Desi Talk

www.desitalk.com – that’s all you need to know 12 BOOKS June 13, 2025 HEALTH Our Languages Have More In Common Than You Might Think Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. By Laura Spinney. Bloomsbury. 352 pp. $29.99 I n ancient India, the most powerful god was known as “sky father,” or in the Sanskrit language, Dyaus pita. Sound it out. Can you see where this is going? In Greece, his equivalent was Zeus pater; in Rome, Jupiter. English speakers have always been used to tracing the etymologies of their words back to the clas- sical languages of Europe, but the suggestion, in the late 18th century, that there were also clear and consistent features in common with languages spoken much far- ther to the east was an astonishing and exhilarating one. If we think of languages as belonging to families, this is like finding out that an acquaintance is really a distant cousin: It points to a shared ancestor, a unity – and a divergence – somewhere in the past. What would it mean for those cultural origin stories – forWhoWe Are – to speak not of European but of Indo-European? “Of what ancient and fantastic encounters were these the fading echoes?” asks Laura Spinney in her latest book, “Proto: How One Ancient LanguageWent Global.” There are about 7,000 languages spoken in the world today; they can be divided into about 140 families. Nev- ertheless, the languages most of us speak belong to just five: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro- Asiatic and Austronesian. And of these, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan (which includes Mandarin) are the biggest. As Spinney notes, “Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European.” Such a large family is, naturally, a diverse one. Among the Indo-European languages are English, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hindi-Urdu and Persian. At the head of the family tree is the postulated language we call Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short. It was spoken – but not written down, as it emerged in the days before writing – some five or six millennia ago, somewhere around the Black Sea. (Exactly where is an open question. We’ll come to that later.) Although we have no documentation of what PIE sounded like, it is possible to triangulate backward using the languages we do know. Over time, the way we speak – the set of sounds we use – gradually changes. This is not a chaotic, willy-nilly drift; rather, the shifts obey a set of general rules. To give you an example, compare the group of words where Latin has a p sound but the English equiv- alent has f: pater/father; pisces/fish, and so on. We can posit, then, that at an early point in their development, Germanic languages went down an f path from their PIE root, while other languages stayed with p. Using these sound-change rules to identify ancestral similarities among languages, we can reconstruct a cor- pus of about 1,600 PIE words, including (with apologies for the somewhat rebarbative notation) family relations like *méhtr and *bréhtr and numbers like *duó-, *tréy. If you were living on the eastern fringes of Europe some five millennia ago, you might stay around your *domo and drink some *hmel or maybe ride out on your *éwos to lie under the night sky and fix your eye on a *hster. So this is the original material. But how, to use Spin- ney’s subtitle, did this ancient language go global? Most of “Proto” is spent picking through the genetic and archaeo- logical evidence to explain how PIE, or its descendants, came to be spoken from Galway to Kolkata. Whatever its contested origins, by the third millen- nium B.C., PIE was being spoken in the Pontic steppe, the region of grasslands to the north of the Black Sea, by a culture known as the Yamnaya, who were nomadic and had ox-drawn wagons as well as, probably, domesticated horses. It was the Yamnaya – whose migration routes were studded with large burial mounds, still discern- ible, that they built into the landscape – who carried the language deep into Asia. Later branches of the tree, each with its own history, include the Baltic and Slavic lan- guages, not to mention Tocharian, Albanian, Armenian, Greek, Celtic, Germanic and Indo-Iranian. “Proto,” it has to be said, is a dense read. Spinney’s ap- proach is a thorough one, so that the chapters tack back and forth in time as we follow each of these branches in turn. It is easy to lose sight of the timeline while concen- trating on the differences between Hittites, Hattians and Hurrians, between Lydians and Luwians. Spinney’s back- ground is as a science journalist, and it shows in the way she has assimilated a vast amount of up-to-date scholarly information and presented it concisely and accurately. Nevertheless, this is still a knotty story. Spinney leavens the history lesson with sections deal- ing with the present: pen portraits of academics she has interviewed in the archaeological trenches of Ukraine and Russia as well as on the more rarefied battlefields of international academic conferences. As an observer rath- er than a participant, Spinney is comfortable laying out different sides of some of the ongoing debates, the big- gest of all being where exactly the ancestral language was first spoken. Did PIE arise in Anatolia (roughly modern- day Turkey) before spreading first west into Europe along with farming and then east again with the Yamnaya? Or did it originate in the steppe, borne west by marauding nomads who replaced the populations they drove out? Or – the latest linguistic hypothesis – were these Anato- lian and steppe languages both offspring of an even older ancestor spoken in the northern Caucasus (now southern Russia) some 6,000 years ago? “Proto” is an impressive piece of work – hard but ulti- mately rewarding. And if the debates Spinney has delved into are still far from being resolved, time at least is an abundant resource. One Bulgarian archaeologist who spoke to Spinney addresses the ebb and flow of academic funding with an admirable lack of ego: “These people have lain in the ground for thousands of years. Who cares if it’s me or someone else who digs them up.” Dennis Duncan teaches English literature at University College London and is the author of “Index, A History of the.” -Special to TheWashington Post By Dennis Duncan Photo:BloomsburyviaTheWashington Post Mothers Report Worse Mental Health In New Report M ore American mothers re- ported worse mental health in 2023 than in 2016 in a national survey, though many said they were in good health, according to a study in JAMA Internal Medicine. Using data from the National Survey of Children’s Health, researchers analyzed self-reported mental health ratings from some 198,000 mothers with children age 17 and younger. In 2023, 26 percent of the mothers who responded said their men- tal health was “excellent,” compared with 38 percent of mothers in 2016. While 19 percent of mothers reported good mental health in 2016, some 26 percent said the same in 2023. During the same period, fair or poor mental health ratings rose from 5.5 per- cent to 8.5 percent. The self-reported decline in mental health occurred across all sociodemo- graphic groups. However, self-reported mental health status was significantly lower among mothers who were born in the United States, single, less educated or whose children were publicly insured or uninsured. Poor parental mental health can have intergenerational consequences, includ- ing increased risks for adverse birth outcomes and developmental delays in children, according to the study. “Maternal mood disorders, in particu- lar, can have long-term effects on chil- dren, directly by affecting development, and indirectly, by increasing the chance of exposure to co-occurring risks such as parental substance use and lower house- hold resources,” Jamie Daw, one of the study’s authors, said in a press release. “Our results highlight the rising tide of worsening mental health among parent- ing women as a key target for efforts to improve maternal and child health in the U.S.,” added Daw, who is an assistant professor of health policy and manage- ment at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health. - - - This article is part of The Post’s “Big Number” series, which takes a brief look at the statistical aspect of health issues. -Special to TheWashington Post By Hannah Docter-Loeb