Or at least one of the first. Those fond of etymology, and especially philology will find this very interesting.
The basic idea is that Greek, Latin, German and Sanskrit, and all of their derivations come from an original mother tongue. This mother tongue is referred to as Indo-European, or Proto-Indo-European (PIE). It is oft regarded as a mystery as to who the people were that spoke this mother tongue and therefore influenced, or are the ancestors of, most ancient, and modern, civilizations. The reason Indo-European hasn't been known until recently is that it was in use before recorded history. In other words we didn't know anything about it because there is no record of it. But by comparing similar words in derived languages, and by following well-established rules of how diction tends to change in a society over time they have come up with a list of root words that most of the millions of words in use today in most every nation derive from. And then someone compared this list to a language family which previously had no known connections, in structure or phonetics, to any other language or language family, and found that they are one and the same (nearly). So a language that was an orphan in the language tree has been found to be the mother of (almost) them all... Chinese and Japanese (but not Korean) are the only two families of language that appear to be in a different tree. This 'original language' is living in it's modern form among 27 dialects of the DRAVIDIAN family of languages spoken in various parts of India.
The history surrounding all of this is so interesting because it shows where people came from and offers glimpses of why words are what they are, and what they really mean.
"Pirk id". That means "to flatulate noisily" in one of the DRAVIDIAN dialects. Do you see why learning this is so useful!??!?
It is a long thesis, but so SO interesting. I have no idea how recent this news is... but it was new to me when I found it :) and I thought it may be new to others!
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