The Indo-European languages are a family (phylum) of several hundred related languages and dialects including most major current languages of

Europe, the Iranian plateau, and

South Asia

Anatolia

Written attestations appearing since the Bronze Age

The Centum languages=the western European languages

The Satem languages=the eastern European and Asian languages

Indo-European Languages  Countries with a majority of speakers of one or more Indo-European languages  Countries with one or more Indo-European minority languages with official status

INDO-EUROPEAN AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

INDO-EUROPEAN HYPOTHESIS

In the 16th century, European visitors to India began to suggest similarities between Indian and European languages. In 1583 Thomas Stephens, an English Jesuit, missionary in Goa, in a letter to his brother that was not published until the 20th century, noted similarities between Indian languages, specifically Sanskrit, and Greek and Latin.

Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti, a merchant who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian (these included devaḥ/dio "God", sarpaḥ/serpe "serpent", sapta/sette "seven", aṣṭa/otto "eight", nava/nove "nine").

In 1647Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhom noted the similarity among Indo-European languages, and supposed that they derived from a primitive common language.

Mikhail Lomonosov compared different language groups of the world including Slavic, Baltic ("Kurlandic"), Iranian (Median language/Medean/Medic) was the language of the Medes. It is an Old Iranian language. He emphatically expressed the antiquity of the linguistic stages accessible to comparative method in the drafts for his Russian Grammar (published 1755)

The hypothesis reappeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on the striking similarities between three of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, to which he tentatively added Gothic, Celtic, Persian

Thomas Young in 1813 first used the term Indo-European, which became the standard scientific term; Most European languages and others (in India, parts of the Middle East, and Asia) are cognates (are related, as a family, by common origins)

Franz Bopp: systematic comparison of these and other old languages supported the theory.

o "Indo-European" =Indo-Germanic = defines the family by indicating its southeastern most and northwestern most branches. In most languages this term is dated or less common, whereas in German it is still the standard scientific term

o Comparative Grammar, 1833 and 1852, is the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline.

o The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics

August Schleicher: 1861 Compendium and

Karl Brugmann: Grundriss (1880)

Ferdinand de Saussure: laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of "modern" Indo-European

Rasmus Rask (1818) and Jacob Grimm (1822), notice of systematic phonological changes

A. Schleicher, reconstruction of pre-historic Indo-European forms, Stammbaumtheorie (tree stem theory)

DESCENDANTS OF THE COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE

Indo-European Language Subfamilies and examples:

Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Persian) Hellenic (Greek) Armenian (Western Armenian, Eastern Armenian) Balto-Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, Lithuanian) Albanian (Gheg, Tosk) Celtic (Irish Gaelic, Welsh) Italic (Latin, Spanish, Italian, French) Germanic (German, English, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian) Anatolian (extinct) (Hittite) Tocharian (extinct) (Tocharian A, Tocharian B)

THE ORIGINAL INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLE

Kurgan culture

It's speculated that the so called Kurgan were the original Indo-European people; lived northwest of the Caucasus, north of the Caspian Sea, as early as the fifth millennium B.C.

Their language is known by scholars as Common Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European.

domesticated cattle and horses,

farming, herding,

four-wheeled wagons, - mobility,

mound builders, hilltop forts,

complex sense of family relationship and organization;

counting skills; used gold and silver;

drank a honey based alcoholic beverage, mead;

multiple gods (worship of sky/thunder, sun, horse, boar, snake), belief in life after death, elaborate burials

(Reference: Maria GIMBUTAS, "The Beginning of the Bronze Age in Europe and the Indo-Europeans" 1973)

Descendants of words for trees (ash, apple, oak, linden, aspen, pine), animals (bear, wolf), and other (honey, snow, cold, winter, father, mother) allow for hypotheses regarding their original homeland and culture.

Beginning around 3000 BC the Indo-European people abandoned their homeland and migrated in a variety of directions (found in Greece by 2000 BC, in northern India by 1500 BC)

Sources of Knowledge

Foreign sources

BCE Assyrian cuneiform sources

Herodotus mid-5th century BCE second-hand account of the Perso-Median conflict

In the 1st century BCE, Strabo: relationship between the various Iranian peoples and their language which seem to speak quite the same language

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

Writing

Old Akkadian is preserved on clay tablets dating back to 2600 BC.

It was written using cuneiform, a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed in wet clay. As employed by Akkadian scribes the adapted cuneiform script could represent either

(a)Sumerianlogograms (i.e. picture-based characters representing entire words),

(b) Sumerian syllables,

(c) Akkadian syllables, or

(d) phonetic

Lexicon

Words derived from the Common Indo-European language are preserved in a large number of languages:

numerals from one to ten;

the word meaning the sum of ten tens (Latin "centum," Avestan "satem," English "hundred");

words for certain body parts (heart, lung, head, foot)

words for certain natural phenomena (air, night, star, snow, sun, moon, mind);

certain plant and animal names (beech, corn, wolf, bear);

certain cultural terms (yoke, mead, weave, sew);

monosyllables that pertain to sex and excretion (example: modern English "fart" likely derived from Indo-European "perd";

also modern English slang "f" perhaps derived from Indo-European "peig" or "pu" meaning respectively "hostile, evil-minded" and "to soil, defile")

Phonology

many stops, voiced, voiceless, and aspirated ([bh] [dh]) poor in fricatives (only [s] and [z])

several laryngeal (h-like) consonants (could double as vowels)

nasals [n], [m], and liquids [l] and [r], and glides [y] and [w] (also could double as vowels)

vowels: [a], , [i], , [u],

Morphology

The Common Indo-European language was inflected. It used suffixes and internal (root) vowel changes (ablaut system) to indicate grammatical information like

case, number,

tense,

person,

mood, etc.

Nouns

Indo-European nouns were inflected for eight cases:

nominative: subject of a sentence (The soldiers saw me.) vocative: person addressed (Students, listen!) accusative: direct object (They bought a car) genitive: possessor or source (the dog's bone) dative: indirect object, recipient (She gave the boy a flower) ablative: what is separated (He abstained from it) locative: place where (We danced at the bar)

instrumental: means, instrument (She ate with chopsticks)

Example:

Hypothetical declension of Indo-European word EKWOS ("horse") (ancestor of Modern English, "horse," Latin: "equus," and Old English, "eoh")

Nominative: ekwos Accusative: ekwom

Genitive: ekwosyo

Dative: ekwoy

Verbs

Indo-European verbs had six "aspects" (we would call them "tenses"):

present: continuing action in progress (I go) imperfect: continuing action in the past (I was going) aorist: momentary action in the past (I went) perfect: completed action (I have gone) pluperfect: completed action in the past (I had gone) future: actions to come (I shall go)

Indo-European had three voices:

active, passive and

middle (reflexive)

Indo-European had five moods:

indicative(fact), subjunctive(will),

optative (wish),

imperative (command),

injunctive (unreality)

Indo-European had seven verb classes (distinguished by root vowels and following consonants)

Syntax

Indo-European had a flexible word order, tendency to Subject-Object-Verb (SOV)

Prosody/Accent

Indo-European accent could be on any syllable and was characterized by pitch rather than loudness

INDO-EUROPEAN Language to GERMANIC (around 3000 BC) to Common Germanic (CGmc) (around 100 BC)

One of the oldest records of a Germanic language is a runic inscription identifying the workman who made a horn about A.D. 400. Transliterated it reads as follows:

ek hlewagastir holtijar horna tawido

Translated, it roughly means:

I, Hlewagastir Holtson, [this] horn made

Prosody:

Indo-European free, pitch accent became strong stress on the initial syllable in Germanic

Phonology

loss of Indo-European laryngeal consonants, articulation shifting higher up in the vocal tract

1. Grimm's Law (Jakob Grimm, 1822):

o Indo-European voiceless stops (p, t, k) became Germanic voiceless fricatives (f, th, h):

Indo-European pœter, Germanic (English) father (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin pater)

Indo-European treyes, Germanic (English) three (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin tres) Indo-European kerd, Germanic (English) heart, (compare with non-Germanic: Latin cord)

o Indo-European voiced stops (b, d, g) became Germanic voiceless stops (p, t, k): Indo-European abel, Germanic (English) apple (contrast with non-Germanic: Russian

jabloko) Indo-European dent, Germanic (English) tooth (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin dentis) Indo-European grœno, Germanic (English) corn (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin

granum)o voiced aspirated stops(bh, dh, gh) to voiced stops (b, d, g):

Indo-European bhrater, Germanic (English) brother (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin frater)

2. Verner's Law (Karl Verner, 1877)o explanation of an exception to Grimm's Law, sometimes Indo-European voiceless stops (p, t, k )

became Germanic voiced stops (b, d, g) when surrounded by voiced sounds and preceded by unaccented syllable or accent falling after the consonant in question), also; s became r; phenomenon explained by Verner as a result of original IE accent falling after consonant in question:

Indo-European kmtóm, English hundred (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin centum) Indo-European pœtér, Germanic (Old English) fæder (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin

pater) Indo-European snusós ("daughter-in-law), Old English snoru (contrast with non-

Germanic: Sanskrit snusá)

Morphology

Relative preservation of Indo-European ablaut system (also known as apophony or vowel gradation): changes in root vowels indicated tense, number, part of speech (English sing, sang, sung is a survival of this system). The stability of this system was however undermined because the position of the Indo-European accent was a conditioning factor for the vowel changes and the accent/stress became fixed in the Germanic languages.

Simplification of the case system: In Germanic there was a fusion of ablative/locative/instrumental/dative and vocative/nominative; three numbers and genders retained

The deterioration of the case system (i.e. inflectional suffixes) is related to the initial-syllable stress patterns of Germanic (final syllables became unstressed or weakly stressed and lost their distinctness).

Verbs o tense/aspect: change from six aspects to only two tenses, present and preterit o mood: retained indicative and imperative and fused subjunctive, injunctive and optative o seven verb classes in Indo-European (distinguished by their vowel changes) were retained in

Germanic o Germanic added weak verbs (also called dental preterite verbs), featuring a dental sound [d] at

the end of a verb to indicate past tense (the ancestor of our regular past tenses: e.g. walk, walked)

Syntax

Germanic retained a relatively free word order, but made greater use of prepositions to compensate for the loss of inflections

Lexicon

Germanic inheritance of many basic words of the Indo-European vocabulary (e.g. cold, winter, honey, wolf, snow, beech, pine, father, mother, sun, tree, long, red, foot, head, and verbs such as be, eat, lie) and forms for grammatical concepts (negation, interrogation)

borrowings from Italic, Celtic and Balto-Slavic languages large common and unique vocabulary of the Germanic languages (not present in other Indo-European

languages and perhaps borrowed from non-Indo-European languages) (e.g. back, blood, body, bone, bride, child, gate, ground, oar, rat, sea, soul)

extensive use derivative affixes and compounding to create new words

West Germanic languages   Dutch (Low Franconian, West Germanic)  Low German (West Germanic)  Central German (High German, West Germanic)  Upper German (High German, West Germanic)

OLD ENGLISH

Old English was spoken in western Britain and southern Scotland until approximately the end of the 11th century, when it began to evolve into Middle English. At about the same time the Scots language began to diverge from Old English and eventually became established as a separate language.

English = West Germanic language heavy influence from Old Norse, Old French, and Romance languages widely spoken around the world due to previous British exploration and colonization and later

American expansion and cultural influence, including the internet spoken as a first language by more than 300 million people and as a second language by more than 500

million in European countries the rate of fluency in English is high