In “Proto,” Laura Spinney details the centurieslong effort to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European (PIE), what linguists believe to be the mother tongue of a diverse constellation of languages from ...

A new study claims to have identified the first speakers of Indo-European language, which gave rise to English, Sanskrit and hundreds of others. By Carl Zimmer In 1786, a British judge named ...

The reconstructed lexicon of Proto-Indo-European has only about 1,600 words, and at its dawn the language may have been spoken by as few as 100 people—people who didn’t need words for such ...

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.

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.

A pair of landmark studies, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has finally identified the originators of the Indo-European family of 400-plus languages, spoken today by more than 40% of ...

The Proto-Indo-European language emerged 6,000 years ago around the Black Sea when the Yamnaya, a group of nomadic herders, shifted into mining and farming—and interacted with others who ...

Originating from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, historians and linguists since the 19th century have been investigating its origins and spread as there is still a knowledge gap.

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.

In a paper published in Nature in February this year by Iosif Lazaridis of Harvard, based on the ancient DNA of 435 ...

Among the arresting things that Reich et al. argue is that we should speak of a precursor to Proto-Indo-European: Proto-Indo-Anatolian, which they believe split sometime between 4300 and 3500 B.C.

Originating from the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) language, historians and linguists since the 19th century have been investigating its origins and spread as there is still a knowledge gap.