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E-Content Submission to INFLIBNET e-Content Submission to INFLIBNET Subject name: Linguistics Paper name: Introduction to Linguistics Principle Investigator Prof. Pramod Pandey Centre for Linguistics, SLL&CS, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi 110067 Phone: 011-26704226 (O), M- 9810979446 Email: [email protected] Paper Coordinator Prof. RaghavachariAmritavalli Professor, English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad – 500 007 [email protected] +91-40-27097512, 9490148757 Module Id Lings_P1_M26 Module name Historical Perspectives on Language: Language families Content Writer Anish Koshy Email id [email protected] Phone +914027689643 Content Reviewer Prof. Aditi Mukherjee Professor (Retd), Department of Linguistics, Osmania University, Hyderabad 500007 Module 26: Language Families 1. Language families: an introduction What dowe mean when we talk of family relationships among languages? After all, our common experience tells us that family relationships can be postulated only for living organisms. We are familiar with the concept of genealogies drawn for human families, where we place ourselves in a family tree which also contains our siblings, our parents, their siblings, their children, their parents and the like. By postulating that there is something like language families, what historical linguists and linguists in general are beginning to argue is that language is much more than a mere means of communication. Language has to be elevated to the level of an organism, part of our ecology, part of our environment. It is as natural a being as any other found in our natural surroundings. Like all things in our natural surroundings, languages as natural organisms also go through the stages of birth, growth and death. The idea of language families arises from the fact that one can relate languages by postulatingthat certain languages should have originated from a common ancestor or a parent language, called the protolanguage. 2. The discovery of Indo-European Curiosity aboutthe history of words is quite common in people. In fact, the serious studyof familial relationships between languages began with a very accidental discovery about shared word origins by a British Orientalist, Sir William Jones. William Jones was in charge of the Asiatic Society headquartered in Kolkata.He beganstudying Sanskrit during his time in India, and was astonished tofind a number of similarities inthe roots of words in Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. Let us look at some wordsi from these three classical languages. Even a cursory glance at the sets of words below should impress on you the similarities amongthese languages:: Sanskrit Greek Latin Meaning 1. as-ti es-ti es-t ‘3SG’ 2. s-anti (h)enti s-unt ‘3PL’ 3. yugam zugon iugum ‘yoke’ 4. daśa deka decem ‘ten’ 5. aṣṭau oktō octō ‘eight’ 6. pitā patēr pater ‘father’ 7. nábhas nephélē nebula ‘fog/mist’ 8. bhrātā phrātēr frāter ‘brother/clansman’ 9. rudhirás eruthrós ruber ‘red/bloody’ 10. vásati hestía vesta ‘lives/hearth’ 11. ájras agrós ager ‘plain/field’ In a now very famous address to the Society in 1786, William Jones presented his findings in the following words: 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 in 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…ii Jones’ address in 1786 comparing these languages of antiquity has had a significant influence in the history of linguistics. It provided the necessary blueprint for the discipline of Comparative-Historical linguistics, whose serious engagement in systematically studying languages by comparison, has helped in the establishment of many language families, starting with the Indo-European family of languages. It also marked the beginning of a systematic comparative Indo-European linguistics, which “became the most thoroughly investigated area of historical and comparative linguistics and which to the present day has remained the most important source for our understanding of linguistic change.iii” 3. Language families around the world As noted earlier, many language families have been established by painstaking work undertaken by historical linguists over the years. The largest (in terms of the number of speakers) among the families, is the one that was also the first to be established – the Indo-European family. The size of this family can be inferred from the family tree given below (Figure 1). This is a family that includes languages like English, Hindi, French, Spanish, Russian, and many others, spoken globally by more than a billion people across all the continents. With estimates of around 45% of global population speaking one of the Indo-European languages as a mother-tongue, this is the largest of the language families known to us today. INSERT Figure 1 (Indo European Tree).png Figure 1: The Indo-European familyiv There are many other language families that have been postulated over the years. The classification and organization of language families is a constant challenge, as there is no one view on either the member languages of a family or the number of families to be postulated. This leads to different scholars coming up with different numbers of language families and different possible members for each family. The following image (Figure 2) gives us a good idea of the spread of the different linguistic families around the globe. As the figure shows, the Indo-European languages are the most wide-spread of all families, spoken in almost all the continents. However, in terms of the number of languages in a family, it is not the Indo-European family that tops the list. According to scholars v , the top five families in descending order of membership of languages would be the following, with the number in the bracket referring to the estimated number of languages within the family: Niger-Congo (1545) – spoken in Sub-Saharan Africa Austronesian (1257) – spoken in Oceania, Madagascar, Southeast Asia Trans-New Guinea (480) – spoken in Papua New Guinea and neighbouring islands Sino-Tibetan (460) – spoken in China and Southeast Asia Indo-European (445) – spoken in Europe, Southwest to South Asia, North Asia, North America, South America, Oceania, South Africa While some families represented in the map below are enormous in size, some others are very small, as can be seen in the following list, with the number of languages within the family vi represented in the brackets: Yukaghir (2) – spoken in Russia Zamucoan (2) – spoken in Paraguay Aymaran (3)– spoken in Bolivia and Peru Tsimshian (3) – spoken in Canada Barbacoan (4)– spoken in Colombia and Ecuador Jivaroan (4)– spoken in Peru and Ecuador Yanomaman (4)– spoken in Venezuela and Brazil INSERT Figure 2 (Language families).png Figure 2: Prominent language families around the worldvii 4. Language isolates While linguists have been able to establish familial or genetic relationships between a vast majority of languages spoken around the globe today, there are still cases of certain languages whose relationship with any other language is still not established. They are sometimes postulated as unitary language families, that is, language families which just consist of that one language. Such languages are sometimes referred to as isolates, or language isolates or isolated languages. As the name suggests, these are languages to which no other language has been found to be genetically related. The Indian subcontinent is home to two of these language isolates, Burushaski, spoken in modern Pakistan, and Nahali, spoken in Central India. Some other very famous language isolates include the Basque language, the Korean language, Japanese, the Sumerian language which was spoken in the ancient near East, and many other extinct languages whose records have been found but which cannot be related to any of the existing languages. Does the existence of languageisolates that cannot be related to any of the existing languages discredit our attempt to build language families? Does it discredit the attempt to trace all existing languages to one common source? Not really. Language isolates are not languages without any ancestors, but languages whose ancestors cannot be traced. This is because in the long history of the evolution of human language, many languages have been lost or completely transformed. Biologists tell us that the evolution of human language is closely connected to biological and cognitive changes that separate Homo sapiens from its predecessors, with the larynx having “evolved over a period of 300 million yearsto facilitate the production of sound at the expense of respiratory efficiencyviii”Most linguists accept that human speech dates back to at least 10000 years. But if one is to accept, that the first humans who migrated out of Africa, already had a language, then the evolution of human language will go back to at least 50-60000 years. It is possible in this long period, for many intermediary stages of languages as well as protolanguages to have completely died out without leaving any traces, resulting in languageisolates, as we know them now. 5. Language families of India/South Asia India is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world.Let me invite you to guess how many languages are spoken
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