Evolution of the English language

 The English language has come a long way over the ages, from Old English to the modern version we use today.

English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. Nomads, believed to have roamed the southeast European plains, spoke the parent language, Proto-Indo-European, about 5,000 years ago.

Modern English is analytic (relating to analysis or analytics; especially: separating something into component parts or constituent elements) whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages, was synthetic (relating to or involving synthesis; attributing to a subject something determined by observation rather than analysis of the nature of the subject). During the course of thousands of years, English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and German, towards invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese.