I’ve been reading about PIE and i’m confused. As I understand, it is assumed to be the language spoken by Europeans 6,000 years ago. No written record of the language has ever been found so the language has been reconstructed through seemingly arbitrary means. So, In all likeliness actual PIE sounded very different. What makes this language (as it exists today) useful? This is essentially a conlang that is too complicated to learn. What am I missing? Sorry if I’m coming off as negative. I find PIE both confusing and fascinating.
In this line of common origins, a more modern example that comes to mind are Chinese, Korean and Japanese. The 3 still preserve similarities, such as kanji and hanja, phonetics of words, and some structures. And having a better documented history of how migration and colonization went over there, it helps better explaining the similarities.