LIN203H1 Lecture 10: lec10.pdf
Document Summary
We"ve already seen some examples of language families groups of languages all descended from the same ancestral language, via different language changes acting on different regional dialects. Thus the romance languages all descend from different dialects of latin, and the germanic languages from different dialects of proto-germanic. Latin and proto-germanic both date back approximately 2000 years. But we can trace back language families even further than those! Germanic, latin, greek, and more come from an even more ancient language, which is known to us as proto indo-european (pie). Thus germanic, romance, etc. are all subfamilies of the indo-european family. Proto indo-european was spoken at least 5000 years ago and was not written; Everything we know about it is by comparing the similarities and differences we have no direct evidence of it. between the languages descended from it, and reconstructing what the ancestral language must have been like.
