A new linguistic study has revealed that the European Huns, including their famous leader Attila, were not Turkic in origin as once believed, but instead spoke an ancient Siberian language. This ...

Eagle-eyed trackheads following the Ostrava Golden Spike in Czechia might have noticed American hurdler Chris Robinson, an NCAA champion at Alabama, winning the 400 meters with some unorthodox form.

How did the language you are reading come to exist? The Indo-European family of languages covers most of Europe, the Iranian ...

Filip Vezdin, a Croatian missionary and scholar, pioneered Sanskrit studies in Europe. His printed grammar, cultural analyses ...

Laura Spinney’s “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global” explores the roots of language and how it spread and changed across time and place.

That is the leading explanation today for how the majority of Europeans came to speak the languages they do. And not just Europeans. At the same time that those intrepid steppe-dwellers set off ...

In “Proto,” Laura Spinney details the centurieslong effort to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European (PIE), what linguists believe to be the mother tongue of a diverse constellation of languages from ...

For Jones’s “common source” now has a name: “Proto-Indo-European” (PIE). It was first spoken by as little as a few dozen people around the Black Sea then, roughly 5,000 years ago, spread ...

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global Laura Spinney. Bloomsbury, $29.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-63973-258-6 ...

Among the arresting things that Reich et al. argue is that we should speak of a precursor to Proto-Indo-European: Proto-Indo-Anatolian, which they believe split sometime between 4300 and 3500 B.C.

Thinking about proto-languages is not everyone’s cup of tea, but surely only a dullard would deny the inherent wonder of being able to peer into the linguistic past in this way.