the horse the wheel and language by david w anthony

The mission of The Horse, the Wheel, and Language is to put forth an argument for where and when this semi-hypothetical language developed and was used. The Trundholm Sun Chariot, a Bronze-Age artifact displaying the knowledge of harnessed horses and spoked wheels. I would never have seen a strong enough similarity between those words to group them all together, but I guess that's why I'm no Rasmus Rask or Marija Gimbutas! All kidding aside, I can grasp (however dimly) the real scholarly work behind the attempt, and I do think the reconstructed Indo-European language study has scientific merit, even though I have to take some of it on faith.

The cognates that linguists recognize from different languages that share the same root include 'hvél', 'hweohl', 'čaxtra', and 'kuklos' (all meaning 'wheel'). I'm no linguist, but I don't really see any connection between 'mexe' and 'h 2mey-g w', or between 'nime' and 'h 3neh 3mn'. This would be absolutely genius if it were true, but I have a hard time believing in it entirely. Based on these similarities, linguists work backwards to try to rebuild the prehistoric language. The idea is that many of the world's languages seem to share a similar root, from Germanic and Greek to Slavic and Anatolian, and even Indo-Aryan languages. I first heard about Indo-European and the linguists who try to recreate it in college and remember being enthralled and also skeptical. This made for a really interesting reading experience-I was simultaneously SO glad I was reading it and SO glad to finally be done with it! This contrasted sharply with other moments, when I could hardly even comprehend the words that were written down because the ideas and methodologies were so complex and convoluted. Happily, though, I often enough found The Horse, the Wheel, and Language to be engaging and intelligent, sometimes poignant, and sometimes so thrilling that I couldn't bear to put it down. My first impression about this book was that it was going to be way over my head, filled as it was with excavation grid drawings, radiocarbon date tables, and words in a language that was never written down and no longer exists. David Anthony guides the reader through thousands of years of archaeology and cultural development, several different scientific disciplines, and a sometimes incomprehensible comparison of pottery styles to tell the story of the Indo-European speaking people and the language they bequeathed to much of the modern world. My journey through this book, not unlike the prehistoric Eurasian steppe cultures' journey south to the Mesopotamian world, was long, fascinating, and sometimes laborious.

The horse the wheel and language by david w anthony