The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

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the book's enduring value will be its rich and vivid synthesis of an extremely complex corpus of archaeological data from Neolithic times through the Bronze Age, stretching from the Balkans to Central Asia. Anthony writes extremely well and masterfully describes material culture remains, teasing out incredible amounts of information on the nature and scale of subsistence activities, social structure, and even ritual practices. Some, like Jamaican are almost entirely loan words. Jamaican is not a dialect or creole, it is a proper language with its grammar, but other than linguistics everyone, Jamaicans included think it is a bit of a low-class, uneducated dialect of English.. Some countries, like France, have committees to keep (English) loan-words out and have even criminalised the use of some in signs and journalism, no 'computer' 'weekend', 'hamburger' or 'smartphone' for them, but they can't keep them out of speech. Most countries accept the use of loan words. We use (from the French, just for an example) liquor, attorney, beef, abbey, television, army, saxophone and many more. Cutlurally, it is a good explanation of the spread of a language, or languages, but there still has to be an origin, nothing starts from nothing. Neither woven wool textiles nor wheeled vehicles existed before about 4000 BCE. It is possible that neither existed before about 3500 BCE. Yet Proto-Indo-European speakers spoke regularly about wheeled vehicles and some sort of wool textile. This vocabulary suggests that Proto-Indo-European was spoken after 4000–3500 BCE. [8] Chapter Six: The Archaeology of Language [ edit ]

David Anthony's book is a masterpiece. A professor of anthropology, Anthony brings together archaeology, linguistics, and rare knowledge of Russian scholarship and the history of climate change to recast our understanding of the formation of early human society. ---Martin Walker, Wilson QuarterlyThe Horse, the Wheel, and Language brings together the work of historical linguists and archaeologists, researchers who have traditionally been suspicious of each other's methods. Though parts of the book will be penetrable only by scholars, it lays out in intricate detail the complicated genealogy of history's most successful language. ---Christine Kenneally, International Herald Tribune In its integration of language and archaeology, this book represents an outstanding synthesis of what today can be known with some certainty about the origin and early history of the Indo-European languages. In my view, it supersedes all previous attempts on the subject." ---Kristian Kristiansen, Antiquity There's a bit at the beginning about how language can spread due to prestige rather than through conquest. If neighboring cultures perceive that speakers of another language have higher status, they'll encourage their children to be bilingual, and eventually the original language will be lost. This might be part of how Proto-Indo-European spread, coupled with gaining tribe members from agricultural societies, because a mobile herd is easier to defend than stationary agricultural land.

Kenneally, Christine (2 March 2008). "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language – David W. Anthony – Book Review". The New York Times . Retrieved 16 January 2017. The main ideas of this book are a reconstruction of a dead language and how that is possible (in this case Proto-Indo-European) and dating it. The reconstruction of the lives and migrations of the Proto-Indo-Europeans including their possible homeland. I was very impressed by THE HORSE, THE WHEEL AND LANGUAGE. My complaint are mainly limited to presentation. There are quite a few typos. Anthony also uses reconstructions of roots from the whole span of PIE studies, from Brugmann's early system to the latest laryngeal-filled forms. Still, these mistakes and inconsistencies do not affect his main thesis, are mere annoyances. The other infelicity is that he seems to accept Dumezil's theory of societal organization (among other PIE world and myth reconstructions) uncritically and does not even explain exactly what these ideas are to a general audience. Other parts of the book were literally mind-blowing, and actually changed my life. Seriously, I would never in a million years have guessed how much grammar shapes our world view and our perspectives on life. It was riveting to read about how this Indo-European culture has been fixed in time by using clues from the language. Anthony analyzes the rate of change in vocabulary and dates words for "horse", "wheel", and textiles, and then examines the archaeological evidence for when those things entered the region or were invented: There is extensive analysis of when horses were first domesticated and used for food, riding, and pulling wagons and chariots; of the archaeological origins of wheeled vehicles; and of the origin of weaving and other textile crafts. The other mind-blowing thing I learned from this book is that the East Slavic term for a burial mound is a kurgan...am I the only one delighted by the fact that if you google "Kurgan", the Highlander character comes up as one of the first results???Apparently horses were originally domesticated not for riding or as beasts of burden, as one might expect from their uses in the modern day, but for meat! There are a lot of examples of wild horse bones found in middens of early steppe settlements or nomad camps, in some cases more than 60% of animal bones, and at least one subspecies of steppe horse was hunted to extinction. Even after domestication, horses formed the bulk of the meat diet for millennia as well as being frequently used for sacrificial feasts. The obvious success of PIE-speaking cultures made their dialects prestigious and worth knowing, dominating and eventually driving non-PIE languages to extinction in most areas Indo-Europeans reached. In addition, PIE cultures appear to have been very inclusive, basing identification on language and ritual rather than race and ethnicity, which also helped facilitate their spread. This tradition was long lived: Rome's success two thousand years later owed much to her ability to accomodate foreign elites and co-opt them into the ruling hierarchy. When the climate changed between 3500 and 3000 BCE, with the steppes becoming drier and cooler, those inventions led to a new way of life in which mobile herders moved into the steppes, developing a new kind of social organisation with patron-client and host-guest relationships. That new social organisation, with its related Indo-European languages, spread throughout Europe, Central Asia and South Asia because of its ability to include new members within its social structures.