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Classical Hebrew is not an Indo-European language. Modern (Israeli) Hebrew has however been described as a language with Semitic morphology and Indo-European (specifically: Yiddish) phonology and synt …

“Happy” and “happen” were both formed within English from the noun “hap” (good fortune). The OED (Oxford English Dictionary, on-line version) indicates the etymology of “hap” as follows: Etymology …

The origin of sabz is debated. One suggestion is that it derives from Iranian *spar “to blossom, to sprout”, and is thus cognate with Latin spargo, English sprig etc. The derivation is phonologically …

The idea that all languages derive from Hebrew has been around for a long time. It is a theological construct, not a scientific theory. By the way, the tower of Babel story (Gen 11,1-9) does not say a …

The Romans did have a spoken language and a written language. They even had a very rich literature. Everybody knows this. The authors of the Talmud Bavli, living in Sasanian Iraq, probably did not kno …

I do not think that English has changed more than French since the 17th century. A more likely explanation is that the French passages in Henry V are in prose, while most of the English bits are in ve …

The names of seven days of the week exist in two forms, both attested from shortly before the beginning of the Christian era. One is the (originally) Roman planetary week, where each day is associated …

I am reminded of the famous story about how the young Max Planck was told by his professor to steer well clear of a career in physics, as there was nothing new to be discovered in that field. In hist …

Indo-European is a field in which many scholars have been working for a very long time and which has to a certain extent ended up in a dead end, or perhaps rather in a fruitless impasse (multi-laryng …

In linguistics we distinguish (usually) between descendants and borrowings. French chauve "bald" is a descendant of Latin calvus. French calvitie "baldness" is borrowed from Latin calvities.

Can modern speakers of English read Beowulf? Can modern speakers of Arabic read the Qur’an? Yes, but only if they have learned it in school. Why can educated speakers of Modern Greek read (just about …

The problem with Deutscher’s theory is that it posits the exact opposite of what we can observe in real languages across time. If we look at the long-term development from Latin to Romance; from Sansk …

The first thing you need to realise is that there is no unanimity about proto-IE. Robert Beekes is the patriarch of the “Leiden school”, which operates notably with the hypothesis that PIE had three l …

This is a cutting-edge study by the leading scholar in the field. The book can be downloaded for free. Table of contents on the link. https://www.academia.edu/38100372/Al_Jallad_A_Manual_of_the_Histor …

The concept of “closeness” is actually rather problematic in linguistics. English and French are “close” in the sense that they share a large amount of common vocabulary, but in the sense of genetic r …