Urheimat

"Urheimat" is a linguistic term, roughly meaning the original homeland of the speakers of a proto-language. Since many peoples tend to wander and spread, there is no absolute Urheimat, e.g. there is an Indo-European Urheimat different from the Germanic or Romance Urheimat. Urheimat means an area indicated by linguistic evidence to be the place where a proto-language was formed. One method to identify the Urheimat is an analysis of the vocabulary of the proto-language. If there were no historic documents and one wanted to find the Urheimat of the Romance languages, the Romance root for "cow", which is quite similar in all Latin-based languages, would indicate that the Romance languages spread from an area where there were cows. On the other hand, there the is no common root for "potato" in all Romance languages; therefore, South America would be a very unlikely Urheimat of the Romance languages, because, according to archaeological evidence, there were potatoes but no cows in this region before 1500. COW\n* Portuguese: vaca\n* Spanish: vaca\n* French: vache\n* Italian: vacca\n* Romanian: vacă POTATO\n* Portuguese: batata\n* Spanish: papa, batata\n* French: pomme de terre or patate\n* Italian: patata\n* Romanian: cartof