The Early C. C.

Uhlenbeck on Indo-European
Michiel de Vaan
University of Lausanne

Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck (1866–1951) was

one of the leading Dutch linguists between the 1880s and
the 1940s. He made his mark on a number of disciplines in
descriptive and comparative linguistics, such as Basque, the
indigenous languages of North America, Old Germanic and
Sanskrit. In 2008, a special issue of the Canadian Journal of
Netherlandic Studies (Genee & Hinrichs 2008) was devoted
to his memory, the contents of which can be read online.
Uhlenbeck’s work and thinking on the Indo-
European language family, and, in particular, on the
original habitat of its speakers, have been discussed by
Kortlandt 2010, who concluded that Uhlenbeck had
remarkably advanced views for his time. The first two
journal articles in which Uhlenbeck (1895, 1897) sets
forth his views were published in Dutch. During the
academic year 2013/14, I had the opportunity to read a
number of articles on the question of the Indo-European
homeland problem with my students at Leiden University.
I provided Uhlenbeck’s Dutch articles from 1895 and 1897
with an English translation which I hereby submit to all
colleagues.
The question of where Proto-Indo-European was
spoken has been discussed repeatedly by scholars of various
disciplines, such as linguistics (Polomé 2002; Simon 2008,
2009; Clackson 2007: 15–19; Kortlandt 2010; Beekes/de
Vaan 2011: 48–53); archaeology (Renfrew 1999; Anthony
2013; Mallory 2013); evolutionary biology (Bouckaert et al.
2012); and geography (Lewis/Pereltsvaig 2015). Although
rival theories placing the Proto-Indo-Europeans in Anatolia
(Renfrew 1999) or between the Caucasus and
Mesopotamia (Gamkrelidze/Ivanov 1995, 2013) still have
their adherents, it seems fair to say that most linguists,

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174 Michiel de Vaan

today, support the idea that Proto-Indo-European arose in

the steppe landscape north of the Black Sea. This Pontic-
Caspian theory is the only one that fully addresses the
linguistic, cultural and geographical issues that are
connected with this historical problem. In recent years,
journals of a more general impact such as Nature and Science
have published articles on the homeland of Indo-
European, thus taking the discussion to much wider circles.
The application of phylogenetic methods derived from
evolutionary biology to linguistic and geographic data
concerning Indo-European languages has led some to
propose new theories about the age of the Indo-European
protolanguage and about the area from the Proto-Indo-
Europeans may have spread (Gray/Atkinson 2003;
Atkinson/Nicholls/Welch/Gray 2005; Bouckaert et al.
2012; compare also the criticism in Lewis/Pereltsvaig
2015). At this point, it can be expected that future
contributions will add more detail to the computational
models, thus possibly helping the resulting conclusions to a
better acceptance. But so far all quantitative approaches
have relied on a very limited and unbalanced selection of
the available evidence. As long as the linguistic,
archaeological and geographic evidence is not fully taken
into account, mathematical methods are unlikely to
convince the adherents of the present Pontic-Caspian
theory of a different PIE homeland.
In reaction to the criticism that they do not pay
enough attention to all the evidence in favor of the
Pontic-Caspian model, scholars questioning the mainstream
theory have accused Indo-Europeanists of not making all
their arguments for the Pontic-Caspian homeland explicit.
It seems to me that this accusation is mainly due to the
complicated discussion that the evidence forces scholars to
engage in, and not to the absence of scholarly literature
dealing exactly with those arguments. In this light, it is
sobering to see that main core features of the linguistic
and archaeological discussion on the PIE homeland were
already discussed at the end of the nineteenth century —
of course, according to the insights prevailing at that time.
Uhlenbeck’s 1895 article is a small piece that mainly
expresses scepticism about Hirt’s (1892) identification of

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The Early C. C. Uhlenbeck on Indo-European 175

Lithuania1 as the original homeland of the Indo-

Europeans. The arguments brought forward by Uhlenbeck,
viz., that the trees adduced by Hirt can be found in many
other regions too, that the words for ‘wolf’ and ‘bear’ are
hardly distinctive, and that the words for climatic features
and ‘sea’ are also of little use, had become mainstream
opinions a long time ago. The only real deviation from
most modern scholarship — with the exception of some,
such as Gamkrelidze/Ivanov 1995 — is Uhlenbeck’s
contention that the correspondence between Armenian
inc ‘leopard’ and Sanskrit simhá- ‘lion’ “already referred to a
large kind of Felis in the PIE period”. Mayrhofer (EWAia II:
727) regards the connection between inc and simhá- as
“uncertain” and allows for the possibility that the Sanskrit
word was borrowed from another language.
The article from 1897 is much more elaborate.
Section I, Earlier Abodes, discusses the various subbranches
of the Indo-European family and the regions where these
languages were spoken in historical times – of course
without Tokharian and Anatolian, which were not known
at the time. Very little attention is paid to Balto-Slavic,
which, as the reader will come to see, was least removed
from the probable original homeland. In section II, The
Homeland, Uhlenbeck states that the Indo-Europeans were
“previously confined to a smaller area, which included all of
the interior of Europe, the woods and steppes of Russia,
besides a part of the Near East and Central Asia and East
Iran.” He then asks the rhetorical question: “Does
linguistics provide us with the means to indicate a smaller
region as the center of expansion of the Indo-European
languages and peoples? Hardly.” Uhlenbeck goes on to
recount his arguments from 1895 in a somewhat different
order, leading him to the conclusion that “linguistic data
together with the historical likelihood point to a habitat in
the temperate zone, but cannot help us any further in
determining the ‘homeland’.”
In section III, The succession of cultural stages,
Uhlenbeck claims to have found a trace of a stage of
development in which the Indo-Europeans were hunters

1
By Lithuania, Hirt (p. 470, 481, 485) referred to the area where
Lithuanian was spoken in his time, not to any political constellation.

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176 Michiel de Vaan

but not yet animal breeders, viz. in the Slavic word for
‘dog’, Old Church Slavic pîsû. He identifies this word with
PIE *peku- ‘livestock’, implying that the dog was the first of
all domesticated animals. The etymology *pk-u- for Slavic
‘dog’ is still mentioned as one of the possible etymologies
by Derksen (2008), though the conclusion that the dog
was the first tamed animal is not usually drawn anymore by
etymologists. Rather, it is sometimes supposed that the dog
was derived from ‘livestock’ because dogs helped herding
the livestock.
In sections IV, Animal husbandry, V, Agriculture, and
VI, Metallurgy, Uhlenbeck systematically investigates,
which stage in the development of material culture we may
assume for the Proto-Indo-Europeans on the basis of the
words that the daughter languages preserve in these three
fields. It turns out that evidence from shared words for
domesticated animals (cow, sheep, goat, horse) and animal
husbandry techniques (herding, shepherd, wool) is amply
available, whereas the number of etymologies proving the
existence of a PIE agriculture is “dwindling”, according to
Uhlenbeck. Most of section V is devoted to the difference
in agricultural terminology between Indo-Iranian, on the
one hand, and the languages of Europe, on the other
hand. Uhlenbeck concludes: “At the time when agriculture
became known to the peoples of Europe and the
Armenians, they appear to have belonged to a different
cultural cycle than the Indo-Iranians.” In section VI, he
argues that ‘gold’, ‘silver’, ‘copper’ and ‘ore’ already existed
in PIE, and that the first three of these were identical with
— and must have developed from — words for ‘yellow’,
‘bright’, and ‘red’.
Kortlandt (2010: 33) summarizes the position of
Uhlenbeck’s 1895 article within the discussion around the
PIE homeland in the following way: “He recognized that it
is necessary to distinguish between two components of
Indo-European language and culture, an older common
inheritance which reflects a pastoral society and a later
European complex with a common agricultural vocabulary,
both of them dating from before the introduction of
metallurgy. It is interesting that before the end of the
19th century he had already reached the position which
has now become dominant among Indo-Europeanist

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The Early C. C. Uhlenbeck on Indo-European 177

scholars and is supported by the archaeological evidence

(cf. Mallory 1989). The major point which he did not see is
the crucial role of the domesticated horse in the Indo-
European expansions”.
Anthony (2013) and Haarmann (2012) have taken
these arguments yet one step further, from the viewpoint
of archaeology (Anthony) and sociolinguistics
(Haarmann), respectively. Anthony focuses on the
socioeconomic changes that took place in the fifth and
fourth millennium BC, when the Indo-European steppe
peoples entered into contact with the sedentary,
agricultural population of Southeast-Europe, also termed
Old European or Palaeo-European. Importantly, Anthony
dismantles the monolithic view of a single “steppe
pastoralism”, and instead stresses that the steppe
economony itself went through various developmental
phases, which might be linked to different periods of
expansion of Indo-European into Europe. Haarmann
zooms in on the sociocultural effects of the Indo-European
expansion(s). Since language contact will often heavily
influence the languages which are in contact, he sets out
to look for traces of the language of the Old Europeans in
the surviving Indo-European languages, first of all, in
Ancient Greek. As many scholars before him have also
realized, there is a thick layer of non-Indo-European words
in Greek in fields such as agriculture, wine production,
weaving, metallurgy, religion and mythology, building
techniques, and local flora and fauna. Even the Greeks
themselves acknowledged the presence of a “Pelasgian”
substratum in their own language. Haarmann concludes
(2012: 119): “Despite the fact that Indo-Europeans
exercised political power and promoted their language as
the common vehicle, they were nevertheless impressed by
the achievements of the Old Europeans to the extent that
the dominant language of the élite absorbed manifold
influences from the local language(s).”
Another inspiring work on the spread of language in
preliterate cultures in Europe is Heather 2010. His topic is
the first millennium AD, often termed the “Migration
Period”, or, in Dutch, Grote Volksverhuizing ‘Great Migration
of Peoples’. As a historian, Heather first of all focuses on
the historical evidence for and against the migration of

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178 Michiel de Vaan

peoples as the cause for shifts in ethnic identity. But his

discussion also goes a long way toward showing the kind of
socioeconomic detail that is required to understand when
and why certain shifts in identity – and thus often in
language – will happen. Admittedly, we will never possess
for the Early Bronze Age the same historical detail that is
available in writing about the Roman empire, its
neighbours and their successor states in the first
millennium AD. Still, the progress seen in the archaeology
of Eastern Europe over the last decades justifies the
expectation that we will keep improving our models of the
Indo-European expansions in the future, just like our
present models are more reliable and more detailed than
those of C. C. Uhlenbeck 120 years ago.

References
Anthony, David
2013 Two IE phylogenies, three PIE migrations, and four kinds of
steppe pastoralism. Journal of Language Relationship 9, 1–21.

Atkinson, Quentin, Geoff Nicholls, David Welch and Russell Gray

2005 From words to dates: water into wine, mathemagic or
phylogenetic inference? Transactions of the Philological Society
103, 193–219.

Beekes, Robert
2011 Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. Second edition, revised
and corrected by Michiel de Vaan. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
Benjamins.

Bouckaert, Remco, Philippe Lemey, Michael Dunn, Simon J. Greenhill,

Alexander V. Alekseyenko, Alexei J. Drummond, Russell D.
Gray, Marc A. Suchard and Quentin D. Atkinson
2012 Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European
Language Family. Science 337, 957–960.

Clackson, James
2007 Indo-European Linguistics: An introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Derksen, Rick
2008 Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon. Leiden:
Brill.

EWAia = Manfred Mayrhofer, Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindoarischen.

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The Early C. C. Uhlenbeck on Indo-European 179

Gamkrelidze, Thomas V. and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov

1995 Indo-European and Indo-Europeans. English version by Johanna
Nichols. Two volumes. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
2013 Indoevropejskaja prarodina i rasselenije indoevropejcev.
Polveka issledovanij i obsuzdenij. Journal of Language
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Genee, Inge & Jan Paul Hinrichs (eds.)

2008 C.C. Uhlenbeck (1866–1951): A Linguist Revisited. Special issue
of Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies 29-ii/30-i. See
http://www.caans-acaen.ca/issue-xxixxi-fallautomne-
2008-issue-xxxi-springprintemps-2009/

Gray, Russell D. and Quentin D. Atkinson

2003 Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory
of Indo-European origin. Nature 426 (6965): 435–439.

Haarmann, Harald
2012 Indo-Europeanization – Day One. Elite recruitment and the
beginnings of language politics. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Heather, Peter
2010 Empires and Barbarians. Migration, development and the birth of
Europe. London: Pan Books.

Hirt, Hermann
1892 Die Urheimat der Indogermanen. Indogermanische Forschungen
1, 464–485.

Kortlandt, Frederik
2010 C.C. Uhlenbeck on Indo-European, Uralic and Caucasian. In: F.
Kortlandt, Studies in Germanic, Indo-European and Indo-Uralic,
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 31–36. [first published in Historische
Sprachforschung 122, 2009, 39–47].

Lewis, Martin L. and Asya Pereltsvaig

2015 The Indo-European Controversy. Facts and Fallacies in
Historical Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.

Mallory, James P.
2013 Twenty-first century clouds over Indo-European homelands.
Journal of Language Relationship 9, 145–154.

Polomé, Edgar
2002 Some thoughts about the IE homeland. In: Mark Southern
(ed.), Indo-European Perspectives, 233–240. Washington, Institute
for the Study of Man.

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180 Michiel de Vaan

Renfrew, Colin
1999 Time depth, convergence theory, and innovation in Proto-
Indo-European: ‘Old Europe’ as a PIE linguistic area. Journal of
Indo-European Studies 27, 257–293.

Simon, Zsolt
2008 How to find the PIE homeland? A methodological essay. Acta
Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 48, 289–303.
2009 Some critical remarks on the recent PIE homeland and
ethnogenesis theories. Indogermanische Forschungen 114, 60-72.

Uhlenbeck, Christiaan Cornelis

1895 Waar werd de Indogermaansche stamtaal gesproken?
Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde 14, 69–74.
1897 De voorgeschiedenis der Indogermaansche volken. Taal en
Letteren 7, 1–25.

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