Trade and Environment in the World Trade Organization. The Permissible Scope of Environmentally Motivated Unilateral Trade Measures

The possible example closest to home is the language of these pages. There has been a long controversy among linguists over the history of the Germanic language family that includes English, and that presumably arose in the area of the Baltic Sea. As I shall discuss in Chapter Fifteen, Germanic languages belong to a wider grouping of languages termed Indo-European. All Indo-European languages clearly derived much of their vocabulary and grammar from an ancestral language known as proto-Indo-European, which may have been spoken in southern Russia 5,000 years ago and then spread west across Europe. However, the Germanic languages also include many word roots and grammatical features unique to them, and absent from all other Indo-European families. Familiar examples include the English words 'house', 'wife', and 'hand', close to the modern German words Haus, Weib, and Hand. The shores of the Baltic are the source of prized amber that was traded to southern Europe and Russia thousands of years ago, just as it is still traded around the world today ...»