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Comment by jdmichal | Hacker News Reader

As others have mentioned, that etymology section is complete bunk. Sanskrit and English words have similarities because they are both Indo-European, and those specific words are descended pretty directly from PIE roots.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/be

PIE *bheue- "to be, exist, grow"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/am

PIE *esmi-, first person singular form of root *es- "to be"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/was

PIE *wes- (3) "remain, abide, live, dwell"

And the merger of all these forms in English from different verbs happened around the 13th century, not because of some pre-linguistic history.

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"It is something of a lovely surprise that the irregular conjugation of our most nondescript verb is thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’ and could only say that something ‘grows’ or that it “breathes.”"

"when man had no independent word for ‘existence’"??? I take it the author has provided evidence for why he thinks proto-Indo-European was the first human language, and that it did not have a word for "existence"?

Somewhere, a linguist is crying.

Why does PIE need to be the first language?

The author is making a point about abstract terms (and thoughts) evolving from earlier, more concrete ones. All he needs of PIE is for it to have preceded english, or more precisely, to have origins from before 2200 BC.

There's pretty clear reconstructions for abstract terms in PIE. And there were certainly copula verbs to indicate existence. PIE was not cavemen grunting. The fact that we can reconstruct it so well from languages spanning two continents indicates it was both stable and well-featured.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_copula

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_vocabulary

Who said it was?

I'm not even sure this question means. My previous post is the counter to the book's author's proposal. PIE had abstract vocabulary and several words for existence, including a pure copula "to be", and words such as "to live" and "to grow / become". Furthermore, the fact that we could even reconstruct these words in PIE indicates they were stabilized well before the various child languages began to develop.

If you're trying to make a different proposal, you need to articulate it instead of just being argumentative.

> thus a record of a time when man had no independent word for ‘existence’

This also seems a bit strange to me. Sanskrit has words for 'existence', in fact more than one, that has nothing to do with 'bhu' (the growth bit).

It's not about sanskrit vs english. It's about early (pre-2200, when the author thinks this cognitive change occurs).

It's an extraordinary claim with zero evidence.

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