Module 4: Hungarian, Catalan, Welsh

The argument runs approximately like this: There is a word in Indo-European for salmon, so we can assume that the Indo-Europeans lived somewhere near rivers which had salmon, there is a word for beech so we can assume they lived in area with forests, there is no word for sea so we can assume that they did not live by the sea. On the basis of this type of evidence, at least one important theory says that the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans was the Russian steppe. If this sounds interesting, and perhaps even ingenious, there is at least one major trap. If you think of the way words change, why may it be quite wrong to assume that the word salmon is evidence of salmon?

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