[originaltext]I: Good morning, listeners. Today we are very glad to have Joanna

I: Good morning, listeners. Today we are very glad to have Joanna Watson from Cambridge University to discuss with us the origins of Indo-European languages. Nice to meet you, Joanna.
J: Very pleased to meet you.
I: As we all know, Indo-European languages have got the same ancestor.
J: The traditional view goes like this. An Ur-language, ancestor to all Indo-European languages, was spoken by nomadic horsemen. They 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 evolved in local areas into the European languages we know today.
I: This is a quite reasonable explanation, isn’t it?
J: It seems reasonable in itself. But in recent years, 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.
I: What do you mean?
J: Well, when linguists look at the languages of Europe, they quickly find that these languages are related. The connections can be seen in vocabulary, grammar and phonology. For instance, the numbers from one to ten are quite similar in several Indo-European languages. There are significant similarities among many European languages and also Sanskrit, the language of the earliest literary texts of India, but those languages such as Chinese or Japanese are not members of the same family.
I: Interesting. Can you give us a typical example?
J: Sure. Take the Romance languages as an example. Even to someone with no knowledge of Latin, the profound similarities among Romance languages would suggest that they were derived from a common ancestor. It would be possible to reconstruct many of the characteristics of the original proto-language. In much the same way the branches of the Indo-European family could be studied and a hypothetical family tree constructed.
I: So Indo-European languages do have a common ancestor.
J: That’s true. And we call it proto-Indo-European language. This is the tree approach to the explanation of the origin of Indo-European languages. The basic process represented by the tree model is one of divergence: when languages become isolated from one another, they differ increasingly, and dialects gradually differentiate until they become separate languages.
I: I see. So divergence is the main tendency in language evolution.
1. What’s the main topic of this interview?
2. Who created the common ancestor of Indo-European languages?
3. From which aspect can we see the connections of languages of Europe?
4. Which language has significant similarities with European languages?
5. What do we call the common ancestor of Indo-European languages?