Schleicher's PIE "The Sheep and the Horses" (reprise)
« previous post |
"Hear What the Language Spoken by Our Ancestors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sounded Like" | Open Culture (10/14/25)
With two audio recordings. If you want to hear them, click on the link embedded in the title.
…since oral cultures far predate written ones, the search for linguistic ancestors can take us back to the very origins of human culture, to times unremembered and unrecorded by anyone, and only dimly glimpsed through scant archaeological evidence and observable aural similarities between vastly different languages. So it was with the theoretical development of Indo-European as a language family, a slow process that took several centuries to coalesce into the modern linguistic tree we now know.
The observation that Sanskrit and ancient European languages like Greek and Latin have significant similarities was first recorded by a Jesuit missionary to Goa, Thomas Stephens, in the sixteenth century, but little was made of it until around 100 years later. A great leap forward came in the mid-nineteenth century when German linguist August Schleicher, under the influence of Hegel, published his Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages. There, Schleicher made an extensive attempt at reconstructing the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages, “Proto-Indo-European,” or PIE, for short, thought to have originated somewhere in Eastern Europe, though this supposition is speculative.
To provide an example of what the language might have been like, Schleicher made up a fable called “The Sheep and the Horses” as a “sonic experiment.” The story has been used ever since, “periodically updated,” writes Eric Powell at Archaeology, “to reflect the most current understanding of how this extinct language would have sounded when it was spoken some 6,000 years ago.” Having no access to any texts written in Proto-Indo-European (which may or may not have existed) nor, of course, to any speakers of the language, linguists disagree a good deal on what it should sound like; “no single version can be considered definitive.”
And yet, since Schleicher’s time, the theory has been considerably refined. At the top of the post, you can hear one such refinement based on work by UCLA professor H. Craig Melchert and read by linguist Andrew Byrd. See a translation of Schleicher’s story, “The Sheep and the Horses” below:
A sheep that had no wool saw horses, one of them pulling a heavy wagon, one carrying a big load, and one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: “My heart pains me, seeing a man driving horses.” The horses said: “Listen, sheep, our hearts pain us when we see this: a man, the master, makes the wool of the sheep into a warm garment for himself. And the sheep has no wool.” Having heard this, the sheep fled into the plain.
Byrd also reads another story in hypothetical Proto-Indo-European, “The King and the God,” using “pronunciation informed by the latest insights into PIE.”
See Powell’s article at Archaeology for the written transcriptions of both Schleicher’s and Melchert/Byrd’s versions of PIE, and see his article here to learn about the archeological evidence for the Bronze Age speakers of this theoretical linguistic common ancestor.
For more on Schleicher's Sheep, see also J. P. Mallory and Victor H. Mair, The Tarim Mummies: Ancient China and the Mystery of the Earliest Peoples from the West (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), pp. 222-223: Schleicher's original version of 1868, Adams' new version of 1997 (with laryngeals), and our translation.
Related Content
Listen to The Epic of Gilgamesh Being Read in its Original Ancient Language, Akkadian
Hear Homer’s Iliad Read in the Original Ancient Greek
Hear What Homer’s Odyssey Sounded Like When Sung in the Original Ancient Greek
Was There a First Human Language?: Theories from the Enlightenment Through Noam Chomsky
What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Listen to a Reconstruction That’s “100% Accurate”
Selected readings
- "Andrew Byrd reading Schleicher's Fable" (9/23/13) — today's post is an updating, based on recent phonological research, of this post from a dozen years ago
- "Tocharian love poem" (4/1/20) — with lengthy bibliography
[h.t. Ted McClure]
Philip Taylor said,
October 23, 2025 @ 7:23 am
Not speaking PIE, I have no idea whether the audio yielded by the Soundcloud insert at the top of the linked article is about sheep and horses or something totally different, but I am certainly puzzled by the text overlaid on the artwork of the Soundcloud insert which reads :
Can anyone explain why ?
Scott de Brestian said,
October 23, 2025 @ 7:50 am
The story is a little strange since Proto-Indo-European, to the extent there was such a language, long predates the use of horses for carrying humans (which dates approximately to 1000 BCE). A chariot would be less anachronistic.
ardj said,
October 23, 2025 @ 7:51 am
Found it relatively easy to understand the IE texts but the recording of the sheep tale was extraordinary. Have no views on authenticity. Could not get the King and God story to playback, alas.
Anyway, thanks.
Pedro said,
October 23, 2025 @ 11:51 am
Despite the (presumably phonetically perfect) rendering of the reconstructed PIE, you can still hear the reader's accent, and you can tell it's an English speaker.
The same applies to the ancient Greek reading of Homer in the links. Maybe if we heard this read by a modern Greek speaker it would feel more authentic. The Gilgamesh reading, on the other hand, is immediately recognisable as a Semitic language. I guess the reader was a fluent Arabic speaker.
But who knows what these languages would have "felt" like to hear? Somehow there's a quality to a language's sound that phonetic transcription can't quite capture.
Jacob said,
October 23, 2025 @ 1:27 pm
@Phillip Taylor: it's from Archaeology Mag Soundcloud. That image of one cover of a magazine issue must be the stock image used by Soundcloud.
David Marjanović said,
October 23, 2025 @ 4:01 pm
Schleicher's fable has its own Wikipedia article which presents ten versions (1868, 1939, 1979, 1986, 1997, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2013, 2014).
Yes, but Schleicher didn't know that. How recent an invention riding horses is was only really clarified in the last few years.
It would still be anachronistic, and most likely any kind of wagon would be, if by "PIE" we mean Proto-Indo-Anatolian. Wagons at least should work for Proto-Indo-Tocharian, IIRC. But Schleicher didn't know Anatolian or Tocharian, so he could only try to reconstruct Proto-Indo-Actually-European, and chariots would not be anachronistic for that one. (Riding still would, at least on horses.)
I can't listen to any audio files right now, but if it sounds that much like modern Arabic, it probably doesn't contain enough ejectives or affricates…
David Marjanović said,
October 23, 2025 @ 4:09 pm
Correction: the 2010 version comes in Proto-Indo-Anatolian and in Proto-Indo-Actually-European! But their content is identical.
"The king and the god" also has its own WP article, which presents four versions (arguably five).
John S. Rohsenow said,
October 23, 2025 @ 5:07 pm
"With two audio recordings. If you want to hear them, click on the link embedded on the title."
Sorry to be thick but I can't find the link. HOW can I listen to the recordings?
Victor Mair said,
October 23, 2025 @ 7:03 pm
@John
Click on the highlighted title at the very top of the post.
Philip Taylor said,
October 24, 2025 @ 4:06 am
Thank you Jacob.