Word: proto-indo-european
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Dates: during 2001-2001
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...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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