The proto-Indo-European (PIE) - An imaginary language

 How and why the PIE language was invented

By working on the antiquity of various languages and after evaluation of the patterns related to the sound shifts, the western historians and linguists labored hard to invent the PIE language.  They constructed the grammar and the vocabulary for this newly invented PIE language.  The location of the homeland of the PIE speaking people was assumed somewhere in Ukraine/southern Russia in and around the Caucasus in the European continent.

Now with the invention of this hypothetical PIE language, it was somewhat easier to explain the reason for the similarity between the Sanskrit and the European languages.  It was proposed by them that these PIE speaking people spread from their European PIE homeland to other parts of Europe and Asia.

The concept of the PIE homeland in Europe and then the spread of the PIE speaking people to other parts of the world also served the colonial purposes.  Based on the premise of this PIE homeland and subsequently the spread of these PIE speaking people to other parts of the world, the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) was postulated.  This theory suggested that one of the groups of the PIE speaking people invaded the Indian subcontinent and as they had brought horses and chariots with them so being martially superior to the native people here in the Indian subcontinent, they overpowered these native Shudras and Dasas. They also displaced some native people known as Dravidians from the northern part of the subcontinent and drove them to the down south.  In this way the Aryans who were foreigners and invaders, ultimately settled here in northern India.

The invention of PIE also served to uphold the supremacy of the European race

The concept of the Proto Indo-European (PIE) language and a homeland of the PIE speaking people in the Europe have been introduced to uphold the supremacy of the European race and also to justify the colonization of the Asia, Africa and the Latin America by the western colonisers.  It was thought essentially to have the existence of a proto language being spoken in the European region in the ancient time, and from which all the modern languages must have evolved. 

Now the Britishers had moral grounds for colonizing the Indian subcontinent.  According to them, it was not the first time that this part of the world has been invaded and colonized.  Previously also, the Aryans who had come from the central Europe had invaded this land and ruled here.  So the PIE homeland theory also served the British colonizers.

But no evidence for the existence PIE has been found.

But the fact is something else.  So far no evidence has been found that could suggest that this imaginary language was once spoken anywhere in the world.  No literature pertaining to this language has been ever found and there is no hope of its discovery in the foreseeable  future too.  It was the Indian subcontinent that was the homeland of the Aryans.  The Sanatana Shastra, the literature of the Aryans mentions that the Aryan people had flourished here in the subcontinent.  It is nowhere mentioned in this literature that the Aryans people have settled in the subcontinent from somewhere else.  Usually, when people migrate to a new place they definitely want to keep the memories of the old place with them.  There must have been at least a mention of the migration that had taken but there is no mention of it.  The literature of the Aryans is vast.  In such a huge literature, there is not a single line written about the fact that these people had actually migrated from a different place to the Indian subcontinent. The European or any other homeland of the Vedic people has not been mentioned anywhere in the Shastras (the scriptures of the Sanatana dharma). It was from the Bharatvarsha or the Indian subcontinent that the Vedic people moved in different directions, to different places.  The Sanatana Shastra, Aitareya Brahmana describes the extension of the Vedic Civilization beyond the Himalayas to the northwest in Uttara Kuru and Uttara Madra. Aitareya Brahamana 8.14 says Uttara Kuru had Vedic consecration for their kings. The word Uttara Kuru got corrupted to Ottorokorrha being the region lying between the Aral and the Caspian Seas. So it is quite possible that from these regions of Uttara Kuru and Uttara Madra, the Vedic philosophy and practices further propagated to Europe.  We also observe a close connection between the Vedic and the Slavic languages and the practices related to the worship of the Supreme Divine in many forms in these two regions. The Sanskrit language still exists quite clearly in the Lithuanian and Slovenian languages.  Not only the Salvic and Lithuanian but the Sanskrit has similarity of its words with all the Indo-European languages.  The interaction between the Vedic people and West Asians can be seen through the similarities between the these people and the Mitannis, the Hurrians, the Kassites and other people of the west Asia. The linguistic evidence suggests  that the entire West Asia had Vedic roots.  The Vedic roots of the entire West Asian region are also supported by the archeological findings.  Excavation have revealed the documents having references to the Vedic deities, Mitra, Varuna, Indra, Nasatya (Ashwin twins) in the peace treaty signed by the Mitanni kings with their rivals.  The name of the rulers of the Assyrians,  the Kassites and the Mitannis are Sanskrit in origin. The Vedic Sanatana roots of these empires confirm the Sanatana past of the West Asian region also and the origin of the Semitic languages from the Sanskrit.  It is usually preseumed that Semitic language are different from the Indo-European languages and practically have no similarities in between them.  But linguistically, a large number of words of the Semitic languages have their origin in the Sanskrit.

The artificially invented PIE language is nothing but Sanskrit

There is pre-eminence of Sanskrit in the proto Indo-European language.  There are ten main branches of the PIE language spread across the world. Only one percent of the PIE cognates are found in all Indo-European language branches.  More than fifty percent of the reconstructed PIE vocabulary is based on just 4-5 language branches.  Further, only one percent of the reconstructed vocabulary is based on a cognate found in all ten major language groups. Even the staunch proponent of PIE language do admit the Sanskrit as one of the earliest one with literary evidence.  They place it with Mycenaean Greek and Anatolian (Hittite). Sanskrit has gigantic ancient literature. The religious practices and the injunctions prescribed in this literature are carried out and followed word for word even today in the Indian Subcontinent.  The Stutis or the hymns praising the Deities are sung verbatim as were used when the ancient Vedas, Puranas and Upanishadas were composed. The detailed worship of the Deities is performed as per the injunctions ordained in these Shastras.  So the peripheral literature available in Sanskrit language is large.  It is more than any other major language group of these 4-5 branches mentioned above.  In fact, with its systematic grammatical structure and vocabulary, it was the Sanskrit language that facilitated the understanding of many of these ancient language groups, a work that could not have been possible without the Sanskrit being in the picture at the centre.

Furthermore, an interesting fact to be observed is that only four percent of early Vedic Sanskrit vocabulary is non Indo-European.  This places the Vedic Sanskrit almost equivalent to this hypothetical ancient Indo-European language.  The Vedic Sanskrit is almost similar to this reconstructed PIE language. So as mentioned above, if 96% percent of the Vedic Sanskrit is similar to PIE, then it can be fairly concluded that the hypothetical proto language that the historians and the linguists are searching is in fact, the Vedic Sanskrit.   

The etymological evidence

Now we discuss the etymological evidence. Evidence that the languages of Europe had, with a few exceptions, evolved in stages from a common source, was found neither in Greece nor Rome, nor anywhere in Europe, but in an ancient and distant language, the Classical Sanskrit of India, used from the time immemorial in the speech and practices of the people of the Indian subcontinent.

Now we see what the eminent linguists who had played a major role in the concept of the PIE language had opinion on Sanskrit. The celebrated linguist William Jones had described Sanskrit as "more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either".  Max Muller, a German philologist who popularized the Aryan Invasion theory (AIT) had at one place wrote how difficult it was to defend this hypothetical PIE homeland, PIE language and the Aryan Invasion Theory. He admits surprisingly that it is the Hindu only that has been successful in preserving the grammar, the roots and the vocabulary of the PIE people.  He admits that though the other branches of the PIE language differ significantly from each other, it is the Sanskrit that agrees with all the other branches.

In spite of the progress the modern society has made, we still have not invented a language more elaborate and developed than Sanskrit. There is no language more sophisticated than Sanskrit. The proponent of the Proto-Indo-European language propose that the parent language of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin the PIE language that was spoken once in antiquity is now dead but they never accept that the language they are looking for is right in front of them, and that is Sanskrit itself.  As discussed above, the PIE reconstruction is purely imagination.  It is just one of any number of similar reconstructions one can develop.

How the different languages spoken across the Indian subcontinent evolved to their present stage 

Sanskrit, the most precisely grammared having a refined manner of speaking was for learned classes of the society and for educational purposes, similar as it still is today. In this way, Sanskrit existed along with the different Prakrits or regional languages. In the Indian subcontinent, there are a number of languages though derived from Sanskrit yet these languages retain striking similarities to the Sanskrit.  These regional languages gradually during a prolonged period of time, underwent a change to such a considerable degree in terms of their grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation that these languages and Sanskrit ceased to be comparable.  These had to be learned as separate languages.

The same is the case with the languages spread across the world

It is quite probable that in the same way, the Geek, Latin, Avestin and other languages that we find across the world and which still hold many similarities with their mother language i.e. Sanskrit developed. So these languages spread across the world had their origin in Sanskrit but during the prolonged period of time, these were identified as separate languages although retaining a lot of similarity with the Sanskrit. The homeland, the race and the culture of supposed Proto-Indo-European population which has been discussed above never ever have existed.

No evidence of an Aryan invasion

There is no archaeological indication of an Aryan invasions or even migration into northwestern India.  The western historians and linguists observed close similarities between the European languages and the Sanskrit, which was an ancient language spoken by the people of the Indian subcontinent.  There was a vast amount of literature available for the social/cultural and religious practices being followed here since ancient time continuously. This similarity of the language tempted these linguists to mistakenly conclude that the linguistic change has been attributed to migration of people from the Central Europe to this part of the world in spite of the fact that there has been no evidence for such a migration.

The migration had in fact happened out of India. 

The migration, in fact, had happened from the Indian subcontinent to the other parts of the world.  The Indo-European language family originated in Northern part of the subcontinent and spread to the Indo-European region through a series of migrations. The Aryan Invasion or Migration Theory was proposed purely as a theoretical linguistic exercise.  Too much of labor was used in an effort to fit the things at proper place.  Every effort was made to exclude the India from being considered a possible PIE homeland. They did not had any evidence available to exclude the subcontinent as the PIE homeland linguistically.  In their effort to exclude Indian subcontinent as the origin of PIE language speaking people, they complicated the matter and the process of establishing the PIE homeland elsewhere in the world on only on linguistic grounds became too problematic for them.  

The Indian civilization is an unbroken tradition that dates back to the earliest period of the Sindhu-Sarasvati (or Indus) tradition (7000 or 8000 BCE) or even before that to 14500 BCE (as per the dating of the composition of the Surya Siddhanta, a book written on astronomy by Mayasura).