If you study the genomes of the populations of Europe as well as parts of Central and South Asia, you can reconstruct a very broad family tree rooted in a shared genetic ancestry from in a population who lived somewhere in Eurasia at a certain point in time. If you also study the languages of those same populations, you can independently reconstruct a family tree of languages that culminates in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language that would have existed at the same point in time. The simplest explanation for this is the spread of Indo-European-speaking populations, and not merely the language itself, from a single ancestral population.
David Reich is aggressive about these genetics results though. IIRC I read a NYT story once where he came in and claimed to have upended all of Polynesian history based on the genetics of a few historical skulls they found, but it didn't seem like strong enough evidence to me.
Primarily the male population. Genetically much higher proportion of the female population survived.
Of course that’s an exaggeration as well. In much of Southern Europe and other areas the replacement was far from full.
This is absolutely true.
They had agriculture as well as wheels for transportation and pottery. All predating middle eastern civilizations.
They also burned down their own cities every 50-100 years.
This culture was in constant threat from the nomads of the steppe and they learned to live in large groups as protection. This hypothesis is discussed at the end of a recent publication [2: p219-220].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucuteni%E2%80%93Trypillia_cul...
[2] https://pure.tudelft.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/144861667/enig...
Warning, link has an auto play when I opened it (but don’t let that minor obnoxiousness dissuade you from listening).
Fun facts, the most common words of Indo-European Family are surprisingly very similar across Sanskrit (S) <--> English (E) <--> German (G) [3].
Pitara (S) <--> Father (E) <--> Vater (G)
Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)
Bhratara (S) <--> Brother (E) <--> Bruder (G)
Duhitar (S) <--> Daughter (E) <--> Tochter (G)
[1] New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages (147 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36930321
[2] Ancient genomes provide final word in Indo-European linguistic origins (16 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42515584
[3] Turandot and the Deep Indo-European Roots of “Daughter” (15 comments):
Just wondering if other people have experienced the same or have effective arguments to deal with the outright rejection I've previously faced. I like to think of these discoveries as great unifying ancestry many of us share, which I consider a positive thing, So it surprised me when I discovered an outright rejection of the thought.
As anyone following the war in Ukraine closely has long since realized, village names alone are not very useful for identifying where something is in Ukraine. There are just too many places with the same names. e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mykhailivka
Don’t they mean western China here?
On a tangent, with the advent of AI and the final decades of our species, we should make more clay tablets to leave lying around...
Are you suggesting: A) the Yamnaya lived in present-day Iran and that this information was purposely left out B) the studies findings about the Yamnaya are incorrect C) the study should have mentioned Iran despite it not actually being historically relevant to the Yamnaya people D) something else entirely?
1. By intersecting ancient word sets of ancient Indo-European languages using comparative phonetics we can try and reconstruct the words of the proto-IE language, both their approximate sounds and approximate meanings. This gives us some information about the society. E.g., the PIE language very likely had a word for wheel, which puts the common PIE community in the period after the wheel was invented. Other words can help us guess what landscape the PIE people lived in, and it has been generally assumed for almost a century now that it strongly resembles Southeastern Europe, essentially the Ukrainian steppe. Two alternative hypotheses (modern-day Turkey and the area to the north, in modern-day Poland/Ukraine) had different drawbacks. We can also look at the locations of the earliest historically attested IE groups (Europe, Middle East, Punjab, Anatolia) and try and guess where they all may have had come from, given the time frame.
2. By looking at the descriptions of the earliest IE societies (first of all the society of Rig-Veda), we can try and guess what way of life these people had. We can then look at all the archaeological cultures in the roughly appropriate area from the roughly appropriate time frame and see which of those have features of interest (in the IE case, warrior-like culture with social stratification, etc.).
3. We know that IE migrated a lot and provided a lot of genetic material to modern populations in Europe and some other regions. Since quite recently, by looking at palaeo-DNA data from the remains of the people who belonged to these cultures, we can try and check who of them made the biggest contribution to contemporary populations.
All these sources of data are rather imprecise, but if you combine them all together and see a clear pattern, this looks rather convincing.
I fail to understand how the Rigvedic society can be connected to this DNA research. Rigveda never mentions anything beyond the Punjab/Swat/Haryana region in any of the hymns. The flora and fauna mentioned in it is also exclusive to this region. Lastly there is no mention of an ancient homeland both in Rigveda and Avesta.
It's about the origin of a population whose widely dispersed descendants often speak a language whose primary features descend from the language spoken by the original population (albeit changed via thousands of years of drift and borrowing from other languages).
That doesn't mean that a) all features of the descendant language come from the origin language or b) all speakers of the descendant language have ancestry from the original population.
https://borissoff.wordpress.com/2025/02/06/russian-sanskrit-...
For my part I built the web based editing tool, DB and LaTeX generation system that he used to assemble this massive undertaking over the years. :)
https://borissoff.wordpress.com/2015/10/30/first-public-pres...
It was interesting hearing him talk about how you can see pieces of the original proto language preserved in the different languages. E.g. Russian has 6 cases, Sanskrit has some of these but also others and the original language had something like 12 (I don’t have any particular knowledge on the subject so might be misremembering).
For me it was interesting that the original language seemed to be more complex than the modern descendants, like there is a general trend towards simplification with time. In my mind then there is the question as to where the original complex language came from and why would a culture that we would consider more primitive that ours would need and come up with one.
Some studies actually suggest that literacy systematically pressures languages to use longer, more complex sentences, thus disincentivizing complex inflection rules.
> Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)
> Bhratara (S) <--> Brother (E) <--> Bruder (G)
> Duhitar (S) <--> Daughter (E) <--> Tochter (G
Since you seem to be quoting the Sanskrit words in their root forms, (to which the case-lacking English and German equivalents most closely correspond) your spellings are incorrect. The correct forms are:
pitr
mātr
bhrātr
duhitr
No thematic 'a' on the end.
You might be confusing it with the nominative plural case forms:
pitarah
mātarah
bhrātarah
duhitarah
>Matara (S) <--> Mother (E) <--> Mutter (G)
Also some roots of the smaller natural numbers, like (E): one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, etc.
(G) eins, zwei, drei, ...
(S) eka, dvi, tri, ...
See the "Table" here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari_numerals
Although it is about numerals, there are words in a few languages, on the right side.
And Sanskrit is the ancestor of many Indian language, such as the regional languages of most of the northern (e.g. Punjabi, Haryanvi, Himachali, Hindi and its dialects), central (e.g. Hindi), eastern (e.g. Bengali, Odiya) and western (e.g. Gujarati, Marwadi) Indian states. To a rough approximation, only the languages of the 4 (now 5, with Telangana added) southern states, and of the 6 / 7 north-eastern states (Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, etc.) and maybe a few aboriginals' / forest tribals' languages, like Bhil, Gond, etc., don't descend from Sanskrit.
The same goes to Malay-Austronesian language family that is spoken in Taiwan, Malay archipelago and further away in Polynesian islands including native people of New Zealand and Hawaii, their numbers of one to ten are very similar accross very wide geographical area confirming they are from the same language tree. Fun facts their most common word is (nyior/nyiur) which further cemented their status as the community with largest number of islands because coconut tree is trademark of their islands environment.
[1] Austronesian peoples:
For example, 'to be' - French 'etre' (circumflex over the e indicates old 's' after the e), Marathi 'asane' (pronounced esnay)
'to go', German gehen, Marathi jana (when conjugated the j becomes hard)
'to give', french 'donner', Hindi 'danaa' (pronounced similarly)
'to mix', french 'melanger', Hind 'melaanaa'
Other non-obvious ones:
Vedas and Wisdom / Wit. Alternatively, Latin video (to see)
Dyaus-pitar and Jupiter, Zeus-pater
'that' in English is 'que' (that/what) in french and 'kya' (for what) or 'ki' (for that) in Hindi (pronounced similarly to French 'que').
English burden or 'to bear' and Hindi bhar (burden)
English 'ignite', Latin 'ignis' and Indic 'agni' (fire)
'Raja' and 'regal' or 'royal'
'Dental' and Hindi 'dant' (tooth)
Greek 'polis' and Indic 'pore' / 'pur' / 'puram' (the 'r' is pronounced like a soft l)
This one is slightly more interesting than a mere cognate as it is believed that the Proto-Indo-European speakers worshipped a sky god with the reconstructed name *Dyḗus ph₂tḗr ("sky-father") which is the ancestor of these (also Tyr and the like on the Germanic side). See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us "*Dyēus is considered by scholars the most securely reconstructed deity of the Indo-European pantheon, as identical formulas referring to him can be found among the subsequent Indo-European languages and myths of the Vedic Indo-Aryans, Latins, Greeks, Phrygians, Messapians, Thracians, Illyrians, Albanians and Hittites."
Not all similarities between mondern languages are inherited, coincidences do happen.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
Pedar, Madar, Baradar, Dokhtar
When I look at the difference between modern and “old English” they seem to have changed quite a bit [0]. When I read an etymological explanation [1], it sounds like a just so story.
0. https://www.reddit.com/r/etymology/comments/9ouweu/how_engli...
1. https://www.pimsleur.com/blog/words-for-father-around-the-wo...
If you have to make up a new just-so story for every pair of words, of course you're not gaining much, but if the same story works for many words at the same time, positing a common origin isn't too far-fetched.
For a particularly extreme example of this, see Great Zimbabwe, a ruined city in what is now Zimbabwe. When the country was Northern Rhodesia (a white minority ultra-nationalist breakaway state, somewhat like apartheid South Africa but moreso), any serious discussion of the nature of the site was essentially _illegal_ there, because its existence challenged the official narrative (the government insisted that it could not have been built by black people).
Then again. Rhodesia didn't last very long. And nobody outside cared much what they thought.
A lot of political mythology is based on a group of people being either ethnically homogeneous or ethnically non-homogeneous.
For example a lot of Nazi ideology would've been undermined if it could've been shown that Germans were ethnically non-homogeneous. However it would've been supported if it could've been shown that other groups of people like WW1 German Army deserters were ethnically homogeneous. Or undermined again if there were non-German ethnic homogeneity in WW1 heroes who participated in the German army.
Recently NCERT books were edited indicating that the Rig-vedic people were a continuation of Harappans.
On the other hand, the popular science and journalism has not done any favours by framing the IE studies as "The Aryans brought the Vedas with them from Europe", which is wrong at so many levels. The AMT/AIT was also weaponized by certain political elements in India to proliferate harassment against the Brahmins of Tamil Nadu. So it's kind of understandable why some Indians get defensive about this. But for the most part it's the same blind nationalistic spirit by which boomers claim all science was invented by Indians. Given that most Hindus today won't even know what's there in the Veda which is markedly different from the contemporary Hindu religion, that much attachment to the very small part of ancestry is not required.
Sensitive fields like IE studies should be kept to serious circles and not dumbed down to the level layman whose faith in his Gods or respect towards other humans will be changed by suggesting that people moved around and fought a lot 4000 years ago.
I don't believe any reputable journalist or popular science publication has pushed that view in recent decades. Please post links if you have them
I was born and raised in Tamil Nadu, having lived there for over two decades. In my experience, I have not witnessed any widespread harassment specifically targeting Brahmins. While isolated incidents may exist—just as they do for various communities across all states—there is no substantial evidence to suggest a systemic issue. Could you provide concrete examples, statistics, or credible sources to substantiate this claim ?
That's still the theory, except it's not politically correct to say it out loud. There was an idiot re-tweeted by the VP, who claimed "Buddha was Blonde with Blue-eyes; so was Pāṇinī". You might claim he's an idiot and "AMT is a sophisticated theory you pleb", but it actually is not. As we speak, Indologists like Bronkhorst, Beckwith and many others in EBT are scheming all sorts theories, which give wind to the old-Nazi ideas of "(early) Buddhism" being close to the early "Aryan religion", by claiming that the Shakyamuni was a remnant of original Steppe clans.
The way West frames/manipulates History (based on so little evidence) is deeply violent, and has roots in Xtianity and its violence. This is precisely the issue with this racial theory from the backdoor, and anyone with any shred of morality/ethics should stand with India, and for the indegeneity of its culture, civilization and languages.
Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.
> On a tangent, with the advent of AI and the final decades of our species, we should make more clay tablets to leave lying around
The irony is that even with AI we have yet to decode Indus script perhaps due to the lack of the equivalent of Rosetta Stone [1]. I think there's a Nobel prize waiting for those who can decipher the Indus script with AI or not [2].
[1] Rosetta Stone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone
[2] Indus script:
It’s not like Porto Indo-European developed out of nothing. It was related to other languages that just didn’t survive and happens to be the most recent (hypothesized) common ancestor of all other Indo-European languages)
Oh, come on. This is what we get from social media bubbles and breathless irresponsible media reporting.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I agree it's a provocation and, worse, a generic tangent, but the rest of the comment was pretty good.
Speaking of bubbles, how sure are you that Silicon Valley and HN are not part of a bubble composed of people with an emotional attachment to technological progress and people with a financial stake in AI?
How sure are you that the AI labs aren't being even more irresponsible than the news media?
Laryngeals replaced by vowel lengthenings, merging of consonsants, vowel shifting based on other sounds, etc. It's like there were many different events where "Indo-European with a heavy foreign accent" suddenly emerged.
My recollection is that the complexity went the other way; Latin was more complex than the reconstructed languages, especially if the reconstruction didn't include Romanian, because the modern Romance languages became simpler over time in similar ways.
It's clear that the result is useful for understanding features of the ancestral language, but it's not perfect, and never will be.
On the other hand, comparative linguistics came long before genetics, and it is this field that first noticed a connection between the Indo-European languages.
Archaeological and especially genetic evidence now show the peoples of this language family (mostly) have shared (though distant and diluted) ancestry, so the field was broadly correct in noticing a connection.
So, the base of the article is that they found a population which appears to be ancestral to both the Yamnaya and the Hittites, and that the latter split off before that population became the Yamnaya by migrating elsewhere and merge with people there. What's missing is definite proof that the "Caucasus Lower Volga" people actually spoke proto-proto-IE, but if they didn't then things look even more complex. If they did it would match the current linguistic and DNA evidence pretty well.
On the Indian side we have fair share of people who blabber that, (Indra forbid), all IE languages took birth from Sanskrit, or on the other side of political spectrum, that Buddhism predates the Veda.
Violence is the use of physical force to coerce or to cause harm. The "way [someone] frames [something]" can't be anywhere close to "violent".
I don't know the facts, but it sounds to me like there's no evidence that could convince you to accept the position opposite yours.
Just feels perhaps a little out of place this time that the gp would be in the wrong at all here. But I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.
I was already interested in polynesia, from quite a while ago, and had read some books about it, and also a great National geographic magazine series about ancient polynesian navigators, who did not have any modern instruments, they just used knowledge and observation carried across generations, of patterns of wind, stars, ocean waves and swells, sea and land bird movements, clouds, et cetera, to navigate thousands of miles across the Pacific, to both initially discover and settle, and later travel between, multiple islands and Island groups in the Pacific.
the hokulea saga is an example.
Here we go: https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/chariot-racers... - make of that what you will.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/radiocarbon/article/...
- no horse remains or equestrian objects have been found, anywhere in India for this time period
- solid wooden wheels (shown in the reconstruction) are too heavy for horses to draw, for which spoked wheels were developed in the Steppe
- the shape of the yoke that would be tied to the animals is straight, the way ox carts have, like Harrapan ox carts. By contrast, yokes for horses are curved, to match the animal's posture.
Edited to add: there are basically no migration stories in _any_ indo-european mythological cycles or oral traditions. That's not evidence that there wasn't spread through, migration or invasion, but it does indicate that it was a gradual process that wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time.
The problem of IE is of course very abstract, while the problem of, e.g., Celts is much more concretely paradoxical (continental and island Celts share the language family but not a lot of archaeology and a dubious amount of genes). However, it is still a more or less commonly accepted fact that at some point in the past PIE peoples spread like wildfire, bringing their dialects, genes, and culture to a very large area, and it is of huge historical interest to know where they started from.
The fact the IE epic and mythological traditions have zero memories of all this, I would say, is interesting but does not prove or disprove anything.
How much do English-speakers today know about the events in early 10th century France that eventually led to English becoming a sort of pidgin French, full of words like "eventually" and "sort" that didn't exist in Beowulf? How much effort do they typically devote to passing on traditions about Æthelwold's challenge to Edward the Elder in Wessex?
And that's after 1100 years of a literate, mostly settled culture with libraries that contain physical books from that time, in a culture that values that kind of factual knowledge of history, rather than more practical sorts of knowledge such as how to properly worship Agni to gain his favor and which plants to poison your arrows with.
Oral tradition can preserve knowledge to an astounding degree. There are songlines, as I understand it, that record the geography of landforms that have been undersea since the Ice Age (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ancient-indigenou... roughly the same time as the Proto-Indo-European culture). But it is hardly surprising when it is silent on a topic we wish we knew more about.
Irish have migration myths.
So do Greeks (probably a bit more localized intra-Balkan movement, though).
To be fair IE migrations were very long ago. It’s not inconceivable that oral myths might have been preserved for several thousand years and yet we might know nothing about them.
> wouldn't have been particularly noticeable in any one life time
Probably not true. At least genetic evidence points otherwise. IIRC we’ve found individuals as far as Britain who were closely related (a couple of generations) with remains found in the steppes. At least some elite groups were very closely related paternally and moved very fast across Europe.
If you take left leaning publications in English, I bet you can still find some subtle variation of this written by average journalist with only pop-sci level understanding of the topic.
The current gen of journalists and teachers have learned from previous gen of books and media, which obviously oversimplified this and also had various political agendas.
Purely based on the content of the website, I fail to see anywhere on the website allusions to Hindu Nationalism. The website contains a paper from acadamia.edu showing their analysis. Lastly the claim about "Brahmin circles" also seems malicious because it is being discussed on mainstream media like CNN-News18 or IIT Hyderabad.
https://www.academia.edu/78867798/A_cryptanalytic_decipherme...
As a non-linguist, non-Sankrit speaker I can't evaluate those claims, but considering that this script declines as the Indus Valley Civilization fades away, along with the arrival of Indo-European speakers who would be more likely to speak the ancestor language of Sanskrit, I'd be highly skeptical of these claims.
If the script is a full writing system, and I were forced to guess what a future decipherment might find, it wouldn't surprise me to see that the language is related to the Dravidian languages.
Hopefully more examples of the writing will be found so that we may one day know for sure.
btw why is it wrong for Hindus to say about their history. Should we allow only White Christian historians? Critic the text not the person. Please stop with outdated racist views.
If we can decipher letters from burnt, rolled up scrolls, I’m sure eventually we’ll figure out what IVCs writings meant.
That's a very negative presumptions.
How about the oldest attestation of Indo-European language or the long extinct language Hittite who once lived in Bronze age Anatolian Steppe? The language is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BCE.
Hittite people created an empire centred on Hattusa, and also around northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia [1].
[1] Hittite language:
The Hittites adopted the Sumerian form of writing; they did not bring a writing system with them from the Volga. Neither did other Indo-European groups have writing, which is why Hittite is, as you say, the oldest attested Indo-European language.
That Indic language was the language of some group of people who at some point in time, perhaps after a war victory, had become the main members of the elites who ruled Mitanni, a Southern neighbor of the Hittites, located mostly in present Syria, where most inhabitants were speaking Hurrian, a non-Indo-European language.
Those Indic-speaking people were renowned as expert horse trainers, so the quotes from their language were encountered in Hittite documents about horse training.
Most known data is consistent with an older migration towards South Asia of the people speaking Indic languages, who had gone both towards East, reaching India, and towards West, reaching as far as Syria, where they entered in contact with the Hittites and other related populations, who had migrated towards South at an even earlier date and through a different path, reaching present Turkey.
The Indic migration has been followed much later by a migration on the same path of people speaking the closely related Iranian languages, who have reached the present territories of Iran, Afghanistan, Tadjikistan, forming the ancient Persian empires, after various conquests.
The people whom we now name Hittites used another name for themselves, and they called Hittites a non-Indo-European population, who were the former inhabitants of the territory ruled by what we call Hittites.
It’s just interesting that the apparent trend is from complexity to simplification, like what I observed with English as grammar is not taught so much here in England anymore. It could well be (and likely is) an illusion stemming from my shallow knowledge of the subject of linguistics.
In some regards English is simpler, but in other ways it is more complex in order to compensate for what’s lost in simplification elsewhere. English is simplified morphologically, but word order does a lot of heavy lifting instead, and it’s often apparent when speaking to someone who hasn’t yet mastered the language.
The grammar of language tends swing back and forth on these factors, perhaps some guided by literacy and the rest a random walk, and what is “simpler” to us might be a subjective statement based on what we speak now.
To fall back on the reliable technology principle: it depends on your use case.
and that "more words" combination may be more precise, expressive and much simpler to handle in communication in some contexts (not necessary in all though) than say something like <prefix><word root><suffix 1><suffix2> with <suffix>-es being "juschij" and the likes (my past comment on that https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40244902 )
An example: "Petr kicked Ivan" and "Ivan kicked Petr" - 2 opposite things in English while in Russian i can use all 6 combinations of the "Petr", "kicked", "Ivan" words while still saying the same thing just by utilizing necessary suffixes to express the case, and by switching suffixes i can use the same 6 combinations to express opposite ("Ivana pnul Petr" and "Petr pnul Inava" and "Pnul Ivana Petr" and so on - all is the same thing while "Ivan pnul Petra", "Petra pnul Ivan",... is the opposite - great for writing poetry, while not that good for the contexts where concise and precise communication is at premium, like for example in the tech world)
The 3 examples you give in each case are not the same though - they have a different colour to them and would be “wrong” to use depending on the context. This is precisely the sort of nuance that I mentioned in one of the other comments and like you say it’s great for poetry but also for encoding additional context in fewer words. Incidentally, I recall my dad pointing this out as another similarity to Sanskrit.
As an example: I once spent some time trying to explain to my wife the difference between «какая-то фигня» and «фигня какая-то». Same words quite different meaning. :)
Taking it further, this difference can be used as a lens to see the fundamental difference between Western and Eastern philosophy and way of thinking but that’s a whole separate rabbit hole. (This is much more my subject of interest rather than linguistics.)
It's not that it "matters" in a political or nationalistic sense. That's an error in interpretation of the motivation for this kind of work.
It is important because the more we know about how we got where we are, the better.
Science is useful, if it is not immediately obvious, then future generations will surely find an use for it, as it has happened time after time with mathematical ideas.
I would even say it is you who are putting a modern political spin on this by rejecting it.
For all we know, we might never get a complete picture and there might be many other aspects which we are not aware of behind PIE.
Sanskrit is a language that goes beyond Hinduism. Almost all important Buddhist Sutras and influential works like Mulamadhyamakkarika or Jaina works like Tattvartha Sutra are in Sanskrit.
Lastly Sanskrit is also the language of many secular works like Siddhanta Shiromani, Sushruta Samhita, Kama Sutra or Abhigyanashakuntalam.
It is likely that various kinds of "proto-writing" have been independently invented in a lot of places, but very few of them have evolved into writing systems.
"Proto-writing" is just a set of graphic symbols that are used to designate various things. Such a set of symbols can be used e.g. to write an inventory, to tag things to show ownership or purpose, to show on a map what can be found in certain places, and so on.
"Proto-writing" cannot be used to write human speech. All systems of "proto-writing" that have evolved into writing systems have done that by reinterpreting a part of the graphic symbols, or sometimes even all of them, to no longer be the names of some things, but to have a phonetic meaning, i.e. to represent some sounds of human speech (syllables in almost all cases), allowing thus the writing of the more abstract components of the speech, like various grammatical markers.
Therefore for a system of "proto-writing", it does not make sense to ask which is the language that has been written with it, because there exists no such language.
The only kind of information that can be known about a system of proto-writing is which is the thing denoted by each symbol. Even when the meanings of all symbols are known, that does not offer any information about the language used by those who have invented and used that system of proto-writing.
For now, there is no evidence that the Indus script was a writing system, because only very short strings of symbols have been preserved. It could have been a writing system, because by that time other writing systems already existed not far away, which could have inspired them, or it could have been just a proto-writing system, which would give no clue about the language of its users.
Recent genetic research points to the complete opposite (at least to some extent). It might have taken just a generation or two for some individuals to get from the steppe to e.g. Britain.
It wasn't really until the 19th century that it was re-translated and the connection to other indo-european cultures and pantheons was rediscovered.
Were there such events?
> How much effort do
Not a lot. Since they don’t need to because of writing. As far as we can tell non-literate societies put in massively more effort into preserving oral traditions.
Of course it’s debatable but there is some evidence that oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.
There certainly were; quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_I_of_Normandy (28 August 0932 – 20 November 0996):
> Richard either introduced feudalism into Normandy or he greatly expanded it. By the end of his reign, the most important Norman landholders held their lands in feudal tenure.
Normandy, as you may or may not know, is in France.
Then, a century later, his great-grandson, Duke of Normandy, conquered England, subjugating the Britons, Anglo-Saxons, et al., under a French-speaking noble elite. If Jarl Rikard had been cut down by bandits in his youth, or had merely failed to enlist the Norman landholders' swords under his banner (and that of his son, grandson, and great-grandson), the Norman invasion would not have happened. Similarly, if Richard's son Richard had been unable to escape from the court of King Louis IV in 0946, or unable to then win back Normandy from the king by force of arms, his grandson William would have been in no position to conquer—and it is unlikely that the subdivided Duchy would have been able to raise an army to successfully invade England, a feat that has not been repeated in the ensuing 959 years. And so on.
> Of course it’s debatable but there is some evidence that oral knowledge can be preserved for thousands of years.
Yes, your comment was written in reply to a comment naming one of the most surprising examples of such preservation, as a result of non-literate societies, as you said, "put[ting] put in massively more effort into preserving oral traditions". Nevertheless, they seem to preserve massively less historical knowledge despite that effort.
That’s rather indirect. But you do have a point.
However we do know quite a bit about those events? So any English speaker who cares can learn about them.
> How much effort do they typically devote
Well unlike illiterate societies they don’t need to because of books.
> massively less historical knowledge despite that effort.
Well obviously, we can’t really compare them with more literate societies. Then again we’re just very lucky that there was no complete societal collapse in the Greco-Roman world since the 500-600s BC. or so. Some highly literate civilizations like Carthaginians or the Etruscans were effectively entirely erased because nobody bothered to copy their texts).
The problem with oral traditions is that they can preserve knowledge of events that might have happened > 500 years ago (e.g. Homer describes cities, weapons and other aspects of pre Bronze age collapse Mycenaean civilization but it’s all intermixed with contemporary(Greek dark age) stuff and it’s very hard to separate fact from fiction (even ignoring the supernatural bits).
As I understand it, the Bronze-Age Minoan civilization spoke an unrelated language (as evidenced by Linear A) and has a material culture relatively continuous with Neolithic Crete, not imported from the Kurgan culture. They would have been the ones experiencing the steppe-nomad-descendant invasion, the steppe nomad descendants in question being the Mycenaeans around 01450 BCE, who were at that point millennia removed from both the steppes and nomadism but presumably still rode horses at least sometimes.
What I was trying to get at is that, by the time the Rig Veda was composed, the diaspora from the steppes was over a thousand years into the past. You wouldn't expect the composers of the Rig Veda to necessarily know anything about it to be able to mention it. Instead, you'd expect them to know even less about the migrations of their nation from the steppes than modern English-speakers know about Jarl Rikard. So the fact that the Rig Veda doesn't mention any long migrations is (almost) no evidence that the migrations didn't happen, nor that they were in any sense gradual. Especially since, unlike Homer, it barely mentions historical events at all—it's almost entirely supernatural bits.
Any recommendations for an overview of the field?
You had several priestly functions, like the Hotar, who recites the invocations of the Veda, and there is also the Brahman. The Brahman checks if everything is done to precision and no mistakes are made. If there are, they need to do corrections.
This is another reason why one can say it has been passed down without much change. There is a critical edition by scholars that reconstructs the changes in meter that might have occurred, but nothing else.
The Rig Veda does provide important evidence of a migration, but not by narrating it. Rather, the vocabulary, grammar, and mythological content are so similar to the Avestan texts that a common linguistic origin seems inescapable. That of course doesn't demonstrate population replacement on its own, but lacking Starlink or even homing pigeons, some kind of migration was clearly involved.
The prevalence of Steppe Ancestry in all modern day Indians should be enough to conclude that some form of migration happened.
All this politically tinged talk about supposed purity of DNA is utter nonsense.
A bit more classical but thorough is a History of India by Herman Kulke and Dietmar Rothermund.
And the best one to go into detail is “The Rigveda : a guide” by Joel P Brereton & Stephanie W Jameson.
> It is unclear as to when the Rigveda was first written down. The oldest surviving manuscripts have been discovered in Nepal and date to c. 1040 CE.[3][78] According to Witzel, the Paippalada Samhita tradition points to written manuscripts c. 800–1000 CE.[79] The Upanishads were likely in the written form earlier, about mid-1st millennium CE (Gupta Empire period).[33][80] Attempts to write the Vedas may have been made "towards the end of the 1st millennium BCE". The early attempts may have been unsuccessful given the Smriti rules that forbade the writing down the Vedas, states Witzel.[33] The oral tradition continued as a means of transmission until modern times.[81]
As I understand it, the Tipitaka, Panini, Patanjali, etc., were also first written down around the end of the first millennium BCE or the beginning of the first millennium CE, as writing was adopted relatively late in India.
But actually there are rather solid reasons for believing that the alterations in the Rig Veda over the last 3000 years have been minimal, going far beyond what is commonly described as "pure speculation". Some of them have been described already in this thread, but there is an extensive academic literature on the topic, much of it linked from the Wikipedia article you started reading.
Here’s an article that goes deeper into this:
https://eruditus.substack.com/p/sons-of-the-indus-the-indian...