What languaages are part of the Indo European language family?
The most recognizable Indo European languages include Celtic, Armenian, Germanic, Italic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Hellenic or Greek, and Indo-Iranian among others. The language is spoken prominently in Europe except for countries such as Hungary, Finland, Estonia, Turkey, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.
What is the hardest language in Europe?
- Basque. Generally regarded as one of the most difficult languages in the world, since it is not even remotely related to anything else.
- Georgian. Agglutinative (everything is expressed by hanging endings on the main word in the phrase, so you can end up with one long word that needs a dozen words in ...
- Sami, in particular the Ume variety. ...
Which Indo-European language is closely related to Germanic?
English language, West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to the Frisian, German, and Dutch (in Belgium called Flemish) languages.
What languages are spoken in the EU?
The following is a list of the 23 official languages of the EU arranged in alphabetical order:
- Bulgarian
- Czech
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Estonian
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
See more
Where did Indo-European language come from?
The majority view in historical linguistics is that the homeland of the Indo-European language family was located in the Pontic steppes (present day Ukraine) around 6000 years ago.
What was the first Indo-European language?
Aside from a very poorly known dialect spoken in or near northern Iraq during the 2nd millennium bce, the oldest record of an Indo-Aryan language is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda, the oldest of the sacred scriptures of India, dating roughly from 1000 bce.
What are the four main roots of the Indo-European language?
Branches. The Indo-European language family has four main living branches: Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, and Italic.
Who discovered the Indo-European?
William JonesThe discovery of the Indo-Europeans is one of the most fascinating stories in modern scholarship. The tale begins with linguists in the late 1700's, in particular, William Jones, a British judge who lived in India and in 1786 was the first person to suggest the possibility of Indo-European civilization.
What is the oldest language known to man?
Dating back to at least 3500 BC, the oldest proof of written Sumerian was found in today's Iraq, on an artifact known as the Kish Tablet. Thus, given this evidence, Sumerian can also be considered the first language in the world.
Which is the oldest language of the world?
World's oldest language is Sanskrit. The Sanskrit language is called Devbhasha. All European languages seem inspired by Sanskrit. All the universities and educational institutions spread across the world consider Sanskrit as the most ancient language.
What language is closest to Indo-European?
The most common one this is claimed about is Lithuanian, which preserves lots of IE cases lost elsewhere and has a phonology that's fairly conservative.
Which language is mother of all languages?
SanskritSanskrit is the Holy and Divine language of India, written in Devanagari script which is also known for its clarity and beauty. Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-European languages family.
Where are Indo-European languages spoken?
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 ...
Where was the Greek language first spoken?
The earliest surviving written evidence of a Greek language is Mycenaean, the dialect of the Mycenaean civilization, mainly found on clay tablets and ceramic vessels on the isle of Crete. Mycenaean did not have an alphabetic written system, rather it had a syllabic script known as the Linear B script.
What is the oldest language in India?
Sanskrit, which belongs to the Indic sub-branch, is the best known among the early languages of this branch; its oldest variety, Vedic Sanskrit, is preserved in the Vedas, a collection of hymns and other religious texts of ancient India. Indic speakers entered into the Indian subcontinent, coming from central Asia around 1500 BCE: In the Rig- Veda, the hymn 1.131 speaks about a legendary journey that may be considered a distant memory of this migration.
What are the other languages of the Romance language?
Other languages of this branch are: Faliscan, Sabellic, Umbrian, South Picene, and Oscan, all of them extinct. Today Romance languages are the only surviving descendants of the Italic branch. Map of Indo-Euopean Migrations. Dbachmann (CC BY-SA)
What was the language of Athens called?
There were many Greek dialects in ancient times, but because of Athens cultural supremacy in the 5th century BCE, it was the Athens dialect, called Attic, the one that became the standard literary language during the Classical period (480-323 BCE).
Which Roman civilization was responsible for the growth of Latin in ancient times?
Rome was responsible for the growth of Latin in ancient times. Classical Latin is the form of Latin used by the most famous works of Roman authors like Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, and Marcus Aurelius. Other languages of this branch are: Faliscan, Sabellic, Umbrian, South Picene, and Oscan, all of them extinct.
Who was the British jurist who became familiar with the Sanskrit language?
During the British colonial expansion into India, a British orientalist and jurist named Sir William Jones became familiar with the Sanskrit language. Jones was also knowledgeable in Greek and Latin and was surprised by the similarities between these three languages. During a lecture on February 2, 1786 CE, Sir William Jones expressed his new ideas:
Where are Indo-European languages spoken?
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;
How many branches of Indo-European language are there?
The well-attested languages of the Indo-European family fall fairly neatly into the 10 main branches listed below; these are arranged according to the age of their oldest sizable texts.
What is the best known language in Anatolian?
By far the best-known Anatolian language is Hittite, the official language of the Hittite empire, which flourished in the 2nd millennium. Very few Hittite texts were known before 1906, and their interpretation as Indo-European was not generally accepted until after 1915; the integration of Hittite data into Indo-European comparative grammar was, therefore, one of the principal developments of Indo-European studies in the 20th century. The oldest Hittite texts date from the 17th century bce, the latest from approximately 1200 bce.
What is the oldest Germanic language?
Their expansions and migrations from the 2nd century bce onward are largely recorded in history. The oldest Germanic language of which much is known is the Gothic of the 4th century ce. Other languages include English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.
What is the language of Albania?
Albanian. Albanian, the language of the present-day republic of Albania, is known from the 15th century ce. It presumably continues one of the very poorly attested ancient Indo-European languages of the Balkan Peninsula, but which one is not clear.
What is the Indo-Iranian language?
Indo-Aryan languages have been spoken in what is now northern and central India and Pakistan since before 1000 bce.
What are some examples of Indo-Aryan languages?
Examples of modern Indo-Aryan languages are Hindi, Bengali, Sinhalese (spoken in Sri Lanka ), and the many dialects of Romany, the language of the Roma. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now.
How many languages are in the Indo-European family?
There are ten major branches to the Indo-European family of languages: Tocharian, Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, Celtic, Italic, Germanic, and Anatolian. These branches also branch to other major languages, such as Russian, Polish, Spanish, German, English and many more. Words derived from the Indo-European languages are similar among each other, most commonly found in numerals from one to ten, body parts, plants, and animals. 3 These findings have opened the gates for numerous researchers, including the famous philologists Sir William Jones and Franz Bopp.
What happened to the Indo-European language?
As time passed, the language evolved greatly in a way that new languages began emerging, causing the original to perish. Despite the current exploration, researchers are still puzzled about the original Indo-European language, and they continue to search for answers today.
Who discovered that all languages are derived from the same language?
Sir William Jones was an English philologist who first introduced the theory that all these languages were derived from the same language. Jones knew twenty-eight languages, which set the groundwork for his future findings. In 1786, he published The Sanskrit Language, in which he suggested that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin shared a common root and were also related to other languages. 4 In 1788, he delivered a famous speech, which is considered the beginning of Indo-European language studies and comparative linguistics. Jones writes:
Who discovered the importance of Sanskrit in comparative studies?
After Jones’ death, different scholars continued to investigate his findings. Franz Bopp , a German linguist, discovered the importance Sanskrit had in comparative studies of the Indo-European languages and analysed grammatical structures and compared their morphology. 6 His work concentrated on tracing the origins of five different languages by focusing on their verbs. Then in 1820, he extended his studies to include grammar. Bopp’s findings resulted in the science of comparative grammar that we study today.
Where did the Indo-European language originate?
Instead, it came from the vast grasslands to the north of the Caspian and Black seas . This photograph (see below) of the grasslands of Kazakhstan, with the shores of the Caspian in the background, may represent the actual place where people developed the first Indo-European language.
How many people speak Indo-European?
Over 2.6 billion of the world’s population speak a language belonging to the Indo-European language family. Millions of people learned the language over centuries of European expansionism. But this only tells half of the story. Even before colonialism, Indo-European languages spread far and wide. In fact, almost all of the people ...
What languages have similar origins?
European, Near East, and Indian languages all have similar origins. However, most people would agree that they sound very different from one another. Still, linguists have noticed similarities in their structures and have puzzled over them for centuries.
Which language is the mother tongue of all Indo-European languages?
Given the archaeological evidence, the most obvious candidate for the mother tongue of all the Indo-European languages rests with the Yamnaya people. Early settlers left a trail of cultural artifacts in their wake as they migrated all over Europe. And the cultural legacies of the Yamnaya only serve to further strengthen that claim.
Can DNA tell us what language people speak?
After all, examining DNA cannot tell us much about how people spoke or what language they used. But ancient DNA plays a vital role in helping linguists and scientists pinpoint which populations migrated where and when. And that gets us closer to finding the origins of the Indo-European languages.
Can a language replace a pre-existing language?
This fits with the anthropological argument that a language can only replace a pre-existing one if a large settler-immigration occurs there. Renfrew’s argument won over most scholars. And it would hold sway for about another two decades until new evidence tilted the balance towards a new explanation.
Did the Indo-European Language Family Originate from Anatolia?
In his book, “ Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of the Indo-European Languages “, Renfew attempts to explain a single origin point for all Indo-European languages. He argues that it was the ancient people of Anatolia (Turkey) who spread their mother tongue over the continent approximately 8,000 years ago.
Abstract
Two of Prof. Jóhannesson's works—his "Grammatik der urnordischen Runeninschriften" and his "Islenzk tunga í fornöld"—are well-established handbooks for the Germanic philologist. But, in his recent article in NATURE 1 (and more fully in the Icelandic work to which he there refers), he has embarked for more unconventional regions.
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Where did Indo-European languages originate?
By now the reader may have concluded that the spread of these languages across the globe had something to do with European Colonization. And whilst this is certainly true for the last 500 years, since the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, the initial spread of Proto-Indo-European dialects, the ancestral language to all Indo-European languages, across Eurasia, precedes this by several millennia and probably began in the Pontic-Caspian steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas and the Caucasus mountains. This area is now considered to be the Indo-European homeland by most scholars.
How many languages are there in the Indo-European family?
This language family consists of about 445 (source: Wikipedia) living languages and a substantial amount of dead ones, which are no longer spoken today. These 445 languages form subgroups, whose names may sound familiar to some. The subgroups are: Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Albanian, Armenian and Greek. Among the dead branches of the family the Anatolian languages, formerly spoken in what is now Turkey, and Tocharian, formerly spoken in China, are probably the most noteworthy. All of these branches of the Indo-European Family tree can be divided further into either more ‘sub’-branches or individual languages. For example, Germanic can be divided further into North-, West- and East-Germanic whilst Hellenic consists of a singular language: Greek. In the following we will take a closer look at the individual branches, focusing on its history and distribution, rather than getting into too much detail in regards to their linguistic differences.
What are the subgroups of the Indo-European family?
The subgroups are: Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Albanian, Armenian and Greek. Among the dead branches of the family the Anatolian languages, formerly spoken in what is now Turkey, and Tocharian, formerly spoken in China, are probably the most noteworthy. All of these branches of the Indo-European Family tree can ...
What language was the ancient Macedonian language?
The sole other member of this branch may have been Ancient Macedonian, although the evidence is inconclusive. It may have been a mere dialect of Ancient Greek (cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Macedonian_language, 27/09/2020).
What is the most widely spoken language in the world?
The Indo-European language family is the world’s most widely spoken one, both by the number of its speakers (3.2 billion according to Wikipedia) and by the area which it covers. Today it encompasses most of the worlds temperate zone between the subtropics and the arctic circle, although the languages belonging to this group also extend far into ...
When did Germanic languages start?
It would take until the second century AD until we got the earliest attestations of the language in form of runic inscriptions. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire Germanic Kingdoms sprung up all across the continent, giving rise to the predecessor of modern European nation states such as France, England and Germany, among many others.
When was the Hellenic language first spoken?
Mycenaean Greek, first attested on clay tablets in the mysterious Linear B script from the palaces of Mycenaean Greece and Crete, is the second earliest attested IE language, dating to about 1400 BC.
How The Proto-Indo-European Language Spread
The Discovery of A Common Language Ancestor
- European, Near East, and Indian languages all have similar origins. However, most people would agree that they sound very different from one another. Still, linguists have noticed similarities in their structures and have puzzled over them for centuries. In fact, they are so similar that most people who study languagesbelieve they must have come from a common ancestral tongue. On…
Did The Indo-European Language Family Originate from Anatolia?
- In his book,“Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of the Indo-European Languages“, Renfew attempts to explain a single origin point for all Indo-European languages. He argues that it was the ancient people of Anatolia(Turkey) who spread their mother tongue over the continent approximately 8,000 years ago. To some degree, this makes sense. The ancie...
Indo-European Wagon Migrations
- In 2010, the anthropologist David Anthony published his book, called“The Horse, the Wheel, and Language“. He argued that almost all of today’s Indo-European languages have a shared vocabularyfor wagons. He discovered similarities in all kinds of words relating specifically to wagons. Including ‘axle’, ‘harness’ and ‘wheel’. And he believed that indicated that the first true In…
Language Migration and Assimilation
- Anthony’s argument was already strong enough to lead linguists to prefer his views over Renfrew’s. However, evidence increased from the “wagon theory” in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This time from an unlikely source—the new and emerging field of ancient DNA studies. DNA extracts from burial sites all over Europe and the Middle East reveal striking g…
Yamnaya’S Impact on Indo-European Languages
- Given the archaeological evidence, the most obvious candidate for the mother tongue of all the Indo-European languages rests with the Yamnaya people. Early settlers left a trail of cultural artifacts in their wake as they migrated all over Europe. And the cultural legacies of the Yamnaya only serve to further strengthen that claim. The word “Yamnaya” itself is a direct translation of a …
The Genome of The Indo-European Language Family
- It does not seem immediately obvious on how ancient DNA studies can work towards finding the true origins of language. After all, examining DNA cannot tell us much about how people spoke or what language they used. But ancient DNA plays a vital role in helping linguists and scientists pinpoint which populations migrated where and when. And that gets us closer to finding the orig…