How Indo-European Was Discovered

Indo-European was never written down, so we can only rediscover it by piecing together the remnants left in existing languages. These are in a sense the slightly distorted echoes of the long-dead mother language.

An Italian merchant called Filippo Sassetti made a surprising discovery in 1585, which was that Hindu scholars wrote and used an ancient language, previously unknown in the west, which he called Sanskrit. He noticed that there were some similarities with his own Italian language - for example the word for God was "deva", similar to Italian "dio", "sarpa" a snake was like Italian "serpe" and the numbers seven eight and nine "sapta", "ashta" and "nava" were like Italian "sette", "otto" and "nove".

Sir William Jones, working in India Company in 1786, presented his theory that Sanskrit vocabulary and grammar was much closer to Latin and Greek than could be accidental, and that therefore it was likely they came from a common source.

Building on this theory, Franz Bopp in 1816 published a book showing the relationships of verbs across many Indo-European languages, developing Jones' theory further and from which in due course it was proved beyond doubt that languages as diverse as Celtic, Italic, Iranian, Albanian and Hittite shared a common source or root.

These connections can best be seen on a family tree of languages.

The story of the salmon is an example of one word whose origins can be traced across several Indo-European languages.