From Helen Proszenyak
Proto-Indo-European is not “the common ancestor of all modern European languages” (4 July, p 28). The ancestor of Basque apparently predates Indo-European languages; and we should also mention the Uralic languages (including Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian) and remember other smaller language groups.
I also wonder who told the author that the word “name” comes from the Latin “nomen“. Others think it came from Old English “nama“, and before that from Proto-Germanic “namon“. Of course the Latin and Germanic come from a common ancestor.
Metung, Victoria, Australia
