Connected by Language and Art

As someone with a love for languages, it has been an exciting opportunity to practice my Thai and Spanish, and to begin learning a new language with Sinhala. As you can imagine, these languages are each very distinct and with their own unique challenges for a non-native speaker like myself. But what you may not realize is that these languages share common connections going back thousands of years. As we explore our ÀNI Art Academy value of “Community”, I thought it may be interesting to share how the languages we speak share some common roots, specifically for the way we talk about art, and even the word ‘art’ itself.

The first thing to understand about languages is that they are grouped into ‘families’ that share a common ancestor. For example, you may have heard of the ‘Romance Language family’, where languages like Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and others trace back to Latin and the Roman Empire. But this is a bit of a misnomer, as Romance Languages actually form only a small subfamily in the much larger and much more expansive language family called Indo-European. According to the most recent data, there are 446 languages in the Indo-European language family, with a total of 3.39 billion people speaking an Indo-European language as their mother tongue, or about 42% of the total world population. Now, if 446 languages seem like a lot of languages to have in one family, keep in mind that it only makes Indo-European the 5th largest language family, in a world with over 7,000 actively spoken languages.

The earliest common ancestor of all Indo-European languages was likely spoken over 5,000 years ago by a people called the Yamnaya Culture in present-day Ukraine. Then, as the name suggests, people either migrated east toward India or west into Europe. Almost all languages in Europe belong to this family and its many subfamilies like Romance (Spanish, Italian, French, etc), Slavic (Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, Serbian, etc), and Germanic (Swedish, German, English, Dutch,h etc), along with smaller subfamilies like Celtic, Greek, Baltic, Albanian, and Armenian. For the groups that migrated east, their languages evolved into branches like Iranian (Persian, Pashto, Tajik, Kurdish, etc) and Indo-Aryan (Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Sinhala, Marathi, etc). From this, you can see how three of our ÀNI Languages (Spanish, English, and Sinhala) share a common ancestor, but the link for Thai is slightly less straightforward.

Unlike the other languages of ÀNI, Thai is not one of the 446 Indo-European Family members but is a member of a much smaller language family called Kra-Dai, which has fewer than 100 related languages. But just because Thai has a different common ancestor than the Indo-European languages, it doesn’t mean that the connection between these languages ends there. Instead, there is another interesting phenomenon that affects language development, and that is language contact.

Distant or even totally unrelated languages have, throughout history, come into contact with each other and spread words from one language to another. All languages owe several of their words or even aspects of their grammar to contact with other languages. To briefly demonstrate just how far-reaching this vocabulary can spread, I’ll show a few examples of English words borrowed from other languages in a table below. 

But English is not unique. Thai borrowed many of its academic words from the now extinct Indian languages of Pali and Sanskrit. Due to the spread of Hinduism and later Buddhism across Indochina, many words in the region can trace back to contact with Pali and Sanskrit-speaking monks who brought their languages along with their religions across Southeast Asia. And while Thai is not an Indo-European language, Pali and Sanskrit were part of this family that included English, Spanish, and Sinhala, and therefore some common roots exist, even across these unrelated languages. 

From Iceland to Sri Lanka, all countries in green speak an Indo-European language.

Below are some word evolution trees to show how linguists hypothesize the development of different words from a common root. Although we will never know the true sounds of the extinct ancestor to all of our present-day languages, linguists have been largely able to retroactively reconstruct the origin language called “Proto-Indo-European”.

First, the origin of the word ‘art’ in English traces back to Proto-Indo-European through the Latin word for ‘skill, craft, or way’, but in Sanskrit, the word came to mean something like ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’, which evolved into Sinhala and Thai words with similar definitions.

For the origin of the word ‘art’ in Thai ศิลปะ (sinlapa), two theories exist as to their connection to words in European languages. Above, is the first theory, that Thai’s sinlapa and Sinhala’s shilpa derive from the Sansrkit silpa which itself comes from the Proto-Indo-Euorpean root ‘skel’ meaning to cut, split, or carve. From this origin, English and Spanish get their word for sculpt from Latin, and English gets the word skill from Old Norse, which also traces back to the same root.

Another theory exists where the Sanskrit silpa comes from a more ancient word, pisla, by way of something called ‘metathesis’. In linguistics, metathesis is when letters or sounds evolve to swap around in a word. In English, we can see this when some people say ‘ax’ instead of “ask,” where ‘s’ and ‘k’ swap positions. This also happened with English words like bird (original Old English brid), and wasp (Old English waeps), and it also explains how some of us pronounce comfortable as comf-tor-ble. In this way, the Sanskrit word silpa may have originally come from an older Sanskrit word pisla that traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root ‘peyk’ meaning to stitch, mark, or paint, and where English and Spanish get the word ‘paint’ from. 

There are many, many more ways in which our languages connect us, and some of these connections may never be uncovered. What is important isn’t really the fact that certain words trace back to different roots or that this word comes from that language. Instead, it is that our communities are connected in more ways than we could ever realize. Since writing was only invented a few thousand years ago, we can only guess how long we have been using spoken languages to communicate. Some experts claim it started around 100,000 years ago; others say it started before or after.

But what is clear is that since our earliest beginnings, humans have been compelled to communicate visually, to express ourselves through artwork, as if to convey things impossible to articulate through the spoken word. Just last year, researchers discovered the oldest known figurative painting in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. It dates back to about 51,200 years ago. This is all the more exciting since human migration to the island had only been reliably traced back 50,000 years. To me, this indicates that creating artwork is an intrinsic part of the human experience, since it was at the very moment the first people stepped foot on Sulawesi that they began drawing and painting on the walls of their caves. So just as the ancient origins of our languages connect us across time and continents, so too does our natural compulsion to create visual representations of the world around us.