Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author's Introduction

• A key human characteristic is our ability to communicate through complex languages — about 7,000 of which are spoken around the world today. Understanding the origin and development of past and present languages can help researchers to understand human evolution.
• Although today’s languages group into about 140 families, only 5 of these families are widely used: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger–Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Indo-European languages form the largest family, if those who speak them as a second language are included — with 12 main branches ranging historically from northwestern China to western Europe. “Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European”, notes science writer Laura Spinney in Proto, one of a trio of intriguing books exploring the history of languages, common and rare.
• Both Spinney’s lively book for non-specialists, and The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered — an academic study with broad appeal by archaeologist James Mallory — focus on the origins of this vast language family. By contrast, extinct and endangered languages are the preoccupation of Rare Tongues, a quirky study by linguist Lorna Gibb, aimed at all audiences.
• The origin of the Indo-European language family has been the “Holy Grail for many intellectuals and many not-so intellectuals” over the past few centuries, writes Spinney. “The arguments have run from ingenious to ingenuous to outright weird,” comments Mallory, with one even proposing a source “outside our galaxy”. His book’s eye-catching appendix lists 176 individuals who, between 1686 and 2024, each proposed birthplaces, or homelands, for Indo-European — “as far north as the polar regions and as far south as Antarctica, from the Atlantic to the Pacific”.
• William ‘Oriental’ Jones was one such thinker who was, and still is, widely cited, not least by Spinney and Mallory. A British philologist and pioneering Indologist who worked as a judge For example, the Sanskrit word for ‘mother’ is mata and the Latin is mater; the verb ‘to fly’ is pátami in Sanskrit, pétomai in Greek and petō in Latin. Jones found these similarities so strong that he wrote: “No philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” Here was the “semi-official discovery of the Indo-European language family”, observes Mallory.
• Books Reviewed:-
  1. Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
     Laura Spinney, William Collins (2025)
  2. The Indo-Europeans Rediscovered: How a Scientific Revolution is Rewriting their Story
     J. P. Mallory, Thames & Hudson (2025)
  3. Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages
     Lorna Gibb, Atlantic (2025)