The Indo-European Family of Languages

This chapter describes the prehistory of English and other Indo-European languages as reconstructed during the past two centuries. It was not until the discovery of Sanskrit by Western scholars in the late eighteenth century and rigorous attention to phonological change in the nineteenth century that an overall theory emerged. The work of Jacob Grimm, Karl Verner, and other philologists resulted in a description of the Indo-European languages, often displayed as a family tree. Its main branches are Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Hellenic, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, and Celtic. Ongoing research on the original homeland makes use of widespread cognates that have geographical significance, such as beech and bee .