Will (6:58)

Honestly Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.

Mike Pesca (7:06)

That's not the itinerary we're following.

Will (7:08)

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

Mike Pesca (7:22)

Bon voyage.

T Mobile Announcer (7:24)

Introducing Family Freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com FamilyFreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone16128 gigabyte $8,029.99 Eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile.

Mike Pesca (7:52)

Laura Spinney writes about things that go viral. Her last book literally was about the 1918 influenza epidemic. But the new book is about something even more viral about that. In fact, without it, we couldn't understand the complexities of the word going viral. The book is called Proto How One Ancient Language Went Global Spread Everywhere. We're using it now. Laura, welcome to the gist.

Laura Spinney (8:19)

I'm happy to be here. Thank you.

Mike Pesca (8:21)

What is our language or what do we call this thing? We're talking about a couple of levels up from English.

Laura Spinney (8:26)

A couple of levels up. Okay, so we're talking about the Indo European language family, which is the largest on earth, whether you measure it by number of speakers or geographical spread. And the language that I'm focused on in this book is the common ancestor of all the Living Indo European languages. So we call it proto Indo European because we don't know what its speakers called it because they didn't write it down. So proto meaning first or parent. And that's the name we call it by, and it's the one from which the hundreds of others that we speak today sprang.

Mike Pesca (8:59)

There are 8 billion people on earth, they speak 7,000 languages. Is it a power curve distribution?

Laura Spinney (9:07)

What do you mean?

Mike Pesca (9:08)

Well, oh, this is where it's not a bell curve. Like if you look at Spotify. MUSIC PLAYS There's a whole lot of artists, but a very large part of them are Taylor Swift.

Laura Spinney (9:18)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are five of it. You always come back to how you define these things. But there are, let's say, several hundred language families in the world, but most of us speak the top five of those. And at the top of those five are Indo European and Sino Tibetan English being the main representative, Indo European and Mandarin being the main representative of Sino Tibetan.

Mike Pesca (9:44)

Right. And the Indo in Indo European. How closely is it related to the European languages, the Romance languages, the Slavic languages?

Laura Spinney (9:53)

Yeah, exactly. So Indo European is like a, a pretty ugly term, but it kind of says what it does on the tin. So it covers languages from all the descendants of Sanskrit, for example, in the east, spoken in the subcontinent, to the languages spoken in Western Europe. And of course, since the imperial age, since the age of ocean going ships, they've gone much further afield. But it was initially a Eurasian language. And you could, you know, the language was sort of defined as such at the, at the end of the 18th century because people recognized very obvious similarities between Sanskrit and Latin, for example. So you could look at Deus Deva for God, Patel, Peter for Father, Rex, Raja for King. Plenty of examples that just jump out at you even if you've got no linguistic training.

Mike Pesca (10:42)

Right. It can't be coincidence that all these languages all throughout the world have very similar words for daughter, Right, exactly.

Laura Spinney (10:49)

So in Ancient Greek, Tugatera in Persian. Doctor. In Old English. Doctor. And what else have I got? Armenian, I think, was it? Yeah, Armenian is duster. So you can see very easily the similarities across huge swathes of speech space.

Mike Pesca (11:08)

So they knew that they being people who study languages, they knew of this language group, this Indo European language group a couple of hundred years ago, and they knew it just by looking at languages and saying things like this is way too common to be a coincidence. Even Dante knew some of this. Right?

Laura Spinney (11:27)

So, yeah, you're right. But the realization kind of came slowly, Dante, back in the, in the 14th century, he realized that all the Romance languages were very similar. And so he kind of. He was the first to think, well, maybe, you know, the forerunners of French, Spanish, Italian and the like came from Latin, which was a radical idea at the time because people had no concept of languages evolving. There was this idea of Noah's Ark, right? And. And Hebrew being the primordial language, and then the Tower of Babel and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, there was no idea of languages gradually changing over time. Dante was one of the first to change that. Then other people realized, for example, that the Germanic languages, which is the branch of the Indo European family that includes English, they also went back to a common ancestor called proto Germanic. And gradually we had a sense of the expanding boundaries of this family until the late 18th century, when, as I said, there was this realization that they were linked from the subcontinent to the west of Europe.

Mike Pesca (12:22)

Was that a leap? Were there people getting in the way of coming to that conclusion? Because I'll just throw a couple of constants of the human condition out there. People are a little bit xenophobic. People think that their own culture and language, which is key to the culture, is supreme. People are unwilling to share, I guess, credit for signature accomplishments of one culture. And then you also have, you know, religion getting in the way, the Tower of Babel or Babel. So it was to some degree sacrilegious to even say that that story was wrong. So tell me about the leap or the hardships in coming to this accuracy.

Laura Spinney (13:04)

Right. I mean, even in the early days, you know, it was even heretical. We hinted at that with this, you know, idea that they were going against something that the Bible said, for example, in judo, Christian cultures. But also, you know, it took a while for people to grasp this notion of languages being dynamic things. And then on top of all those problems, on top of all the xenophobia, which you very rightly referred to, which still exists today, of course, you've got the problem that language itself is inherently hopelessly, as I say in the book, political. So if you want to distinguish between a language and a dialect, there's the famous saying that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. And to some extent that's true. To give you an example, if you look at the Scandinavian languages, the Danes, the Swedes and the Norwegians can all pretty much understand each other quite well, but they're considered three separate languages. Danish, Swedish, Norwegian. If you look at people who. In Germany, the speakers of northern German dialects, the speakers of southern ones don't understand each other, but they both supposedly all speak German. There's a lovely story about the Prussian War, Prussian French War of 1870, when the Prussians and the Bavarians who were supposedly fighting on the same side, couldn't understand each other. So they communicated in what language? French, the language of the enemy.

Mike Pesca (14:17)

This is, is this why we call it lingua franca?

Laura Spinney (14:20)

Lingua franca, because it was supposedly the language of the Franks. That was the language that was spoken around the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages and was used as a kind of trade language, which is still the meaning that we, we attach to that today.

Mike Pesca (14:31)

Right. And Bavarians and Prussians wouldn't want to necessarily speak the same language. Each looking at each other with these deep suspicions and stereotypes which pride in their own identity. Yeah, fascinating to outsiders. Oh, those Prussians, they're so hardworking. Oh, those Bavarians, they get drunk a lot. It's probably true. So. So it also strikes me that these great insights as to the commonality of language that was occurring at roughly the same time as Darwin giving us these insights about the commonality of species and archeology, real archeology and some version of it has always been done, was coming into its own as a real science. Was there cross pollination among the fields of linguistics and archeologists, in evolutionary biologists, even back then?

Laura Spinney (15:22)

I mean, absolutely. You've got parallel movements going on here. The kind of the religious resistance to these ideas that, you know, the gradual winning over the kind of persecution of the people who were associated with those ideas in the beginning, beginning. And surely since there was this thinking about a sort of, you know, there was this kind of evolutionary mindset in the air and you know, we're talking also about a time when, you know, when. Of empires. Right. So if you look at the big empires of Western Europe, they were sending their functionaries out to very far flung lands and those functionaries, those administrators were having to learn new languages, were encountering new cultures and so they were beginning to see the vast palette of, in this case, languages that humans were capable of. And you know, they were broadening their, until then, very Eurocentric focus and at the same time beginning to see relationships across those very distant and supposedly distinct languages. So there was both this idea of difference and of perhaps some kind of common origin in the deep and distant past.

Mike Pesca (16:30)

So your book Proto is cross disciplinary and we would, I think maybe people would be surprised to hear what the third discipline is, the first two being linguistics, archeology. But then genetics come, comes into it, comes into it In a big way. And there are recent developments in the field that tell us what.

Laura Spinney (16:48)

Right, okay. So just to take a tiny step back, the linguists and the archaeologists have been collaborating on this story for some. Some time, okay? Because we're talking about languages, especially in the case of proto Indo European, spoken about 5,000 years ago, that was spoken long before writing reached at least that part of the world, okay? So it was never written down. So we can't get at it through historical records. So the idea is that if linguists could get insights into that very ancient language, can reconstruct it, if you like, from its descendants, they can then look at what the archaeologists know about who was alive at that time, what kind of technologies they had, how they lived in, what landscapes they inhabit and so on, and try and put these two pieces together to fix those languages in time and space. Okay, so that's been going on for some time. Then what really revolutionized this story, I'd say, in the last 10 years? And the reason I wrote my book is, as you rightly say, the crashing into this field of genetics. Now, genetics has been around for much longer, obviously, but the real innovation was ancient DNA. So the ability to extract DNA from ancient human remains, analyze it, separate it from all the modern contamination, and try and tell the story that it specifically is telling you about the relationship between ancient people and the way they moved through the landscape. Because if you think about it, it's the same thing today. People, when they move, they take their languages with them, at least for a while. And so the movement of people tells you an awful lot about the movement of languages. And in fact, we have quite a lot of examples now where the branching of family trees, linguistic family trees, maps onto prehistoric migration routes. So that's why it's useful.

Mike Pesca (18:24)

And do the geneticists, archaeologists and linguists speak the same language as it were?

Laura Spinney (18:30)

No, they don't really, because they've all three got three different ideas of human identity. And that's normal. That's what you'd expect because, like, identity isn't monolithic, right? I mean, I have several identities, depending on where I am, who I'm talking to, what language I'm speaking, and so on. What, you know, I have a religious identity, I have a national, you know, so on. We have many layers, all of us, and these three tools are telling you about different facets of your identity. And so they're all useful, but they are looking for different things in the record, if you like. And so they have to try and cobble something together. I Mean, it's very much like thinking of the blind men tapping the elephant, right? They're all getting a different picture of what they're tapping with the data that they're looking at. But all these three sources of information are useful to create the cohesive.

Mike Pesca (19:19)

By the way, I have heard that different cultures have different analogies for that exact thing. And sometimes it's not an elephant. Sometimes. What would the geneticist. You could take any one of the three. What would they say the linguists get wrong? What would the linguists say the archaeologists get wrong? Where do they dig in their heels. And if they do dig in their heels, I guess eventually the archeologists will find them.

Laura Spinney (19:41)

I mean, I suppose the. What it boils down to is the way that these three things get transferred. So if you think about it, Genesis, your genetic identity, your biological identity is something you inherit from your parents. Simple, right? You get your genes from your parents, but your culture, your ideas, the things that archaeologists detect moving across space can be learned, right? You can get it from people you're not related to. And ideas can pass through populations without people moving. Okay. And language is a sort of hybrid that's different again, in the sense that you can get your maternal tongue, as we call it, your mother tongue, from your parents, but you can also learn other languages from school, from books, from apps. You can lose languages, you can't lose your genetic identity, but you can lose your linguistic identity over time or change it, let's say. So in the way that these things become attached to an individual and are transferred to other individuals, all three things have different dynamics. Does that.

Mike Pesca (20:43)

Oh, absolutely. So so far we've done a lot of definitions, a lot of exposition. It's all been fascinating. I've enjoyed every bit of. We've communicated to each other, but we haven't done. Is really answered the promise of the book, how one ancient language went global. So let's not give away the ending and Also it takes 300 pages to get there. But let's start off with. Before going global, at our best understanding of its origin, it's very germinal stages. What are we talking about? How, as far as we can tell, or the best theories, what was the original earliest form of our Indo European language?

Laura Spinney (21:21)

Right. So putting some quibbles about the definitions aside, we're talking about a language that was spoken roughly 5, 6000 years ago in the vicinity of the Black Sea, so right at the heart of Eurasia by people who were involved in a great big trade network around that sea in some of the first metals to be traded in the part of that. In that part of the world. So copper and later bronze. The people who spoke proto Indo European, which is the common ancestor of all the living Indo European languages, we think were nomads who lived on the steppe north of the Black Sea in, ironically, the very contested piece of land at the heart of the Ukraine Russia war, or the war that Russia declared on Ukraine. So we're talking about the borderlands of those two modern countries, really, which is where the oldest archaeological sites and genetic samples have been found of the people that the archaeologists refer to as Yamnaya, who they think were the speakers of proto Indo European.

Mike Pesca (22:28)

So let me just interrupt and note ruefully that it is where our communication started and where, if you look at recent peace talk attempts, it has gone to die.

Laura Spinney (22:39)

But absolutely important observation. Yeah. There is a huge historical irony in this whole story and in writing it now. I mean, I, you know, I went to Russia for part of my research because I felt I needed to, but that's a side story.

Mike Pesca (22:53)

Yeah, yeah. The book starts in Donetsk and essentially ends in Mariupol.

Laura Spinney (22:58)

Right, exactly.

Mike Pesca (22:58)

Can't tell the story without these places that I maybe wouldn't have even known five years ago before the war. But please, go ahead.

Laura Spinney (23:05)

Right. And. Exactly. And maybe that's a reason for telling it now, although of course it threw up some practical obstacles to me, but it gives it a kind of emotional charge as well. You're right. So these people we know from archaeology and now also from genetics were extremely mobile in the landscape. They left practically no trace of their campsites. For example, we have their burial mounds. Those are quite well attested, and we have their, you know, their grave wealth. But how they actually lived is something that's come together really quite recently because they're so difficult to detect in that strange, flat, hostile landscape. But when the genetics came along, it basically allowed us to see that those people who were exceptionally well adapted to that very difficult landscape moved through it, expanded in their numbers and radiated through it and carried their language. This is the crucial part, east and west. Hence we get Indo European because they went east into Asia and west into Europe. And that really is the beginning of this Indo European story.

Mike Pesca (24:08)

Do languages grow like proto European because they're really good as tools? Might if these traders had spoken a language that's kind of isolated now, I don't know. I hear this about Finnish, though. I understand its roots. But if these people had spoken a language that few people speak now, by the dint of what they did, and how far flung they were as people might that language have spread?

Laura Spinney (24:35)

I think that there is a. It's very clear that no language, broadly speaking, no language, is inherently more successful than any other. Okay, there might be some exceptions at the edges to that where you've got some exceptionally complex language that has evolved in isolation on an island and nobody can learn it, blah blah, blah, that may happen, but essentially through the sort of leveling effects of communicating with your neighbors and having to transmit language to your children. All languages are pretty good at what they do. And you know, this is one of the interesting thing of constructed languages or conlangs, you know, they have to follow the rules of natural language evolution or they won't work. So no inherent success is not really a thing. But if the people who speak that language happen themselves to have hit upon a very, you know, to become very well adapted to their niche to the extent that their population numbers increase and they move, they expand through space and they persuade other people to join their numbers either by force or charm, they, their language will spread. Okay, they will have more children. That's one way it will spread. And they, other people will convert to speaking their language. That's another way it could spread. So no, not inherently successful, but if the people who speak it are successful then it will spread.

Mike Pesca (25:51)

But there's no real example of the deficits of a language really holding a people back that we know of.

Laura Spinney (25:58)

I mean linguists might be able to suggest some, but I don't think so. The one, all the ones that we, you know, a language dies out because its people die out and that could be by historical accident. There may be some experiments in language where they don't last long because they're just too difficult to learn. But it's sort of self selecting in the same way that biology is.

Mike Pesca (26:19)

Laura Spinney is the author of How One Ancient Language Went global. Thank you.

Laura Spinney (26:25)

Thank you.

Mike Pesca (26:26)

And we have more with Laura Spinney we shall in the next segment of the show available to just Pesca plus subscribers, we will focus on emojis, text language and I'll talk to her about taking a break from writing plus an Americanism that she likes. To subscribe go to subscribe.mike pesca.com get the show without ads. Get the show with this the bonus content support the gist in audio form subscribe dot Mike Pesca let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.

Will (27:09)

Honestly Will, I didn't plan any trips but I did switch to T mobile with their new family freedom offer that's.

Mike Pesca (27:17)

Not the itinerary we're following.

Will (27:19)

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house.

Mike Pesca (27:33)

Bon voyage.

T Mobile Announcer (27:34)

Introducing Family freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte 8, 299 eligible trade in iPhone well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel.

ZipRecruiter Announcer (28:00)

Contact T Mobile Finding great candidates to hire can be like, well, trying to find a needle in a haystack. Sure, you can post your job to some job board, but then all you can do is hope the right person comes along. Which is why you should try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com Zip ZipRecruiter doesn't depend on candidates finding you, it finds them for you. Its powerful technology identifies people with the right experience and actively invites them to apply to your job. You get qualified candidates fast. So while other companies might deliver a lot of hay, ZipRecruiter finds you what you're looking for. The needle in the Haystack.

Mike Pesca (28:38)

See why 4 out of 5 employers who post a job on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free. That's right, free at ZipRecruiter.com Zip that ZipRecruiter.com Zip ZipRecruiter.com Zip and now the spiel once and current late night host Jimmy Kimmel returned last night. In his sometimes emotional monologue, he thanked his heroes like Howard Stern, his peers like Stephen Colbert and his fans. Then he engaged in a rare piece of rhetoric designed perhaps to change minds or maybe just and this is no small just in today's day and age, maybe just attempted to reach across divisions. Here's some of that who supported our show, cared enough to do something about it, to make your voices heard so that mine could be heard. I will never forget it. And maybe weirdly, maybe most of all, I want to thank the people who don't support my show and what I believe but support my right to share those beliefs anyway. People who I never would have imagined, like Ben Shapiro, Clay Travis, Candace Owens, Mitch McConnell, Rand Paul, even my old pal Ted Cruz, who, believe it or not, said something very beautiful on my behalf. I hate what Jimmy Kimmel said.

ZipRecruiter Announcer (30:13)

I am thrilled that he was fired.

Mike Pesca (30:16)

Oh, wait, no, not that. The other part. But let me tell you, if the.

ZipRecruiter Announcer (30:22)

Government gets in the business of saying, well, we don't say what you, the media have said, we're going to ban you from the airwaves. If you don't say what we like, that will end up bad for conservatives.

Mike Pesca (30:38)

I don't think I've ever said this before, but Ted Cruz is right. He's absolutely right. Now, I think even a curious but critical Kimmel viewer could take something out of that monologue. And I also think Donald Trump, who is shrewd, sense this as well. The cancellation of a joke teller at the behest of a president. It's not the fight Donald Trump wants. Trump wants to pick on and intimidate Disney, but the specific arm of Disney is ABC News. And by the way, that worked. Same with cbs, the other network that paid Trump off. He even wants to pick fights with the other ones who so far haven't ponied up NBC, CNN and the like. He also very much wants to attack his political rivals who don't have the public support of a more or less beloved late night clown. I'm thinking of James Comey, who is about to, according to sources close to the doj, about to be charged with crimes for what? Spelling out things on eggshells? No, the answer is for being someone who Trump perceives as an enemy. And I don't think Trump perceived Kimmel as an enemy per se, at least not in the category of those in these other camps. I am not saying that Trump is forgiving, but he does have a sense. I called it shrewdness. Sometimes I call it a reptilian sense of what plays, especially among people who don't even pay attention to politics. And this was a case where people not even paying particularly close attention, where people who will hear the news should it come to pass that James Comey is being frog marched out of his house and say, wait, who's Comey? Wait, isn't that just politics? When it comes to Kimmel, they understand what's going on. And what they understand did not reflect well on Trump and not just to the people who think that nothing reflects well on Trump. However, there was one misstep in the return and that was this Album is called Better Broken here with the title track, Sarah McLaughlin. Yes. He chose to have on as his guest Canadian piano player, singer, songwriter Chantreus Sarah McLaughlin. I mean, I will remember you. Will you remember me? Don't let your life pass you by Weep not for the memories I'm so tired But I can't sleep Standing on the edge of something much too deep it's funny how we feel so much but cannot say a word I mean, what's the most cliche thing to rhyme with not saying a word? Ah. Though we are screaming inside oh, we can't be heard oh, God. Not just the sentiment. The only reason we know this song is the title. The song's title does almost all the work. I will remember you. Change that title to I Will Put on a Shoe. No one cares. One piece of woods bamboo. I don't enjoy beef stew. All right. You're saying to yourself, well, of course the title matters. Who wants to listen to some Canadian chick singing about bamboo? I do. I'm a niche listener. But you know the song Yesterday by the Beatles? Mike, are you comparing Sarah McLachlan to the Beatles? I am now. To make my point, I'm not above it. Yesterday was once titled Scrambled Eggs. Working title. And when it was Scrambled Eggs, it was still a banger and mash. I'm not sure how English breakfast works or it was a moper. Whatever the Beatles were going for, it was one of the best songs at the time ever. And it was about breakfast foods. So this is why. This is among the reasons why Sarah McLachlan just doesn't do it. For me, it's, I think, beyond the subjective at this point. I'm trying to make the case that Sarah McLachlan, she doesn't deserve that slot on Kimmel or maybe even the place in your hearts. And, you know, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. Viewers can find ways to change their conduct and take action on Sarah McLachlan, where there's going to be additional work for whatever government agency regulates Canadian singer songwriters. But you know what? I've been thinking about this, but thinking about Jimmy's words, I will remember what Jimmy Kimmel, and apparently Candace Owens said. We must allow for all voices to be heard. Even if they think they could write a song that goes to the top 10 and doesn't even attempt to rhyme. Sarah McLachlan did that. Ada, I thought we could make it. I know I can't change the way you feel I leave you with misery A friend you won't betray. I pull you from your tower I take away your pain. I can go on. This song does not work. But I have to admit she should not be silenced. I don't know who am I to say Jimmy Kimmel and possibly Idea would want it that way. See, I rhymed. I rhymed. It's not hard. Sarah. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the Gist. Ashley Khan is our production coordinator. Jeff Craig runs our social media. Kathleen Sykes writes the Gist List with me today on the Gist List. Well, on Wednesdays we run a long piece. I call it the Pesca Profundities piece. And I'm running a piece that originally ran in the Free Press, a piece of mind that I've been working on for a long, long time. And audio version of this will be coming down the pike. Text 33777 the word Mike text the word Mike. Get 25% off. Just list and substack subscriptions. All right, thanks to everyone who made this possible, but especially Michelle Pesca who helps me camera angles and cap placement improve. G Peru. Do Peru. And thanks for listening.

Libsyn Ads Announcer (36:23)

Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to libsynads. Com. That's L I B S Y N Ads. Com. Today.