Russia-Ukraine region: Cradle of Indo-European languages, including Sinhala

Ukraine and Russia are in the news for the wrong reasons involved in a wasteful war, provoked by attempts to expand NATO borders. Ukraine has been made a pawn in the hands of western powers, the fate that often befall their allies. But the subject for this brief note is not the war but the story involving a region that contributed so much for the development of so many languages and cultures and its significance to Sri Lanka with regard to the development of Sinhala language.

- BY N. A. DE S. AMARATUNGA

In ancient times (2000 BCE), much of the Ukraine region was covered by the Eurasian Steppes, also called the Great Steppes, which, by the way formed the background to the novella "The Steppes" by the great Russian novelist Anton Chekov, which was a grassland and shrubland that covered a vast area in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, extending for 8000 km from Hungary, in the west, through Ukraine, southern Russia, to Mongolia, in the east. This ecosystem was fertile ground for cultural development, during this period, and several tribal confederations, and states, had emerged in this region. Some of the important cultures, relevant to this discussion, developed in this region: Eurasian Steppe Sintashta culture (2200-1800 BCE) and the subsequent Central Asian Andronovo culture (2000-400 BCE) (ref. Reich D et al 2009,). Sintashta spoke a Proto-Indo-Aryan language.

Indo-Aryan Languages, which were the origin of Sanskrit, Pali and later Hindi, and also Sinhala, belonged to the larger family of Indo-European languages. Indo-European languages developed around 6,500 years ago in the Eurasian steppe, specifically the region of the Caucasus. All Indo-European languages have descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime during the Neolithic or early Bronze Age (c. 3300 – c. 1200 BC). The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, is the Pontic-Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and Southern Russia, (Mallory, J. P. 2006). This theory is known as the Steppe Hypothesis or Kuragan theory. With advances in DNA genome mapping, the Kurgan theory is today considered to have been proved beyond doubt (Shinde, et al., 2019).