Proto-Languages 456

What is a proto language? If you study languages you might notice that there are many similar words in some odd seemingly unrelated languages like English, Latin, Russian, and Hindi. For example, the word for mother in Latin is mater, in Russian it is mat' and in Hindi it is maan. Why is this so? This suggests that these languages have a common ancestor but the only thing is that there was no language ever discovered to be this. So, to find an ancestor language, a large group of people may study how sounds and words in many languages change over time based on what we know and try to find a common constructed language ancestor. This is called a proto language. One of the most famous examples of this is Proto-Indo-European which is hypothesized to be the ancestor of many languages like English, Latin, Russian, and Hindi even though they do not seem related. -- Written by Vikenait Productions