Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c14.7

c14.7

But cutting across these divisions such close linguistic parallels can be traced within the whole known Indo-European group that it has been possible to reconstruct, with some conviction, the essentials of the original parent language and its cultural background. Verbal equations can be made through six or eight languages, representing ideas or objects which are fundamental to a society and not dictated by changes of environment; for instance, relationship within the family represented by the words for ‘father’ – Sanskrit *pitár-*, Greek *πατήρ*, Latin *pater*, Irish *athir*, Germanic *fadar*, Tocharian *pātār*, Armenian *hair* – or a characteristic domesticated animal such as ‘horse’ – Sanskrit *áśva*, Greek *ἵππος*, Latin *equus*, Celtic *ech*, Anglo-Saxon *ehu*, Lithuanian *aszwà*, Tocharian *yakwe*. Based on such equations as these, a hypothetical Indo-European community has been reconstructed, of agriculturalists who had also domesticated the horse, patrilineal in social structure, users of copper and bronze but not of iron, and worshippers of a pantheon of anthropomorphic gods with a certain ritual. The method has its dangers – the great Sanskrit scholar A. B. Keith once remarked that by taking the linguistic evidence too literally one could conclude that the original Indo-European speakers knew butter, but not milk; snow and feet, but not rain and hands! But nevertheless the broad outlines are certain enough, and the structure of the society as worked out from the linguistic evidence is convincing enough when it is tested against our knowledge of second-millennium archaeology in Western Asia and Eastern Europe.