Word: proto-indo-european
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...primary interest is in comparative historical linguistics with a focus on the Proto-Indo-European language. The language was probably spoken somewhere in central Asia around 4000 B.C. and there is no proof of it in the written record, although linguists have reconstructed all aspects of its grammar by looking at languages that descended from this proto-language. Rau then uses this knowledge to study the history of the Greek and Latin languages, which are just two of the languages that descend from the Indo-European. He is the only faculty member with a core interest in this area, which...
...Linguists have their own ideas about how change occurs; they have managed through a rough philological equivalent of genetic research to work back from modern languages to common roots, thus reconstructing Proto-Indo-European, a purely theoretical tongue. But as Renfrew points out, if the difficulties of dating genetic change are vexing, the ones for dating linguistic change are even harder: though linguists can chart the rate of change from, say, late Latin to early Spanish, they can't prove the same rate applies for other languages before the advent of writing...
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