PIE for beginners

If you're reading this, you are either a) struggling or b) part of the the anglophonie. English is a bit peculiar because all the short words are "germanic" related to Nederlands and Frisian but the $10 words - from cooking, law, politics, science and tech - come from the South mainly Latin, via [Norman] French, but with a smattering of Greek. We'll ignore the obvious loan words like adobe, bungalow, chutney, divan, embargo, fjord, gulag, hummus, incognito, junta, klutz, mantra, nark, opera, poteen, Qi, robot, sauna, Tory, ukulele, veld, wanderlust, yacht, zero. These blow-ins can be a poser, but not a problem for linguists digging into the origin of languages. The origin of Language itself is another, deeper, more speculative, problem.The Blob has had much to say about PIE (Proto Indo European) but, because there's 2½ million words schlubbing about in the archive, and because I eat more than I speak, I've had more to say about Pie [apple, mutton, lemon-meringue, scotch]. When Proto:…