In 1786 William Jones noticed Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were too similar to be coincidence. Linguists have since reconstructed a parent language, Proto-Indo-European, spoken perhaps 6,000 years ago, likely on the steppes north of the Black Sea. We know some of its actual words, yet no sentence of it was ever recorded.
Genesis 11 tells of a single human language shattered at Babel, scattering speech across the earth. Many cultures hold similar divided-language myths, from the Maya to the Zulu.
Esoteric and mystical traditions, from medieval Kabbalah to 17th-century seekers like John Dee, held that one original sacred language exists whose words name the true nature of things, and finding it would restore lost power.
If one tribe's words now live in the mouths of three billion people, what else did that tribe quietly give the world?