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When you say "I sang" instead of "I singed," you aren't just using an irregular verb. You are deploying a 6,000-year-old "linguistic fossil" that predates written history.
Hidden in the everyday grammar of modern European languages are ancient structures that have stubbornly survived unchanged from their Bronze Age ancestors.
That "sing/sang/sung" pattern is a prime example. Proto-Indo-European (PIE)—the ancient mother tongue spoken on the Eurasian steppe 6,000 years ago—did not use suffixes like "-ed" to change tense. Instead, it used an internal vowel-shifting system called ablaut. By swapping the root vowel—usually between "e," "o," and no vowel at all—speakers changed the word's grammatical function. English strong verbs like drive/drove/driven and swim/swam/swum kept this mechanism intact.
In English, other fossils are hidden in plain sight. Think of the words who, what, where, when, why, and which. They all begin with "wh-". This is a direct relic of the PIE labiovelar consonant *kʷ. In the original language, the root for question words was *kʷi- / *kʷo-. When the Germanic branch split off, a phonetic shift called Grimm’s Law changed the "k" sound into an "h" sound, turning *kʷ into the Old English hw (which we now spell wh). That letter combination is a 6,000-year-old barcode marking an interrogative.
If you want to observe an entire language as a living fossil, look to Lithuanian. Geography kept it largely isolated from the massive phonetic and grammatical shifts that simplified languages like English and French. It retains the complex seven-case noun declension system and pitch accents of PIE. Its vocabulary is so well preserved that linguists use it as a baseline to reconstruct ancient speech. Compare the ancient word for wolf (*wĺ̥kʷos) to the Lithuanian vilkas, or the word for son (*sū́nus) to the Lithuanian sūnus. The French linguist Antoine Meillet famously remarked that anyone wishing to hear how Indo-Europeans spoke should go and listen to a Lithuanian peasant.
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Why do 86% of the basic one-word "question words" in the English language begin with the letters "wh"?
Because they all derive from the same word in Proto-Indo-European, *kwos or *kwis (both meaning something like 'what' or 'who').
Who and what derive from Old English hwā and hwæt, respectively, and in turn are simply the descendants of the masculine and neuter forms of Proto-Indo-European *kwos and *kwod. Compare Latin quis and quod.
When and where both derive from the same roots as what and who, but I'm not quite sure where the -n and -r endings came from.
Why comes from the instrumental case form of Old English hwæt, which was either hwȳ, or hwī (both meaning something like "by what means"). Compare the Modern German wie (how), and note the semantic shift --- at some point, the Old English word came to mean less "by what means" and more "for what reasons". Ultimately, however, the word derived from Proto-Indo-European *kwey, which was simply the locative form of *kwis (meaning something like "at what" or "where"). Again, there was a semantic shift involved!
Finally, how comes from Old English hū, which of course comes from the same exact roots as the five other question words listed above. The only reason it doesn't begin with a 'wh' is because the 'w' sound basically merged with the 'ū' sound at some point in its history, which is a fairly normal phenomenon in languages worldwide, because 'w' is basically a shortened form of the 'oo' sound.
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Indeed they all go back to the same starting sound in the "mother language" Proto-Indo-European. You will also notice that their translations in Spanish or Italian or French all start with [k-] or [kw-] (written qu-, ch-, qu-), and in Slavic languages they often have a [k-] as well, in Greek they start with [p-] or sometimes [t-]... Indeed, question words tend to start with the same sounds in Indo-European languages.
Now in English these are the etymologies, I'll abbreviate Old English as OE, Proto-Germanic as PG and Proto-Indo-European as PIE:
what < OE hwæt < PG *hwat < PIE *kʷód 'what'
why < OE hwȳ < PG *hwī < PIE *kʷey 'who.ʟoc' (lit. "at whom")
who < OE hwā < PG *hwaz < PIE *kʷos, *kʷis 'who'
when < OE hwænne < PG *hwannē < PIE *kʷo-, *kʷi- 'interrogative base'
where < OE hwǣr < PG *hwar < PIE *kʷo- 'interrogative pronoun'
There is another word that should be in this list, but for some reason changed in pronunciation and orthography:
how < OE hū < PG *hwō < PIE *kʷos, *kʷod 'who, what'
So in PIE the root was usually *kʷo- or *kʷi- with the meanings 'what' and 'who' and both served as bases for all other question words. They simply got other words or suffixes attached to their ends to give the precise meaning. Here is a list of reconstructed declension of these roots in PIE and their outcomes (so-called "reflexes") in other Indo-European languages: kʷis - Wiktionary.
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English "who," Latin "quis," and Sanskrit "kaḥ" aren't just translations of each other. They are literally the exact same word, warped by a 6,000-year game of telephone.
The connection between English "wh-" words, Latin "qu-" words, and Sanskrit "k-" words traces back to a single ancestral tongue: Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Spoken by nomadic herders on the Eurasian steppe around 4000 BCE, this language used a specific sound to ask questions. Linguists represent it as *kʷ—a "kw" sound, made by rounding the lips while making a hard "k" in the back of the throat.
As these ancient speakers migrated outward in different directions, their languages drifted. The branch that settled the Italian peninsula kept that original quis (who), quid (what), and quando* (when).
The branch that migrated southeast into the Indian subcontinent dropped the lip-rounding part of the pronunciation, simplifying the sound to a plain "k". This became Sanskrit, yielding question words like kaḥ (who), kim (what), and kadā (when).
The branch that moved into Northern Europe—the ancestors of the Germanic tribes—underwent a more dramatic shift. Around 500 BCE, Germanic speakers started pronouncing hard consonant stops as breathy, continuous friction sounds. This systematic sound change, known as Grimm's Law, turned the "p" sound into "f" (which is why Latin pater is English father) and turned the sharp kʷ* question sound into a breathy hw*.
Because of Grimm's Law, the early Germanic tribes asked questions starting with an "hw" sound. This was preserved perfectly in Old English, where the question words were spelled exactly how they sounded: hwā (who), hwæt (what), and hwænne (when).
So where did the "wh" come from? It was largely a clerical update. After the Norman Conquest in 1066, French-speaking scribes took over English record-keeping. They found the traditional "hw" spelling visually awkward and standardized it to "wh" to match other digraphs like "ch" and "sh". The pronunciation eventually dropped the breathy "h" in most dialects, but the spelling remains frozen in time—a linguistic fossil pointing straight back to the ancient steppe
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who, pron.nom. 1 (Interrogative) a Cé (hé, hí, hiad, etc.) (followed by relative clause as in 2 (a) below) Who am I? cé mise?
whom, pron. 1 (Interrogative) a (For direct object) Cé (followed by relative clause as in who 2 (a)) Whom do you see there? cé a fheiceas tú,
what. I a. 1 (Relative) Cibé, an (méid, beagán, etc.)
when. I (interrogative) adv. Cathain, cén uair, cá huair? (followed by a, with lenited relative or independent form of verb in pres. and fut.; with lenited independent form in other tenses); a d' (before vowels or fh in tenses other than pres. and fut.), neg. nach (with eclipsed dependent form), nár (with lenited form of past tense of regular vbs.)
where, adv. 1 (Interrogative) a Cá (with eclipsed dependent form); cár (with lenited form of past tense of regular vbs.) Where am I, cá bhfuil mé?
why. 1 adv. a Cad chuige? cén fáth? cad ina thaobh? cad fáth?(followed by a, neg. nach with eclipsed dependent form; ar, neg. nár with lenited form of past tense of regular vbs.).
how, adv. 1 Conas, cén chaoi.
where » Cá
whereabouts » Cá
when » Cathain, cén uair, cá huair?
whence » Cad as, cá has
whither » Cá háit? cén áit?
cér, cérb, cérbh : cé2 1. Who, whom.
cár, cárb, cárbh) (a) What.(b) when
cés = cé is
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