...what is the broad-stroke time-line for western-ish language evolution?
Hope that question makes sense - the idea does in my mind, but I was trying to keep the subject line reasonable.
Thanks!
The majority of European langauges can be traced back to a language called Proto-Indo-European, which was first postulated by William Jones in the 18th century. Jones noticed that there were a number of similarities between Sanskrit (The primary liturgical language of Hinduism) and Ancient Latin and Greek.
[Here is a link] (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/IndoEuropeanTree.svg) that shows the list of all the Indo-European languages in the world. And as you can see, they spread from Brazil in the West to Bangladesh in the East. Basically all modern and ancient European languages (except notably Basque, and the Uralic family) are on that chart somewhere.
Now, we don't actually know how it was spoken, but PIE (or at least the phonology) has been reconstructed to a certain degree, and it is possible to create sentences with it.
As to who spoke it, it was not one single people, but rather a large group of loosely related populations that coexisted in around c.3500BCE. The general consensus is that they lived in the Pontic-Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and Moldova (Though all of this is debated by some scholars, this is the mainstream approach). One of the defining features of PIE societies, was the existence and worship of a Sky God (Zeus, Jupiter, Tyr, are later examples of this feature)
I'm not sure what you're asking, but Latin and Greek words in English are loan words as English is not descended from either language. They are in English because educated people used to learn Latin and Greek. Latin and Greek themselves had loanwords from the more ancient near eastern languages like Phoenician.
The Romance languages are all descended from vulgar Latin, the low social register of Latin spoken in the Roman Empire. Most European languages are Indo-European, but some like Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, Turkish, and Maltese are not. Here is a family tree for the Indo-European language family.
How far back do we have to go to connect eastern languages in Asia to the PIE language? Are there any links we can still trace?
