Tema 2. El latín desde el indoeuropeo hasta hoy. Su relación con el inglés y las lenguas europeas.

2.1 The Indo-European

2.1.1 The Study of Language Relationships

All languages are similar in certain ways: consonants, vowels, words, etc. are fundamental structural
units common to all forms of human speech; by contrast, identical or near-identical words for the
same concept are not. This kind of resemblance can have several sources:

1. Chance. The word for dog in Mbabaram, an Australian Aboriginal language, happens to be dog. The
Greek and Latin words for ‘god’, theós and deus, have no historical relationship with one another. And
despite the similarity of form and meaning of English to have with Latin habere (Span. haber) these
verbs come from different roots. The English equivalent of Latin habere is to give.

2. Borrowing. The contact of people speaking different languages typically leads to mutual borrowing
of both cultural and linguistic material. English, for example, borrowed a huge number of words from
French during the Middle Ages, to such an extent that English appears to be a Romance language.

3. The existence of language universals (features that are common to all languages). For example,
onomatopoeia (whereby words sound like what they mean) explains the similarity between English
cuckoo and German Kuckuck, names based on imitation of the bird’s cry. And baby-talk words for
kinship terms typically contain ma, ba, da, ta, the first syllables that babies articulate clearly (compare
English Ma with Chinese mā ‘mother’).

Sometimes, however, languages present similarities in their vocabulary that cannot be attributed to
any of these sources. To take a concrete example,

The striking similarities in each row demand an explanation. The relationship between sound and
meaning is purely arbitrary. This means that there is no logical or intrinsic relationship between a
sound pattern and the concept it represents (that’s why it takes so long to learn the vocabulary of a
foreign language).
If two or more languages share similarities that are so numerous and systematic that they cannot be
ascribed to chance, borrowing, or linguistic universals, then the only hypothesis that provides a
satisfactory explanation for those similarities is that they are genetically related: they descended from
the same parent language. And in the case of Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese we know from
other evidence that these languages are all descended from spoken Latin.

2.1.2 The discovery of the Indo-European

Already in classical antiquity, ancient writers pointed out, for example, that Greek héks ‘six’ and
heptá ‘seven’ bore a similarity to Latin sex and septem. The ancients explained such facts by viewing
Latin as a descendant of Greek. During and after the Renaissance, as the vernacular languages of
Europe came to be known to scholars, it became understood that certain groups of languages were
related, such as Icelandic and English, and that the Romance languages were derived from Latin.

Following the British colonial expansion into India, Sanskrit (the oldest language of the subcontinent)
came to the attention of Western scholars knowledgeable in Greek and Latin.

Jones’s insight marks the beginning of the scientific study of the language family called Indo-European
(Thomas Young, 1813). A language family is a group of languages that have diverged from a common
ancestor, a proto-language, and its descendants are its daughter languages. The prodigious linguistic
scholarship of the 19th century, drawing on the known languages, did much to identify the members
of the family and to reconstruct the ancestor of all the Indo-European languages: the
Proto-Indo-European (PIE), an unwritten language dated to anywhere between 2500 and 7000 BC.

Everything we know about Indo-European (IE) is based on reconstruction. The existence of IE is

proven only by linguistic considerations: we have neither historical vestiges (funerary monuments,
works of art, etc.) nor texts in IE. Therefore, the existence of IE is a hypothesis formulated from the
comparison of the IE languages.

Comparative linguistics, as the name implies, compares the phonology, grammar and vocabulary of
the languages in order to establish their historical relatedness. The methods of linguistic
reconstruction have established historical linguistics as a science unto its own. The course which
changes in language takes cannot be predicted, but in retrospect we are (often) able to trace how
linguistic changes have occurred in the past. For example, it is possible to follow the English of today
back to Old English.

2.1.3 The Indo-European family

Languages change, and usually have dialects, which is due to the fact that changes do not always
affect entire language communities equally. Through dialectal variation, a language can split up into
one or more different languages. There is no linguistic way to decide what is the difference between a
dialect and a language. The criterion of mutual intelligibility (if two speech varieties are mutually
intelligible, they are different dialects of the same language) isn’t valid: Romance languages are often
mutually intelligible. The decision on wether two speech varieties should be considered different
languages depends often on political and social grounds.

The notion of family of languages is part of a representation of linguistic kinship modeled on

biological kinship. August Schleicher proposed in 1861 a model called the “family tree”. Schleicher,
who drew on Darwin's theories, believed that each language was formed by the separation of an
earlier language into two branches. This understandable and clear model implies that IE is a
homogeneous language and is completely outdated at present. However, concepts such as “family”,
“kinship”, “branch”, etc. are still used symbolically. The “family tree” model was criticised by the
“wave theory” (Johannes Schmidt, 1872): linguistic changes spread outward concentrically like waves,
which become progressively weaker with the distance from their central point.

The period of common IE explains the similarities among the various language subfamilies, and their
divergences by a separate evolution which produced their differentiation. The speakers of IE broke up
into separate groups, which migrated to some parts of the Eurasian land mass. They took their speech
with them, and over the millennia the speeches of the different groups, no longer in contact with one
another, developed each in its own direction to the point that they became separate and mutually
unintelligible, despite their common origin.

For example, the group that eventually occupied southern Scandinavia and the northern edge of
Europe east of the Rhine spoke Proto-Germanic. As time went by, Proto-Germanic in turn broke up
into groups whose languages, as lost touch with one another, developed in different ways: English,
Dutch, German, etc. are the result of this process. Another IE group, speaking Italic, settled through
the center of the Italian peninsula; out of Italic, Latin and other languages would develop.

Just as the period of common IE explains the similarities among the various language subfamilies
(Germanic, Italic, Slavic, Celtic, etc.), so the period of common Germanic explains the similarities
among the Germanic languages that are descended from it. And in just the same way, the common
period of Latin explains why the Romance languages resemble one another.

2.1.3.1 The Indo-European languages

The term Indo-European defines the eastern and western boundaries of the home territory over
which the vast family of descendant languages is spoken, from the Atlantic Ocean and Europe to the
northern Indian subcontinent, via the Baltic Sea, Russia, Iran and Pakistan. In Europe, all the
languages are IE languages, except Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque, a language isolate, a
natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages.

PIE is therefore not the ancestor of all languages now spoken, nor even of a majority of them,
although there are more speakers of IE languages than of the languages of any other family. We don’t
know whether any other language families share a common ancestor with PIE.

A difficulty with trying to determine the inner subgrouping of the IE family is the fact that the earliest
documentation of IE languages (from the mid-second millennium BC) is still over two millennia later
than the date of PIE itself. The branches therefore had considerable time to undergo changes before
their first attestation. Also, some branches (such as Anatolian and Indo-Iranian) enter into recorded
history much earlier than others (such as Baltic and Albanian, nearly 3000 years later). The fact that
there are so many gaps in our knowledge about the prehistory of PIE branches has also provided
ample room for speculation about the influence from languages spoken by the non-IE populations of
the territories into which IE speakers migrated (substrate languages): the Basque, Iberian, etc.

The IE languages are classified into ten major groups. Seven have modern spoken representatives.
1. Anatolian (extinct): Hittite, language of the Hittite empire, flourished in the 2nd millennium.
2. Indo-Iranian: Sanskrit, dating roughly from 1000 BC.
3. Greek, despite its numerous dialects, is a single language, spoken since at least 1600 BC.
4. Italic. The principal language is Latin. The earliest inscriptions date from the 6th century BC.
5. Germanic. The oldest Germanic language of which much is known is Gothic (4th century AD.).
6. Armenian. The oldest texts date from the 5th century AD.
7. Tocharian (extinct), spoken in present-day northwestern China during the 1st millennium AD.
8. Celtic. Celtic languages were spoken from Spain and Britain to the Balkans, with one group (the
Galatians) even in Asia Minor. Very little of the Celtic before the Christian era has survived, and this
branch is known almost entirely from the Insular Celtic languages—Irish, Welsh, etc.—spoken in and
near the British Isles, as recorded from the 8th century AD.
9. Balto-Slavic. The earliest Slavic texts, written in a dialect called Old Church Slavonic, date from the
9th century AD. The oldest substantial material in Baltic dates to the end of the 14th century.
10. Albanian is known from the 15th century.
2.1.3.2 Inflection, the Defining Trait

The cardinal feature of IE, marking it off from most other language families of the world, is that it was
an inflected language. Inflection, when used with reference to grammar, refers to a change, usually
made at the end of the word, that indicates its grammatical relationships. In English, the -s at the end
of boys refers to more than one boy. In laughed, the ending (or inflection) -ed locates the action in
the past, etc.

At the last common stage, the IE verbal system included three voices (active, middle and passive),
four modes (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, optative), six tenses (present, imperfect, perfect,
pluperfect, future, aorist) and grammatical aspect.

PIE nouns are declined for eight cases (Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Locative,
Instrumental, Ablative, Vocative), have three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and
three numbers (singular, dual, plural).

Generally speaking, IE languages tend to lose their synthetic character (complex conjugations,
absence or weak use of the article, very rich declensions) and to become more and more analytic
(simplification of conjugations, more and more frequent use of auxiliary verbs, article and
prepositions, impoverishment or disappearance of declensions).

2.1.4 The Comparative Method

The aim of reconstruction by the comparative method is to recover as much as possible of the
proto-language from a comparison of its descendants, and to determine what changes have taken
place in the various languages that developed from the proto-language. Thus, comparing English with
its relatives, Dutch, Frisian, German, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and so on, is possible to understand
what the ‘ProtoGermanic’, was like. There are no written attestations of ‘ProtoGermanic’, and the
language is known only from comparative reconstruction. English is a much-changed ‘dialect’ of
Proto-Germanic, having undergone successive linguistic changes to make it what it is today, a
different language from its other sisters, which underwent different changes of their own. The same
can be said about the other IE branches (Italic, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, etc.).

The work of reconstruction usually begins with phonology, with an attempt to reconstruct the sound
system; this leads in turn to reconstruction of the vocabulary and grammar of the proto-language. To
begin to apply the comparative method, the linguists look for potential cognates among related
languages (or among languages for which there is reason to suspect relatedness). Cognates are words
of similar meaning, attested in at least two languages genetically related, which descend from the
same common etymon. The term comes from Latin co-gnatus, "of common descent" from nasci "to
be born" (cf. Sp. cognado and cuñado).

A difficult task for the reconstruction is to distinguish between genuine cognates and those that are
the result of borrowing. For example, flower, fleur, flor are cognates, all descend from Latin florem. If
the aim is to reconstruct the original Latin form, only the Romance fleur and flor can be used,
because English flower is borrowed from Old French flor, and it is impossible to reconstruct from
flower the Latin form that would have resulted in fleur and flor.

In general, it is convenient to begin with cognates from ‘basic vocabulary’ (body parts, close kinship
terms, low numbers), since these resist borrowing more than other sorts of vocabulary, and for the
comparative method only true or genuine cognates are compared, words which are related in the
daughter languages by virtue of being inherited from the proto-language (cf. 2.1.5). Morphology,
conjugations, etc. are also hard to borrow (cf. the table in 2.1.1), but not impossible: English
borrowed third person plural pronouns (they, them, their) from Scandinavian.

The study of sound change plays an extremely important role in the comparative method and hence
also in linguistic reconstruction, in detecting loanwords, and in determining whether languages are
related to one another. If two languages descend from a common ancestor, the phonemes of one
language will correspond to the phonemes of the other consistently and systematically.

*pəter *mater
PIE *ped-
- -
pe(d)
Latin pater mater
s
Class.
patér pōs méter
Greek
Sanskrit pitā pāt matár
Old English father foot mother
Turkish ata ayak Anne
Finnish isä jalka äiti

We see that Turkish and Finnish words have no resemblance to the words of the other languages, so
they do not seem to be part of the same family. In contrast, the fact that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek
have in common the [p] and the [t] means that they are inherited from IE.

The most important basic assumption in historical linguistics is that sound change is regular. To say
that a sound change is regular means that the change takes place whenever the sound which
undergo the change is found in the environments that condition the change. For example, between
vowels, original Latin p regularly became b in Spanish (lupum > lobo); if a sound could change in
unpredictable ways, the reconstruction of the original sound would be impossible.

The table shows the situation of English, where [f] corresponds to PIE [p] and [th] to PIE [t]. Once this
case has been verified in many words and in the other Germanic languages it’s possible to formulate
an evolution law specific to them. Jacob Grimm (1822) described the evolution of Proto-Germanic
occlusive consonants and pointed out regular correlations between the Germanic and other IE
languages: Grimm's law. This law is important for historical linguistics because it clearly
demonstrates the principle that sound change is a regular phenomenon. Karl Verner (1875)
explained the exceptions to Grimm's law.

PIE roots, the basic parts of words that carry the lexical meaning, were able to be reconstructed
because sounds (consonants, vowels) were discovered to correspond regularly between languages.
Regularity is the key.
2.1.5 The Indo-European culture

Reconstruction provides us with a PIE vocabulary. It is fair to assume that the things which the
reconstructed words represent also actually existed: if there is a PIE word for ‘snow’ then the
Indo-Europeans would have known it. In this way it is possible to form a picture of what PIE speakers
had in common culturally. Reconstruction provides information about PIE that archeology is unable to
provide, although the fact that it isn’t possible to reconstruct a PIE word for something does not
necessarily mean that PIE did not have it. For example, there isn’t a common name for ‘husband’ or
‘wife’. This does not mean that the IE speakers ignored marriage.
An asterisk is the conventional marker in historical linguistics for a hypothetical form – one that is not
actually attested (preserved in documents) but is thought to have once existed. 

The reconstruction of common PIE words for ‘snow’, ‘ice’, ‘wolf’ or ‘bear’ (*Hrtkos) shows that they
lived in a cold or temperate climate. There are common words for spring, summer and winter. The
name of the ‘sea’ is a difficult problem. There is a common word, *mori, in many IE languages ​(lat.
mare, celt. mori…), but some believe that it originally meant ‘swamp’. It is difficult to see, however,
how the PIE speakers could not have known the Caspian Sea or the Black Sea, especially since there
are common words for ‘boat’ (*ná:w-), for ‘rowing’ and ‘oar’. The Greek thalassa is apparently not of
PIE origin, which tends to show that the first Greeks came from a continental region.

The main activity was the breeding of cattle, the possession of which was a symbol of wealth (and it
served as currency), as evidenced by the kinship of the terms designating cattle (PIE *peku-) and
money (pecuniary). The most important domesticated animals were the cow and the sheep. We also
know the words for ‘lamb’, ‘goat’, ‘pig’, ‘dog’ or ‘hare’, but there were neither chickens nor rabbits.
The horse was certainly the animal which more than any other characterized the Indo-Europeans. The
donkey belongs to more southern regions and is unknown.

PIE speakers notably cultivated cereals (barley and wheat). The name of the plow, (Ved. si:ra, Tokh.
are, Arm. arwar, Gr. arotron, Lat. aratrum, O.-isl. ardhr, Slav. *ordlo, Lit. árklas, Mid.-irl. arathar, etc.)
derives from a root meaning "to work the earth". There are also common PIE words for ‘sowing’,
‘grind’ and ‘millstone’, but not for ‘bread’. There are words for ‘cooking’, ‘fish’, ‘meat’, ‘salt’, ‘honey’
(*melit-). Of the fruits, the word for ‘apple’ is uncertain.

The term designating the metal (*áyes-), from a root *ay- (meaning "what is heated"), refers to
copper or bronze. It must be deduced that the final period of the PIE community is before the
invention of iron metallurgy. They also knew gold and silver.

The PIE speakers made use of wagons, evident by the verb ‘to carry, ride’ and words for ‘wheel’, ‘axle’
and ‘yoke’. The wagon was pulled by the ‘ox’. The well-represented word for sheep’s ‘wool’, for
‘sewing’, for ‘needle’ and ‘thread’ show that the PIE produced textiles.

The PIE speakers did not have cities, and lived in ‘houses’ with ‘doors’. PIE society was hierarchical.
The word for ‘king’ (Skt. rá̄j̄ â, Lat. rēx, etc.) means probably something like a tribal chieftain. The
society was patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal (brides go to live with the family of their husbands).
The PIE words for ‘father’, ‘mother’, ‘brother’, ‘sister’, ‘son’, and ‘daughter’ have descendants in
almost every branch; also reconstructible are words for ‘grandfather’, ‘mother’s brother’, ‘nephew’
and ‘niece’. No single term for ‘marriage’ can be reconstructed. For ‘marrying’ we find *uedhâ‚ "to
carry (home)", that is, by the husband. That’s why there are terms for the family of the husband, but
there aren’t words for the family of the woman.

The most securely reconstructible members of the PIE pantheon had to do with the sky. The general
word for ‘god’ is a derivative of a root meaning "shine" (*dyeu-), as of the bright sky (cf. Lat. dies
‘day’): Sansk. devás, Lat. deus, O. Irish día, and Lit. divas. The same root for ‘shine’ furnished the
name of the head of the PIE pantheon, a god called Father Sky: Sansk. Dyàus pítar, Greek Zeus, and
Latin Ius-piter (‘father Jove’) and of the goddess Diana. Some idea of how the PIE culture conceived
the relationship to the gods can be seen in the term for ‘human being’, whose descendants
(Lat. homo, etc.) derived from the word for ‘earth’ (Lat. humus, humanus, etc.) or ‘land’, attesting to a
conception of humans as ‘earthlings’ as contrasted with celestial gods. Another paired contrast is the
widespread use of the word for ‘mortal’ as a synonym for ‘human’, as opposed to the immortal gods.
Other words for ‘worship’, ‘prayer’ and ‘sacred’ give indications of organised religion.
2.1.6 The PIE Homeland Question

No issue in IE studies has aroused more controversy than determining the place the
Proto-Indo-Europeans called home and the question of when they lived there. The difficulty with
answering both these questions is the simple fact that no material artifact of a preliterate people, nor
their mortal remains, can tell us what language they spoke. Much of the time, we cannot even
assuredly identify a type of artifact with a particular people, and the reconstructed terms relating to
PIE material culture aren’t specific enough for matching particular archaeological finds with speakers
of PIE.

A date of about 3500 BC corresponds with the first large-scale occupation of the Pontic-Caspian
steppes of southern Russia, around the Black Sea and middle Volga, by a people known as the
Yamnaya culture. The dead were buried in a pit (Russ. yama is ‘pit’, from which Yamnaya is derived),
lying on the back with the knees drawn up. The grave was covered with a mound (Russ. kurgan). The
late Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas proposed in the 1950s that the kurgan peoples were in
fact early Indo-Europeans. The archaeological excavations, in Gimbutas’s view, indicate that the
kurgan cultures had a pastoral economy, hierarchical social structure, patriarchy, aggressive warfare,
animal sacrifice, use of the horse, wheeled vehicles, and worship of a solar deity. All these are IE
cultural characteristics.

There seems to be no doubt that the Yamnaya culture represents the last phase of an IE linguistic
unity, although there were probably already significant dialectal differences within it. The horse must
have been of fundamental importance to them. It provided food, was very useful for hunting and for
trade and sustained a flexible pastoral economy. Its mobility made it possible for riders to cover very
large areas. In war, the horse could be used for the purpose of scouting and for sudden attacks. The
combined use of the horse and the ox-drawn wagon made the Indo-Europeans exceptionally mobile.
A date of c. 3500–3400 BC was the earliest possible date for the breakup of common PIE.

Importantly, the Yamnaya can be linked rather clearly with a later cultural complex that we are
reasonably sure was IE – specifically, Indo-Iranian: the Andronovo culture, that appeared around 2200
BC in northern Kazakhstan and that evinces numerous features explicitly described in early
Indo-Iranian texts. Their kurgan burials contain wheeled vehicles, cattle (horses, sheep, goats),
weapons and ornaments.