The Indo-European
Language Family and Proto-Indo-European
Classifying
Languages:
Typological:
Group together
those with structural similarities, with no regard for any possible historical
relationship
Based on a number of morphemes per word:
(General
guidelines
there
are no “pure” languages in any of these camps)
Isolating Agglutinating Inflecting
e.g., Inuktitut
(Snow-problem)
Progression,
necessarily?
Not really; cf. English
Edward Sapir’s classification:
Analytic Synthetic Polysynthetic
Word order Affixing giant-word-sentences
Function words
Based on word order:
SVO SOV VSO
e.g.,
English Latin Hebrew
Genealogical
Classification (Genetic)
Works form the
assumption of common origin for similar languages
uses
the model of the Family Tree
Most useful for historical linguistics (that’s us!)
Mother tongue;
sister languages; daughter languages
Traces language
back to a Proto-Language
Often
hypothetical/reconstructed language:
Proto-Indo
European, Proto-Germanic
But not
necessarily:
Latin is the
proto-Language of Romance languages
Genealogical
Classification is useful, but has its limits
like
tracing the influence of French and Latin on English
linguistic
cousins, which act like mothers for vocabulary
Language
Families:
c. 6500 languages
in the world
Indo-European:
Not the most
important; just the one that concerns us
Approximately 140
diff languages, or 3% of the world’s languages
but
spoken by nearly half the world’s population
Currently the
most widespread language family, because of European Colonialism and US
economic dominance (English, Spanish, Portuguese)
Exceptions:
non-Indo-European
Languages in Europe:
Finnish,
Estonian, Lappish, Hungarian, Turkish, Basque (language isolate)
Hebrew and Arabic
are NOT Indo-European (they are Semitic
Languages)
But remember, the
Latin and Greek alphabets were based on the Semitic Phoenician alphabet
Search for
Origin:
Hebrew
as original language?
72 languages in
the world
Sir William Jones:
1786
discovery
of Sanskrit and its connections to Greek and Latin
Based on
grammatical structure in addition to vocabulary
The birth of Comparative
Philology
Help from youtube:
Branches of Indo
European:
·
Dead-languages:
no longer has native speakers
·
“old” “middle” are relative to the
language in question
e.g., Old Latin:
500 BC; Old English, 700 AD
Archaic features: preserves
features which seem to go back to proto-IE
Does not matter
how “old” the language is
Innovative features: a change
not in proto-IE:
can
often be used to group sub-families:
e.g., Germanic,
has “weak things”
–ed suffix for past tense
“–an” for plural
nouns
(Satem / Centum languages:
A broad divide based
on the realization of palatal and velar K
from Indo-European
Most current
linguistics do not find this to be a satisfactory
criterion for dividing language sub-families)
Indo-European Language Tree
(make sure to check the ‘Satem’ languages too!:
Some things to
note:
Indo-Iranian
Sanskrit:
Rig Veda preserves very
ancient texts (as religions do)
2000–1000 BC
Hindi; Urdu
Iranian/Persian/Farsi
and Kurdish are Indo-European
they
are linguistically and culturally distinct from Arabs/Arabic
though
they use the Arabic alphabet
Anatolian:
Hittite
A
long-dead language, only discovered in the 20th cent.
1900–1100 BC
some
of the oldest records of IE,
but
the language has many innovative
features
Hellenic:
Ancient
Greek, etc.
700 BC –>
Italic:
Latin,
etc.
500 BC –>
“Romance”:
French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian
Romance languages
are derived from spoken Latin:
“vulgar Latin,” not “classical Latin” (Ciceronian Latin)
Many of our
modern misconceptions about language derive in part from the dominance of
Latin—a dead, written language—as the model for language study
All classical
forms of languages:
people
did not speak like that
Cf. Shakespeare
“Grammar” in the Middle Ages – 19th century meant Latin grammar
Celtic:
Continental
and Insular
Gaulish
(dead)
Brythonic:
Welsh, Breton, Cornish
Goidelic:
Irish (Gaelic), Scots Gaelic, Manx
Old
Irish: many archaic features
Armenian
Baltic
Slavic
Albanian
Germanic:
East:
Gothic
North:
Scandinavian
(Norwegian, Swedish), Icelandic and Faroese
West:
High German
Modern Standard
German (and its ancestors: OHG and MHG)
Low West Germanic
families (or immediate family):
Plattdeutsch
Dutch
Flemish
Frisian
English
Proto Language:
The common
source; the great-great-great grandma language
The language form
which some group of language is derived
Some are attested (we have written
records):
Latin is the proto
language of the Romance languages
Many are not
attested:
Proto-Germanic
and Proto-Indo-European
these
are purely hypothetical and reconstructed languages
Comparative method:
Look at a number
of related languages (or suspected to be) and make deductions about their
ancestry:
Reconstruct dead
languages
cf. evolutionary
biology:
hypothesize
“missing links”
Use of *
Cognate sets:
lists
of words from diverse languages which seem to be related to each other
true
cognates will ultimately be derived from the same word in the Proto-Language
Not always the
same exact meaning:
Indo-European
Cognates
raja
(Skt): “king”
rex, reg–
(Lat): “king”
rice
(OE): “kingdom”
[
mod English “rich”]
Note Bene: none of these words derive from each
other. Rather, they all share a common
ancestor
“Sanskrit raja is ‘cognate with’ or ‘akin to’
Latin rex and Old English rice”
Drawn from CORE VOCABULARY
Really important
words: high frequency words
·
tend to not change
·
they are very conservative —
maintain irregularities
·
resist analogy and loan words
·
Body parts; familial relationships;
natural phenomena; colors, numbers
·
Very basic verbs (come go; eat; be)
·
Function words (pronouns;
demonstratives; conjunctions)
(SOME
STATIC ABOUT CORE VOCABUALRY?)
Cognates are
often disguised because of historical sound changes:
Comparative
philologists can peel away the layer to find sound correspondences
canis and Hund:
cognates
comparing
Germanic and Romance you have to know that [h] and [k] are reflexes:
Then: collis and hill become apparent
Pater and Father: cognates
Beware of Loan
Words:
Languages that
have historical connections in the past may share many words and roots which
are not cognates, but the result of direct borrowing from one to the other: derivatives
The words are
“too close”
English has
hundreds of such words from Latin (and French)
paternal
is not cognate with L pater (it’s
derived from it directly)
canine
is not cognate with L canis
(it’s derived from it)
No historical
interaction is helpful:
like
Sanskrit and Latin
Earliest attestation:
depends
in great part on the age of the written records of the language in question
dictionaries (we
already know all about them)
Comparative
method:
rests
on the assumption that a large number of similarities between two languages can
be explained in terms of an actual relationship between the languages, rather
than:
·
Natural connection between sound and
meaning
o (all
languages are arbitrary: even onomatopoeia somewhat arbitrary)
·
Sound changes are regular and
widespread
·
That there is not “intelligent
designer” to these languages
Look at the FOOT
example
Foot, ped- pod-
one, una, ein
mother, madre,
mater, mutter, [Finnish: aiti !]
Sanskrit Avestan Greek Latin Gothic English pita pater pater fadar father
padam poda pedem fotu foot
bhratar phrater frater brothar brother
bharami barami phero fero baira bear (verb)
jivah jivo wiwos qius quick
('living')
sanah hano henee senex sinista [<senile>]
virah viro wir wair were(wolf)
('man')
tris tres thri three deka decem taihun ten satem he-katon centum hund(rath) hundred
More !
We’ve
reconstructed hundreds of Proto-Indo-European words based on this method
Characteristics of Proto-IE
·
Accent: Free or Floating
·
Use of Ablaut (vowel gradation) to
show grammatical change in meaning
o “strong
verbs”
·
Derivation and inflection
·
Compounding
·
Highly inflected
o reconstructed
from daughter languages
o comparison
of “endings” like cognates
·
Nouns inflectional morphology:
o 8
cases (Nom., Acc., Dat., Abl., Voc., Loc., Instr., Gen.)
o 3
numbers (sing., pl., dual)
o 3
genders (M, F, N)
o 3
degrees of comparison (abs., comp., superl)
o +
different classes
·
Verbs:
o 3
persons
o 3
numbers
o 2
voices
o 6
tenses
o 5
moods
o 3
aspects
o
= 1620 different forms for a given
verb (in theory)
Indo-Europeans:
deductions
about their Society based on their words
There is no physical / archeological evidence of these
people
Homeland:
Split the
difference:
somewhere
between India and Europe: how about the Caucasus
Mountains?