c. 4500 BCE · Pontic Steppe
Proto-Indo-European — The Ancestor of Half the World's Words
Before Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, German, or English — there was one language. Spoken by herders on the Eurasian steppe, its echoes live in every word you know.
Around 4500–3500 BCE, nomadic peoples of the Pontic-Caspian steppe (modern Ukraine / Kazakhstan) spoke a common tongue — never written, reconstructed by linguists from its 450+ daughter languages. Today, over 3.2 billion people speak descendants of this language — Hindi, Spanish, Russian, Persian, German, English, Bengali, and more. Asterisked forms like *pṓds are scholarly reconstructions.
Tap any reconstructed root — watch it bloom across languages
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Same root — five thousand years apart