Languages of the World in 1200 BC
Tides of History
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The Relationship Between Languages and One Another
Languages are related to one another, genetically related in that they sprang from a common source. These relationships take the form of family trees with branches and sub branches shooting off from the trunk of the ancient ancestral language. When we don't know that common ancestor, we can still reconstruct it through the systematic comparison of all its descendants. If a reconstructed language has a ton of terms related to the sea and none about deserts, for example, then its safe bet that the people who spoke it were a seafaring folk rather than desert dwellers.
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