Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

In this episode, we're going to look at how a fairy tale collector helped to resurrect

a dead language, specifically the Indo-European language.

In the last couple of episodes, we looked at William Jones' discovery that almost all

the languages of Europe, as well as several languages of Central Asia, were all descended

from an ancient common ancestor.

And in the last episode, we looked at the various languages that descended from that ancestral

language, in which are part of the Indo-European family tree.

But keep in mind that even though early linguists concluded that all of those languages had evolved

from an ancient ancestor, they actually knew very little about that original language.

They didn't really know what it sounded like, where it was spoken, or when it was spoken.

There were some early guesses, but that was about it.

In this episode, we're going to look at how early linguists actually began to reconstruct

large portions of that original Indo-European language.

And this is actually a fascinating story as it relates to English, because much of the

initial research in the area of Indo-European languages was conducted in northern Europe,

and especially in Germany.

And this naturally included a great deal of research into the early Germanic languages,

and since English is a Germanic language, this research revealed a great deal about

the history of English as well.

And in fact, one of the most important researchers in this area was a well-known collector of

German folk tales, Jacob Grimm of Brother's Grimm fame.

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