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 “related” (more specifically, “genetically
related”, though “genetic” here does not have any connection to the term
referring to a biological genetic relationship) and to belong to a “language
family”. It can therefore be convenient to model such linguistic genetic relationships
via a “family tree”, showing the genealogy of the languages claimed to be related.
Many such language families
can be recognized, and the languages within each exhibit striking formal
correspondences — in their phonology, morphology, overall structure, and vocabulary
— that link them together. One of the
earliest language families to be recognized, and thus the most thoroughly investigated
of all to date, is the one that Greek belongs to, the one known as the Indo-European
language family. The source language, generally called “Proto-Indo-European”,was
spoken some 6,500 years ago (see the article by J. P. Mallory) and has given
rise to several hundred languages, in ten major branches.
1. The Major Branches of
Indo-European
The ten major branches of the
Indo-European family are listed here roughly in the order of their location
east-to-west at the point of their first attestation, with an indication of the
oldest representative languages in each and their earliest attestation
(generally literary in nature).
1.1. Tocharian.
Two closely related languages, generally referred to simply as TOCHARIAN A and
TOCHARIAN B, make up this easternmost branch of Indo-European. Though extinct
by the 10th century AD, these languages were discovered in documents dating
from the 6th to 8th centuries AD that were found in the Central Asian region of
Chinese Turkestan in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
1.2. Indo-Iranian.
This branch, consisting now of hundreds of modern languages found mainly in
South Asia, is represented by two large sub-groups, IRANIAN and INDIC (also known
as INDO-ARYAN), both with important ancient testimony. The earliest-attested Iranian
languages are OLD PERSIAN, known from rock-cut inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings
in the 6th to 4th centuries BC, and AVESTAN, the sacred language of
Zoroastrianism, known from orally transmitted texts from at least as early as
the 7th century BC. On the Indic side, the major representative is SANSKRIT,
which in its most archaic form, known as Vedic, is the language of the orally
transmitted sacred Hindu texts the Vedas, the oldest being the Rig Veda,
conventionally dated to about 1200 BC. A vast literature in the highly archaic
Vedic Sanskrit and in the somewhat later Classical Sanskrit, dating from the 6th
century, including detailed native grammatical treatises, make this language
especially important for Indo-European studies.
1.3. Armenian.
Though showing considerable dialect diversity, this branch is represented essentially
by a single language, ARMENIAN, spoken now mainly in the Armenian Republic and
in eastern Turkey, and attested from the 5th century AD through Bible
translations into what is referred to as Classical Armenian.
1.4. Anatolian.
Several of the ancient languages of Anatolia, in what is now Turkey, came to
light in the early 20th century in cuneiform archives discovered at Bo azköy,
east of Ankara, and were soon recognized as Indo-European languages. Though the
oldest of these is PALAIC, an extinct language even in the 18th century BC, the
best represented by far is HITTITE, attested from the 17th century BC up
through the 13th century BC. Also important are LUVIAN, contemporaneous with
Hittite but spoken into the first millennium BC, and LYCIAN and LYDIAN, both
attested from as early as the 5th century BC. All of the Indo-European
Anatolian languages were extinct by late Hellenistic times.
1.5. Greek.
Like Armenian, GREEK is essentially a single language throughout its long history,
yet constitutes a separate and distinct branch of Indo-European, though it too
has considerable dialect diversity at all points in its history. Greek is
attested first in Linear B texts from (perhaps) as early as 1400 BC, with the
later Homeric texts showing considerable archaism as well.
1.6. Albanian.
Attested quite late, only from the 15th century AD, ALBANIAN, in its two major
dialects Geg and Tosk, is a separate branch of the Indo-European family. Its prehistory
is most unclear, though some connection with an ancient language of the
Balkans, possibly Illyrian or Thracian, is often assumed.
1.7. Balto-Slavic.
This branch consists of two well-represented subgroups, the BALTIC languages
and the SLAVIC languages. Grouping them together into a single branch is somewhat
controversial but is generally accepted and is justified by some significant innovations
they share, particularly in the accentual realm. The oldest attested
representative of Baltic is the now-extinct OLD PRUSSIAN, attested from the
14th century AD, but the most substantial documentation for Baltic comes from
LITHUANIAN and LATVIAN, both attested from the 16th century and still spoken
today. The Slavic languages are attested from the 9th century AD,
with the earliest text being a Bible translation prepared, at the invitation of
the ruler of Moravia, by Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica writing in a
southern Slavic dialect now referred to as OLD CHURCH SLAVONIC.
1.8. Germanic.
Three subgroups with important older representation make up the GERMANIC branch
of Indo-European. The earliest attested Germanic is found in the socalled “Runic”
inscriptions from as early as the 2nd century AD, though the evidence is sparse
compared to the rich literary material of later centuries. Earliest among this
richer documentation is GOTHIC, the sole (and now-extinct) representative of
East Germanic, attested first through a 4th century AD Bible translation. West
Germanic is represented by OLD ENGLISH, attested from the 7th century AD, and
by OLD HIGH GERMAN, attested from the 8th century. North Germanic is attested
earliest in OLD NORSE, from the 12th century. Italic. Along with Anatolian,
Indo-Iranian, and Greek, the other branch of Indo-European with substantial
attestation from before the common era is ITALIC, covering many of the
languages spoken in ancient Italy. The primary representative of this branch is
LATIN, attested first in the 6th century BC through short inscriptions with
much more extensive documentation coming in the 3rd century BC and later (and
note Latin’s modern offshoots, the so-called “Romance” languages). Other Italic
languages include FALISCAN, OSCAN, and UMBRIAN, all somewhat spottily attested
and rendered extinct in ancient times by the spread of (Roman) Latin.
1.10. Celtic. The
westernmost branch of Indo-European at the time of its first attestation is the
group of CELTIC languages. Although Celtic languages were spoken over much of
the western European continent in ancient times, with traces attested in
GAULISH and CELTIBERIAN inscriptions from as early as the 3rd century BC, the
main representatives of this branch are found in the British Isles. The most
important Celtic language for Indo- European studies is OLD IRISH, attested in
short inscriptions from the 4th and 5th centuries AD and in extensive literary
documents from the 8th century; WELSH, too, is important, attested also from
the 8th century.
Home and history of Indo-European
linguistics
In the 16th century, European
visitors to the Indian Subcontinent began to suggest similarities between
Indo-Aryan, Iranian, 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 (born in Florence in 1540), 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").However, neither Stephens's nor Sassetti's observations led to further scholarly inquiry.
In 1647, Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn noted the similarity among Indo-European languages, and supposed that they derived from a primitive common language he called Scythian. He included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorn's suggestions did not become widely known and did not stimulate further research.
The Ottoman Turkish traveller
Evliya Çelebi, who visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission,
noted a few similarities between words in German and Persian. Gaston Coeurdoux
and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a thorough
comparison of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to
suggest a relationship between them. Similarly, Mikhail Lomonosov compared
different language groups of the world including Slavic, Baltic ("Kurlandic"),
Iranian ("Medic"), Finnish, Chinese, "Hottentot", and
others. 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, and Sanskrit, to
which he tentatively added Gothic, Celtic, and Persian, though his
classification contained some inaccuracies and omissions.
It was Thomas Young who in 1813 first used the term Indo-European, which became the standard scientific term through the work of Franz Bopp, whose systematic comparison of these and other old languages supported the hypothesis. A synonym for "Indo-European" is Indo-Germanic (Idg. or IdG.), which defines the family by indicating its southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. In most languages this term is dated or less common, whereas in German it is still the standard scientific term. Advocates of Indo-Germanic often claim that "Indo-European" is misleading because many historic and several living European languages (the unrelated Uralic languages, as well as several others, are also spoken in Europe) do not belong to this family. Advocates of Indo-European counter that Indo-Germanic is misleading because many of the European languages included are not in fact Germanic.
Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar,
which appeared between 1833 and 1852, is the beginning of Indo-European studies
as an academic discipline. The classical phase of Indo-European comparative
linguistics leads from this work to August Schleicher's 1861 Compendium and up
to Karl Brugmann's Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmann's
junggrammatische reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure's
development of the laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of
"modern" Indo-European studies. The generation of Indo-Europeanists
active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins, Jochem
Schindler and Helmut Rix) developed a better understanding of morphology and,
in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie, understanding of the ablaut.
Characteristics of IE languages:
The IE language family is extensive in time and space. The
earliest attested IE language, Hittite, is attested nearly 4,000 years ago,
written on claytablets in cuneiform script in central Anatolia from the early
second millennium BC.We have
extensive textual remains, including native-speaker accounts of three more IE
languages from 2,000 years ago: Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. Also from
the beginning of the Christian Era we have much more limited corpora of many
more IE languages. The stock of recorded IE languages further increases as we
move forward in time. In 2003, over 2.5 billion people spoke an IE language as
their first language, and there were at least seventy codified varieties, each spoken
by a million or more native speakers. Four hundred years ago nearly all speakers
of IE lived in Europe, Iran, Turkey, Western Asia and the Indian subcontinent, but
migrations have nowspread speakers to every part of theworld. The wealth of
historical material makes IE the best-documented language family in the world.
Linguistics was born from the study of the
superfamily of Indo-European languages (about half of the world's population
has an Indo-European language as mother tongue). During the last two centuries,
the linguists have rebuilt the vocabulary and syntax of the Indo-European
protolanguage. Early investigations located its origin in Europe. Those
investigations indicated migratory routes by which the daughter tongues would
have developed till they grouped in two well defined branches: Eastern and
Western.
Latest investigations indicate that the
protolanguage was born in the Eastern region of Anatolia over 6000 years ago.
They also indicate that some daughter tongues were differentiating through
migrations which took them firstly to the East and then to the West. The
linguists try to find any grammatical, syntactic, lexical and pronunciation
correspondences between the known languages in order to rebuild their immediate
preceding ones, and at last, the original language. Living languages can be
directly comparable to each other; in turn, dead ones that have survived in their
written form can generally be articulated through inference, by relying on
internal linguistic data. However, dead languages that were never written can
be only rebuilt by comparing their descendants, and by tracing back, with one's
attention being paid to the laws ruling the phonological changes (this is very
important because the sounds are more stable than the meanings as time goes
by).
Early studies dealt with languages well known by
the European linguists: those ones pertaining to Italic, Celtic, Germanic,
Baltic and Slavic families (since the sixteenth century, the European travelers
had detected the similarity among the aforesaid languages and the
"Aryan" ones from the far India).
In 1786, William Jones proposed that they all
could share a common ancestor. This was called "Indo-European
Hypothesis". To reconstruct the Indo-European language, early linguists
relied on a law called Lautverschiebung (or "the change of sound"),
enunciated by Jacob Grim in 1822. That law postulated that the consonantal groups
would substitute one another regularly and predictably, in the course of time.
The rules of that law were utilized to rebuild an
Indo-European vocabulary which could reveal how Indo-European-speaking people
lived. The words of that vocabulary described landscapes and climates located
in Europe by the linguists, on the region ranging from the Alps up to the
Baltic and North seas. Nowadays, the latest data locate the probable origin for
the Indo-European language in the Western zone of Asia. The archaelogical and
linguistic investigations carried out so far included about a dozen of ancient
languages (situated on the region ranging from Turkey up to far countries such
as Tocharia --in the Turkestan--).
