Speakers of Indo-European

[NapoleonXIV]

In the 1970's the BAM (Baikal-Amur) spur of the Trans-Siberian railway cut through areas so remote that tribes living there were surprised to know the Tsar no longer ruled all the Russias.

WI they had run across a group who spoke a strange dialect that the other tribes in the area themselves regarded as backward. And some anthropologist had taken it down. On further analysis it is determined to be actual Indo-European, the ancestor tongue to most of the widely spoken languages in the world today.

Assuming such a determination to be possible, what would happen next?

[Michael]

Leo is found days later in a comatose state, with a puddle of drool on the floor around his computer, and the website that announced this open.

[David S Poepoe]

Are we talking about Aryans? In the true sense that is.

[NapoleonXIV]

Indo-European predates that, I think. The ethnicity of the speakers seems indigenous to the area of Far East Siberia.

[Rahul]

Wow, this would be amazing indeed. For one, people would want to know what the religion of this tribe would be a big deal IMO. People would want to know about that from India to Ireland.

This would be amazing beyond belief though. For all you know, we mgiht see a revival of that language as it could act as a bridge for all speakers of Indo-European tongues (though admittedly, few would find any similarities with it as languages have evolved so much since the Proto-Indo-European).

[eschaton]

It's theoretically impossible for a language to remain unchanged for the 6 to 10 thousand years of history we are talking about. Even Icelandic, which is famed for it's conservatism linguisticly, has changed in the past 1000 years to a greater degree than popularly said, though they really still can read the norse eddas.

Proto-Indo-European probably was indegenous to either Turkey or the Southern Urkaine. While the nearest relations to Indo-European are Turkic and Uralic, there are a ton of early loan words from Semetic languages. Though Indo-European does have even more tenuous links to Eskimo-Aleut, Chuki-Kamatchan, Korean, and Japanese, so an origin somewhere in Siberia isn't totally out of the question.

the 1970s is too late of a time period for it to have any ideological impact upon the world. It would be interesting, on the other hand, if they were discovered in the 1930's, to see how it would impact various nazi mythos. By the 1970s, the only real impact would be to solve some long standing debates around the language and history in general.