Ar kalbate lietuviškai?

When scholars set out to investigate the common root of the word, which in the earliest Indo-European language would have meant ‘people’, they reconstructed the following form: *teutā*. They did so using a complex method, which probed into closely-sounding words and parts of words in the unending variety of the related languages. Since the exact sound-meaning correlation of the resulting proto-form was not attested in any specific language, dead or living, they added an asterisk thereto, indicating that the form was hypothetical – **teutā*. Variously-sounding remnants of that common form have survived in various languages, including the German people’s self-appellation, *Deutsch*, the English name of the people of the Netherlands, *Dutch*, and that of the old Germanic tribe, the *Teutons*. In Lithuanian ‒ the world's most archaic Indo-European language ‒ *tauta* (with the stress on the second syllable) means just that: 'people'.