ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Indo-European vocabulary

Indo-European is a big word that talks about different kinds of languages spoken by people who lived a long, long time ago. People who spoke these languages were living in an area from Europe to India.

The Indo-European vocabulary is all the words used by people who spoke these languages. It is a list of words that has many, many words that sound the same, but may have different meanings in different languages. For example, the word "mother" sounds the same in English and in Spanish, but in some other Indo-European languages, it sounds a little different, like "mutter" in German or "mat" in Russian.

Indo-European vocabulary includes words related to things like family, body parts, food, and animals. It also includes words that describe the world around us, like "sun," "moon," and "water." Those words are important because they helped people communicate with each other even if they were from different places that spoke different languages.

People have studied the Indo-European vocabulary a lot to understand how different languages are related to each other. By studying the similarities and differences between these words in different languages, they can understand how people may have migrated from one part of the world to another and how they may have developed new languages over time.