Indo European Language

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There are two ways to study the way that language has changed over time. The first is to start at the beginning of language and trace changes forward through time. The other is to start with language as we know it now and trace its changes backward as far as we can go. Let's try both.

About seven million years ago, a type of ape lived in Africa. Some of its descendants are called "gorillas," some are called "chimpanzees," and some of them are us. Two out those three descendant species don't speak, so we are fairly sure that this ancestral ape didn't speak, either. Our own ancestors, and only our own ancestors, started to speak at some time between then and now.

We don't know when language started. We don't know why it started. This is not very good progress!

Perhaps we can learn more by looking at our current languages and working backwards.

Some languages are very similar to each other in vocabulary and grammar. For example, the German word "Mann" and the English "man," the German word "jahre" (pronounced "yar") and the English "year" are very similar. Grammatical similarities between English and German include the use of male, female and neuter genders for every noun. ("He," "she," and "it" are the English words). Cantonese and Mandarin are another two languages that are similar to each other, but they are very different from either English or German.

A type of scientist called a "Historical Linguist" looks at similar languages and tries to reconstruct the language that was the ancestor of both the modern languages. Sometimes, if he's very lucky, he will find writing in the ancestral language, which lets him check his work. For example, French and Spanish are very similar because they both came from Latin, and we have lots of written Latin to prove it! More often, historical linguists are not that lucky.

The beginning of Historical Linguistics was probably a paper read by Sir William Jones in 1786 that discusse...