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

So far in this podcast, we've looked at the oldest ancestor of English, the ancient Indo-European

language.

And in the last couple of episodes, I looked at some of the words that have been reconstructed

in that language.

Remember that the original Indo-European language was not written down.

It existed long before the alphabet, and there is no evidence of a written form of the

original language.

So pretty much everything we know about that language comes from reconstructed elements

of the language, like the words that we've looked at previously.

In this episode, I want to look at one other aspect of that original language.

The way in which the Indo-Europeans used those words.

In other words, I want to explore a few aspects of their grammar.

Now this may not seem as interesting as the words which have come down to us in modern

English, but this original Indo-European grammar is very important to our understanding of how

old English grammar worked, because much of old English grammar was inherited from this

original language.

One other quick note before we get started.

In the next episode, I'm going to try to pinpoint exactly who these original Indo-Europeans

were.

This has been the subject of much debate and controversy for over two centuries, but

a general consensus has emerged over the past few decades, and this view is based on

...