“Latin is a latecomer” says Professor Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading, “Today we think of Latin as an ancient language, a dead language, the language of antiquity, but that is a relative newcomer on the European language scene, it was used just 2,000-4,000 years ago.”

Using statistical models, the professor has traced back a common root of all Indo- European languages to a proto-language that was probably spoken about 15,000 years ago and has formed the common root for about 7 language families today; language families which include modern day Turkish, Uzbek and Mongolian in the Altaic family, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, spoken in northeastern Siberia, Dravidian, spoken in Southern India, Inuit-Yupik spoken in the Arctic, Kartvelian, which evolved into Georgian, and Uralic, which is the mother of Finnish and Hungarian, and of course, most other European languages, too.

They took a list of about 23 commonly used words in our language, words like “I”, “we”, “mother”, and “man”, but also more surprising ones like “bark”, from a tree, and the verb “to spit”. This all started with work Pagel and his team did about five years ago, which found that they were able to trace the ancestry of words by analyzing how often they appeared in speech today, and what type of word (be it adverb, verb or noun) it was.

Even today, across the European languages, the word for “I” for instance has a common root, I in English, Ich in German, Je in French, Io in Italian, Yo in Spanish. In the Proto-European language this was more what we would recognize as the word for “me” or the sound “meh” or “beh” says Pagel.

See: DW

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