alt Hacker NewsA good book on this is Proto by Laura Spinney, it covers all the branches of Proto-Indo-European and also postulates that the entire family may have started from as few as a hundred speakers who were steppe nomads, which is mindboggling if true.
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Insanity • today at 4:42 PM
A book I enjoyed in a similar vain is "Wordslut", it's an exploration of the etymology of various English words (mostly pejoratives today) and the difference in language use between genders. It's more sociolinguistics than linguistics, but a good read.
+1 on Proto. It focuses on the tremendous amount of information revealed by DNA analysis, and it weaves this together with historical linguistics and archeology.