Historical Linguistics: A Window into the Human Past

Theme: Languages

Published: 11 June 2025

Summary
In this episode within our theme ”Languages” we meet Axel Palmér, a historical linguist specializing in Indo-European languages. Axel Palmér discusses his research on agricultural vocabulary in the Rigveda, exploring whether the people who composed the Rigveda were pastoralists or agriculturalists by examining the text's descriptions of agriculture and comparing them to other Indo-European languages. Palmér explains how tracing the history of words like "phala" (plowshare) can reveal insights into cultural and technological exchange in prehistoric language communities. He also touches on his future research plans, focusing on the relationship between Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages, and how his time at SCAS has broadened his interdisciplinary perspective.

Keywords
Indo-European languages, Rigveda, agricultural vocabulary, Center for the Human Past, academic career

Suggested Link/s
SCAS Page: Axel Palmér

Transcript of the Episode

Axel Palmér 00:09
And there's this question since a long time of whether the people who spoke Sanskrit and who made the Rigveda, for example, were they pastoralists or agriculturalists. So what I'm trying to do is, first of all, looking at how agriculture is described in this text, to see whether it is something that's described as recent or foreign or bad maybe, or good, and then compare that to other Indo-European languages. So it's basically about how old were the words that are used to describe agricultural tools, technologies, crops, cereals, how old are those words?

Natalie von der Lehr 00:57
Welcome to SCAS talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. My name is Natalie von der Lehr, and in this episode, I talk to Axel Palmér, a historical linguist specializing in Indo-European languages. He is a Human Past junior fellow in residence at SCAS during this academic year, 2024/2025. AxelPalmérs research seeks to understand the development of the Indo-European languages, particularly the Indo-Iranian branch, and its relationship to its European relatives. One focus is the reconstruction of the prehistoric movements and interactions of the speakers of Indo-European languages. We will hear more about this in this episode, which is the fourth episode in our theme "Languages". Very welcome to SCAS Talks and the studio.

Axel Palmér 01:48
Thank you very much. Natalie,

Natalie von der Lehr 01:49
Would you like to say a few more words about yourself?

Axel Palmér 01:52
Yeah, so I'm just back, I would say it feels like I'm just back in Sweden. I'm from Uppsala originally, so I know the city very well, but I have never been to, I didn't really know much about SCAS before starting here, so it's cool to see this other very international part of the town.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:13
Yes

Axel Palmér 02:15
Well, about seven years ago, I moved to the Netherlands to do a Masters in Indo-European linguistics. And then I thought, well, I'm just going to be here for two years, get my degree, and then who knows, maybe I'll goback to Sweden. But I ended up staying for another five years to do my PhD there. So I had some time abroad, and now I'm back here for for this fellowship, for this academic year.

Natalie von der Lehr 02:41
So you did your PhD quite recently.

Axel Palmér 02:44
Yeah

Natalie von der Lehr 02:45
Probably you're one of the younger fellows.

Axel Palmér 02:47
I think I am the youngest, yeah. So that's definitely also an interesting dynamic. I have a lot, I feel like I, you know, at SCAS there is, on the one hand, you learn a lot about other people's research and and about other fields of science, but I also learn a lot of, just based on the fact that people are more advanced in their career. So it's actually a great place for a like, early career person like me to to get more experience talking to them about the academic career paths that are possible.

Natalie von der Lehr 03:21
Yeah, I can imagine, it must be very useful so early on in your academic career to get these kind of contacts and knowledge about academia. Yes, very interesting. We will get back to SCAS a little bit later so we can talk more about this. But first of all, so our listeners get a little flavor, really briefly and broadly, what is your research about?

Axel Palmér 03:43
So it deals with a group of languages, which is a very large group, which is called the Indo European language family. And this is a language family that's very widely distributed all over the world now, actually. But if we go back to sort of before the colonial era, it was mainly in Europe and Asia, but all the way from India and Bangladesh and so on to Europe. So a lot of languages that are very different from one another, but still we can compare them and find out that they actually have the same origin. My research is basically about how did that happen? It has to have happened a long time ago that these languages actually were, atsome point one language, and then because of something probably related to people moving in different directions, migrating to new areas, the language gradually diverged, and now it's a more than, yeah, how many languages are there even in the in the Indo-European. It's hundreds of different languages.

Natalie von der Lehr 04:54
And as a Human Past fellow, you have an affiliation both with SCAS and the Center for the Human Past. Can you say a little bit more about the center?

Axel Palmér 05:04
Yeah, so the Center for the Human Past has an even broader scope, as the name suggests. So it's not only about Indo-European languages, but also about other parts of the world and other language families. So it deals primarily with Eurasia and with Africa and with Indonesia and other parts of Southeast Asia.

Natalie von der Lehr 05:28
Back to your research then, how did you develop this interest? How did you get into the topic to start with?

Axel Palmér 05:35
Yeah, well, that's - it goes a long way back for me. I was already interested in languages. As a teenager, I wasalways interested in dialects. Why do people speak differently? How did that happen? What is the historical background of this? So then, when I started studying at Uppsala University, I really fell in love with that type of study, so I didn't think back then that I would become, you know, interested in languages like Sanskrit that are so far away. I thought maybe I will stay a little bit closer to home. But that happened. And then when I went to Leiden to continue with this, I also got into this whole new type of research, which is interdisciplinary in nature. So it goes beyond linguistics and beyond the study of languages, and tries to put all these languages into a sort of concrete or real world context by comparing the evidence to archeological and now also genetic evidence. So that's the type of research that I think is really exciting to do right now. It's really becoming much more important to not only work within your own field, but also to collaborate outside of your field.

Natalie von der Lehr 06:55
In previous episodes, we have heard more about this LAMP-project from Jenny Larsson, which is who is also connected to the Center for the Human Past, of course. But let's dive into your current research then. So we get some, some examples here what you're actually looking at. What are you working on right now while you're at SCAS?

Axel Palmér 07:15
So my project at SCAS is called "Pastoralists and Agriculturalists in the Rigveda and beyond". So perhaps I should unpack some of these terms.

Natalie von der Lehr 07:26
Maybe you should.

Axel Palmér 07:29
Starting from the back, maybe. So, Rigveda is a text in Sanskrit, so it's an ancient religious text. You could sayit was transmitted orally for thousands of years, and it's still a living tradition in India. So there are these people who learn to recite these, actually poems, religious poetry. And thousands of years ago, this was connected to rituals, religious rituals. And, yeah, this is a really old text, and it was composed in South Asia, and it tells us a lot about the way of life back then. So my research is then about pastoralists and agriculturalists. So that means people who had different occupations, you should say, to sustain themselves, to sustain their lives. So pastoralism, mainly herding cattle, sheep, maybe, and agriculture more sedentary, working in the field, sowing crops and so on. And there's this question since a long time of whether the people who spoke Sanskrit and who made these, the Rigveda, for example, were they pastoralists or agriculturalists? And this is a question that goes a long way back in the research history, but it's interesting right now, because this is the type of things that we can compare to archeological material. So if we have, for example, if we can say that a prehistoric culture is sedentary and has agriculture, then it should fit with, if we want to find out where that group of people was who spoke a certain language, then we have to look at the archeology to see where are the archeological cultures that fit with such a culture. So what I'm trying to do is, first of all, looking at how agriculture is described in this text to see whether it is something that's described as recent or foreign or bad, maybe, or good, you know, and then compare that to other Indo-European languages to see if this is something that goes back to the Proto-Indo-European, so the reconstructed proto-language, or if it's something that came in later. So yeah, it's basically about how old were the words that are used to describe agricultural tools, technologies, crops, cereals. How old are those words, basically.

Natalie von der Lehr 10:01
When I was reading about your research, I was thinking, this must actually be quite good way to trace a language, because the terms are so specific for agriculture and also for herding animals and so on. It's like a whole vocabulary. Even nowadays, if you get into the subject, you sort of have to learn new terms and so on.

Axel Palmér 10:21
Yeah, definitely.

Natalie von der Lehr 10:22
You're working on this right now. But can you share an example or give a result or something of your research?

Axel Palmér 10:28
So the Rigveda is really, it's more than 1000 hymns, and lots and lots of them are really about cows and pastoralists practices. So that's really one of the main themes. But then there are a few hymns that have a different theme, and there's one that specifically is about Devis connected to agriculture. So it's even, you know, there are many different kinds of gods, but in this case, the plow is even addressed as a Devi in this hymn, so maybe I can read this. So this is basically the recitation of the Rigveda. It's basically a chanting. So it's basically singing. Sunam nah phala vi krsantu bhumim sunam kinasa abhi yantu vahaih.

Natalie von der Lehr 11:26
When I listen to you now, it' this sunam? That was quite, what does that mean?

Axel Palmér 11:33
So that means prosperity. So this is a prayer, basically asking for different things, asking for blessings, and what specifically the poet is asking for is that the plowshares, so the sharp ends of the plow that cut through the earth. He asked that "Let our plowshares cut through the earth and let the plow men, the people controlling the plow, let them go forth with the draft animals". It really shows that this was something that was important. It wasn't only about cows and and cattle.

Natalie von der Lehr 12:13
But this was actually about the manual, about the labor.

Axel Palmér 12:16
Yeah

Natalie von der Lehr 12:16
The plowing.

Axel Palmér 12:17
Yes. So I think this shows that it was at least a part of the subsistence strategy, you could say, of the people who made these texts. But what I then do, so I'm looking at this text, I'm interpreting, I'm translating it and seeing what it means, but then I'm going into specific words. So for example, this word "phala", which means plowshare, that has an interesting history, because, yeah, if we look at this word in historical linguistics, we can basically define which words are inherited and which words are borrowed or came into a language at a later point in time. And we do this by comparing different languages to one another. So in this case, with the word "phala" - plowshare in Sanskrit, it has some correspondences in the Iranian languages, which are the most closely related to Sanskrit, and that tells us that this word must have existed further back in time when the Iranian languages and Sanskrit were the same language, basically. So that allows us to say also that probably they knew about plowing and they were familiar with this type of technology already further back in time before any kind of textual evidence, so in pre-history, basically. But then it kind of stops there, because this word is not found in any of the other Indo-European languages. So if we look at the European languages, we don't find this word at all. So that indicates that this word came into the ancestor of Sanskrit after it had split off from the European branches. And this is the type of evidence that we can use to construct some kind of relative chronology of this development. And then we can use that to try to find out, well, where, in archeological terms, where did people use plows in pre-history, for example? And that's how we can try to date, both date and locate these prehistoric language communities.

Natalie von der Lehr 14:33
But that's interesting, because by that, you don't only trace the language, but also the culture. I mean, the, yeah, the plow and what people actually did at the time.

Axel Palmér 14:42
Yes. I'm interested in this for a very specific question, but it also has a wider, it's just interesting also on its own, yeah.

Natalie von der Lehr 14:51
You have previously also looked at - in your PhD work, you have looked at linguistic borrowing.

Axel Palmér 14:56
Yeah

Natalie von der Lehr 14:58
Can you see that here also, with the farming words, the agricultural terms?

Axel Palmér 15:03
So definitely, so like the word "phala" that I talked about earlier. So the word for plow or plowshare, that is a word that doesn't have any further connections in the Indo-European languages in Europe. So this is a kind of word that may have been borrowed into Indo-Iranian. And there are other cases. One that perhaps is quite obvious is the word for rice. So this is in Sanskrit "vrihi". It even sounds a bit like rice, you know, it has this r-i. And this is probably not a coincidence, because this is probably something that spread from South Asia over the Middle East, and then to Europe. And this is also a word that comes in quite late in the Sanskrit language, so it probably also is a borrowing. We don't really know from where, from what language, but it's probably, anyway, from some language in South Asia.

Natalie von der Lehr 15:56
So you can place your little bits and pieces of information on this sort of language tree and see what happened. Then there are many other disciplines that are also active at the Center for the Human Past, as we talked about, for example, archeology, religious studies and so on. And they also have relevance for your project of course. I guess, I mean, for example, archeology, the sort of tools or something that you can find. How do you coordinate your findings there with the other scholars and make a connection?

Axel Palmér 16:26
We're still in the early stages, I would say, and it's the tricky part is that, as linguists, we're interested in very - for archeologists, maybe basic questions sometimes. Archeologists have, there are lots of different things that they're interested in. And I'm mainly interested in when and where were there certain crops or certain tools?

Natalie von der Lehr 16:49
How would an archeologist think there about the crops and the tools and so on?

Axel Palmér 16:54
Now they have, you know, really advanced new ways of studying this. So studying the dental cavities of skeletons, for example, you can find lots of information about what people ate and so on. But then there are, of course, also the just the finding traces of grains, for example, or finding tools. So there are all kinds of different ways of inferring the knowledge of agriculture. And then the other thing is that I'm sort of interested in a large area and comparing different areas to each other, whereas sometimes it's really hard to find good data on a specific area. So the challenge for me, who is not an archeologist, is knowing where to look for this kind of literature and this kind of data. And then the challenge is that even if you have good data from one place in the world, you might not have it for another part. And there are lots of projects in archeology doing this sort of more synthesis of existing studies to see the broad developments. So looking at, for example, one crop, like wheat or barley or some kinds of legumes, and then seeing, okay, if we look at all of Eurasia, or all of Europe and all of, at least parts of Asia, how did that crop spread? Those kinds of synthesis would be reallygreat to have.

Natalie von der Lehr 18:26
It feels like - I've talked with Jenny Larsson about this, also, that you have this map, you're constructing this map, what happened, and when, and so on. So it really feels like that also. You recently did your PhD and you're doing this year at SCAS. You have your academic career ahead of you. What would you like to continue with and focus on after your year at SCAS?

Axel Palmér 18:36
Yeah I would like to continue with a project that I sort of got the idea of during the PhD, or it came came out of thePhD. So in my dissertation, I looked at Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages. So the Balto-Slavic languages are the languages like Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Russian, other slavic languages in southern Europe. Yeah, what I did there is basically to compare the lexicon of these languages, and what I found that there are more than 50 words that are related but are only found in those two branches and not anywhere else. And that supports this idea that Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages are closely related within the Indo-European family. But there are other similar hypotheses, like the most prominent one is that Greek and Indo-Iranian are closely related. This has been sort of the main, I mean, the most popular hypothesis, I would say, for the position of Indo-Iranian in the Indo-European family tree. So that's what I would like to look into next. I want to sort of go against myself, and say, well, what is the evidence? What, is there counter evidence to this Indo-Iranian Balto-Slavic hypothesis.

Natalie von der Lehr 20:17
You're currently a Human Past junior fellow here at SCAS. What is your experience of the multi- and interdisciplinary environment, research environment so far? We can start with SCAS.

Axel Palmér 20:29
It's a very interesting experience, because for the last, however, many years, 10 years of, you know, university studies and so on, you get really deep into one field. And I forgot what it was like to be so near, be close to people that are doing completely different things and to interact with other types of research. So in a way, after a few months, I realized that, you know, it really feels like it felt in - I mean, of course, it's different - but like in high school, where you're you have different subjects that you study at the same time, and they're verydifferent, and you're interested in all of them, but they are, you know, very, very different. And so here it's also like the initial instinct might be, well, what do I don't care about history in the 19th century, but then you realize, actually, this is also really, really interesting. And I've missed having the opportunity to learn about history and philosophy and anthropology. You know, these are things that you don't do when you're so focused on one field that's actually really interesting to be in that environment, and it's challenging. You have to challenge yourself to think about things that you're not used to thinking about.

Natalie von der Lehr 21:48
I recognize that from doing this podcast series, because that's what it's like for me, also, that I get thrown into this new topics and that I didn't know you could even study. You learn a lot, and it's nice to do that. Challenge yourself, really, yeah. But what about the Human Past then, the centre? I mean, that's also interdisciplinary, but in a little bit of a different way.

Axel Palmér 22:12
So I would say the main difference then would be that in the Centre for the Human Past, there is a shared research agenda. So that, of course, means that our goal there is already, from the beginning, to collaborate and to work towards some kind of the same types of research questions. And at SCAS, it's much more wide. So it's more about - it's not so directed. I would say it's more - well, here you are all together, and let's see what what happens, basically. You know, we have all these activities where we listen to each other present about research. And, you know, I've never been in a more, in an environment where so much focus is put on questions after a seminar, for example. So the SCAS seminars are, it's one hour presentation or 45 minute talk, and then it's a whole hour of questions afterwards. And that is really amazing to get so much time for questions, and that people actually really go out of their way to to engage every single time with so different topics that, I think that's really interesting, but it's much less goal oriented. Yeah. Another difference would be the Center for the Human Past has this overlap between the humanities and the sciences, and at SCAS, it's more focused on humanities.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:37
Humanities and social sciences.

Axel Palmér 23:39
Social of course, yeah.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:40
But some fellows also have a background in the natural sciences.

Axel Palmér 23:44
And there's now my fellow Human Past Fellow, Mehmet Somal, who is a geneticist.

Natalie von der Lehr 23:51
Then thinking ahead again, when you now continue with your next project and so on. How are you going to integrate interdisciplinarity into that?

Axel Palmér 24:00
Yeah, I think something that I've, you know, that I hadn't thought about so much before, is that, as a linguist, I'm really, very often interested in things like in relating to what I talked about earlier. So what tools did they use? Or something like that, very sort of yes or no questions. But then talking to anthropologists here at SCAS, for example, there are totally different questions that you can also ask. So when you talk about pastoralists and agriculturalists, yeah, who were those people? What kind of power structures existed in that society, in that community. Those types of questions. It's not the types of questions that we are trained to ask, I would say, as linguists. So that's something that I have been become more interested in. So I think, yeah, that's something I would take with me.

Natalie von der Lehr 24:46
Thank you very much for joining me here in the studio and our listeners, of course.

Axel Palmér 25:05
Thank you so much.

Natalie von der Lehr 25:10
And thank you for listening to SCAS Talks, a podcast by the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. In this episode I have talked to Axel Palmér, historical linguist specializing in Indo-European languages and Human Past Junior Fellow in residence at SCAS during this academic year, 2024/2025. And we have talked about his research on the Indo-European agricultural vocabulary and how this can integrate into the studies of the development of the Indo-European languages. This was the fourth episode on our theme "Languages". In the previous episodes, we have heard Jenny Larsson about finding the origin of Indo-European languages, Marianne Gullberg on our capacity for language learning, and Sofia Lodén on the role of translations to create new literary traditions and links between European cultures. These are episodes number four, six and eight, respectively. If you're interested in Indo-European languages and culture, you might also want to listen to the SCAS Talks Spotlight on Indo-European afterlife. SCAS Talks features a broad variety of topics, which is a reflection of the multi- and interdisciplinary research environment at the collegium. We are sure that there is something of interest for everyone. Tune in, find your favorite topic or surprise yourself with something new. And as always, we are very happy if you can recommend SCAS Talks to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to us and you won't miss any new content. SCAS Talks is available on podbean, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and most podcast apps. I would like to thank Axel Palmér once again for talking to me, and thanks to you, of course, for listening. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai