Indo_European_Language

Indo European Language There are two ways to study the way that language has changed over time. The first is to start at the beginning of language and trace changes forward through time. The other is to start with language as we know it now and trace its changes backward as far as we can go. Let's try both. About seven million years ago, a type of ape lived in Africa. Some of its descendants are called "gorillas," some are called "chimpanzees," and some of them are us. Two out those three descendant species don't speak, so we are fairly sure that this ancestral ape didn't speak, either. Our own ancestors, and only our own ancestors, started to speak at some time between then and now. We don't know when language started. We don't know why it started. This is not very good progress! Perhaps we can learn more by looking at our current languages and working backwards. Some languages are very similar to each other in vocabulary and grammar. For example, the German word "Mann" and the English "man," the German word "jahre" (pronounced "yar") and the English "year" are very similar. Grammatical similarities between English and German include the use of languages, language, indo-european, very, family, english, called, similar, latin, between, time, started, speak, scientists, sanskrit, historical, german, ancestor, years, writing, think, people, one, know, indian, first, find, either, dead, common, both, ancestral, ancestors, written, word