a) It studies the similarities, and diversities of originally related languages.
b) The discovery of Sanskrit, the ancient classical language of India stipulated its origin
c) The concept of relative languages (a sisterhood of European languages with Sanskrit. E.g. Sanskrit «mata» means «mother»)
d) The works of Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask, Alexander Vostokov, V.M. Jirmunskiy, etc.
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Two languages have a genetic relationship, and belong to the same language family, if both are descended from a common ancestor, or one is descended from the other.
For example, the Romance languages are all descended from the spoken Latin of ancient Rome, and so languages like Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and French are said to be genetically related to one another as well as to Latin. Similarly, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian are genetically related as members of the North Germanic language family because of their shared descent from Ancient Norse. In addition, the Romance languages and the North Germanic languages are both subfamilies of the Indo-European language family since both Latin and Old Norse are believed to be descended from an even more ancient language, Proto-Indo-European: therefore, they are genetically related to each other as well.
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