Proving Languages Are Related
How can linguists be so certain that English and ancient Sanskrit are cousins, while neighboring Finnish is a total stranger? It's not guesswork—it's a rigorous scientific process called the comparative…
Tag: grimm’s law
The Great Germanic Sound Shift
Long before English vowels did their famous shuffle, a far more ancient and dramatic event rocked its linguistic family tree. This was the Great Germanic Sound Shift, a systematic chain…
The Ultimate Ancestor: How Linguists Reconstructed the Proto-Indo-European Language
Imagine a language that vanished over 5,000 years ago, leaving behind no written records. This is Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the mysterious ancestor of English, Russian, Hindi, and hundreds of other tongues.…