Of beasts and men. The animals of the Proto-Indo-Europeans

“Of Beasts and Men – The Animals of the Proto Indo Europeans” was a research project with the goal to reconstruct and analyze the animal-related lexicon of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language in order to find out what animals (wild and domesticated) were known to the speakers of PIE, which word-formation patterns were involved in the naming of the animals, and what the etymology of these animal names can tell us about the structure of the prehistorical PIE society and/or their view of the world.

Over the course of the project, I collected and examined over 60 zoonyms that are reconstructible for PIE. The criteria for being included were that they need to be attested in at least two genetically and geographically not very closely connected branches, that they must exhibit the exact same form (e.g. root + suffix), and that they are not potentially onomatopoetic in origin. In a next step, I evaluated the etymologies of the collected words, analyzed their derivational structure, and interpreted the semantic constituents and concepts of the animal names in view of their derivational meaning.
Words for mammals dominated the corpus (32 in total), followed by birds (10), insects (7), amphibians (5), fish (5), arachnids (2), and molluscs (1). As expected, the study showed that PIE had a more variegated lexicon for domesticated than for wild animals. For example, there is just one generic term for most species of the latter group (e.g. *h2ŕ̥tkos ‘bear’, *u̯ĺ̥kʷos ‘wolf’, *bʰebʰrús ‘beaver’, *údros ‘otter’, *múhₓs ‘mouse’, etc.), while we can reconstruct several different words for certain species of domesticated livestock (e.g. for cattle: *gʷóu̯s ‘cow’, *táu̯ros ‘bull’, *h2uksṓ ‘young bull’, *u̯etsós ‘calf’). In terms of etymology, some zoonyms are perspicuous and refer to either color (e.g. *bʰebʰrús ‘beaver’, literally ‘the brown one’), habitat (e.g. *údros ‘otter’, lit. ‘the one in/at the water’), age (e.g. *u̯etsós ‘calf’, lit. ‘of this year/one year old’), physical characteristics (e.g. *h2uksṓ ‘young bull’, lit. ‘the strong one’), or typical verbal actions (e.g. *múhₓs ‘mouse’, lit. ‘the stealer’), others are helplessly unanalyzable (e.g. *h2ŕ̥tkos ‘bear’) and/or belong to a very old and thus formally opaque stratum of words (e.g. *gʷóu̯s ‘cow’). A couple of these etymologies provide an insight into the minds and the every-day life of our linguistic ancestors. For example, if the interpretation of *múhₓs ‘mouse’ as ‘the stealer’ is correct, this suggests that already the Proto-Indo-Europeans had problems with rodent-infested pantries. The etymology of *u̯ĺ̥kʷos ‘wolf’ (lit. ‘the dangerous one’), on the other hand, confirms the intuitive assumption that this animal was considered a substantial threat to life and well-being of the community. It is very likely that *u̯ĺ̥kʷos ‘the dangerous one’ replaced an older word for ‘wolf’ that had been put under a taboo for fear of summoning the animal by pronouncing its real name.

Even though the scope of the project (i.e. PIE zoonyms) seems very restricted, the study of these animal names led to an investigation of much more substantial research questions that have hitherto been neglected and/or are still unsolved in the field, such as the cross-linguistic process of substantivization of adjectives (e.g. *u̯l̥kʷós ‘dangerous’ vs. *u̯ĺ̥kʷos ‘the dangerous one’), the semantic possibilities in denominal derivation (e.g. *u̯etsós ‘calf’, literally ‘having one *u̯étos “year”’), and the origin of the feminine grammatical gender in the Indo-European languages.
At the end of the first project year, I started a project account on Twitter (https://twitter.com/pie_animals). I posted one or two threads per week, in which I presented one of the collected zoonyms, listed the cognates (i.e. words that go back to the same PIE source) in the 12 branches of the IE language family, and discussed interesting features of etymology, word formation, and general aspects of Indo-European linguistics at a level that is accessible for specialists and non-specialists alike. The Twitter page has proven to be a great success. My tweets are seen by up to 16.000 people and as of October 2021, I have almost 1.300 followers from all over the world.

Indo-Europeanists, linguists, philologists, and zooarchaeologists consistently commented on my posts with valuable comments, which led to a lively scholarly discussion that would otherwise not have been possible so easily. Making my research visible and accessible on Twitter was probably the best decision during my project time.
The plan is to publish all ca. 65 threads in continuous text as a book, serving as a popularizing introduction to Indo-European linguistics, in which each animal is assigned a chapter that introduces one important concept to the reader (e.g. sound change, semantic change, onomatopoeia, etc.).
Apart from this, several papers have been published in, submitted to, or are in preparation for peer-reviewed journals and other scholarly publications. I presented my project’s result on several occasions including conferences and invited talks and organized two online conferences myself that were intended to facilitate the scientific debate around some of the key aspects of the project (i.e. nominal word-formation in the Indo-European languages, and gender in PIE).

The important benefits that were gained from this research project are a better understanding of the fauna, and thus the environment, surrounding the speakers of PIE, knowledge about the most archaic PIE nominal word-formation processes, and precious cultural insights into the every-day lives and into the minds of our linguistic ancestors.

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - PIE ANIMALS (Of beasts and men. The animals of the Proto-Indo-Europeans)

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