Dolgopolsky list

Okay, so imagine you have a big group of people and they all speak different languages. But some of these languages are really similar to each other, like how Spanish and Italian are similar. A man named Dolgopolsky made a list of all these similar-sounding words from different languages and he put them into groups called "lexical-sets."

So, for example, he found that the words for "water" in many different languages sounded really similar. He put all those words together in a group called the "water" lexical-set. Then he did the same thing for other words, like "mother" and "father."

This way, we can see which languages are related to each other and how they might have evolved from a common ancestor language a long time ago. It's kind of like a big puzzle to figure out the history of languages!