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OMightyMartian t1_jbd4w05 wrote

Reply to comment by Jimbob929 in Humans Started Riding Horses 5,000 Years Ago, New Evidence Suggests by Magister_Xehanort

A cognate is a word in a language that is related to a word in another language. For instance, the word "night" is a cognate of the German "nacht" and more distantly of the French "nuit", itself descended from Latin "nux". The reconstructed Proto Indo European form is *nókʷts. Linguistics can treat words to some extent like evolutionary biologists treat genes, and if they understand the sound changes that happen in languages and their daughter languages they can come up with reconstructed forms of the ancestral word.

When linguists study a language family like Indo-European, they find some words are well preserved, taking sound changes into accounts. Words like horse, axle and wheel are among the most conserved words in the Indo-European languages, which has led to the hypothesis that before the Proto-Indo-European language began to break up, the Proto-Indo-Europeans had already domesticated horses and invented horse drawn chariots. Other linguistic evidence, such as conserved names for flora and fauna, give clues as to where these ancient people lived, and the Pontic-Caspian Steppe is a major candidate.

From there various groups spread, some south to Anatolia (the Hittites), Greece, others headed west (the Celts and Italic peoples), some north and are the likely ancestors of the Germanic peoples. Others went east and were the ancestors of the Indo-Iranian peoples. There were other groups that seemed to stay closer to home like the Balto-Slavic and Albanian peoples.

It's more complex than that, with influences from both related and unrelated languages (think about how many Romance words are in the English language, largely borrowings from Norman French).

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Birziaks t1_jbfr61x wrote

*nókʷts - naktis in lithuanian, or nakts in my local dialect. You can adress me as mister proto Indo-European from now on, thank you very much.

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PtahandSuns t1_jbd8c1o wrote

Wouldn’t it be the other way around though? In your example of night didn’t they have night before axles, so why did night change so much? Wouldn’t it make sense that one group came up with the technology traveled around and told people about it and not enough time has gone by to adapt those words into something by other groups yet?

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PaulJazof t1_jbdkkne wrote

In linguistic terms the word 'night' didn't change a lot between indo european languages.

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Tyg13 t1_jbdsv27 wrote

The Proto-Indo-European words for axle and horse are reconstructed as *h₂eḱs and *h₂éḱwos, so I'm not sure you can make a strong argument that *nókʷts (night) changed more than them.

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BabyJesusFTW t1_jbdcvlo wrote

Maybe because night is a period of time vs an animal? Night has many phases as well vs horse is horse?

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iLynux t1_jbdjtxs wrote

Night is so ubiquitous on Earth that it's no surprise there are thousands of different words for it across cultures and even within language families.

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Rocktopod t1_jbee6yx wrote

That's the opposite point to what the other comment was saying.

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iLynux t1_jbfoa18 wrote

What I meant was, everyone on Earth knew about night, and would've been using language to describe it, regardless of what people thousands of miles away call it. Horses were not everywhere on Earth, and so the first people to encounter and domesticate them kinda got dibs on what they were called.

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thewerdy t1_jbllrvw wrote

The change in the words isn't the important part - tracing the changes through time is how we arrive at the original PIE word. The important part is that the words were conserved throughout the daughter languages which indicates that the original PIE speakers had words for them and the were used enough and important enough to be passed down from the generations. A lot of really common words in IE languages can be traced back all the way to the hypothesized mother tongue simply because they are commonly used words. The fact that there are tons of preserved words relating to horses, chariots, and wagons tell us that the original PIE speakers likely used them a lot.

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