The Long Way Back to Ourselves

1.8

Language Itself: How Words Are Born, Travel, and Die

This episode traces how comparing father, foot, and horn across German, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit let 19th-century linguists reconstruct a vanished Proto-Indo-European language. Reconstructed vocabulary for wheels and yoked animals dated the parent language to around 3,500 BCE, later confirmed when ancient DNA revealed a matching steppe migration into Europe. The chapter corrects the strong Sapir-Whorf claim that language determines what you can think, citing the debunked Eskimo-snow-words myth, but supports its weaker form: speakers of Kuuk Thaayorre, who have no words for left and right, arrange time east to west regardless of which way they face. It ends on language death, noting most of today's 7,000 languages are unlikely to survive this century.