Proto: Laura Spinney

The greatest achievement of this book is the crunching of a vast - multi-continental, multi-millennial - journey into less than 300 pages without being too dense.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that it is too easy either. Keeping track of the evolution of the mother language of what more than half the world speaks can never be easy.

Yet, Spinney succeeds somewhat, balancing information with insight quite well.

And what an epic journey it has been.

Take for instance one minor example of how words travel and evolve. This example is not from Proto alone, but cherrypicked from multiple sources, just to emphasise a point:

The idea of wheel/cycle/rotation:

An ancient obscure tongue split into proto-Indo-European and proto-Anatolian, according to one theory. Speakers of this mother language did not know of the wheel. So they had no word for it.

But by the time of the Proto-Anatolian-speaking Hittites, there was a word for the wheel: "hurkis"

Proto-Indo-European speakers called it "roteh" and "Queqlos/kwekwelos".

Apparently, the root of “hurkis” is different from that of “roteh” and “Queqlos/kwekwelos”, because by then they had become different languages — and people.

Roteh: returning periodically to the same point -- became rotate in the west. Periodically changing weather became "Rutu/Ritu". Menstrual cycles in Marathi and Malayalam: Ritu.

Queqlos/kwekwelos: This became cycle in the west. In Marathi and Kannada, the round shape of murukku made them call it "chakli".

Proto-Anatolian "Hurkis": apparently not part of Proto-Indo-European - still managed to enter Indian vocabulary as "charkha" and "chakra".

It is all so beautifully random and yet logical.

This somehow connects me to the idea of entropy in quantum physics. It basically means that matter is constantly decaying or degenerating into smaller, simpler matter or units, while giving out heat. Entropy is THE ONLY evidence of time according to many scientists.

Is the evolution of languages a similar process — if the standardisation brought out by the modern nation state or the smaller administrative units don’t create hurdles?

Like I have mentioned before, if there is no Kerala state, there is every possibility that “Kasargodan” and “Thironthari” could potentially be new languages in a few centuries or even less. I am almost sure that is exactly what happened to Kannada and Tamizh.

And for the North Indian “proud” Aryan nationalist, the book has got just one thing to say: “Go to Ukraine”!