1.6 The Indo-European language family

Mm. So Latin, about 600BC then looked very different from classical Latin but that presumably comes from something else? Can we go further and further back in time and find…

Sure. Absolutely. I mean, there is some point, I suppose, at which you have to say Latin is distinctively itself but if you go back far enough, of course, we don’t have direct evidence for Latin before the middle of the first millennium BC because that’s when writing was first introduced in Italy but we do know that Latin belongs to a very large language family, conventionally called the Indo-European family and other members of this family include not just ancient languages like Greek and Sanskrit but also modern ones like English and Russian. All of these languages ultimately derive from this common source and that’s why lots of words, let’s think of an example, words meaning six and seven, all begin with an S sound or at least some kind of sibilant in virtually all of these languages like English, Latin, Sanskrit, and Russian. They all derive from, ultimately, the same words in a single language and they’ve descended over time from that source. We don’t know when this hypothetical Indo-European language was actually spoken or even where it was spoken, but must have been at least five thousand years ago.

Gosh. So we can, we can go that far back in the history of Latin and all the way to the present day then?

Well, in partial terms, that’s absolutely right. I mean, the amount of hard information is often quite small but we have methods for reconstructing the past when we have a certain amount of information, gaps can be filled and that’s certainly how we can go beyond the written documents of Latin into pre-history and, of course, for the later period we do have a more or less continuous written record to show us the way Latin is developing over time.

OK. Thanks very much. That’s very interesting.