If modern European languages derived from Latin and Greek, how did Latin and Greek come about?
According to the language chart I’m looking at here :
“The Indo-European family of languages, of which English is one member, are all descended from the prehistoric Proto-Indo-European language, which was spoken in an as yet unidentified area between eastern Europe and the Aral Sea around the fifth millennium B.C.”
I am the user formerly known as puffington.
Also, some of the languages of India are Indo-european, like Sanskrit.
I myself am an incorrigible conlang slut. I love oral lex.
The Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Romanian, and a couple of obscure ones) are derived from Latin. Modern Greek is derived from Greek. German, English, Dutch, the Scandanavian languages, and some obscure languages are derived from Germanic. Russian, Polish, Czech, etc. are derived from Slavic. There’s a couple of other minor languages subgroups in Europe. All of these are derived from Indo-European. There’s also some languages in Europe that aren’t derived from Indo-European, like Finnish, Hungarian, and Basque.
Go to a library and check out an introductory books about linguistics. Read especially the sections on historical linguistics. Do you have a set of encyclopedias? Read the article about Indo-European. This is a little complicated to explain in a single post, so you would do better to read a book about this.