How Are Proto-Languages Reconstructed From Ancient Languages?
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I’ll give you an example:
Words that in Spanish start with the letter c, usually start with the letter h in English. Think casa and house. They’re cognates. This is because words that used to start with a c changed to start with an h in English, but not in Spanish.
Now look at the word computer. In Spanish, it’s computadora. Since it starts with C in both words, the word was probably invented after English and Spanish diverged into different languages. The Germanic and Romance language groups split apart around the year 1000 BC. From this we can assume that the people who lived in the year 1000 BC probably didn’t have computers.
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