people through space with the idea that they also carried their languages with them, then you can begin to trace the diaspora of languages that were never written down. And there's some evidence to think that that's a reasonable way to proceed because we know that From other stories where the splits in family trees, if you like, of the way that languages have evolved and split from each other over time, very often maps quite closely onto what is known about prehistoric migration routes. So it's not an idea without foundation. And we're using that as the guiding principle in this story.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there is one sort of very important idea that hovers behind all of this, which is that in prehistory, before states, before writing, the main or a major, if not the main motor of language change is migration. That is, people move. Sometimes they move very long distances. They carry their languages with them at least to begin with. Because the original set of dialects of a language is separated by this process and because the traveling dialects become in contact with new ones, these effects cause the languages to the original languages to spin away from each other and to change and to become hybrids and to evolve as languages always do. So that idea that migration is the main motor here is key to what I mean to say next, which is that then if you can follow”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Until basically, the ancient DNA revolution happened in the last sort of 20 years or so and tipped the balance of probabilities strongly in favor of the step hypothesis. So that's very much the one that is favored now. The other hasn't died completely and may never in this very uncertain story, but the step hypothesis is very much the leader now for where the parent of all living Indo-European languages comes from that there is an earlier stage of the story which complicates matters but maybe we won't go into that now.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The alternative theory was the one known as that Anatolian hypothesis, and that essentially pulls the origins of the Indo-European languages several thousand years earlier and places them in Anatolia, modern Turkey at the time of the Neolithic Revolution. That is the invention of farming. So the idea is that it was the farmers of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent who spoke the Proto-Indo-Indo-European language. And when they become numerous because farming can support larger populations than hunter gathering, they then spread out to find more land and they carry their languages with them and they go west into Europe and East into Asia. And that would have been starting from about 8,000 years ago. So much earlier than the 5,000 year starting point that the step hypothesis postulates. Both of them seemed plausible and both of them had strengths and weaknesses. Both were still on the table.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I suppose coming into this twenty first century there were two main theories of where the Indo-European languages originated and how they spread around the world that were sort of still on the table. Other ones had kind of fallen by the wayside. The first is the step hypothesis, which is that these people, the Yamnaya and their descendants came from the step west into Europe, east into Asia, and carried their languages with them and sort of imposed the Indo-European languages over the area where we first see them when writing comes in.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“mobile, we think that they were pastoralists, herders, and all of this is to some extent reflected in their language, but we also have archaeological traces of people like that who live at roughly the right time, who are inventing this lifestyle in the Eurasian steppe about 5,000 years ago or a little before, and who from there we can then trace with the help of geneticists in a massive diaspora them and their descendants going to the four corners of the Eurasian landmass and at least to begin with carrying their languages with them.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Before written records, you go and talk to the archaeologists and you say, do you know of any people living at that time whose world fits with the one reflected in this language? And that's why I talk about a detective story. It's a cross-referencing. It's a sort of what can you tell us about a people who might have spoken this language? Where does it fit? What does this whose world does this best reflect? through this very indirect exercise and very interdisciplinary exercise, the archaeologists and the linguists who were working together long before the geneticist came in have traced these people to the vicinity of the Black Sea. So right at the border if you like of Europe and Asia, right in the middle of the Eurasian landmass. And I can tell you about those people. We think that they were nomadic. We think that they were very, very...”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, linguists can begin to reconstruct that ancestral language by comparing the descendants. And since words in the descendants are related, and since the languages evolve according to various known rules because of the mechanics of the vocal tract and the sounds that we can make, they can track that divergence backwards and begin to know some things about what that ancestral language sounded like and the words that it contained. Then they can begin to think, what does that language tell us about the world in which it was spoken? Because, for example, the vocabulary that we all use reflects to some extent our culture, the world that we inhabit. We speak about things that are important to us. So you can actually amazingly glean some things about the world in which that language was spoken from the reconstructions. And then, since we're talking about prehistory, since we're talking about a time...”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, first of all, perhaps I should say that, because how could we possibly know where these languages came about when they weren't written down? The way we get at that answer is by looking, if you like, at the very first written traces of these languages. So the oldest sort of texts of any substantial length in Indo-European language are in Sanskrit, the Rigveda, the very first Indian and Hindu scripture, religious text, and Greek texts. They date to about 1400 BC, so about 3400 years ago. But there are older Indo-European texts, and those are Hittite. They're in a language that was spoken in what is now Turkey and that went extinct more than 3,000 years ago. But we have written traces of those languages. Those are very much The oldest written traces, but we can already see from those that these languages are related.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So proto meaning first or parental, if you like, the parent language, Indo-European because the members of the family are spoken or were originally spoken even in the ancient world from the Indian subcontinent to Europe. So the sort of first realization that there was this family of language that it existed the realization came about slowly. People realized that there were links between the Italic languages, the offspring of Latin, the Celtic languages, the Germanic languages. And then they realized even more extraordinarily that there were links between Latin and Sanskrit and Greek and Sanskrit. So gradually kind of awareness of the extent of this family and the geographical range over which this family of languages was spoken extended, hence the name Indo-European because it's spoken as I write in the book from the Himalaya to the Scottish Isles.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spoke those languages today. But if you think about the fact that just for a tiny bit of background, Homo sapiens, our species, has been around for 300,000 years. The current thinking is that we've been speaking all that time. That would be the consensus on the history of language. So I'm talking about the last 10,000 years of that. That's roughly the period in which these languages arose. And writing is about 5,000 years old. So roughly half the story of these languages that I'm concerned with predates writing. So we only begin to see them about halfway through their story. And that's why we need other sciences, including archaeology and genetic stuff to try and help us piece together that story.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you talk to a lot of linguists, historical linguists to be precise and archaeologists and geneticists. And you try to understand what's happening in terms of reconstructing the languages that we're interested in, the prehistoric languages from their living descendants. And then it's a question of trying to piece together the story. It's really, I think what I tell in this book is really a detective story because the central goal is something really quite, I mean, if I put it this way, you'll understand how difficult it is. We're trying to reconstruct a language that has been dead for thousands of years and was never written down. And we're trying to understand who spoke that language, where they were and how come it spread from where they were to the rest of the world and to the huge numbers of people.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the beginning of the story of these languages is in prehistory, that is before the beginning of written records. So we have to have other ways getting what was happening in the world when those people were speaking these tongues.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, Indo-European languages are, as you say, one of the largest, they are the largest language family in the world. They're spoken as a first language by nearly half of humanity. There are 400 of them roughly spoken today, languages and dialects, and they include things like English, Spanish, Hindi, Russian, and many, many others. And so question number one is why so successful? Why spoken by so many of us? That's always fascinated me. But then the story of those languages has really been rewritten, overhauled in the last sort of decade or so with the advent of a new science in the form of ancient DNA, genetics, paleogenetics, which has essentially, and we can go into this if you're interested, because it is a large part of the story, but it essentially allows us to trace prehistoric migration.”
2025-04-21 · Intelligence Squared · Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, with Laura Spinney · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT