专八改错练习第五篇：
Tracing missing persons can take much patientdetective work. But a special kind of “private eye” cantrace the missing ancestors of whole peoples by
studying the clues buried by words. __1__
These philologists, such as the language detectives arecalled, have traced __2__
the word trail back from peoples in Europe, India,South Africa, the Americas,
and the Pacific islands in a tiny nameless, and forgotten tribe that roamed central__3__
Eurasia 5000 to 6000 years ago, before the dawn of writing history. __4__
Since a long time scholars have been puzzled over the striking __5__
difference of words in different languages. In Dutch, vader; in Latin, pater;in __6__
old Irish, athir; in Persian, pidar;in the Sanskrit of distant India, pitr.
These words all sounded likely and meant the same thing—“father” __7__
Where did it happen that widely separated peoples used such __8__
close related sound symbols? The problem baffled linguists for years. The more so__9__
because “father” was but one of a host of such coincidences. Towards the end
of the 18 century it dawned on scholars that perhaps all these words stemmed__10__
from some common language.
（责任编辑：liushengbao）
