Sublime

If we can combine the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary with a specific set of archaeological remains, it might be possible to move beyond the usual limitations of archaeological knowledge and achieve a much richer knowledge of these particular ancestors.

In the modern Nordic languages, vikingar or vikinger is still used only in the exact sense of seaborne raiders,

But what did those Iron Age people believe about the world around them? What deities did they worship, and what stories did they tell each other around the fire? These seem like impossible, ephemeral ideas to grasp hold of, especially when talking about a society that was pre-literate for so much of its existence. But we know that the Celtic langua

One of the changes described in Grimm’s Law was that the archaic Indo-European sound [k] shifted in most phonetic environments to Germanic [h]. The Indo-European k preserved in Latin centum shifted to h in Old Gothic hunda-; the initial k seen in Latin caput ‘head’ shifted to h in Old English hafud ‘head’; and so on throughout the vocabulary. (Capu

they stumbled upon a crucial detail—Indo-European

But Alexander Vovin, a linguist at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in France, contends that language doesn’t always spread with agriculture. He points to the case of the Finno-Ugric language group, which includes modern Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian. The speakers of these languages, he says, were fishermen who likely spread