Words have history, and part of understanding them is to know something of their origins. The study of the origins of words is etymology, a word that comes into English from Greek, where it was a compound of the word etymon, the real or true sense (of a word), and logia, the study of such, which in turn comes from logos, word, which comes from lego, I speak, which comes from the Indo-European root *leg- which is the source through Latin (legere) for many English words like lecture, legible, collect, diligent, intelligent, and so forth, and through Greek (legein) for many other English words besides etymology like lexicon, dialect, dialogue, catalogue, analogous, apology, prologue, and so forth. IndoEuropean is the source language from which many European and other languages derive; it was spoken in the steppes of Russia by nomadic tribes who had tamed the horse and started to migrate away from the steppes in groups about 2500 years BC. No first hand evidence of the IndoEuropean language has survived, because nothing was ever written down then; there was no writing and no alphabet. We have reconstructed the language of the IndoEuropeans from the languages that were its children. As they migrated, they went in different directions and broke into separate groups, and over the centuries their languages changed into Greek, Latin, Celtic (=Gaelic), German, the Slavic languages including Russian, and various other languages (Persian, Sanskrit, and so on). English gets its words from its mother language, Anglo-Saxon, a dialect of old German, and also from Latin directly and through French (in 1066 the French conquered the English), and finally also from Greek directly and through other languages.