Anthony Jakob: “Echoes of Preliterate Voices on the Shores of the Baltic Sea”

ABSTRACT:

When people think of their ancestry, they are often just as concerned with the origins of their linguistic and cultural identity as they are with their genetic history. And while modern advances in ancient DNA have dramatically improved our understanding of prehistoric population movements, genes do not themselves carry language. The fields of population genomics, archaeology, and historical linguistics, while capable of informing one another, study qualitatively different aspects of human history, which only partially overlap. In this way, linguistics offers a unique perspective in the study of our past.

Most languages ever spoken by humans have been lost to history. Prior to the relatively recent migration events that brought the Uralic and Indo-European language families to the Baltic region, the area may have been rich in an unwritten linguistic diversity, a diversity that was dissipated as communities shifted away from their native tongues. In my talk, I argue that we can infer traces of these lost languages on the basis of the words for local fauna, flora, and topographical phenomena used today that appear to be borrowed, but whose source cannot be identified.