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The chief reason for grouping the Indo-European languages together is that they share a number of items of basic vocabulary, including grammatical affixes, whose shapes in the different languages can be related to one another by statable phonetic rules. Especially important are the shared patterns of alternation of sounds. Thus, the agreement of Sanskrit ás-ti, Latin es-t, and Gothic is-t, all meaning ‘is,’ is greatly strengthened by the identical reduction of the root to s- in the plural in all three languages: Sanskrit s-ánti, Latin s-unt, Gothic s-ind ‘they are.’ Agreements in pure structure, totally divorced from phonetic substance, are, ...(100 of 7342 words)
