Indo-European (IE)

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Indo-European is a  family of languages (including most of the languages spoken in Europe, India, and Iran) descended from a common tongue spoken in the third millennium B.C. by an agricultural people originating in southeastern Europe. The family of languages is the second-oldest in the world, only behind the Afroasiatic family (which includes the languages of ancient Egypt and early Semitic languages). In terms of written evidence, the earliest Indo-European languages that researchers have found include the Hittite, Luwian, and Mycenaean Greek languages.

Branches of Indo-European (IE) include Indo-Iranian ( Sanskrit and the Iranian languages), Greek, Italic ( Latin and related languages), Celtic, Germanic (which includes English ), Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Anatolian, and Tocharian. Some of the most commonly spoken IE languages in the modern world are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Russian, Punjabi, and Bengali.

The theory that languages as diverse as Sanskrit, Greek, Celtic, Gothic, and Persian had a common ancestor was proposed by Sir William Jones in an address to the Asiatick Society on Feb. 2, 1786. (See below.)

The reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages is known as the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). Although no written version of the language survives, researchers have proposed a reconstructed language, religion, and culture to some extent, based largely on shared elements of known ancient and modern Indo-European cultures who live in the areas where the language originated. An even earlier ancestor, dubbed Pre-Proto-Indo-European, has also been proposed.

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"The ancestor of all the IE languages is called Proto-Indo-European , or PIE for short. . . .

"Since no documents in reconstructed PIE are preserved or can reasonably hope to be found, the structure of this hypothesized language will always be somewhat controversial."

(Benjamin W. Fortson, IV, Indo-European Language and Culture . Wiley, 2009)

"English--along with a whole host of languages spoken in Europe, India, and the Middle East--can be traced back to an ancient language that scholars call Proto Indo-European. Now, for all intents and purposes, Proto Indo-European is an imaginary language. Sort of. It's not like Klingon or anything. It is reasonable to believe it once existed. But nobody every wrote it down so we don't know exactly what 'it' really was. Instead, what we know is that there are hundreds of languages that share similarities in syntax and vocabulary , suggesting that they all evolved from a common ancestor."

(Maggie Koerth-Baker, "Listen to a Story Told in a 6000-Year-Old Extinct Language." Boing Boing , September 30, 2013)

Address to the Asiatick Society by Sir William Jones (1786)

"The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek , more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit, and the old Persian might be added to this family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia."

(Sir William Jones, "The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus," Feb. 2, 1786)

A Shared Vocabulary

"The languages of Europe and those of Northern India, Iran, and part of Western Asia belong to a group known as the Indo-European Languages. They probably originated from a common language-speaking group about 4000 BC and then split up as various subgroups migrated. English shares many words with these Indo-European languages, though some of the similarities may be masked by sound changes. The word moon , for example, appears in recognizable forms in languages as different as German ( Mond ), Latin ( mensis , meaning 'month'), Lithuanian ( menuo ), and Greek ( meis , meaning 'month'). The word yoke is recognizable in German ( Joch ), Latin ( iugum ), Russian ( igo ), and Sanskrit ( yugam )."

(Seth Lerer, Inventing English: A Portable History of the Language . Columbia Univ. Press, 2007)

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A view of the Anatolian steppe in Turkey.

Indo-European languages: new study reconciles two dominant hypotheses about their origin

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Profesor Titular (lingüística, traducción), Universitat Jaume I

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Kim Schulte has worked on "IE-CoR: A Database on Cognate Relationships in ‘core’ Indo-European vocabulary ", funded by the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

Universitat Jaume I provides funding as a member of The Conversation ES.

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The languages in the Indo-European family are spoken by almost half of the world’s population. This group includes a huge number of languages, ranging from English and Spanish to Russian, Kurdish and Persian.

Ever since the discovery, over two centuries ago, that these languages belong to the same family, philologists have worked to reconstruct the first Indo-European language (known as Proto-Indo-European) and establish a “language family tree”, where branches represent the evolution and separation of languages over time. This approach draws on phylogenetics – the study of how biological species evolve – which also provides the most appropriate model for describing and quantifying the historical relationships between languages.

Despite numerous studies, many questions still remain as to the origin of Indo-European: where was the original Indo-European language spoken in prehistoric times? How long ago did this language group emerge? How did it spread across Eurasia?

Anatolia or the Pontic Steppe?

There are two main, though apparently contradictory, established hypotheses. On one side we have the Anatolian Hypothesis , which traces the origins of the Indo-European people to Anatolia, in modern day Turkey, during the Neolithic era. According to this hypothesis, created by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew , Indo-European languages began to spread towards Europe around 9,000 years ago, alongside the expansion of agriculture.

On the other side we have the Steppe Hypothesis , which places the origin of Indo-European languages further north, in the Pontic Steppe . This theory states that Proto-Indo-European language emerged somewhere north of the Black Sea around 5,000 or 6,000 years ago. It is linked to Kurgan culture , known for its distinctive burial mounds and horse breeding practices.

DNA comparison

In order to decide which of these two hypotheses is correct, genetic studies have been carried out to compare DNA found at prehistoric sites with that of modern humans. However, this type of research can only provide indirect clues as to the origins of Indo-European languages, since language, unlike, for example, blood type, is not inherited through genes.

A new study published in Science has approached the question from a different angle by using direct linguistic data to assess the timelines put forward by both hypotheses.

In this project, carried out by over 80 linguists under the direction of Paul Heggarty and Cormac Anderson from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, we applied a new methodology that allowed us to obtain more exact results.

More comprehensive sampling

The samples used in earlier phylogenetic studies were taken from a limited pool of languages. Moreover, some analyses had assumed that modern languages are derived directly from ancient written languages, when they actually come from oral variants that were spoken during the same period – Spanish, for example, did not come from the classical Latin found in Virgil’s works, but from the popular or “vulgar” Latin which was spoken by ordinary people. These shortcomings and assumptions have distorted age estimates for Indo-European language family subgroups such as Germanic, Slavic or Romance.

The new study addresses these issues, eliminating inconsistencies and taking data from a wider range of sources (from 161 languages, to be exact), to provide a more balanced and complete sample set. This data then underwent a Bayesian phylogenetic analysis , a statistical method for establishing the most probable relationships between languages and branches of the family tree.

The study showed, for example, that an Italo-Celtic language family cannot exist, since the Italic and Celtic languages separated several centuries before the separation of the Germanic and Celtic languages, which took place around 5,000 years ago.

write an essay on indo european family of languages

An eight thousand year old language family

Regarding the question of the origin of Indo-European languages, calculations based on the new data show that they were first spoken approximately 8,000 years ago.

The results of this research do not line up neatly with either the Anatolian or the Kurgan hypotheses. Instead they suggest that the birthplace of Indo-European languages is somewhere in the south of the Caucasus region. From there, they then expanded in various directions: westward towards Greece and Albania; eastward towards India, and northward towards the Pontic Steppe.

Around three millennia later there was then a second wave of expansion from the Pontic Steppe towards Europe, which gave rise to the majority of the languages that are spoken today in Europe. This hybrid hypothesis, which marries up the two previously established theories, also aligns with the results of the most recent studies in the field of genetic anthropology.

In addition to bringing us closer to solving the centuries-old enigma of the origin of our languages, this research illustrates how disciplines as disparate as genetics and linguistics can complement each other to provide more reliable answers to questions of human prehistory. It is hoped that the same methodology will also serve, in future research, to expand our understanding of how languages and populations spread to other continents.

This article was originally published in Spanish

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Languages have families, too: a look at the indo-european language family.

write an essay on indo european family of languages

Most languages currently spoken on Earth are part of a language family , meaning they are related to each other by sharing a common ancestor language. Of these families, Indo-European is one of the best understood. This family consists of languages spoken in Europe, parts of the Middle East, much of South Asia, as well as places in the Americas. 

With almost 450 Indo-European languages spoken today, more than a third of the entire planet speaks one of these languages. So what are they and how are they similar?

What Is A Language Family?

Language is changing all the time: Even one language can be spoken differently across social groups and between generations. In fact, what some people see as “lazy” speech patterns is actually language evolution in progress. So when we say that several languages are part of the same family, what we mean is that they have a common ancestor that they both grew from in this constant evolution.

In the case of Indo-European languages, the ancestor language was spoken around 6,000 years ago in the Caucus region (modern southern Russia and Ukraine). As this predates writing by about 2,500 years, there are no physical records of the original language, but linguists can track its development backwards through its language descendants to piece together an idea of what that ancestor was like. We now call this language Proto-Indo-European .

Which Languages Are In The Indo-European Language Family?

The major sub groups of languages in the Indo-European family are Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic), Gaelic (Irish, Welsh, Breton), Romance (French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian), Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian), Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian), Albanian , Greek , Armenian , Indo-Aryan (Urdu, Hindi, Gujurati, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Sinhala) and Iranian languages (Kurdish, Farsi, Pashto, Dari).

However, not all European languages are part of this family. There are a few European languages with different roots which are often mistaken for their Indo-European neighbors. The best examples of these are Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish and Sámi (from the Uralic family), Maltese (a Semitic language, related to Arabic and Hebrew), and Basque which, very unusually, is not related to any other living language.

‘Shesh’ Is The Word: Indo-European Vocabulary

We can spot many similarities between Indo-European languages via numerals (names for numbers). For example, the word for “two” in both Lithuanian and Kurdish is du ; “four” is cuatro in Spanish and četri in Latvian; “six” in Russian is shest and in Farsi shesh ; “eight” is acht in German and ocht in Irish; “ten” is deset in Czech and dhet in Albanian.

Everyday words can also have striking similarities. “Bread,” for example, is pan in Spanish, paine in Romanian, pain in French (all Romance languages); brood in Dutch, brød in Danish, brauð in Icelandic (all Germanic languages); chleb in Polish, Russian and Serbian, hleb in Bosnian and leb in Macedonian (all Slavic languages).

That’s not to say that every word has a sibling in another Indo-European language. After all, languages are a living history of the ebb and flow of people across the planet’s surface: Vocabulary is a time-capsule of social mobility, conquest, trade routes, popular sayings, folklore and even jokes. Indo-European languages may come from a common ancestor, but these languages also interacted with, and were influenced by, languages from unrelated families. 

For example, we often find words in English that originated in far-flung parts of the globe, like “tea” from Mandarin, while “alcohol” has an Arabic root. “Safari” is Swahili, “tsunami” is Japanese, and “durian” is Malay… to name but a few.

The Journey Continues

We hope you enjoyed this trek through the many branches of the Indo-European language family! Of course, it’s just one of a kaleidoscope of families that make up the hundreds of languages spoken on our planet, but as perhaps the most dominant, it’s always good to know who your Indo-European language siblings are.

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The Indo-European Language Family: A Phylogenetic Perspective

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Approaches to Teaching the History of the English Language: Pedagogy in Practice

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15 English Is an Indo-European Language: Linguistic Prehistory in the History of English Classroom

  • Published: October 2017
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This chapter suggests ways that Indo-European can be made relevant throughout an entire course on the history of English. Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law, for example, are not just useful for demonstrating that English is member of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family. Rather, in combination with other, later sound changes, they have repercussions in present-day English. For example, they tell us that day and diurnal are not cognate, but that raw and crude are, as are seethe and sodden . An understanding of Proto-Indo-European linguistic phenomena, such as sound changes, ablaut, and the PIE active-stative verb system can be used to explain the structure of Old, Middle, and Modern English as well as aspects of English as it is spoken today.

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The Indo-European Family of Languages (Chapter 2)

Profile image of Ahmed Shafik  Elkhatib

. Languages Constantly Change As long as language lives and is in actual use it is in a constant state of change. Speech is produced by certain muscular movements, which are subject to gradual alteration when they are constantly repeated. Any such alteration results in a difference in the sound produced. Thus each individual is constantly, though unconsciously, making slight changes in his/her speech. Although the alteration is mostly gradual, after a period of time the differences become noticeable. For example, in the eighteenth century the words join and divine were both pronounced with the centralized diphthong [əI]. Also the word tea was pronounced as tay, and thus rhymed with obey. Other rhyming pairs were: full – rule; give – believe ; glass – place ; ear – repair ; lost – boast; thought – fault; obliged – besieged; and reserve – starve. But later the pronunciation ofone word or both words in each pair has changed and the pairs no longer rhyme. II. Dialects May Become Separate Languages When there is constant communication among the speakers of a language, the individual differences we have referred to in section I merge in the speech of the community, and conformity prevails. But if separation takes place for a long time, such differences increase. If the separation is slight, the differences are also slight and we have merely local dialects. Conversely, if the separation is considerable, the differences are great, and we generally have separate languages. Even when the separation has gone far, it is possible to recognize a number of features which the resulting languages still retain in common. These common features indicate that at one time such languages were one and the same language. For example, it is easy to notice a close relationship between English and German from the words milk and milch, bread and brot, flesh and fleisch, and water and wasser. Another example is the connection between English and Latin, which is indicated by such pairs as father and pater, and brother and frāter. Also when we notice that father is similar to vader in Dutch, to fadar in Gothic, to faðir in Old Norse, to vater in German, to patēr in Greek, to pitar- in Sanskrit, and to athir in Old Irish, we are led to the hypothesis that the languages of a large part of Europe and part of Asia were at one time the same.

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Transactions of The Philological Society

Gerhard Meiser

Syncretism, which I understand in this paper as the functional merging of paradigmatic categories, is caused either by inflectional homonymy or by changes in needs of communication, when the linguistic cost for the retention of two grammatical concepts no longer appears to be justified. The free variance of allomorphs which arises through syncretism is seldom tolerated for long. Mostly the allomorphs are redistributed according to principles which can be compared with concepts of ‘natural morphology’ (iconicity, system adequacy, distinctive strength). But the excess of morphemes is sometimes used to create a new category.

Brian D Joseph

A stunning result of linguistic research in the 19th century was the recognition that some languages show correspondences of form that cannot be due to chance convergences, to borrowing among the languages involved, or to universal characteristics of human language, and that such correspondences therefore can only be the result of the languages in question having sprung from a common source language in the past. Such languages are said to be &quot;related&quot; (more specifically, &quot;genetically related&quot;, though &quot;genetic&quot; here does not have any connection to the term referring to a biological genetic relationship) and to belong to a &quot;language family&quot;. It can therefore be convenient to model such linguistic genetic relationships via a &quot;family tree&quot;, showing the genealogy of the languages claimed to be related. For example, in the model below, all the languages B through I in the tree are related as members of the same family; if they were not rel...

Proceedings of the sixth …

Giancarlo Tomezzoli

Ondřej Šefčík

Foreign elements in the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary

Rasmus G Bjørn

A comparative loanword study The present thesis scrutinizes a number of loan etymologies (135 in total) for PIE lexical items with the aim to establish data available for further elucidation of the prehistoric speech community. Extensive methodological considerations are given in the first chapter, including sources, the problems of identifying points of tangency for extinct languages, and the trichotomy between heritage, borrowings, and chance resemblance that constitutes a central distinction in the science. The remainder of the chapter discusses other sources of information that may contribute to the identification of ancient contact situations, in particular derived linguistic approaches, archaeology, and genetics. Chapters two and three are introductions. The second chapter is a general introduction to the language families and isolates, different from Indo-European, that are treated in the paper. These are NW Caucasian, NE Caucasian, Hurro-Urartian, Kartvelian, Uralic (and Yukaghir), Semitic (and Afro-Asiatic), Sumerian, and finally a short note on isolates, extinct languages, and other language families (Altaic and Dravidian). The third chapter has two components. It first sets out to provide an overview of proposed homeland theories and their associated loanword components, treating the Pontic-Caspian Steppes, Central Asia, Anatolia, and Transcaucasia. The second half introduces affinity and adstrate theories connecting PIE with other language families. In addition to the families mentioned in chapter two, a short note on macro-families is added at the end. All of these are included to familiarize the reader with the context in which most loanword etymologies have been proposed. The next two chapters constitute the core of the thesis and discusses previously proposed evidence of borrowings and, occasionally, genetic affinity. Chapter four is a wordlist of 131 individual etymologies (4 are reserved for the treatment of numerals). Each entry provides the standard IE etymology and suggested external comparanda before a discussion attempts to establish the plausibility of external relations. Chapter five is basically an extension of the wordlist, but treats the numerals in sequence to explore their mutual relationship. Chapter six analyses the consequences of the etymologies in the previous chapters. A few correspondences are best categorized as older than PIE and are presented as possible evidence of more profound relations. While emphasis is on borrowings from external sources, a short note is also given on the stratificational implications of loanwords in the opposite direction. Borrowings are then arranged according to the internal stratification of PIE, after which discussions of the source languages follow. The items are finally divided into semantic spheres to analyze the systemic implications of borrowings into PIE. The present study concludes that PIE shows signs of extensive borrowing from neighboring languages, and further that some of these are part of broader developments in the speech community, most saliently the formation of the decimal system, the transition to agriculture and adoption of domesticated animals, and ultimately external marriage alliances. The hope is that the concise treatment of this phenomenon will contribute the increased use of borrowings and their descriptive powers as evidence of features in PIE. Download at www.loanwords.prehistoricmap.com where you’re also invited to add comments. Note that the interactive parts of the page pend further work (blame it on the day job and small children) Loanwords in PIE - a new methodological approach, including 135 proposed borrowings and semantic field analyses. Semitic, Uralic and Caucasian comparanda. MA thesis and prize paper

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Jacques FRANCOIS

In the second half of 19th century, two German linguists, August Schleicher and Johannes Schmidt, worked out a method of genealogical comparison of the indo-european languages which crucially rested on inflectional morphology and phonology (so-called Stammbaum-hypothesis of Schleicher) supplemented by wave-like spreading (so-called wave-hypothesis of Schmidt) of such properties amonst geographically neighbouring languages. First, this method is applied to four European languages : Dutch, English, French and German in order to assess the genealogical relatedness beween these languages. Next, a list of 18 structural properties of the four languages is collected in order to assess the structural relatedness of each pair of languages. The two resulting charts turn out to be similar concerning the proximity between Dutch vs. German, but quite disparate concerning the latter vs. English and French. The structural chart is insightful, but weighting the collected structural properties (on the basis of criteria to be supported) might generate a differently shaped chart

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Indo-European Language Family Essay Example

Indo-European Language Family Essay Example

  • Pages: 2 (507 words)
  • Published: April 30, 2017
  • Type: Essay

The Indo-European language family includes about 150 languages and dialects spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia. This hypothesis was first proposed by Sir William Jones, who noticed similarities between four of the oldest languages known in his time, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit and Persian. Scholars used to call the group "Indo-Germanic languages". However, when it became obvious that the connection is relevant to most of Europe's languages, the name was expanded to Indo-European.

Some of the modern languages include Bengali, English, French, German, Gujarati, Hindi, Italian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. The Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as possessing the longest recorded history after the Afro-asiatic language family. The languages of the Indo-European group are spoken by roughly three billion people, the

largest number for recognized language families. Of the top 20 modern languages, 12 are Indo-European: Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, German, Marathi, French, Italian, Punjabi and Urdu, accounting for over 1. billion native speakers.

The connection is determined by genetic relationships, meaning that all members are presumed to be descendants of a common ancestor. Membership in the various branches, groups and subgroups is also genetic, suggesting a common ancestor that split off from other Indo-European groups. The Indo-European Family stretches from the Americas through Europe to North India, and is divided into twelve branches, ten of which contain existing languages. The Celtic Branch; this is now the smallest branch.

These languages originated in Central Europe and once dominated Western Europe. The Germanic Branch; these languages originate from Old Norse and Saxon. Due to the influence of early Christia

missionaries, the vast majority of the Celtic and Germanic languages use the Latin alphabet. The Latin Branch; also called the Romance languages. These languages are all derived from Latin. Latin is one of the most important classical languages. Its alphabet, which was derived from the Greek alphabet, is used by many languages of the world. The Slavic Branch; these languages are confined to Eastern Europe.

The Baltic Branch; there are three Baltic States, but only two Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Prussian. The Hellenic Branch; the only language in this branch is Modern Greek. The Illyric Branch; another single language branch, only Albanian. The Anatolian Branch; all languages in this branch are extinct. The Thracian Branch; represented by a single modern language, Armenian. The Iranian Branch; these languages descended from ancient Persian. The Indic Branch; this branch has the most languages. The Tokharian Branch; recently identified extinct languages from west China.

Some linguists say that Indo-European languages form part of a hypothetical Nostratic language family, and attempt to relate Indo-European to other language families, such as South Caucasian languages, Uralic languages, Dravidian languages, and Afro-asiatic languages. This theory remains highly controversial, and is not accepted by most linguists in the field. Objections to such groupings are not based on any theoretical claim about the likely historical existence or non-existence of such families; it is entirely reasonable to suppose that they might have existed.

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  1. Indo-European languages

    Indo-European languages, family of languages spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of Southwest and South Asia.The term Indo-Hittite is used by scholars who believe that Hittite and the other Anatolian languages are not just one branch of Indo-European but rather a branch coordinate with all the rest put together; thus, Indo-Hittite has been used for a family ...

  2. Indo-European Languages

    The Indo-European Languages are a family of related languages that today are widely spoken in the Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia.Just as languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian are all descended from Latin, Indo-European languages are believed to derive from a hypothetical language known as Proto-Indo-European, which is no longer spoken.

  3. Indo-European languages

    The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family— English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish —have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several ...

  4. Indo-European Family of Languages

    Definition . Indo-European is a family of languages (including most of the languages spoken in Europe, India, and Iran) descended from a common tongue spoken in the third millennium B.C. by an agricultural people originating in southeastern Europe. The family of languages is the second-oldest in the world, only behind the Afroasiatic family (which includes the languages of ancient Egypt and ...

  5. Indo-European languages summary

    The study of Indo-European began in 1786 with Sir William Jones's proposal that Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Germanic, and Celtic were all derived from a "common source.". In the 19th century linguists added other languages to the Indo-European family, and scholars such as Rasmus Rask established a system of sound correspondences.

  6. PDF 1 The Indo-European language family

    1.1 Introduction. Indo-European (IE) is the best-studied language family in the world. For much of the past 200 years more scholars have worked on the comparative philology of IE than on all the other areas of linguistics put together. We know more about the history and relationships of the IE languages than about any other group of languages.

  7. Introduction (Chapter 1)

    The Indo-European Language Family - September 2022. 1.1 Background . The study of the genealogical relationship between the Indo-European languages has been the object of research ever since August Schleicher's famous Stammbaum representation of the then-known subgroups, or branches (Reference Schleicher 1861: 7; see also Reference Schleicher 1853: 787).

  8. Indo-European languages

    Characteristic developments of Indo-European languages. As Proto-Indo-European was splitting into the dialects that were to become the first generation of daughter languages, different innovations spread over different territories.. Changes in phonology. Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Armenian, and Albanian agree in changing the palatal stops *ḱ, *ǵ, and *ǵh into spirants (s, ś, th, etc.) or ...

  9. Indo-European languages: new study reconciles two dominant hypotheses

    The languages in the Indo-European family are spoken by almost half of the world's population. ... Write an article and join a growing community of more than 182,200 academics and researchers ...

  10. Languages Have Families, Too: A Look At The Indo-European Language Family

    Most languages currently spoken on Earth are part of a language family, meaning they are related to each other by sharing a common ancestor language.Of these families, Indo-European is one of the best understood. This family consists of languages spoken in Europe, parts of the Middle East, much of South Asia, as well as places in the Americas.

  11. PDF The Indo-european Family

    3. The Evidence Uniting the Indo-European Languages As mentioned above, what provides the basis for positing an Indo-European family and for relating the various languages listed in §§1 and 2 is a set of striking correspondences of form among all these languages. These correspondences come at all levels of grammar,

  12. The Indo-European Language Family: A Phylogenetic Perspective

    Book provides an introduction to linguistic subgrouping as well as offering comprehensive, systematic and up-to-date analyses of the ten main branches of the Indo-European language family: Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Armenian, Albanian, Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic

  13. The Indo-European Family

    View PDF. THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY — THE LINGUISTIC EVIDENCE by Brian D. Joseph, The Ohio State University 0. Introduction A stunning result of linguistic research in the 19th century was the recognition that some languages show correspondences of form that cannot be due to chance convergences, to borrowing among the languages involved, or to ...

  14. Indo-European Family of Languages: Features and Classifications

    Indo-European Language: Some Basic Features. 1. Totally different endings of nouns and verbs to express the grammatical relation between the two. 2. Eight cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, optative, locative and vocative. 3. Dual number in Indo-European besides singular and plural. 4.

  15. Indo-European Linguistics

    The Indo-European language family consists of many of the modern and ancient languages of Europe, India and Central Asia, including Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, German, French, Spanish and English. Spoken by an estimated three billion people, it has the largest number of native speakers in the world today.

  16. Indo-European languages

    Establishment of the family Shared characteristics. The chief reason for grouping the Indo-European languages together is that they share a number of items of basic vocabulary, including grammatical affixes, whose shapes in the different languages can be related to one another by statable phonetic rules.Especially important are the shared patterns of alternation of sounds.

  17. PDF 2 The Indo-European Family of Languages

    The Indo-European Family of Languages 13. Language Constantly Changing. In the mind of the average person language is associated with writing and calls up a picture of the printed page. From Latin or French as we meet it in literature we get an impression of something uniform and relatively fixed. We are likely to forget that writing

  18. English Is an Indo-European Language: Linguistic Prehistory in the

    Abstract. This chapter suggests ways that Indo-European can be made relevant throughout an entire course on the history of English. Grimm's Law and Verner's Law, for example, are not just useful for demonstrating that English is member of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European family.

  19. Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction, 2nd Edition

    This revised and expanded edition provides a comprehensive overview of comparative Indo-European linguistics and the branches of the Indo-European language family, covering both linguistic and cultural material. Now offering even greater coverage than the first edition, it is the definitive introduction to the field. Updated, corrected, and expanded edition, containing new illustrations of ...

  20. PDF The Expansion of the Indo-European Languages: An Indo-Europeanist s

    An Indo-Europeanist's Evolving View. by Eric P. Hamp with annotation and comments by Douglas Q. Adams. Victor H. Mair, Editor Sino-Platonic Papers Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305 USA [email protected] www.sino-platonic.org.

  21. [PDF] The Indo-European Language Family

    Modern languages like English, Spanish, Russian and Hindi as well as ancient languages like Greek, Latin and Sanskrit all belong to the Indo-European language family, which means that they all descend from a common ancestor. But how, more precisely, are the Indo-European languages related to each other? This book brings together pioneering research from a team of international scholars to ...

  22. The Indo-European Family of Languages (Chapter 2)

    These languages fall into eleven principal groups, which form the branches of the Indo-European family. Fowling is a brief look at each. A. The Indian Branch The oldest literary texts preserved in any Indo-European language are the sacred books of India, known as the Vedas. These books fall into four groups, the oldest of which goes back to ...

  23. Indo-European Language Family Essay Example

    The Indo-European language family includes about 150 languages and dialects spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia. This hypothesis was first proposed by Sir William Jones, who noticed similarities between four of the oldest languages known in his time, Latin, Greek, and ...