Note that this is entirely a story created for illustrative purposes for the message I want to send out. It’s not intended to be an accurate account of history but just a way to relay that the connection between languages in the same family are the gift of some of our ancestors we often call barbarian, a word that today does not mean anything good.
Once upon a time, a baby boy was born in the rough, arid terrain somewhere between the Western civilisation of Mesopotamia and the Eastern civilisation of Indus Valley. The tribe he was born into knew only the way of life of pastoral nomads – they traveled from one place to another with their herd. For the sake of this tale, let’s assume that this baby, named Ayeh, lives to be a thousand years old – a witness of the change that was coming to the way of life of our ancestors.
Through the infancy, Ayeh saw the nomads constantly attempting to find pastures. They travelled extensively to do so. And as they found these pastures they learnt about villages farther and farther away. His elders knew the villages that dotted their world and what they were good at producing, but they were simply attempting to herd their livestock which on some days could be a painful fruitless exercise. Of course, this took effort and coordination so the tribe would not just follow each other but be able to communicate so they could plan and spread out to aid discovery. That, my friends, takes language.
One day, these nomads were parked close to an artisanal village. A wise elder woman of the “nomadic tribe” realized that the artisans of the village were unable to sell their art to a village known for their weapons because none of them traveled. So, she bought some pieces of art – a capital investment if you will. After days and months of traveling on their horses, she reached the village known for weaponry and these villagers were so enamored by the art that they were willing to give her some of their best weapons for it. Ayeh watched the trade from the lap of his grandmother. They probably haggled a bit or at least had some kind of interaction as the woman tried to sell the products. Centuries went by and this sort of trade became commonplace. Pastoral nomads became astute traders, and Ayeh was now well into his boyhood. He spoke the language of his tribe, but what he failed to notice was that he could effortlessly speak with the children of both the villages even though the villagers themselves had never interacted. They did sound a bit different though – pronunciations differed, words took different forms but they were generally traceable to the tribe’s language. Villages sprung up along longer trade routes, and so if anyone were to venture a guess, multiple branches of the same language were now also spoken elsewhere as traders communicated with other traders in common meeting points. Similarly, the villagers they traded with also began to speak some version of Ayeh’s mother tongue.
Ayeh became an old man, at least in the eyes of the tribe, and a thousand years later he remained only but a memory in the folklores shared by the tribe. But one thing remained, the language and its many children. And these languages were forever going to live. They would grow up just as Ayeh did, their height would change, their voices too, and maybe some of them would develop funny quirks. Just like everyone who ever met Ayeh couldn’t point to him at a different stages of life and recognize him, not everyone could hear these languages and understand them. But one thing remained – their common history, often visible through some unexpected delightful commonalities.
And that my friends, is how all the Indo-European languages are connected to each other, and how the Sub-Saharan languages are all branch outs of the Bantu language.
Why do I tell you this story? I tell you this story because these very pastoral nomads are often referred to as barbarians (even in some school history books) – a word that has carried the weight of significant negative connotations even though all it meant in ancient Greek was ‘foreigner’. And these very ‘foreigners’ are likely the reason we all are unexpectedly connected through languages that come from the same root.
Credit: Note that this thought of Ayeh and languages growing up as children came to me while reading a fascinating book called The Invention of Yesterday by Tamim Ansary. It is his book that talks about pastoral nomadism and their contribution to families of languages and hence if this peeks your interest, I’d suggest reading the book for a much more educated view of our shared history.
Autograph 
Leave a comment