The Indo-European languages are a family (phylum) of several hundred related languages and dialects

including most major current languages of

Europe,
the Iranian plateau, and

South Asia

Anatolia

Written attestations appearing since the Bronze Age

The Centum languages=the western European languages
The Satem languages=the eastern European and Asian languages

Indo-European Languages
Countries with a majority of speakers of one or more Indo-European languages
Countries with one or more Indo-European minority languages with official status

INDO-EUROPEAN AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

INDO-EUROPEAN HYPOTHESIS

In the 16th century, European visitors to India began to suggest similarities between Indian 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, a merchant
who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between
Sanskrit and Italian (these included deva /dio "God", sarpa /serpe "serpent", sapta/sette "seven",
a a/otto
"eight", nava/nove "nine").

In 1647Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhom noted the similarity among IndoEuropean languages, and supposed that they derived from a primitive common language.

Mikhail Lomonosov compared different language groups of the world including Slavic, Baltic
("Kurlandic"), Iranian (Median language/Medean/Medic) was the language of the Medes. It is an
Old Iranian language. 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, Sanskrit, to which he
tentatively added Gothic, Celtic, Persian

Thomas Young in 1813 first used the term Indo-European, which became the standard scientific
term; Most European languages and others (in India, parts of the Middle East, and Asia) are
cognates (are related, as a family, by common origins)

Franz Bopp: systematic comparison of these and other old languages supported the theory.
o

"Indo-European" =Indo-Germanic = defines the family by indicating its southeastern most

and northwestern most branches. In most languages this term is dated or less common,
whereas in German it is still the standard scientific term

o Comparative Grammar, 1833 and 1852, is the beginning of Indo-European studies as an

academic discipline.
o The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics

August Schleicher: 1861 Compendium and

Karl Brugmann: Grundriss (1880)

Ferdinand de Saussure: laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of "modern"

Indo-European

Rasmus Rask (1818) and Jacob Grimm (1822), notice of systematic phonological changes
A. Schleicher, reconstruction of pre-historic Indo-European forms, Stammbaumtheorie
(tree stem theory)

DESCENDANTS OF THE COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE

Indo-European Language Subfamilies and examples:

Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Persian)

Hellenic (Greek)
Armenian (Western Armenian, Eastern Armenian)
Balto-Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, Lithuanian)
Albanian (Gheg, Tosk)
Celtic (Irish Gaelic, Welsh)
Italic (Latin, Spanish, Italian, French)
Germanic (German, English, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian)
Anatolian (extinct) (Hittite)
Tocharian (extinct) (Tocharian A, Tocharian B)

THE ORIGINAL INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLE

Kurgan culture

It's speculated that the so called Kurgan were the original Indo-European people; lived northwest of
the Caucasus, north of the Caspian Sea, as early as the fifth millennium B.C.
Their language is known by scholars as Common Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European.

domesticated cattle and horses,

farming, herding,

four-wheeled wagons, - mobility,

mound builders, hilltop forts,

complex sense of family relationship and organization;

counting skills; used gold and silver;

drank a honey based alcoholic beverage, mead;

multiple gods (worship of sky/thunder, sun, horse, boar, snake), belief in life after death, elaborate
burials

(Reference: Maria GIMBUTAS, "The Beginning of the Bronze Age in Europe and the Indo-Europeans"
1973)
Descendants of words for trees (ash, apple, oak, linden, aspen, pine), animals (bear, wolf), and other
(honey, snow, cold, winter, father, mother) allow for hypotheses regarding their original homeland and
culture.
Beginning around 3000 BC the Indo-European people abandoned their homeland and migrated in a
variety of directions (found in Greece by 2000 BC, in northern India by 1500 BC)
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Sources of Knowledge
Foreign sources

BCE Assyrian cuneiform sources

Herodotus mid-5th century BCE second-hand account of the Perso-Median conflict

In the 1st century BCE, Strabo: relationship between the various Iranian peoples and their language
which seem to speak quite the same language

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

Writing
Old Akkadian is preserved on clay tablets dating back to 2600 BC.
It was written using cuneiform, a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed
in wet clay. As employed by Akkadian scribes the adapted cuneiform script could represent either
(a)Sumerianlogograms (i.e. picture-based characters representing entire words),
(b) Sumerian syllables,
(c) Akkadian syllables, or
(d) phonetic

Lexicon
Words derived from the Common Indo-European language are preserved in a large number of languages:
numerals from one to ten;
the word meaning the sum of ten tens (Latin "centum," Avestan "satem," English "hundred");
words for certain body parts (heart, lung, head, foot)
words for certain natural phenomena (air, night, star, snow, sun, moon, mind);
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certain plant and animal names (beech, corn, wolf, bear);

certain cultural terms (yoke, mead, weave, sew);
monosyllables that pertain to sex and excretion (example: modern English "fart" likely derived from IndoEuropean "perd";
also modern English slang "f" perhaps derived from Indo-European "peig" or "pu" meaning respectively
"hostile, evil-minded" and "to soil, defile")
Phonology

many stops, voiced, voiceless, and aspirated ([bh] [dh])

poor in fricatives (only [s] and [z])

several laryngeal (h-like) consonants (could double as vowels)

nasals [n], [m], and liquids [l] and [r], and glides [y] and [w] (also could double as vowels)

vowels: [a],

, [i],

, [u],

Morphology
The Common Indo-European language was inflected. It used suffixes and internal (root) vowel changes
(ablaut system) to indicate grammatical information like

case,
number,

tense,

person,

mood, etc.

Nouns
Indo-European nouns were inflected for eight cases:

nominative: subject of a sentence (The soldiers saw me.)

vocative: person addressed (Students, listen!)
accusative: direct object (They bought a car)
genitive: possessor or source (the dog's bone)
dative: indirect object, recipient (She gave the boy a flower)
ablative: what is separated (He abstained from it)
locative: place where (We danced at the bar)
instrumental: means, instrument (She ate with chopsticks)

Example:
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Hypothetical declension of Indo-European word EKWOS ("horse") (ancestor of Modern English, "horse,"
Latin: "equus," and Old English, "eoh")

Nominative: ekwos
Accusative: ekwom

Genitive: ekwosyo

Verbs
Indo-European verbs had six "aspects" (we would call them "tenses"):

present: continuing action in progress (I go)

imperfect: continuing action in the past (I was going)
aorist: momentary action in the past (I went)
perfect: completed action (I have gone)
pluperfect: completed action in the past (I had gone)
future: actions to come (I shall go)

Indo-European had three voices:

active,
passive and

middle (reflexive)

Indo-European had five moods:

indicative(fact),
subjunctive(will),

optative (wish),

imperative (command),

injunctive (unreality)

Indo-European had seven verb classes (distinguished by root vowels and

following consonants)
Syntax
Indo-European had a flexible word order, tendency to Subject-Object-Verb (SOV)
Prosody/Accent

Indo-European accent could be on any syllable and was characterized by pitch

rather than loudness

INDO-EUROPEAN Language to GERMANIC (around 3000 BC) to Common

Germanic (CGmc) (around 100 BC)
One of the oldest records of a Germanic language is a runic inscription
identifying the workman who made a horn about A.D. 400. Transliterated it
reads as follows:
ek hlewagastir holtijar horna tawido
Translated, it roughly means:
I, Hlewagastir Holtson, [this] horn made
Prosody:

Indo-European free, pitch accent became strong stress on the initial

syllable in Germanic

Phonology

loss of Indo-European laryngeal consonants, articulation shifting

higher up in the vocal tract

1. Grimm's Law (Jakob Grimm, 1822):

o

Indo-European voiceless stops (p, t, k) became Germanic voiceless

fricatives (f, th, h):
Indo-European pter, Germanic (English) father (contrast
with non-Germanic: Latin pater)
Indo-European treyes, Germanic (English) three (contrast
with non-Germanic: Latin tres)
Indo-European kerd, Germanic (English) heart, (compare
with non-Germanic: Latin cord)
Indo-European voiced stops (b, d, g) became Germanic voiceless
stops (p, t, k):
Indo-European abel, Germanic (English) apple (contrast
with non-Germanic: Russian jabloko)
Indo-European dent, Germanic (English) tooth (contrast
with non-Germanic: Latin dentis)
Indo-European grno, Germanic (English) corn (contrast
with non-Germanic: Latin granum)
voiced aspirated stops(bh, dh, gh) to voiced stops (b, d, g):
Indo-European bhrater, Germanic (English) brother
(contrast with non-Germanic: Latin frater)

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2.

Verner's Law (Karl Verner, 1877)

o explanation of an exception to Grimm's Law, sometimes IndoEuropean voiceless stops (p, t, k ) became Germanic voiced stops
(b, d, g) when surrounded by voiced sounds and preceded by
unaccented syllable or accent falling after the consonant in
question), also; s became r; phenomenon explained by Verner as a
result of original IE accent falling after consonant in question:
Indo-European kmtm, English hundred (contrast with nonGermanic: Latin centum)
Indo-European ptr, Germanic (Old English) fder
(contrast with non-Germanic: Latin pater)
Indo-European snuss ("daughter-in-law), Old English
snoru (contrast with non-Germanic: Sanskrit snus)

Morphology

Relative preservation of Indo-European ablaut system (also known as

apophony or vowel gradation): changes in root vowels indicated tense,
number, part of speech (English sing, sang, sung is a survival of this
system). The stability of this system was however undermined because the
position of the Indo-European accent was a conditioning factor for the
vowel changes and the accent/stress became fixed in the Germanic
languages.

Simplification of the case system: In Germanic there was a fusion of

ablative/locative/instrumental/dative and vocative/nominative; three
numbers and genders retained
The deterioration of the case system (i.e. inflectional suffixes) is related to
the initial-syllable stress patterns of Germanic (final syllables became
unstressed or weakly stressed and lost their distinctness).
Verbs
o tense/aspect: change from six aspects to only two tenses, present
and preterit
o mood: retained indicative and imperative and fused subjunctive,
injunctive and optative
o seven verb classes in Indo-European (distinguished by their vowel
changes) were retained in Germanic
o Germanic added weak verbs (also called dental preterite verbs),
featuring a dental sound [d] at the end of a verb to indicate past
tense (the ancestor of our regular past tenses: e.g. walk, walked)

Syntax

Germanic retained a relatively free word order, but made greater use of
prepositions to compensate for the loss of inflections

Lexicon
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Germanic inheritance of many basic words of the Indo-European

vocabulary (e.g. cold, winter, honey, wolf, snow, beech, pine, father,
mother, sun, tree, long, red, foot, head, and verbs such as be, eat, lie) and
forms for grammatical concepts (negation, interrogation)
borrowings from Italic, Celtic and Balto-Slavic languages
large common and unique vocabulary of the Germanic languages (not
present in other Indo-European languages and perhaps borrowed from
non-Indo-European languages) (e.g. back, blood, body, bone, bride, child,
gate, ground, oar, rat, sea, soul)
extensive use derivative affixes and compounding to create new words

West Germanic languages

Dutch (Low Franconian, West Germanic)
Low German (West Germanic)
Central German (High German, West Germanic)
Upper German (High German, West Germanic)

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OLD ENGLISH

Old English was spoken in western Britain and southern Scotland until
approximately the end of the 11th century, when it began to evolve into Middle
English. At about the same time the Scots language began to diverge from Old
English and eventually became established as a separate language.
English = West Germanic language
heavy influence from Old Norse, Old French, and Romance languages
widely spoken around the world due to previous British exploration and
colonization and later American expansion and cultural influence,
including the internet
spoken as a first language by more than 300 million people and as a
second language by more than 500 million
in European countries the rate of fluency in English is high

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