Martha Barnette at LitHub:
But just how do scholars dig up those linguistic fossils and discover those brilliant pictures within? One way is to compare related words in languages arising from a common ancestor, which brings us to the hypothetical mother tongue scholars call Proto-Indo-European.
The languages spoken by nearly half of the world’s population—including some four hundred million native speakers of English—are thought to have descended from this prehistoric language. Scholars have managed to reconstruct its fundamental elements by using comparative linguistics to identify common features and vocabulary in its descendants. Exactly where Proto-Indo-European began is a mystery. Some believe it arose six thousand years ago on the grassy plains of Central and Eastern Europe north of the Black and Caspian Seas. Others suggest earlier origins in Anatolia, the large region of what is now Turkey, bordered by the Black Sea to the North, the Aegean to the west, and to the south, the Mediterranean. Wherever Proto-Indo-European originated, its linguistic offspring spread throughout Europe, to Iceland and Ireland in the west, and eastward to India and what is now part of Chinese Turkestan.
more here.
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