Linguistic time travel
A love of puzzles and the patience of a saint: these are two essential traits for linguists wishing to explore the Indo-European language family. Fortunately, Professor Michaël Peyrot possesses both. In his inaugural lecture he will take the audience on a voyage of discovery to the past.
As Professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics, Peyrot studies the ‘mother language’ Proto-Indo-European and its many descendants. ‘Proto-Indo-European was spoken in the late Stone Age and nearly all languages that we now know in Europe and large parts of Asia derive from it: from the Germanic and Romance languages to Indian and Sanskrit.
Anything but stuffy
You might not expect it in a discipline that deals with Stone Age language, but comparative Indo-European linguistics is extremely topical, says Peyrot. ‘Obviously, the mother language is very old and so is the discipline itself, but it is anything but stuffy. The huge developments in archaeology and archaeological genetics in recent years have given us access to much more knowledge about prehistory and human migration.’
And that knowledge comes in handy. ‘We have the reconstructed mother language, then for a long time there is nothing and then come the languages we know today. Archaeological and genetic research is helping us fill in that “nothing” and we are seeing our hypotheses about the migration patterns of different peoples and the development of their languages confirmed.’
Puzzling over letter combinations
Peyrot specialises in Tocharian, one of the two branches of the mother language that do not have modern descendants. It was spoken some 1,500 years ago in what is now Northwestern China, and probably became extinct around the year 1000.
‘Deciphering the text fragments is a lot of work but it’s very rewarding too’
In his inaugural lecture Peyrot describes the challenges posed by Tocharian. ‘The problem with Tocharian is that the number of texts is relatively limited and no single text is complete.’ This may sound like a Sisyphean task but it is exactly what Peyrot loves about his work.
‘Deciphering the text fragments is a lot of work but it’s very rewarding. It begins with a fragment containing a word or letter combination that we don’t yet know, or something we don’t yet understand. Then I start puzzling, comparing and figuring out the context until I can place the word’s meaning. That can take weeks.’
Time travel
When he was appointed as professor, Peyrot said he looked forward to passing on his love of the discipline to the next generation of students. Has this lived up to his expectations? ‘Yes, I really enjoy it. We are not the largest section of the linguistics programme but we always have well-filled classrooms and lots of interested students. When I was at university, there was sometimes only one other student on the course. That is not the case nowadays.’
Peyrot continues, ‘Students find it fascinating that you can go back so far in time in our discipline.’ He shares this fascination with them. ‘The texts also have you learning about the people of the time. You have to know what they thought about gods, the cosmos, the earth and the underworld; otherwise you can’t understand the texts. You have to immerse yourself in and identify with other cultures, and that’s a lot of fun.’
Intimate introduction
‘Reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European language plunges you back deeper in time still’, says Peyrot. ‘You find yourself in the fourth millennium BC. Then you have no text and don’t know all the words and it’s all a bit hazy but that makes it all the more fascinating. It’s hard to imagine a more intimate introduction to our ancestors from the Late Stone Age.’
On 6 September at 14.00 hrs., Michaël Peyrot will give his inaugural lecture: Het Indo-Europese landschap. Een trektocht door het verleden van de taal (The Indo-European landscape. A trek through language’s past). Peyrot is Professor of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics.
Text: Julie de Graaf