Chapter 15, Horses, Hittites, and History Summary and Analysis

Indo-European derived languages dominate the world. England, Spain, Portugal, France, and Russia all have actively spread their languages over the world. English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Russian are all derived from a common root language, which is generally referred to as Proto-Indo-European, or "PIE". The text presents a map of European linguistic dispersion and several tables listing comparative vocabularies from sample languages.

PIE has been somewhat reconstructed by linguists from glottochronology and an analysis of the oldest existing texts known. This reconstruction uses numerous data sources to corroborate the basic evidence and has resulted in several thousand "words" which are considered likely to be very similar to the original language. Various analyses put the initial use of PIE c. 4000 to 2000 BCE. PIE probably originated on the steppes slightly to the north of the...