When history had barely begun, when ideas were replacing instinct, when grunts were becoming speech, a mysterious people were unknowingly laying the foundation of both western and eastern civilization. Their proto words and beliefs spread across Europe and Asia.
The bones of their world are with us still in modern concept and prefix.
Anthropologists and Linguists were slow to accept the astonishing idea of a previously unknown people, who spoke a common tongue, who influenced language, and culture, and who did so across the amazing entirety of the Indo-European landmass.
"Balderdash", "Stuff and nonsense", and so on.
The first clue came from an Englishman, Sir William Jones, a British civil servant in India. who was also a respected philologist. In 1786, Jones's knowledge of many languages prompted him, to write an academic paper on the surprising agreement of meaning between words, as well as grammar, in Sanskrit and many European Languages.
Sr. Williams paper excited the imagination
of linguists. Over the course of the nineteenth century the evidence accumulated. Eventually the reality of a common Indo-European language was accepted.
Some even speculated that a common language suggests the probability of a primordial common culture; a culture that may have laid the foundation of every civilization from Europe to Asia, impossibly long ago - in the time before time.
It's a grand notion, with considerable evidence
to support it.
Structural similarities in religion, family, and government along with many other behavioral peculiarities support the notion - including a peculiar penchant for grouping all sorts of things in threes.
The concept of three-ness was important to Indo-Europeans, and it still is to those of us who inherited the concept; in Sanskrit, trayas, in Greek, treis, in Latin, tres. The word/idea of three-ness is so intrinsic we often use
it while barely noticing we used it.
For example, I just illustrated the point with a three-word example.
We don't notice our use of Indo-European words and ideas because they seem natural to us. What else would we say or think?
Fish don't know about water, birds don't know about air, and we don't know about Indo-European words and ideas, because they're our words and ideas.
Echoes in time continue to sound.
Memories became models for current events. Ideas from the past are ever-new. The latest thing no more than
a re-morphing of the oldest thing - time after time.
The Indo-European foundation is still in place.
Indo-European memories of scary real monsters evolved into the scary mythical monsters of history, which continue to prowl the depths of our collective psyche.
So too, basic ideas of how religion, family, and government should be structured. So, too conceptual proclivities like three-ness. So too, root sounds that have kept their original meaning as prefixes to modern words.
Ma and Pa ain't just hillbilly talk.
Ma and Pa are the primordial Indo-European words for Mother and Father. Ma and Pa are also prefixes to the Latin words: Mater & Pater, to the Iranian words: Matar & Pitar, and to the Sanskrit words: Matr & Patr.
The number of Indo-European root words still in use is amazing.
I have a fat volume: The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language that lists, in six-point type, thirty pages of Proto Indo-European words.
That's a lot of words. I've looked through them.
I haven't studied them.
Thankfully, generations of scholars have.