IELTS
JOURNAL
163
READING PASSAGE 3
You are advised to spend about 20 minutes on Questions 26-39 which are based on
Reading Passage 3 below.
THE ORIGINS OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
The traditional view of the spread of the Indo-European languages holds that an Ur-
language, ancestor to all the others, was spoken by nomadic horsemen who lived in
what is now western Russia north of the Black Sea near the beginning of the Bronze
Age. As these mounted warriors roamed over greater and greater expanses, they
conquered the indigenous peoples and imposed their own proto-Indo-European
language, which in the course of succeeding centuries evolved in local areas into the
European languages we know today. In recent years, however, many scholars,
particularly archaeologists, have become dissatisfied with the traditional explanation.
The starting point of the problem of the origins of Indo-European is not archaeological
but linguistic. When linguists look at the languages of Europe, they quickly perceive
that these languages are related. The connections can be seen in vocabulary, grammar
and phonology (rules for pronunciation). To illustrate the numbers from one to ten in
several Indo-European languages. Such a comparison makes it clear that there are
significant similarities among many European languages and also Sanskrit, the
language of the earliest literary texts of India, but that languages such as Chinese or
Japanese are not members of the same family (see figure 1).
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