The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern WorldRoughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization. |
From inside the book
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... spread beyond its properlinguistic and geographic confines. Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race (1916), a best-seller in the U.S., was a virulent warning against the thinning of superior American “Aryan” blood (by which he ...
... spread of the Indo-European languages? For about a thousand years, between 1700 and 700 BCE, chariots were the favored weapons of pharaohs and kings throughout the ancient world, from Greece to China. Large numbers of chariots, in the ...
... spread. It is possible that the resultant loss of linguistic diversity has narrowed and channeled habits of perception in the modern world. For example, all Indo-European languages force the speaker to pay attention to tense and number ...
... spread of Indo-European grammars has perhaps reduced the diversity of human perceptual habits. It might also have caused this author, as I write this book, to frame my observations in a way that repeats the perceptual habits and ...
... spread like a virus through all pre-French words with analogous sequences of sounds. Latin cera 'wax', pronounced [kera], became French cire, pronounced [seer]; and Latin civitas 'community', pronounced [kivitas], became French cité ...
Contents
The Opening of the Eurasian Steppes | 121 |
Authors Note on Radiocarbon Dates | 467 |
Notes | 471 |
507 | |
547 | |
Other editions - View all
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian ... David W. Anthony No preview available - 2007 |