How did we found out how the various languages are all descendant from proto-indo European and how did we develop so many different languages?
In: Culture
Indo-European languages, spoken natively by 46% of humans, are descended from P.I.E. The proto language was derived backwards from the known I.E. languages, by scholars beginning from William Jones in the 18th century. Rebuilding proto languages is a kind of linguistic forensics: if there is no recording of the proto language, one takes a best-fit guess based on knowledge of known descendant languages, which have similarities, to take the words of the aforementioned William Jones, too great to be purely coïncidental.
Latest Answers