A little while ago I came across Youtube videos by Rob Watts called Robwords. Given he has nearly a million followers, you are possibly familiar with his output. He takes a subject and talks through how we ended up with the language that we have - where words come from, why do we spell them in the way we do, etc. He does it in a surprisingly interesting and engaging way, given he's basically talking to camera.
I thought of Rob today, as he did a video on the 'ancestry' of languages (see below) - which seeks to explain why there are some words which seem to occur in a wide range of languages, suggesting they have a common ancestor. The notion of Proto-Indo-European is a good example - it is used to explain why English, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit have related words - e.g. for father, mother, brother and sister, and also numbers. No written examples exist of the original Proto-Indo-European language; it is a reconstruction, based on the languages we do have that point to an earlier common root - just like in a family tree.
A recent reading for our service of Holy Communion included the word yoke (Matthew 11:28-30). According to Wikipedia, versions of the word occur in Latin, Greek, Persian, Sanskrit and more.
When I thought about it, that makes a lot of sense. Using a yoke in agriculture goes back a very long way - predating not only modern languages, but also some of the older languages that are no longer spoken, such a Latin. It doesn't seem too fanciful to think that a word was needed thousands of years ago to describe a wooden beam linking a pair of oxen, and versions of the word have come down through different routes into the languages we know today.
It just goes to show that even quite diverse cultures are more closely related that we might think. Rather than a word being 'foreign', it might just be a distant cousin.
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