Indo-European Languages Origination

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Studying how languages diffused is a vital part of understanding our ancestor’s language. There are about 450 Indo-European languages, making up the largest language family in history! There are three main theories on how the Indo-European language spread and where they originated: agricultural theory, the Renfrew hypothesis, the conquest theory, and the dispersal hypothesis. Through the process of deep reconstruction and backward reconstruction, linguists (geographers that study language), such as William Jones and Jakob Grimm, are able to give some evidence for these three theories. Being the father language family, it is important to know how the Indo-European language came to be, where it came from, and who it came from. A geographer named William Jones studying Sanskrit, found a remarkable resemblance between the grammar and vocabulary of Sanskrit and the ancient Greek and Latin languages. He proposed that they all came from a similar hearth. This led to further studies carried on by an analytical fairy tale writer, Jakob Grimm. Grimm supposed related languages have similar, but not identical consonants. Grimm actually created the technique of backward reconstruction by proving harder consonants would become softer as time passed and languages were exposed to new languages. By combining their theories, they proposed the existence of the Proto-Indo-European language, which is a hypothesis proposing the existence of an Indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancient Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit languages. Using backward and deep reconstruction, we are able to produce important information concerning the origination of the Indo-European language. Using backward reconstruction (the tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants backward toward the original language), we are able to identify all the Indo-European languages spoken all over
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