1Moving on to historical linguistics, let us consider how scholars first mapped the Indo-European family.
2In the late eighteenth century, William Jones noticed striking similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin.
3He proposed they sprang from a common source, an idea that transformed the study of language.
4Contrary to earlier scholarly assumptions, this ancestral tongue left behind no written records of any kind.
5Everything we believe about it has been reconstructed by comparing sounds across its daughter languages.
6The word for father, for instance, shows remarkably consistent sound patterns from India to western Ireland.
7Early reconstruction was originally thought complete by the nineteenth century, but new branches kept emerging.
8Hittite, discovered in central Turkey in the early twentieth century, forced linguists to revise supposedly settled rules.
9What I want to emphasize is that reconstruction is an argument, not a photograph of the past.
10Even today, different scholars still disagree about where the homeland of these early speakers actually lay.
11The steppe hypothesis currently dominates the field, though older theories placed the original homeland in Anatolia.
12In next week's seminar, we will test these competing ideas against the available archaeological and genetic evidence.