A linguist wrote a short story in a language that hadn't been spoken for 5,000 years
In 1868, August Schleicher wanted to prove that Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed ancestor of languages from English to Hindi, was more than an abstract list of sound correspondences. He composed a short fable, 'The Sheep and the Horses,' entirely in his reconstructed version, to show it could function as a real, spoken tongue. Later linguists rewrote the fable as methods improved, and comparing the versions side by side now teaches how much the field's grasp of PIE has changed.