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Language as a Clue to Prehistory

Like to read this thread.

I'm an interested retired sensory psychophysiologist. Never got past bones in anthropology even though my speciality was human acoustic communication. communication. Many reports in this thread have been pretty speculative, yet, pattern and structure seem to become consistent and reliable over the decades. Congrats to the field.
 
As an example of the linguistic complexity that can be reconstructed in some cases, I note  Proto-Indo-European verbs

I think that a good analog among present-day languages is the verb systems of most Slavic languages. It's not a perfect analogy, and it was heavily reworked from the PIE verb system, so its details are very different.

Here's a demonstration of Russian verb tenses:
Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live
Ленин жил, Ленин живет, Ленин будет жить
Lenin zhil, Lenin zhivet, Lenin budet zhit'

The past tense agrees with the subject in gender and number like an adjective, suggesting that it was once a participle. The future tense is a compound tense, and no compound tense is known to go back to PIE. The personal endings, represented by -et here, also go back to PIE. Even the root, *zhi- goes back to PIE, *gweiH3- with descendants like English quick ("alive" > "lively" > "fast"), Latin vivus "alive" "living", Greek zoon "living thing", bios "life", etc.

I now turn to the aspect system, and Slavic has two aspects: imperfective (ongoing action and similar in the past and future) and perfective (completed action and similar in the future). Slavic had inherited the PIE aspect system, but most of the dialects have partially or completely replaced it with the new Slavic system.

Most verbs have their imperfective form as their primary form, with their perfective form being formed with a variety of prefixes - usually prepositions as verb prefixes (a common feature in the IE languages). Like Russian pisat' / napisat' "to write". Sometimes the perfective form is the primary form, with the imperfective form formed with a suffix. Like Russian davat' / dat' "to give". Sometimes the imperfective and perfective forms are separate word forms, like govorit' / skazat' "to say, speak".

This seems complicated, and one has to learn each form individually.

By comparison, in English, verb tenses have aspect in them, and the compound tenses are formed completely regularly with one small exception (no negative auxiliary for the simple tenses of "to be" - "I am not" rather than "I don't be").
 
Turning to active vs. passive voice vs. reflexive (middle), these refer to the subject doing the verb's action, the subject being the target of the verb's action, and both together.

Slavic reflexive voice is formed with with *se, a PIE pronoun turned into a suffix. It is also used to form the passive voice, this making it a mediopassive voice.

Something similar is found in Spanish where "Se habla español" ("Spanish speaks itself" > "Spanish is spoken") is a mediopassive construction.


Turning to Proto-Indo-European, it also had a mediopassive construction, but with verb suffixes -r and -i. The original one was likely -r, with -i added later. -r is present in Hittite, Tocharian, Latin, and IIRC Old Irish. -i is present in Greek and Sanskrit. I recall from somewhere that Modern Greek is the only present-day Indo-European language to preserve ancestral IE mediopassive endings. It is certainly one of the few to preserve nominative -s, and that may be dropping out in pronunciation. The others are Lithuanian, Latvian, and (modified to -r) Icelandic.


Now to PIE aspects. Three aspects are generally reconstructed as follows. I'll quote the Wikipedia article:
  • Stative verbs depicted a state of being.
  • Eventive verbs expressed events. These could be further divided between:
    • Perfective verbs depicting actions viewed as punctual, an entire process without attention to internal details, completed as a whole or not completed at all. No distinction in tense was made.
    • Imperfective verbs depicting durative, ongoing or repeated action, with attention to internal details. This included the time of speaking; separate endings were used for present or future events in contrast to past events.
This was often reduced to two aspects, imperfective and perfective, in the dialects. Like Germanic simple present and simple past, including in English.

There were a variety of ways of forming aspects from each other, like repeating the initial constant (reduplication), adding an "n" infix, various suffixes, like -s- (the "sigmatic aorist" of ancient Greek), and vowel shifts (ablaut), the latter often occurring with the others. There was also suppletion, like for "to be": imperfective *es- and perfective *bheuH- These survive as English "is" and "be", for instance.

The Germanic languages distinguish strong and weak verbs, the strong ones having inherited ablaut and the weak ones having a Germanic innovation that is -ed in English.
 
There are more Proto-Indo-European verb complexities that have been reconstructed, like participles, verb moods / modes, and derivational suffixes.

 Proto-Indo-European nominals

The PIE language had several noun cases: nominative (subject case), vocative (case of addressing someone, usually the nominative or a shortened version of it), accusative (target of action), dative (receiver of something, to-case), locative (at/in-case), ablative (away from something, from-case), genitive (relationship, of-case), instrumental (what's used for something, with-case).

PIE had three grammatical numbers: single, dual, and plural.

PIE originally had two grammatical genders, common and neuter, something preserved in Hittite. But common gender got split into masculine and feminine, what we see in most of the others of the older and more conservative IE languages.

Nouns could either have their number/case suffixes directly added on, making them root nouns, or a variety of suffixes, both consonants and vowels. Root nouns and some suffixed nouns often had ablaut and accent shifts in them, features that tended to be erased as nouns got forced into more regular paradigms in the dialects.

 Proto-Indo-European pronouns

PIE had personal pronouns only for the first and second persons, using demonstrative pronouns for the third person. It is rather hard to reconstruct the demonstrative ones, since the dialects show great variety. This is likely from formations that are roughly "this here" and "that there". PIE also had a reflexive "self" pronoun, a relative pronoun, and an interrogative/indefinite pronoun (who/what).

 Proto-Indo-European root

PIE roots had a basic structure: consonant-vowel-consonant

There are lots of PIE roots like that, like *sed- "to sit" and *wes- "to clothe" (this root appeared in Latin, and was borrowed in suffixed form as "vestment")

PIE allowed for consonant clusters, with the consonants rising in sonority in an initial cluster and falling in sonority in a final cluster. Only one of each sonority class can appear in each cluster.

From highest to lowest sonority: (r, l, n, y), (m, w), (stops, s, laryngeals: H)

For instance *prews- "freeze" (yes, the English word comes from that PIE root)

Early PIE scholars reconstructed consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant roots. The former always had long vowels, while the latter often had short ones. That is explained by the laryngeal theory, the theory that some PIE consonants later dropped out. They were named after one linguist's theory that they were some throaty sounds found in some languages, but though that theory is nowadays not widely accepted, the name has stuck.

Like *ed- "to eat", nowadays *Hed-, and *dhê- "to put", nowadays *dheH-

There were further restrictions on possible roots, like of what kinds of consonants can coexist in the same root.

 Proto-Indo-European phonology - what I'd discussed earlier in this thread
 Indo-European ablaut - those vowel shifts
 Proto-Indo-European accent - variable position in the word, a position that can often be reconstructed
 Indo-European sound laws - sound correspondences

 Proto-Indo-European language - overview
 
 Proto-Indo-Europeans
 Proto-Indo-European homeland
 Indo-European migrations
 Proto-Indo-European society
 Proto-Indo-European mythology

Some of the best-known Indo-European cognates are words for immediate family members: father, mother, brother, sister, son, daughter -- all these English word forms are descended from PIE. Some branches have replacements, however, like Latin filius/a for son/duaghter, Greek adelphos/ê and Spanish hermano/a for brother/sister, Russian otets for father, ...

Words for more distant relatives may be borrowed, like English uncle, aunt, nephew, niece, cousin from Old French. Spanish tio/a "uncle/aunt" is borrowed from Greek, etc. English grandfather/mother/son/daughter are all from native words prefixed with "grand", borrowed from Old French.

That sort of coinage happens elsewhere. Latin avunculus "maternal uncle (mother's brother)" is a diminutive of avus "grandfather, ancestor", thus meaning "little grandfather". That word's descendants are present-day French oncle and English "uncle", for brothers of both parents. "Uncle" is sometimes used as "respected male elder", as in present-day "Uncle Bernie", "Tío Bernie" (Spanish), and "Amo Bernie" (Arabic).

Such complexities aside, for PIE, it is possible to reconstruct words for a husband's relatives but not for a wife's relatives. This meant that women moved in with their husbands rather than men moving in with their wives or the two founding a new household.

It seems difficult to test this from archeology, but there could be genetic evidence of such marriage practices, like mitochondria being more mobile than Y chromosomes. I recall that that's been found for some central Asians, but I don't recall much more.
 
Kóryos - Wikipedia
The kóryos (Proto-Indo-European: "army, people under arms" or "detachment, war party") refers to the Proto-Indo-European brotherhood of warriors in which unmarried young males served for a number of years before integrating their host society, in the context of a rite of passage into manhood.

Subsequent Indo-European traditions and myths feature parallel linkages between property-less adolescent males, perceived as an age-class not yet fully integrated to the community of the married men; their service in a "police-army" sent away for a part of the year in the wild (where they hunted animals and raided foreign communities) and defending the host society during the remaining part of the year; their mystic self-identification with wolves and dogs as symbols of death, promiscuity, lawlessness, and warrior fury; and the idea of a liminality between invulnerability and death on one side, and youth and adulthood on the other side.
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Sort of like a street gang supervised by elders. Their idea of military discipline was apparently to work oneself up into a frenzy and then to charge one's targets. That's where the word "berserk" comes from -  Berserker

Armies in well-defined formations were a later invention.

There is archeological evidence for this tradition:
At Krasnosamarskoe (Volga steppes) were found 51 dogs and 7 wolves sacrificed and consumed in what could have been a winter-season rite of passage into a status represented metaphorically by the animals.[68] The site is associated with the Srubnaya culture (1900–1700 BC), generally regarded as proto-Iranian, and possibly made up of archaic Iranian speakers.[69]

Krasnosamarskoe appears to have been a place where people from around the region came to periodically engage in transgressive initiation rituals conducted in the winter and requiring dog and wolf sacrifice.[70] According to Anthony and Brown, "it was a place of inversion, as is the eating of wolves, animal symbolic of anti-culture (a murderer 'has become like a wolf' in Hittite law; 'wolf' was used to refer to brigands and outlaws, people who stand outside the law, in many other Indo-European languages)."[70] The dogs found on the site seem to have been well-treated during their lifetime, and they were probably familiar pets.[71]

The ritual was centred on dog sacrifice in a region and time period when dogs were not normally eaten.[68] Cattle and sheep were indeed consumed throughout the year on the site, whereas dogs were killed almost exclusively in the winter in a regular inversion of normal dietary customs.[72]
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The article on PIE society mentions several features of PIE social organization -- though PIE society had social hierarchy, it did not have much state-level organization -- mostly local chieftains.

Georges Dumézil famously proposed his  Trifunctional hypothesis of PIE society, an ideology of three divisions:
  • Sovereignty
  • Military
  • Productivity

PIE society did not have writing, and words in the dialects are separate coinages. Instead,
Poetry and songs were central to Proto-Indo-European society.[80][81] The poet-singer was the society's highest-paid professional, possibly a member of a hereditary profession that ran in certain families, the art passing from father to son as the poet had to acquire all the technical aspects of the art and master an extensive body of traditional subject matter.[82][83] He performed against handsome rewards—like gifts of horses, cattle, wagons and women—and was held in high esteem. In some cases, the poet-singer had a stable relationship with a particular noble prince or family. In other cases, he travelled about with his dependants, attaching himself to one court after another.[83]
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Rhythmic poetry is very good for remembering things, because the poetic rhythm helps jog one's memory. PIE poetry is inferred as using many stock phrases like "undying fame" and "swift horses" and the like, something that one can see in the works of Homer.

Nearly 2400 years ago, Plato toward the end of his dialogue "Phaedrus" describes someone objecting to writing as making people's memory atrophy, and that's what it might have seemed like to such people. But that's the main literary evidence of objection to writing that's known to me, and there is a certain problem with its preservation: it would have to be preserved by people who thought that writing is very worth doing. That seems like a big barrier to the preservation of such evidence, I'm sure.
 
We are able to reconstruct a sizable amount of PIE mythology.

There aren't many deity names that can be reconstructed. Mainly "Father Sky" *dyeus pHter

There is also a goddess of the dawn, *ausos "Dawn", and the Sun and the Moon were also deities. But for the most part, deities were known by a variety of names. They include some horse-riding twins, an Earth goddess, a weather god, a fire god, water deities, wind deities, fate goddesses, a smith god, etc.

 Indo-European cosmogony

PIE cosmology pictured the Earth as flat with a river running around it. Above it was the sky, the realm of the immortal gods. The stars didn't have any special significance, however. Below it was the realm of the dead, which one reaches by crossing a river in a boat. This realm is guarded by a multi-headed dog. Like Greek Hades, with Charon as the ferryman across the river Styx, and guarded by the three-headed dog Cerberus, whose name means "spotted".

How the Universe was created is rather murky, but a part of it likely went something like this:

There were once two brothers, Man *manus and Twin *yemos. Man sacrificed Twin, cut up Twin, and created the familiar Universe from Twin's body parts.

There is also an account of the weather god fighting a multiheaded snake monster who holds back water -- the oldest known dragon-slayer story, I think. The weather god or storm god likes to wield a cudgel or an ax - Thor's Hammer.

There are accounts of cattle raiding, with that action justified as getting back cattle that one rightfully owns. Seems rather self-serving, I must say.
 
lpetrich said:
Rhythmic poetry is very good for remembering things, because the poetic rhythm helps jog one's memory. PIE poetry is inferred as using many stock phrases like "undying fame" and "swift horses" and the like, something that one can see in the works of Homer.

Nearly 2400 years ago, Plato toward the end of his dialogue "Phaedrus" describes someone objecting to writing as making people's memory atrophy, and that's what it might have seemed like to such people....
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Lynne Kelly's controversial work on systems for memorization — which had crucial value for pre-literate cultures — has changed the views of many archaeologists. Poetry or music is one type of memory aid; and so are the "memory boards" used by present-day low-literacy cultures. 952ac0084975c69a821501e17c2ec1250afd2a81.jpg. The purpose of monuments like Stonehenge is being reconsidered based on Kelly's work.

Taboos against unsanctioned recitation of memory songs were common, not just to give the memorizers job security, but to prevent mutations to the memory song.

--------------------

There is much evidence connecting the early religions of the Ino-European people. Other god-name cognates likely include Norse Fjörgyn with Indic Parjanyas, Baltic Perkunas. Spectacular similarities arise when the elaborate horse-sacrifice rituals of, say, Hindus and Irish are compared. (In one tradition the Queen mates with a stallion after he is slaughtered.) Some think the name of the Hindu ritual asvamedha ('horse-drunk') is cognate to the Irish royal name Epomeduos. Googling these two names together gets Google hits.

(On the topic of Norse myth, some speculate that some myths map to historic events, e.g. the arrival of remnants of a Hunnic army in Scandinavia. But this topic needs a different thread.)
 
Interesting about "memory boards". Like making pictures or diagrams or maps.


I find it remarkable how much can be reconstructed about the society of the Proto-Indo-European speakers, not just from linguistic evidence, but also from the societies of the earliest speakers of the IE dialects. Like those horse-sacrifice rituals. This may be connected with Hittite laws on bestiality. Apparently OK to have sex with a horse but not with a cow.

This extends to people's names. Individual PIE names may be difficult to reconstruct but their formation is very evident: two-word compounds. Greek names included many <something>-horse names, and Germanic names include many <something>-wolf names.

Some name features, however, were likely innovations in the dialects. Like ancient Roman ordinal-number names like Quintus "fifth". That may originally have meant the fifth to have some name in some family name, like Lucius Cornelius Quintus, the fifth with the name Lucius Cornelius (hypothetical example). But it became used a lot in its own right, giving rise to family names like Quinitilis and Quintilianus (Latin family names sometimes acquired multiple derivational suffixes, like Valentinianus -- Valens -inus -ius -anus).

This feature was shared with neighboring Oscan speakers, where the word for "fifth" was pompo (sound correspondence: Latin qu ~ Oscan p). That got into names like Pomponius, Pompilius, and likely also Pompeius.

Although PIE had rather complicated inflections, it must be noted that many of its dialects have inflections that cannot be reasonably traced to it.

Like the Latin future participles. Like futûrus, "(what) is to be", which got borrowed as English "future". Also the name Amanda, "(someone) to be loved".

As to invention of complexities, the Latin future tense is not originally PIE, as far as anyone can tell, and the Romance languages have different future-tense formations, with the Continental Western ones having (infinitive) + "have", and Romanian having "wish/want" + (verb stem), like the English future-tense formation.
 
I note that the Latin present tense carries over the PIE imperfective aspect and the Latin perfect tense the PIE perfective and stative aspects. The Latin -âre, -êre, and -îre conjugations form the perfect tense as -âvi, -ui, -îvi, while the (short-e) -ere conjugation carries over a lot of PIE forms, like perfective -s- ("sigmatic aorist") and stative reduplication (repeating initial consonant).

Latin -v- perfects, possibly from PIE -wos active past participle
amâre amô, amât amâvi "to love"
habêre habeô habet habuî "to have" *gheH1bh-
finîre finiô finit finivî "to finish"

Latin -s- perfects, from PIE -s- perfectives
scrîbere scrîbô scrîbit scrîpsî "to write" PIE *(s)kreybh- "to scratch, tear"

Latin reduplicated perfects, from PIE reduplicated statives
caedere caedô caedit cecidî "to cut down, hew" PIE *kH2eyd-

Latin nasal infix, from PIE nasal-infix imperfectives
frangere frangô frangit frêgî "to break" PIE *bhreg- (the English and Latin words are IE cognates)

Latin suppletives (different word forms), from PIE suppletives
esse sum est fuî "to be" PIE *H1es-, *bhuH- (English "am, is, be")

I note that the passive past participle of caedo is caesus, and that an agent noun is caesar ("cutter") -- it's in Julius Caesar's name, and also in the name of Caesarean section -- "cutting cutting".

Although English have and Latin habere look much alike, they have different IE origins.
Lat. habere < PIE *gheH1bh-
Eng. give < PIE *ghebh-
Eng. have < PIE *keH2p- "to seize"
Lat. capere "to take" < (same root)

As to why *ghabh- and *kap- (simplified reconstructions) having similar meanings, that may be some doubling of a root in some ancestor of PIE.
 
Also in vowel-shift Latin perfects is

facere facio facit fêcî "to make, do" *dheH1- "to put, place" (also English "to do")

Those Latin examples are good examples of what a crazy quilt the PIE verb aspects were -  Proto-Indo-European verbs

The Slavic aspects are also a crazy quilt, but a later development.


The PIE imperfective and perfective aspects survived into Germanic as the simple present and past tenses, and into Slavic in the same way, though most Slavic languages have dropped the ancestral Slavic simple past tense. It survives in Old Church Slavonic and Bulgarian, however.

All three aspects survived into Classical Greek as imperfective -> present, perfective -> aorist (simple past), and stative -> perfective. Of these, Modern Greek keeps the first two.


Comparative phylogenetic analyses uncover the ancient roots of Indo-European folktales | Royal Society Open Science - the authors discover that at least one of them goes back to PIE society:
Data for our study were sourced from the Aarne Thompson Uther (ATU) Index—a catalogue of over 2000 distinct, cross-culturally stable ‘international tale types’ distributed among more than 200 societies [26]. We focused on ‘Tales of Magic’ (ATU 300–ATU 749), a category of stories featuring beings and/or objects with supernatural powers. We concentrated on magic tales as they represent the largest and most widely shared group of tales, and because they include the canonical fairy tales, which have been the main focus of debates about the origins of folktales [16]. We recorded the presence/absence of each these tales (n=275) in 50 Indo-European-speaking populations represented in the ATU Index (electronic supplementary material, table S1). We selected these populations as both their oral traditions [15] and their phylogenetic relationships [2,3] have been more intensively studied than any other group of cultures.

...
Our findings regarding the origins of ATU 330 ‘The Smith and the Devil’ are a case in point. The basic plot of this tale—which is stable throughout the Indo-European speaking world, from India to Scandinavia—concerns a blacksmith who strikes a deal with a malevolent supernatural being (e.g. the Devil, Death, a jinn, etc.). The smith exchanges his soul for the power to weld any materials together, which he then uses to stick the villain to an immovable object (e.g. a tree) to renege on his side of the bargain [26].
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Its presence is consistent with the PIE speakers having had metals. Their reconstructed words for metals are very limited: *H2eyos- (*ayos-)

Words for "iron" vary widely, and that's good evidence that the PIE speakers had no knowledge of it other than from iron meteorites.

English "iron" < Proto-Germanic *îsarnan < Proto-Celtic *îsarnom -- uncertain origin: "blood-red"? "holy"?

Latin ferrum -- uncertain origin

Russian zhelezo -- Proto-Slavic *zhelezo
Lithuanian gelezhis -- likely cognate, origin obscure beyond that

Greek sidêros -- uncertain origin
 
 Decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts - in the early 19th cy. The Rosetta Stone is a famous part of that effort, because it is a parallel text: Greek, Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic (that picture writing on monuments), and Ancient Egyptian Demotic (an everyday-use writing system) The royal names Ptolemy and Cleopatra helped in pinning down the phonetic value of some hieroglyphic symbols. The present-day language Coptic was widely suspected of being descended from Ancient Egyptian, and that suspicion turned out to be correct.

I'd like to make a digression into kinds of writing systems:
  • Pictographic = pictures of things
  • Ideographic = symbols represent ideas or concepts
  • Logographic = symbols represent words or parts of words
  • Syllabic = symbols represent syllables
  • Alphabet = symbols represent phonemes
  • Abjad = an alphabet of consonants, with vowels treated as an afterthought
  • Abugida = an alphabet where the consonants have a default vowel value, with vowel symbols added as needed
  • Mathematical notation is ideographic
  • Phoenician, Hebrew, and Arabic writing are all abjads
  • Abjad -> alphabet in Phoenician -> Greek and Hebrew -> Yiddish involved making some symbols vowel symbols
  • Abugidas are common in South Asia
  • Chinese writing is logographic, with each symbol representing a one-syllable word or word part
  • Korean writing is Chinese characters (hanja) + Korean alphabet (hankul)
  • Japanese writing is Chinese characters (kanji) + two syllabaries (hiragana, katakana)
Hieroglyphics turned out to logographic symbols with some of the symbols being used as an abjad. Many of the symbols were used as determinatives, to resolve the meaning of words written in abjad fashion.

That explains all the e's in ancient Egyptian names -- those are placeholder vowels.
 
Emphasis on paternity and male inheritance can be inferred from early I-E cultures. Roman surnames, Celtic systems like Indfhine (despite illiteracy), and the fact that Hindu caste is passed father to son without regard to mother, all attest to this. Note that the non-IE Etruscans and Picts seem to have had matrilineal inheritance. (Yes, "Pictish" itself is regarded as an I-E language, but an ancient non-IE Pictish population probably switched to that language: Celts dominated the British Isles beginning 4000 years ago.)

lpetrich said:
Interesting about "memory boards". Like making pictures or diagrams or maps.
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The mnemonic object (a memory board, or even just the natural shapes and striations on a large rock) need not be an explicit diagram. The memorizer can invent his/her own mapping between the object's features and a story, much like today's stage-performing memorizers can concoct a story to help them memorize the order of a deck of cards.

Read Lynne Kelly. Memory Code (in paperback) is the one I read, but she has expanded her thesis since. She herself advises against spending big bucks for the "scholarly" version. (BTW, there is a children's writer of the same name; Amazon may conflate them.)

lpetrich said:
Words for "iron" vary widely, and that's good evidence that the PIE speakers had no knowledge of it other than from iron meteorites.
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Even during the hey-day of the Hittite Empire, iron was more valuable than gold! They may have smelted iron, but had no recipe to do so consistently. The earliest bloomeries for iron-smelting are dated to the 10th century BC and found in present-day Jordan and Israel.
 
 Cuneiform - the first cuneiform writing to be deciphered was for Old Persian. Its decipherment is less well-known, but interesting in itself. The first version of it that was deciphered was the Old Persian version, used to write some royal inscriptions carved near the ruins of Persepolis in Iran.

From later inscriptions, philologist Georg Friedrich Grotefend guessed that some of these inscriptions have the form "<king>, Great King, King of Kings, son of <king>" in them. This guess wasn't from nowhere; it was from later Pahlavi inscriptions. He next consoluted Greek historians' accounts of the Achaemenid kings of the Persian Empire, and he succeeded in getting the kings right, even if his phonetic values were rather off.

But his work was pretty much ignored until 1823, when Jean-François Champollion of hieroglyphics-decipherment fame got to work on the Caylus Vase originally from Egypt. It has Xerxes I's name on it in hieroglyphics and in Old Persian script. "Xerxes" and "king" agreed with Grotefend's identifications.

Then in 1836, Eugène Burnouf and Christian Lassen identified a list of satrapies (provinces) in one of the Old Persian inscriptions, and that provided identifications of nearly all the Old Persian letters.

The Old Persian language turned out to be close to the Avestan language, the language of the Zoroastrian scriptures.
 
In 1835, Henry Rawlinson turned his attention to the Behistun trilingual inscriptions. One language he could already read: Old Persian. There were two others there, and he tried to decipher them. Unknown to him, Edward Hincks was also working on these inscriptions. EH used proper names, while HR didn't say how he did it. This led to speculation that HR was secretly copying off of EH.

The two other languages at Behistun were Akkadian and Elamite.

Akkadian was a Semitic language, but there was an oddity. Most speakers of Semitic languages prefer to use abjads to write their languages with. But the cuneiform script was a logographic-syllabic script. That suggested that it was originally devised for some non-Semitic language. That language was originally discovered: Sumerian. It was deciphered with the help of Akkadian-Sumerian dictionary tablets.

So cuneiform was deciphered in this fashion:

Greek -> Old Persian -> Akkadian -> Sumerian
 
I now turn to the decipherment of  Linear B. The Decipherment of Linear B - process.pdf It was discovered on clay tablets in the ruins of the Palace of Knossos in Crete over a century ago. Some tablets from elsewhere had a similar writing system that was named Linear A.

In the 1930's and 1940's, Alice Kober worked on the symbols, finding from where they appeared that they could be grouped in triplets. Were these some sort of inflectional variants? From how many Linear B symbols, Linear B was probably a syllabary.

She died in 1950, and Michael Ventris and John Chadwick carried on her work. They had the help of a large number of tablets found in the ruins of Pylos, a city near the southern end of mainland Greece.

They continued with AK's triplets, constructing a grid of similar symbols. Some of the symbols rarely occurred away from the beginnings of words, so they were likely of vowels without consonants. A similar syllabary had been used to write Greek on Cyprus, and that gave phonetic values of some of the symbols. Some words found in Knossos but not on the mainland turned out to be Knossian place names, like Amnisos.

Another clue was that some of the symbols were ideograms, like a drawing of a horse's head. That suggested something connected to horses.

Michael Ventris constructed a grid of symbols. From one in Cyprus meaning "ni", he could infer that the row had consonant n and the column had vowel i.

Looking for "Amnisos", he found (vowel symbol) - ? - (ni) - ?. He could interpret that as a-mi-ni-so, thus confirming the i column and adding rows for m and s. Then he found ?o-no-so. This was at Knossos, so it would be ko-no-so, giving the k row. He got vowels a, i, o and consonants k, m, n, s. This enabled him to identify more and more words, and he noticed a startling result: the language was Greek.

For instance: ti-ri-po-de (ideogram: tripod vessel) (2) -- 2 tripodes "three foot/leg"

He also noticed ?-to-ro- in contexts that meant "four". The Classical Greek word for four was tettares / tessares depending on the dialect, but the first symbol was not te or to.

Proto-Indo-European reconstruction to the rescue. The PIE word for "four" is reconstructed as *kwetwores He decided that Linear B had representations of syllables like kwe, though he wrote it qe, giving qe-to-ro-

So PIE reconstruction had that nice result - it helped us read Mycenaean Greek.
 
In the Linear B grid, the vowels are a, e, i, o, u, and the consonants (blank), d, j, k, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, w, z

Linear B was used almost exclusively to write bookkeeping records, like "2 tripods". This gives us a detailed look at the economy of a society from 3,200 years ago.

Deities are mentioned, but exclusively as recipients of offerings. Most of the familiar Olympians can be recognized there, but there were others, like ma-na-sa and pi-pi-tu-na. There were such people as a "priestess of the winds", a-ne-mo-i-je-re-ja -- anemôn hiereia

Also this:
i-je-ro-jo
pu-ro i-je-re-ja do-e-ra e-ne-ka ku-ru-so-jo WOMAN 14
interpreted as
At Pylos, 14 female slaves of the priestess on account of the sacred gold
 
lpetrich said:
The past tense agrees with the subject in gender and number like an adjective, suggesting that it was once a participle. The future tense is a compound tense, and no compound tense is known to go back to PIE. The personal endings, represented by -et here, also go back to PIE. Even the root, *zhi- goes back to PIE, *gweiH3- with descendants like English quick ("alive" > "lively" > "fast"), Latin vivus "alive" "living", Greek zoon "living thing", bios "life", etc.
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Sanskrit and other North Indian language also are no different with Jeeva, jeevan (life). Kashmiri is even close Zoon (Life). 'My zoon has been spoiled' (my life has been spoiled).
lpetrich said:
Like Russian davat' / dat' "to give". Sometimes the imperfective and perfective forms are separate word forms, like govorit' / skazat' "to say, speak".
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Davat in urdu is feast.

Is koryos related to 'Kurus' (clan), work (Karya), doing 'Karma', krita (done, made) ending in creation?
Won't carry on. It is all there. Kerberos, the Zoroastrian dogs in chinvat and the Vedic dogs guarding the bridge are all spotted.

As far as Ashvamedha goes, I would translate it to "setting up the horse". Perhaps at one time IE people sacrificed and ate up the horse or made him drink 'Soma' to invigorate him, after all Indra would ride him against the demons. Queen mating symbolically with the dead horse as far as I think is a Yajurveda degeneration. There is no such mention in RigVeda.

Ayas in Sanskrit is stone or any metal, at a later date iron too.
 
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