Everything that is invented or discovered, needs a name. Otherwise what will people call it? And as people travel, the words they use travel too. This is how language spreads. And the language that spread from a handful of people at first, to billions by usage, is \u2018Proto-Indo-European.\u2019<\/p>\n
\nAuthor Laura Spinney has written a book called \u2018Proto\u2019 to trace this. This is not her first book; she has two novels, ‘The Doctor’ and ‘The Quick\u2019, and a collection of oral history entitled \u2018Rue Centrale,\u2019 research papers and translations to her credit. <\/p>\n
\nIn a conversation with Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta, Spinney talks about her work and passions.<\/p>\n
\nYou say that language is \u201chumanity\u2019s oldest tool. \u201cI couldn’t agree more. Your trigger for the book seems to be science – DNA extraction and analysis – or paleogenetics. How challenging has it been for you to maintain a multidisciplinary balance while tracing linguistic development?<\/p>\n
\nIt\u2019s a book about language, as you say, but the language in question predated the invention of writing, meaning that it can only be studied indirectly because there are no texts preserving it. Since language is a means by which we convey ideas and knowledge, the story leans heavily on archaeology \u2013 another way of tracking ideas and knowledge, through material culture. But it also draws on genetics, because very often it is people who carry languages far and wide, causing them to change in the process. My task was to weave a tale out of linguistics, archaeology and genetics, always remembering that my subject was language and therefore linguistics had to lead the way.<\/p>\n
\nLanguage is political. It is tied to identity. The Indo-European story has been used and abused, you say. Was correcting the narrative, one of your goals with the book?<\/p>\n
\nLanguage is political by definition. A language is a dialect with an army and a navy, as someone witty once said. I\u2019m not sure it is for me to correct the narrative \u2013 or frankly, that anyone would listen if I did \u2013 but I did want to show that there was a long history of people distorting the Indo-European story for their own political ends, and that it\u2019s still happening today. There is much uncertainty in that story, but if a politician is saying \u201cx is true\u201d and the scientists are saying \u201cwe can\u2019t possibly know if x is true,\u201d then you have a problem. You need to be wary.<\/p>\n
\nYour book is authoritative. Thankfully so, because you’re clearly concerned about misrepresentation and keep linguistics in the forefront. What were the gaps that bothered you the most, when you went about writing this?<\/p>\n
\nThere are so many gaps! I\u2019m not sure that any of them bothered me, as such, since that is the nature of the beast. If you are discussing a time before writing, then by definition you are not engaged in the same task as a historian \u2013 you have other sources at your disposal, which allow you to say or not to say different kinds of things. Without writing, for example, there\u2019s very little you can say about character. There were times when I would have loved to know what a prehistoric person was like, or what they thought, but that information was definitively beyond my reach.<\/p>\n
\nHave readers written to you with their views? For eg; you speak of Dante’s work, ‘The Divine Comedy’ being written in the Italian Vernacular as ‘hastening’ the death of Latin. But would you agree that the fall of the Roman empire and the inhabitants abandoning the cities and towns, moving to the countryside, was an important a reason for this? In terms of timelines, this was so much earlier than Dante. Was Dante’s choice also a ‘consequence’ and not only a cause’? <\/p>\n
\nYes readers have written to me with their views, which is great \u2013 especially when this is a story with so many unknowns and with such a strong political dimension. On Dante, the fragmentation of Latin began even before the fall of the western Roman Empire, since the dialects spoken across that empire would have diverged as it expanded. The \u201cfall\u201d, though hard to pinpoint in time, would have accelerated that process, and so \u2013 in a different way \u2013 would Dante\u2019s spectacular showcasing of his Tuscan dialect. As I wrote, Latin had already been shuttered into places of learning by then. It takes many blows to kill a language.<\/p>\n
\nI was pleasantly surprised to catch Nick Patterson, a mathematician with a yen for computational genomics, in the book. Laura has gone far out, while integrating voices that matter. Which is why she says, \u201cperhaps the subjects choose me. I go where the inspiration takes me!\u201d<\/p>\n