Laura Spinney’s “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global” explores the roots of language and how it spread and changed across time and place.

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global. By Laura Spinney. Bloomsbury; 352 pages; $29.99. William Collins; £22 Dante did like a category. Famously, he split sinners into different circles in ...

Dr. Zahra is a professor of history at the University of Chicago and has written extensively about globalization’s first collapse. April 5, 2025 Before World War I, globalization was at a high ...

The answer, in fact, sits above and across those words: Proto-Indo-European. This is the great original language from which English, among many other tongues, both alive and dead, derives.