Rus va ingliz tillari kafedrasi roman-german filologiyasiga kirish

*mater (the asterisk before "mater" is intended to indicate that this form is 
reconstructed). Latin has preserved it intact. The Greek meter is not much different or 
Old Irish mathir or the Slavonis mali. The Proto-Germanic form must have been 
something like *modor, judging from the appearance of the word in Old High 
German and Old Norse; the German Mutter and the English mother have developed 
from the Old High German muother and the Anglo-Saxon modor respectively. So 
modern equivalents of "mother", like the French mere, the German Mutter and the 
Spanish madre are cognates. 
While dealing with the reconstruction of the Proto (Common) Indo-European 
language (Proto- applies only to the ancestral language as reconstructed by the 
comparative method) we can rely only on those cognates from the related languages 
whose origin from this language is supported by sound laws and general tendencies in 
the development of their meaning, and the possibility of chance can be ruled out. 
One plain example of chance is the English bad and the Persian bad, both of 
which have the same meaning, though the words are not related in origin. With a 

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slight shift of sound, we have the Italian donna and the Japanese onna, both of which 
mean "woman", or the Russian khor6shiy and the Japanese yoroshii, both of which 
mean "good". 
Vocabulary is therefore a very shaky criterion on which to base language kinship, 
though it may be observed that there are certain basic words, like names of family 
relationships and numerals, which are hardly ever borrowed. Numerals are especially 
reliable in obtaining information about the close genetic kinship of certain languages 
within a linguistic group. This may be seen from the following scheme: