John McWhorter

It had to happen.

And so, no, there was no pure Proto-Indo-European.

And even, I'll give you even more, it's becoming clearer that, you know,

Indo-European is many, many languages, several dozen languages.

It's becoming clearer that they trace back to at least two different dialects of Proto-Indo-European.

I won't go further than that.

And it's clear that there's that.

And all languages are hybrids to an extent.

However, I would say that there would theoretically have been some one

proto-Indo-European language that was mixed that became the other ones.

And there was constant mixture, kind of like, if I may, the way you talk about the life of a gene, which is snaking through all sorts of various creatures such that it's hard to say exactly, and tell me if I'm getting this wrong, that there was this proto-marsupial and then a proto-placental, and then there was just one shrew.

My impression was that maybe there were other shrews that contributed genes to both of those strains as things went through.

we can assume there's always been mixture.

The pure language would have been spoken for about 10 minutes, probably somewhere in Africa above what is now the Sahara, maybe in East Africa.

After that, once you have more than one, there would have been a hybridity between the two.

There was always mixture as things went along.

So basically, yes.

And you know what?

Richard, I think that we have reached the limit of our time.

We have.