"Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global"

This is one of the three best books I read in 2025 (the others being Orbital and Playground).  As the title indicates, this book elucidates in extensive but clear detail how one early proto-language radiated from the area north of the Black Sea outward toward what is now Europe and southeast into what is now the Indian subcontinent.

An analysis like this requires more than just linguistic skills.  Understanding the processes involved requires familiarity also with the anthropology of the movements of people, their occupations, their trading networks, their social behaviors, and also an understanding of archaeological findings, including DNA extracted from ancient bones. The author, Laura Spinney, is not a professional linguist, anthropologist, or archaeologist.  Instead (and presumably for the better), she is a professional science writer, able to compress immense volumes of information into a form suitable for the general public.  After reading this book, I immediately placed a request at our library for her previous work - Pale rider: the Spanish Flu of 1918 and how it changed the world.

The book is interspersed with excellent maps clarifying the locations of peoples and languages (two of which I am embedding).  I can't summarize all of the text, but here are some salient excerpts (my transcription will lack the umlauts and diacritic marks on some words):

"Now, eight billion humans speak arouind seven thousand languages.  Those languages fall into about a hundred and forty families, but most of us speak languages that belong to just five of them: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian... If you include second or subsequent language-speakers, Indo-European is by far the largest language family the world has ever known... Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European." (11)

"The suggestion [in 1786] that an archaic link existed between Europe and the Orient electrified the public imagination... there was awe to be had in gazing upon Latin-Sanskrit word pairs like domus-dam (house or home), deus-deva (god), mater-mata (mother), pater-pita (father), septem-sapta (seven) and rex-raja (king).  Or in comparing the first three numbers in German (eins-zwei-drei), Greek (heis-duo-treis) and Sanskrit (ekas-dvau-trayas)..." (15)

"... when the future emperor Hadrian addressed the Senate around 100 CE, the senators mocked his Spanish accent (he was born in what is now the Spanish province of Seville).  The fragmentation of Latin was underway, but Hadrian still spoke recognisable Latin rather than an early version of Spanish..." (25)

"The catfish of the Dnieper were up to two and a half metres or over eight feet in length, and three hundred kilogrammes - over six hundred pounds - in weight... They are wels catfish, where wels, the common name of the species in German, shares a root with English 'whale'." (37)

"As in the Balkans, people used fleeces to pan for gold in those mountain streams.  It was in Georgia, in the ancient kingdom of Colchis, that the Greek mythological hero Jason found the golden fleece..." (56)

"A word meaning 'star'... shines steadily through all its descendants.  Waypoint for night travellers since all humans were African, it was known to Sogdian merchants on the camels as stare, to homebound Odysseus as aster, and to Icelanders fishing for herring after dark as stjarna." (77)

"... migrants had radiated east and west from the steppe around five thousand years ago, and in Europe their ancestry had replaced up to ninety per cent or more of the gene pool... No later movement had anything like their genetic, cultural or linguistic legacies: not the massive migrations set in train by the fall of the Western Roman Empire, not the displacements that followed the Black Death, the 1918 flu or either of the world wars.  Most European men alive today, and millions of their counterparts in Central and South Asia, carry Y chromosomes that came from the steppe." (102)

"The core vocabulary of Tocharian was clearly inherited from Proto-Indo-European.  You can see that in these Tocharian B - Latin - English triplets:  pacer-pater-father, macer-mater-mother, procer-frater-brother, and ser-soror-sister.  Or in the Tocharian B words for 'cow' (keu), 'ox' (okso) and 'to milk' (Malk)." (127)

"The yearning for a better world is alive and well and as doomed to disappointment as it ever was (the word 'utopia' contains that disappointment within it, since it means 'nowhere') (140)

"Like the Greeks, the Etruscans and Italic-speakers wrote from right to left at first.  Later they went through a phase called boustrophedon or 'ox-turning', when a line written right to left alternated with one written left to right, until they plumped definitively for left to right." (146)

[note the four major rivers emptying into the Black Sea all begin with the letter D] "An Iranic word for 'river' was danu, which is the root of both Don and Danube.  Dniester comes from Danu nazdya, 'river to the front'. and Dnieper from Danu apara, 'river to the rear'.  These names were the legacy of the Scythians... One remnant of the Scythians survived, however, by retreating to the safety of the Caucasus.  Their modern descendants, the Ossetians, call 'water' don."

"Smok or Zmij, or Zmei or Zmaj, depending on which Slavic-speaking country you happen to be in, is the archetypal serpent, denier-of-life, and any resemblance you may notice to J.R.R. Tolkien's dragon Smaug is not coincidental.  Tolken was a philologist... There was actually a Proto-Indo-European word, smeuk that probably meant 'to slide' or 'glide', and if the Slavic dragon names are derived from it then they are living exhibits of taboo deformation - the phenomenon whereby taboo words [names of Gods you are not allowed to speak] are rapidly recycled through euphemism and circumlocution." (230)

Page 264 includes an interesting discussion of shibboleths (words or phrases, the pronunciation of which identify nationalities or ethnicities), which I don't have time to retype.  See also this list of shibboleths.

BTW, it's also useful to at least browse the endnotes, where I discovered that "Some Indo-European languages do without a word for 'one' entirely.  If there is only one of something, after all, you hardly need to count it.  Old Irish did have a word for 'one' (oen), but if a person wanted to say 'one cow' they would just say the word for 'cow'. 

The book concludes with this language tree:

This will not be a book for everybody.  It will delight those with a general intellectual curiosity, but will be TMI for the casual reader.  On the other hand, it's easy to skim over the parts where the details are beyond one's personal needs or interests.  For those TL;DR people, I would encourage reading the excellent "Introduction" and the equally excellent "Conclusion" chapters.  The latter closes with this observation:

"Language is becoming a battleground in the identity wars, and preserving our linguistic 'purity' a justification used by those who want to raise walls.  Unfortunately for them, the most successful language the world ever knew was a hybrid trafficked by migrants.  It changed as it went, and when it stopped changing, it died."