Indo-European: History, Families & Origins

Early observations pointed to language relatedness:

The Sanscrit language, whatever by 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 .... Sir William Jones -- Presidential Discourse at the February 2, 1786 meeting of the Asiatic Society

2 Darwin & Historical Linguistics

Darwin's On The Origin of Species published in 1859

German biologist Ernst Haeckel persuades his friend - philologist August Schleicher, to read it

Schleicher (and generations of historical linguists) apply evolutionary principle to comparative/historical linguistics

3 Test The Methodology

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) used the comparative method to predict that a certain group of sounds had to have existed in Indo-European

20 years later, when Hittite texts were discovered, Saussure's laryngeals were attested!

4 Indo-European Family

5 Indo-European Homeland

6 Family Branching

7 Earliest Attestation of IE Daughter Languages Anatolian 17th c. B.C.E Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) 15th c. B.C.E Greek 13th c. B.C.E. Iranian (Avestan / Old Persian) 7th c. B.C.E / 6th c. B.C.E. Italic 6th c. B.C.E Tocharian 6th c. B.C.E Germanic 1st c. C.E Celtic 3rd c. B.C.E. Armenian 5th c. C.E. Slavic 9th c. C.E. Baltic "relatively late" Albanian 15th c. C.E.

8 Cultural & Locational Information

Common root words have a good chance of being PIE in origin

These roots some light on the lives of original PIE speakers

Probably originated in a temperate climate

Lack of more data makes speculation about the exact PIE homeland dicey

9 Some IE Highlights

Elaborate Consonantal System (see readings)

voiced aspirates/syllabic consonants!

laryngeals (most probably three - glottal stop and fricatives?)

Three "genders" - Masculine, Feminine & Neuter

Rich System of nominal declension / verbal inflection

10 Nouns - 7 Cases

Nominative - subject

Accusative - direct object

Instrumental - by/with (I hit the wall with my head )

Dative - indirect object

Ablative - "from" case

Genitive - possessive / "of" case

Vocative - "address" case - used to address or call persons

11 Verbal Inflection

Person & Number - 1st, 2nd & 3rd -- Singular, Dual & Plural

Tense - Present / Non-Present (imperfect, aorist [summary occurence], perfect)

Mood - Indicative (unmarked), Imperative (for commands), Optative (should, could, might do something), Subjunctive (shall, can be expected to do something)

Voice - Active (default, direct action - "Gwḗn bit me" ), Medio- Passive (reflexive - "Gwḗn tripped me and I hurt myself" , passive - "I was bitten by Gwḗn" )

12 Daughter Language Tidbits

Celtic

Celts once ranged across much of Europe - Bohemia, Southern Germany, Gaul (modern France), Belgium, Northern Spain, British Isles, Northern Italy, Greece. Settled in Anatolia (modern Turkey) - "Galatians"

Best attested in Old Irish

Now limited to Great Britain (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh) and Northern France (Breton)

13 Daughter Language Tidbits

Italic

Latin most richly attested Italic language

Coexisted early on with Oscan (4th c. C.E.) and Umbrian (3rd c. C.E.)

Dark Age / Medieval language of learning and literacy across Europe

Parent to many European languages

14 Daughter Language Tidbits

Germanic

Germanic peoples spread across modern Germany, Austria & Scandinavia

From there they spread out all over Europe (Völkerwanderung)

Literacy was a late innovation in the Germanic world (oldest surviving text is Wulfila's Gothic Bible - 4th c. C.E.)

Considerable interaction with Slavic, borrowing from Latin

15 Daughter Language Tidbits

Greek

Attested relatively early

Several major dialects - Attic & Ionic (major literary dialects of classic Greek literature), Arcadian & Cypriot, Aeolic, Doric

Modern Greek descended from Attic/Ionic "common language" (koinḕ glôssa)

16 Daughter Language Tidbits

Anatolian

Modern Turkey - home to many ancient language (Turks are recent move-ins)

Hittite - one of the oldest attested IE languages - related but also very different in many ways

17 Daughter Language Tidbits

Indo-Iranian > Iranian

Iranian & Indo-Aryans used same word to refer to themselves: ārya (Iran =genitive plural = "land of the Aryans")

Old Iranian languages - Avestan & Old Persian - Avestan older (Zoroastrian hymns composed by Zarathushtra), Old Persian attested in rock inscriptions of kings

Modern Persian, Kurdish, Pashto & Ossetic

18 Daughter Language Tidbits

Indo-Aryan > Sanskrit

Written Vedic Sanskrit very old - oral tradition even older

Sanskrit served as the scholarly lingua franca of India long after the emergence of regional languages that descended from it

Hindi-Urdu, like Serbo-Croatian, common languages divided by religion