Reconstructing the ancestor

A. I occasionally referred to features that the first Indo-European language had. One might ask, however, just how we can know what that language was like. It was not written: our first written evidence of Indo-European comes after the first language had already split into several new ones, including Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Gothic.

B. Over the past two centuries, linguists have reconstructed what the first Indo-European language was probably like by deducing from the living languages and the older ones that were written. The hypothetical language is called Proto-Indo-European. There is a vast “dictionary” of Proto-Indo-European words, and much is known about its endings and other aspects of its grammar.