except the major difference is just that it uses funny letters, which you can do with any language and that doesn’t mean the actual language itself is different!

You’re effectively taking dutch, writing it in cyrillic script, and going “look at how different the languages are” when in fact dutch is generally easier to comprehend than a thick scottish dialect.

I never really understood at what point a language evolves enough to be an entirely new language.

Old English feels so far removed from even middle English, let alone modern English.

We have “new” and “old” to differentiate them, but with how many Latin words alone entered English between Old English and Modern English, It’s something I’ve never found a comprehensive answer to.

I guess, what is it about proto-indo European that we acknowledge as a distinct language from the hundreds of thousands of languages that evolved from it, other than time scale and global impact.