"With a highly technical understanding of sound change, and collections of thousands upon thousands of cognates, whole words, and then large vocabularies of unrecorded languages have been revealed. Much of the early history of academic linguistics was spent reconstructing European “proto-languages”, our best guesses at earlier forms of familiar linguistic groups. There was proto-Germanic, proto-Romance, proto-Slavic and, eventually, a huge lexicon of proto-Indo-European (PIE) a hypothetical language that represents the common ancestor of everything from Welsh to Romanian, Greek to Sanskrit. This, of course, takes us back quite a long time. Just how long is a matter of fierce debate. In all probability it gets us just a bit beyond the earliest writing, about 6000 years ago. Not quite palaeolithic then, but late neolithic – still stone age, and before, or at the very dawn of agriculture. What did society look like then? How did people live, eat and hunt? Well, let’s look at some of the vocabulary we’ve been able to reconstruct (thanks to the database over at University of Texas, Austin, for these examples)" - Todd Hoff

I'm disappointed there's no ancient word for nachos. - Todd Hoff