into the Scandinavian languages of Sweden and Norway (Indo-European Language Family).
             While no written evidence exists to support the Proto-Indo-European theory, its existence seems necessary to explain the appearances of cognates, words which share a common root, throughout the Indo-European family. Words such as the English father, the German Vater, the Latin pater, and the Sanskrit pitr are cognates and all appear rooted in the same Proto-Indo-European word (Watkins 2002). Many Baltic linguists have postulated that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken by a number of loosely connected nomadic tribes in eastern Turkey and is actually a branch of the theoretical "Nostratic parent language macro-family" proposed by Holger Pedersen in 1903 (Johnson 1995). Nostratic is said to underlie not only the Indo-European family of languages, but also the Kartvelian, Afro-Asian, Dravidian, Uralic, Altaic, Chukchi-Kamchatkan, and Eskimo-Aleut families. However, many western linguists doubt the validity of the linguistic derivations, and with the majority of literature on the subject published in Russian, many others have withheld judgment for lack of investigation (Johnson 1995).
             The invasion of the British Isles by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the early to mid-fifth century catalyzed the development and spread of what is now known as Old English (BBC History). These three groups migrated from present day western Germany and spoke languages very similar to modern Frisian (Frisian). Frisian, the language spoken in the northeastern region of the Netherlands, is generally accepted as the language most similar to Modern English. The intermixing of the invading tribes and the British natives formed the four major dialects of Old English: Northumbrian in the north, Mercian in the British Midlands, West Saxon in the south and southwest, and Kentish in the Southeast (BBC History). Old English plays a curious role in Modern English. While only...