Huff Po: Is This How Our Ancestors Sounded? Linguist Recreates Proto-Indo-European Language (AUDIO)

[Skidmore]

I love this type of scholarly work. Understanding the history of mankind eventually gets us back to the point where we are all only the human race.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/28/proto-indo-european-language-ancestors_n_4005545.html


What did our ancient ancestors sound like?

Between approximately 4,500 and 2,500 B.C, the ancestors of much of Europe and Asia once spoke the same mother tongue, a language referred to as Proto-Indo-European, or PIE. Although there is no written record of such a language, linguist Dr. Andrew Byrd recently attempted to reconstruct his own recordings of PIE language for Archaeology magazine, building off three centuries' worth of scholarly work on the topic.

Byrd is an expert in ancient Indo-European linguistics, focusing on phonology, and teaches at the University of Kentucky. For his recording, he edited and recited his own version of a reconstructed PIE fable known as "The Sheep and the Horses," as well as a version of a Sanskrit story called “The King and the God.”

"The Sheep and the Horses" is an interesting case because it was actually written in 1868 by German linguist Dr. August Schleicher, who then translated the story into PIE as a way to experiment with the vocabulary, according to Archaeology.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/28/proto-indo-european-language-ancestors_n_4005545.html

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