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

First of all, let me thank all of you who have been kind enough to leave feedback and

ratings for this podcast on iTunes, as I've said before, the feedback is very helpful

and I continue to welcome your comments there.

Now as we look at this week's episode, I want to continue to look at the original Indo-European

language and the connections between that language and modern English.

In the last episode, I looked at a specific sound change which has occurred throughout the

history of the Indo-European languages.

That was the shift from the K sound to the S sound, the process called a civilization.

And we looked at how that sound change has marked the history of the modern English letter

C. We also looked at how this sound change helped early linguists to classify the early

Indo-European languages.

In this episode, I want to look at that original Indo-European language more closely.

Remember that this is the ancestor of English, and almost all of the languages of Europe.

Not surprisingly, we can see traces of English in this ancient language.

Chronologically, this is as far back as we can go in the history of English.

This is where English begins as far as our history is concerned.

Of course, languages were spoken before the Indo-European language, and the Indo-European

language has an even older ancestor, but we may never really know the nature of that

language.

But given what we can know, based upon the linguistic evidence, the historical records, and the

archaeological evidence, this is the oldest ancestor of English which we can recreate, at

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