From Per Ahlberg, Uppsala, Sweden
Although the Yamnaya left no written records, circumstantial evidence overwhelmingly points to them being the speakers of the ancestral Indo-European language, which diversified into a language family that includes the overwhelming majority of European languages, as well as the Iranian family, Urdu and Hindi.
The vocabulary of proto-Indo-European can be reconstructed by comparing words in descendant languages, and includes some highly suggestive vocabulary, oft-given examples being “horse” (ekwos), “yoke” (yugom) and “wheel” (kwekwlo). They hint at a mobile people with horse-drawn wagons. So the roots of the descendant languages contain the last faint echoes of how the Yamnaya saw themselves.
