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Comment by h4zel | Hacker News Reader

PIE is fascinating. I desperately wish we knew more about that culture

I read a book called The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by David W. Anthony after watching Simon Roper videos with great interest for the last couple of years.

I can definitely recommend that if you're interested in the topic. A pretty detailed exploration of the Kurgan Hypothesis.

This book is currently free on audible

IMO we know too much (though obviously still too little) about PIE and not enough about non-PIE languages, and I find those much more interesting.

Yes, though it makes sense as majority of Europe and Europe-descended cultures are Indo-Europeans, with Indians and Iranians as the other major cultures.

We know much about Proto-Semitic AND Proto-Afro-Asiatic, thankfully, due to the antiquity of recorded Semitic languages in the Near East. Proto-Austronesian seems to be clear too with the 600+ languages we have access to. Unfortunately the languages between the three (Caucasians, language isolates, Tibeto-Burman, Andamanese, Turko-Mongol-Yeniseian Altaic* sprachbund etc) are much more obscure.

Yeniseian (the originator of such words as Tengri, Kha(g)an, etc) being connected to Native American Apache language was pretty amazing and evidence of the importance of paleo-linguistics in finding out informations about our ancestors

> Yeniseian (the originator of such words as Tengri, Kha(g)an, etc) being connected to Native American Apache language was pretty amazing and evidence of the importance of paleo-linguistics in finding out informations about our ancestors

This is a bit controversial, though. I haven’t read through the original papers, but one person who did so informed me that they found this relationship not very convincing at all. Still, it’s fascinating stuff!

> Yeniseian (the originator of such words as Tengri, Kha(g)an, etc) being connected to Native American Apache language was pretty amazing.

Vajda’s theory is still regarded as very tentative by the community, and even Vajda himself suggests in his most recent book on the subject that work towards proving a connection has barely begun. It is definitely not settled science.

The problem is that there is very little material to work with because all non-PIE languages besides Basque have been lost and what little we have of Tyrsenian (and to an even much lesser Tartessian and some others) is really insufficient to make any substantial claims about their origins or shared features.

> all non-PIE languages besides Basque have been lost Do you mean non-PIE European languages?

Yes of course (I would generally expect most European linguists and anthropologists to be more interested in studying European languages due to obvious reasons).

Thanks. I asked because this is a topic that interests me that I don't know a lot about. I wasn't sure whether there was a theory that (almost) everything is PIE or whether there was an Asian component to your comment or something else that was in my unknown unknowns.

Dravidian languages are extremely not lost.

I'm aware that an overwhelming majority of the global population use non IE languages. I just wouldn't expect that most research related to them would be published in English (and even if it was it would probably be much harder to understand for people who only speak English + other IE languages).

This other commenters are just being pedantic and have nothing to add. What you meant was perfectly valid English and there’s no need to explain you meant European languages when discussing European languages.

However I do not believe your comment about the “vast majority” of languages is accurate. I indo-European languages make up about half of all languages on the planet (3.2 billion) and no other language family comes close.

Even in Europe we have Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian as reasonably large non-indoeuropean languages; Maltese as an example of a Semitic EU language, and of course Turkic languages are also right there.

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