The Tocharian Trek: PIE and migration across Eurasia
In recent weeks and months, Language Log has been quite active in discussions on Tocharian and its relationship to other members of Indo-European. Today's post takes a different approach from this post made just yesterday and many earlier posts.
"Europe's ancient languages shed light on a great migration and weather vocabulary"
by Ali Jones, Horizon: The EU Research & Innovation Magazine (8/15/23)
Painstaking archaeological exploration is a familiar, often widely admired, method of unearthing history. Less celebrated, but also invaluable, is the piecing together of fragments of ancient languages and analyzing how they changed over thousands of years.
Historical linguists have reconstructed a common ancestral tongue for most of the languages spoken today in Europe and South Asia. English, German, Greek, Hindi and Urdu—among others in the Indo-European family of languages—can all trace their origins to a single spoken one named Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
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