Les Indo-Européens, des ancêtres encombrants ?

Abstract

The languages of most regions of Europe and part of western Asia have gradually come to be recognised as related, and so the family of languages known as Indo-European has been defined. These languages are closer to each other than they are to other language families, such as Semitic, Sino-Tibetan or others. The interpretation of this indisputable kinship was inspired by the case of the Romance languages, all more or less descended from Latin following the Roman conquest of part of Europe. And so we looked for the origin of this prehistoric conquering people, whose reconstructed original language would have given rise to all the languages we speak today. Among countless hypotheses, three stand out. The first is the area around the Baltic Sea; without any archaeological argument, it was supported in its time by the Nazis and taken up by certain far right-wingers today. The second is the Near East, identified with the spread of sedentary agriculture (the Neolithic) from this region. The third, currently in the majority, would see cavalry warriors from the Black Sea steppes spread throughout Europe and the surrounding area. Despite the recent and much-publicised help of genetics, the latter cannot be reduced to the simplistic forms it has been given. That's why we need to develop much more complex models, both linguistically (beyond a simple family tree) and historically and anthropologically (beyond an invasive and colonial model), for the formation and spread of these languages.

Keywords

• model
• archaeology
• Nazism
• Indo-European languages
• tree
• spread