Original Idea of the Year: Our languages can show the way – Where did the wheel come from?

This year’s Original Idea of the Year prize goes to Professor Thomas Olander from the University of Copenhagen. With the help of language, he aims to solve an age-old mystery: where and when was the wheel invented? The prize is being presented at Independent Research Fund Denmark’s research conference.

The wheel. Such a fundamental technological invention for humanity that we still make extensive use of it more than 5,000 years after it was invented. Without the wheel, we would have been forced to transport everything on foot or rely on domesticated animals to do the job for us.

Although the wheel has played a central role for thousands of years, we still do not know exactly where and when it was invented, despite persistent efforts by archaeologists, among others. Linguistics can map the activities and movements of humanity in much the same way as archaeology does. The advances made in recent years in DNA analysis have demonstrated this. The research project – and the mind behind it, Thomas Olander – has been named Original Idea of the Year by Independent Research Fund Denmark.

Read more about Thomas Olander’s research: Our languages can show the way: Can we finally trace the origins of the wheel after more than 5,000 years?

Lone Koefoed Hansen, Chair of DFF | Humanities, explains the choice of winner:

“We often say that it is pointless to ‘reinvent the wheel’, but paradoxically, we still do not know where the wheel was actually invented, or whether it was invented in just one place and then spread from there. Archaeological methods have not yet answered that question. What is original about Thomas Olander’s project is that he approaches a very old mystery from a new angle and investigates whether knowledge about the development of language can bring us closer to the answer.”

Thomas Olander, Professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen, explains:

“Within a couple of hundred years, you go from not having wheels to having what we would recognise as wheels. As soon as you have a functional wheel, it spreads. But as linguists, we can see that, when someone invents something new, the invention spreads, but the word for the invention spreads too.”

Thomas Olander continues:

“When the wheel appears around 3,500 BC, it happens in all sorts of places. In Mesopotamia in the Middle East, but also in Central Europe – present-day Germany, Poland and Hungary – there are all kinds of indications that wheels are in use. In Mesopotamia, we have written evidence of wheels. Writing emerged very early there, and wheels are mentioned in very early documents. In Europe, we have images and clay models of carts, as well as archaeological evidence of wheels and axles. And in the steppe regions of Russia and Ukraine, archaeological evidence of carts and wheels has been found.”

Now it is time to take a step beyond archaeology: to use the development of language as a source of evidence in an attempt to get closer to the origins of the wheel.

About the prize winner Thomas Olander

Thomas Olander is a Professor at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at the University of Copenhagen.

He lives in Frederiksberg and has three children.

He and his partner spend quite a bit of time knitting together. He also enjoys taking long walks with his daughter.

Fact: An example of a loanword

The linguists are trying to identify languages in which words such as wheel and cart are loanwords, meaning that the people who spoke the language were probably not the ones who invented the wheel. Quite simply because they borrowed the word rather than coming up with it themselves.

In Danish, for example, we have words such as mus, hus, lus and brun, all of which contain a long u. In English, these correspond to mouse, house, louse and brown. So, something has happened: at some point, the u developed into an ou sound in English. In German, we have Maus, Haus, Laus and braun. Almost the same as in English, so a similar development has taken place there. We can therefore see that the long u in Danish corresponds to ou in English and au in German.

This is a regular pattern. So, if you take the Danish word tun (‘tuna’), it ought to be toun in English and Zaun in German. But in fact, it is tuna in English and Thunfisch in German. The words resemble one another, but something has gone wrong with the pattern. This means that the word must be a loanword in either Danish, English, German or all three languages. In this case, it is a loanword in all three languages, as the word tun originates from Greek and probably entered the more northern languages via Latin.

Why Thomas Olander was awarded the prize

The project is original because it connects a question of broad public interest with a genuine research question. The idea of ‘reinventing the wheel’ is part of our everyday language, while the origins of the wheel remain an unresolved question that archaeology alone has been unable to answer. The originality of the project therefore lies both in the research question and in its approach.

The emergence of wheel technology predates the written word. Historical linguistics can reconstruct earlier forms of language than those found in written sources, but it remains an open question how reliably such reconstructions can tell us about the material world of the same period, particularly where archaeological evidence is lacking. However, new analyses of ancient DNA have shown such a striking correspondence with historical linguistic analyses that it now makes sense to investigate the emergence of wheel technology through historical linguistics.