Posted by Victor Mair

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"Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like" | Open Culture (10/14/25)

With two audio recordings.  If you want to hear them, click on the link embedded on the title.

…since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.

The observation that Sanskrit and ancient European languages like Greek and Latin have significant similarities was first recorded by a Jesuit missionary to Goa, Thomas Stephens, in the sixteenth century, but little was made of it until around 100 years later. A great leap forward came in the mid-nineteenth century when German linguist August Schleicher, under the influence of Hegel, published his Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages. There, Schleicher made an extensive attempt at reconstructing the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, “Proto-Indo-European,” or PIE, for short, thought to have originated somewhere in Eastern Europe, though this supposition is speculative.

To provide an example of what the language might have been like, Schleicher made up a fable called “The Sheep and the Horses” as a “sonic experiment.” The story has been used ever since, “periodically updated,” writes Eric Powell at Archaeology, “to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago.” Having no access to any texts written in Proto-Indo-European (which may or may not have existed) nor, of course, to any speakers of the language, linguists disagree a good deal on what it should sound like; “no single version can be considered definitive.”

And yet, since Schleicher’s time, the theory has been considerably refined. At the top of the post, you can hear one such refinement based on work by UCLA professor H. Craig Melchert and read by linguist Andrew Byrd. See a translation of Schleicher’s story, “The Sheep and the Horses” below:

    A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.

Byrd also reads another story in hypothetical Proto-Indo-European, “The King and the God,” using “pronunciation informed by the latest insights into PIE.”

See Powell’s article at Archaeology for the written transcriptions of both Schleicher’s and Melchert/Byrd’s versions of PIE, and see his article here to learn about the archeological evidence for the Bronze Age speakers of this theoretical linguistic common ancestor.  

For more on Schleicher's Sheep, see also J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2000), pp. 222-223:  Schleicher's original version of 1868, Adams' new version of 1997 (with laryngeals), and our translation.

Selected readings

• "Andrew Byrd reading Schleicher's Fable" (9/23/13) — today's post is an updating, based on recent phonological research, of this post from a dozen years ago
• "Tocharian love poem" (4/1/20) — with lengthy bibliography

[h.t. Ted McClure]

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Posted by Victor Mair

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I could write an entire post about this euphemistic French oath (lit., "sacred blue"), but I leave it to LL readers to figure out how it fits in to what follows.  Nowadays it is used more in English than in French.  (Wiktionary; Wikipedia)

Italian blasphemy and German ingenuity: how swear words differ around the world
Once dismissed as a sign of low intelligence, researchers now argue the ‘power’ of taboo words has been overlooked 
Ashifa Kassam, The Guardian (10/19/25)

The number and nature of swear words in different cultures reveals a lot about the predispositions of the people who speak the languages of those societies.

When researchers asked people around the world to list every taboo word they could think of, the differences that emerged were revealing. The length of each list, for example, varied widely.

While native English speakers in the UK and Spanish speakers in Spain rattled off an average of 16 words, Germans more than tripled this with an average of 53 words ranging from intelligenzallergiker, a person allergic to intelligence, to hodenkobold, or “testicle goblin”, someone who is being annoying.

The results, researchers say, hint at how the overlooked field of social faux pas – whether it be swearing, insults or other off-limit language – can help us better understand the values, boundaries and shifting norms that shape different cultures.

“These words can be more offensive, or less, they can be loaded with negativity or with irony,” said Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive scientist and professor at Madrid’s Nebrija University. “But taken together, they offer small snapshots of the realities of each culture.”

One thing that needs to be considered in a study of slang in various cultures is that individual members of these cultures may have widely varying standards of what is beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior for his/her society.  For example, I have a colleague who is fond of hurling the f-bomb, even in faculty meetings, though no one else would dream of doing so.

When it came to the differences between Spanish and German speakers, Andoni Duñabeitia had two theories. German, with its seemingly endless capacity to build new compound words, could simply offer more options, he said. “But it could also be that some people [speaking other languages] just don’t have these words readily available, or it’s harder for them when asked to produce them in a very neutral environment,” he said.

The striking disparity of scatalogical vocabulary usage in various languages contrasts with words that seek to disparage women.  For instance, "bitch", turned up across cultures.  

“I think it comes down to the terribly sexist traditions of many countries,” said Andoni Duñabeitia, who was among the four dozen researchers involved with the 2024 study. “The vocabulary reflects the reality of societies where women have been mistreated, removed from everyday tasks and relegated to the background.”

• "No way to curse in Japanese?" (1/24/17)
• "The paucity of curse words in Japanese" (9/4/14)
• "Sacré bleu! — the synesthesia of Walmart cyan" (10/8/22)

[h.t. François Lang]

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Posted by Victor Mair

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Why Do Japanese Still Use Kanji? Complicated Writing System…

That Japanese Man Yuta was featured in "'Think' in Japanese" (10/13/25) a few days ago, where he raised some serious questions about kanji usage.  One that neither he nor we answered / confronted satisfactorily / adequately is that different "spellings" of homophones (e.g., おもう 思う / 想う) are written with different logographs / morphosyllabographs, not just different letters / phonetic symbols, so by nature they do not merely convey sound, but also, to one degree or another, convey meaning.

In this longer (12:19) video, near the beginning, Yuta emphasizes that katakana and hiragana are purely phonetic syllabaries with which you can write any Japanese word.  He writes some sentences in katakana and hiragana and says — already at 1:52 — that it is hard to read them because they don't have any spaces between words.

Well, instantly at that moment, I thought to myself, "Why not insert the spaces?  Then you wouldn't have to put up with the clumsy, difficult kanji."  (Think what has happened to hangul in recent years. also Vietnamese ["Not using space is uncommon even in instant messaging."])  Instead, Yuta stresses the efficacy of kanji in breaking up the flow of kana only text.

During the remainder of the video, Yuta continues with a fair appraisal of kanji, and points out more of its defects and deficiencies.  He mentions an American Marine Corps Major named John Campbell Pelzel ジョン・キャンベル・ペルゼル (1914-1999) in Japan during the Allied occupation of Japan.  Apparently Pelzel was one of the officers in charge of the kanji eradication campaign 漢字廃止論, but failed.  For more on the Allied effort to abolish kanji, see William C. Hannas, Asia's Orthographic Dilemma, pages 43-47, focusing especially on the work of Major Robert K. Hall.

James Unger:

Here's one of the earliest SPPs:

J. Marshall Unger, "Computers and Japanese Literacy: Nihonzin no Yomikaki Nôryoku to Konpyûta", Sino-Platonic Papers, 6 (January, 1988), 13 pp.

The Japanese romanization matches the English quite nicely.

Yuta even points out that early video games in Japan, which was a pioneer in this field, due to technical limitations, did have kana-only texts, with spaces, and it worked just fine.

In the end, though he recognizes that kanji have many drawbacks, Yuta admits that Japanese are loathe to abandon them because of their ATTACHMENT to these historical-cultural emblems of Japaneseness.  It's like an old couple who may have fought a lot with each other during their long marriage, but they've been through much together, so they'll continue to stick it out.  After all, they LOVE each other.

BTW, don't become too attached to the English subtitles of this video, because many of them are misleading or wrong.  They must have been done by speech recognition and translation technology.  For example, the subtitles often say "country" in English when Yuta says "kanji".

—————–

After I finished writing this post and was searching for "Selected readings", I realized that I had already partially covered it in this earlier post nearly a decade ago:  

"Character amnesia and kanji attachment" (2/24/16)

I've added much more here, and now we also have Julesy's take on the same question from a Chinese point of view.

Selected readings

• "Japanese survey on forgetting how to write kanji" (9/24/12)
• "More katakana, fewer kanji" (4/4/16)
• "Kanji as commodity" (4/30/18)
• "'The insane effort to preserve this ancient script'" (10/7/25) — with a list of other Julesy videos
• "A radical proposal for sinographs" (5/23/25)
• Geoff Pullum, "There Was No Committee", Lingua Franca (4/30/14)
• _________, "The Awful Chinese Writing System", Lingua Franca (1/20/16)

Haun Saussy, "The Prestige of Writing:  文, Letter, Picture, Image, Ideography", Sino-Platonic Papers, 75 (February, 1997), 1-40.  If you've not yet had the pleasure and privilege of reading this pathbreaking, learned article, do it now while its before your fortunate eyes.

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