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But while the Romance family illustrates well the concept of a language family, it is also highly unusual in that the ancestral language — Latin — was a written language that has left us copious records. The usual situation is that the ancestral language was not a written language and the only evidence we have are its modern descendants. Yet even without written records, it is not difficult to distinguish language families, as can be seen in Table 1 . Here similarities among certain languages in the word for "hand" allow us to readily identify not only the Romance family (Spanish, Italian, Rumanian), but also the Slavic family (Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian) and the Germanic family (English, Danish, German). There are, however, no written records of the languages ancestral to the Germanic or Slavic languages, so these two languages — which must have existed no less than Latin — are called Proto-Germanic and Proto-Slavic, respectively.
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