indo european family of languages essay

Indo-European (IE)

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

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• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
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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.

Examples and Observations

"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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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 Language Family: A Phylogenetic Perspective

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Uploaded by bizantio on November 22, 2022

The Indo-European Family of Languages (Chapter 2)

. 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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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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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

Paulus S van Sluis

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