438: Society in PIE Feb 19, 2016

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Linguists can reconstruct Proto-Indo-European to by looking at the huge similarities between more modern languages (for perspective, Latin would be considered modern). This society existing over 5,000 years ago or more had a word for "son's wife" and "brother's wife" but not "sister's husband" nor "daughter's husband". Besides the basic family units, we also know that there was a word for "husband's brother", "husband's mother", "husband's father" but not the same for wife's anyone. There was even a word, 'vedmo' meaning, "bride-price".
This is useful anthropologically because it suggests that a wife left her family to join her husband's, but not the other way around.

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