Sir William Jones, 1786, hypothesis that most European languages and others (in India, parts of the Middle East, and Asia) are cognates (are related, as a family, by common origins) notion of a common ancestor language, the Indo-European language, which was the origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, Greek, Romance, Germanic and Celtic languages
Indo-European Language Subfamilies and examples:
- Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Persian)
- Hellenic (Greek)
- Armenian (Western Armenian, Eastern Armenian)
- Balto-Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, Lithuanian)
- Albanian (Gheg, Tosk)
- Celtic (Irish Gaelic, Welsh)
- Italic (Latin, Spanish, Italian, French)
- Germanic (German, English, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian)
- Anatolian (extinct) (Hittite)
- Tocharian (extinct) (Tocharian A, Tocharian B)
