Among the Indo-European languages are English, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hindi-Urdu and Persian. At the head of the family tree is the postulated language we call Proto-Indo ...

Today, linguists are in broad agreement on the basics of Indo-European language groupings and how they are related to one another. They agree that the original language, which they call Proto-Indo ...

Today, linguists are in broad agreement on the basics of Indo-European language groupings and how they are related to one another. They agree that the original language, which they call Proto-Indo ...

Laura Spinney’s “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global” explores the roots of language and how it spread and changed across time and place.

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global Laura Spinney. Bloomsbury, $29.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-63973-258-6 ...

Yet, interestingly, the taxonomy of languages has indicated a language-tree that starts with a small set of proto-languages that has branched out into daughter languages with the passage of time ...

The answer, in fact, sits above and across those words: Proto-Indo-European. This is the great original language from which English, among many other tongues, both alive and dead, derives.

Harvard researchers traced the origins of the vast Indo-European language ... “They’ve been able to reconstruct — depending on the language — 1,000 to 1,500 words in Proto-Indo-European.

Around half of the world’s population speaks a descendant of Proto-Indo-European. ... Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. By Laura Spinney. Bloomsbury; 352 pages; $29.99.

Consensus tree of 87 Indo-European languages derived from the Swadesh list of 200 words 5,23,26.Inner coloured ring identifies major clades as shown in the legend.

Indo-European languages (IE), which number over 400 and include major groups such as Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, and Celtic, are spoken by nearly half the world's population today.