Language Dating Back as Far as 4500 B.C. Recorded For First Time

[Buster's Uncle]

Language Dating Back as Far as 4500 B.C. Recorded For First Time
Henry Baker September 30, 2013 12:49 PM  Trending Now

[RAW] Ancient language spoken Language Dating Back as Far as 4500 B.C. Recorded For First Time

 
Even though it used to be spoken throughout most of Europe and Asia, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language is no longer spoken by anyone. That is partly because it was in use mainly between 4,500 and 2,500 B.C., and also because in the modern era we simply haven't known how to pronounce ancient languages correctly. But thanks to decades of research, there is now an audio example of how the language might have sounded.

Andrew Byrd, from the Linguistics Department at the University of Kentucky, recorded himself reading a parable written in PIE and published it to SoundCloud. We gotta say, it sounds at once weird and a tiny bit familiar. And it should sound familiar — it is the common language that birthed English, Farsi, and many other world languages. The speech was taken from a written example that German linguist August Schleicher created in 1868 as an experiment with writing in PIE. The text tells a parable of sheep and horses, appropriate material for 4,500-plus years ago.

Of course, Byrd's pronunciation is by no means unequivocally correct, and he himself described it as "a very educated approximation." He also pointed out that if you wanted to find out how that language was actually spoken, you would need a time machine. But honestly, if we went back in time, someone might accidentally keep English from being developed, which would be really inconvenient.


http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending-now/language-from-more-than-4-000-years-ago-spoken-on-tape-for-the-first-time-164902805.html

[gwillybj]

I'm not surprised another ancient language has been found. Several languages were spoken and written in the Middle East during that time, but most disappeared as entire kingdoms were totally wiped out or assimilated into stronger nations.
For example, Hebrew has been around since almost as far back as 4000 BC. There was a while that it went out of daily use during the 1st centuries BC and AD because the common-man Jews (and other Mediterranean cultures) had picked up Koine Greek (very common during about 300 BC - 500 AD) and later some Latin, but Hebrew has been in use by biblical scholars all the while.
Arabic is very old (before 1000 AD), and is the living language most closely related to Hebrew.
Aramaic developed BC, and is similar to Hebrew; Early Persian morphed into present-day Farsi.

[Buster's Uncle]

And Indo-European was deduced from words like "mamma" being so similar across such a broad range of languages.  There just had to be a common origin.

[Valka]

I just found a link where the documentary series The Story of English is available to watch: http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/story-of-english/

I saw this series years ago on TV, and it's fascinating. There's a memorable scene in the third episode (I think it's the third) where Mary Tamm - who most of us know as Romana I on Doctor Who - is recording some of the Canterbury Tales and is learning to speak in the proper dialect.

I haven't found this series on DVD, so it's great to see it available somewhere.