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The English language, and indeed
most European languages, traces it
original roots back to a Neolithic (late Stone Age) people known as the Indo-Europeans or Proto-Indo- Europeans, who lived in Eastern Europe and Central Asia from some time after 5000 BC (different hypotheses suggest various different dates anywhere between the 7th and the 3rd millennium BC).
We do not know exactly what the
original Indo-European language was like, as no writings exist from that time (the very earliest examples of writing can be traced to Sumeria in around 3000 BC), so our knowledge of it is necessarily based on conjecture, hypothesis and reconstruction. Using the “comparative method”, though, modern linguists have been able to partially reconstruct the original language from common elements in its daughter languages. It is thought by many scholars that modern Lithuanian may be the closest to (i.e. the least changed from) the ancient Indo-European language, and it is thought to retain many features of Proto-Indo-European now lost in other Indo-European languages.
Indo-European is just one of the
language families, or proto- languages, from which the world's modern languages are descended, and there are many other families including Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian, Afro-Asiatic, Altaic, Niger- Congo, Dravidian, Uralic, Amerindian, etc. However, it is by far the largest family, accounting for the languages of almost half of the modern world’s population, including those of most of Europe, North and South America, Australasia, the Iranian plateau and much of South Asia. Within Europe, only Basque, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Turkish, and a few of the smaller Russian languages are not descended from the Indo-European family.
Sometime between 3500 BC and
2500 BC, the Indo-Europeans began to fan out across Europe and Asia, in search of new pastures and hunting grounds, and their languages developed - and diverged - in isolation. By around 1000 BC, the original Indo-European language had split into a dozen or more major language groups or families, the main groups being:
Hellenic
Italic
Indo-Iranian
Celtic
Germanic
Armenian
Balto-Slavic
Albanian
In addition, several more groups
(including Anatolian, Tocharian, Phrygian, Thracian, Illyrian, etc) have since died out completely, and yet others may have existed which have not even left a trace.
These broad language groups in turn
divided over time into scores of new languages, from Swedish to Portuguese to Hindi to Latin to Frisian. So, it is astounding but true that languages as diverse as Gaelic, Greek, Farsi and Sinhalese all ultimately derive from the same origin. The common ancestry of these diverse languages can sometimes be seen quite clearly in the existence of cognates (similar words in different languages), and the recognition of this common ancestry of Indo- European languages is usually attributed to the amateur linguist Sir William Jones in 1786. Examples are:
father in English, Vater in
German, pater in Latin and Greek, fadir in Old Norse and pitr in ancient Vedic Sanskrit. brother in English, broeer in Dutch, Brüder in German, braithair in Gaelic, bróðr in Old Norse and bhratar in Sanskrit.
three in English, tres in Latin, tris in
Greek, drei in German, drie in Dutch, trí in Sanskrit. is in English, is in Dutch, est in Latin, esti in Greek, ist in Gothic, asti in Sanskrit.
me in English, mich or mir in
German, mij in Dutch, mik or mis in Gothic, me in Latin, eme in Greek, mam in Sanskrit.
mouse in English, Maus in
German, muis in Dutch, mus in Latin, mus in Sanskrit.