A notable observation from a lecture which touched on linguistics I attended:
>Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.
(that is a rough paraphrasing from uncertain organic memory)
This a bit facetious, and greatly simplified (the actual discussion in the lecture was far more nuanced), but it does speak to linguistic archaeology in an interesting way --- two notable books on this:
> >Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.
Eh, not really true. Not only is that missing slavic languages, there are edge cases like Romania and Albania, which are surrounded by Slavic speakers. There's also Greece, and even more wild, Hungary which is from an entirely separate language family alltogether.
>Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.
(that is a rough paraphrasing from uncertain organic memory)
This a bit facetious, and greatly simplified (the actual discussion in the lecture was far more nuanced), but it does speak to linguistic archaeology in an interesting way --- two notable books on this:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Wo...