Indo-European languages


The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau, with additional native branches found in regions such as parts of Central Asia, southern Indian subcontinent and Armenia. Historically, Indo-European languages were also spoken in Anatolia and Northwestern China. Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Dutch—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, including Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic, all of which contain present-day living languages, as well as many more extinct branches.
Today the individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, French, and German; many others spoken by smaller groups are in danger of extinction. Over 3.4 billion people speak an Indo-European language as a first language—by far the most of any language family. There are about 446 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue, of which 313 belong to the Indo-Iranian branch.
All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime during the Neolithic or early Bronze Age. The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland, has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports the Kurgan hypothesis, which posits the homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and Southern Russia, associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th and early 3rd millennia BC. By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages, spoken across much of Europe, South Asia, and part of Western Asia. Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during the Bronze Age in the form of Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages of Hittite and Luwian. The oldest records are isolated Hittite words and names, interspersed in texts that are otherwise in the unrelated Akkadian language found in texts of the Assyrian colony of Kültepe in eastern Anatolia dating to the 20th century BC. Although no older written records of the original Proto-Indo-European population remain, some aspects of their culture and their religion can be reconstructed from later evidence in the daughter cultures. The Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as it possesses the second-longest recorded history of any known family after Egyptian and the Semitic languages, which belong to the Afroasiatic language family. The analysis of the family relationships between the Indo-European languages, and the reconstruction of their common source, was central to the development of the methodology of historical linguistics as an academic discipline in the 19th century.
The Indo-European language family is not considered by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics to have any genetic relationships with other language families, although several [|disputed hypotheses] propose such relations.

History of Indo-European linguistics

During the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages. In 1583, English Jesuit missionary and Konkani scholar Thomas Stephens wrote a letter from Goa to his brother—published in the 20th century—in which he noted similarities between North Indian languages and Greek and Latin.
Another account was made by Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian. However, neither Stephens' nor Sassetti's observations led to further scholarly inquiry.
In 1647, Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn noted the similarity among certain Asian and European languages and theorized that they were derived from a primitive common language that 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.
Ottoman Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission and noted a few similarities between words in German and in 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 among them. Meanwhile, Mikhail Lomonosov compared different language groups, including Slavic, Baltic, Iranian, Finnish, Chinese, "Hottentot", and others, noting that related languages must have separated in antiquity from common ancestors.
The hypothesis reappeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on the striking similarities among 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. In one of the most famous quotations in linguistics, Jones made the following prescient statement in a lecture to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1786, conjecturing the existence of an earlier ancestor language, which he called "a common source" but did not name:
Thomas Young first used the term "Indo-European" in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India. A synonym is Indo-Germanic, specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. This first appeared in French in 1810 in the work of Conrad Malte-Brun; in most languages this term is now dated or less common than Indo-European, although in German indogermanisch remains the standard scientific term. A number of other synonymous terms have also been used.
Franz Bopp wrote in 1816 "On the conjugational system of the Sanskrit language compared with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic" and between 1833 and 1852 he wrote Comparative Grammar. This marks 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 neogrammarian 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 developed a better understanding of morphology and of ablaut in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophony in Indo-European, who in 1927 wrote about the existence of the Hittite consonant ḫ. Kuryłowicz's discovery supported Ferdinand de Saussure's 1879 proposal of the existence of coefficients sonantiques, elements de Saussure reconstructed to account for vowel length alternations in Indo-European languages. This led to the so-called laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics and a confirmation of de Saussure's theory.

Classification

The various subgroups of the Indo-European language family include ten major branches, listed below in alphabetical order:
In addition to the classical ten branches listed above, several extinct and little-known languages and language-groups have existed or are proposed to have existed:
  • Ancient Belgian: hypothetical language associated with the proposed Nordwestblock cultural area. Speculated to be connected to Italic or Venetic, and to have certain phonological features in common with Lusitanian.
  • Cimmerian: possibly Iranic, Thracian, or Celtic
  • Dacian: possibly very close to Thracian
  • Elymian: Poorly-attested language spoken by the Elymians, one of the three indigenous tribes of Sicily. Indo-European affiliation widely accepted, possibly related to Italic or Anatolian.
  • Illyrian: possibly related to Albanian, Messapian, or both
  • Liburnian: evidence too scant and uncertain to determine anything with certainty
  • Ligurian: possibly close to or part of Celtic.
  • Lusitanian: possibly related to Celtic, Ligurian, or Italic
  • Ancient Macedonian: proposed relationship to Greek.
  • Messapic: not conclusively deciphered, often considered to be related to Albanian as the available fragmentary linguistic evidence shows common characteristic innovations and a number of significant lexical correspondences between the two languages
  • Paionian: extinct language once spoken north of Macedon
  • Phrygian: language of the ancient Phrygians. Very likely, but not certainly, a sister group to Hellenic.
  • Sicel: an ancient language spoken by the Sicels, one of the three indigenous tribes of Sicily. Proposed relationship to Latin or Proto-Illyrian at an earlier stage.
  • Sorothaptic: proposed, pre-Celtic, Iberian language
  • Thracian: possibly including Dacian
  • Venetic: shares several similarities with Latin and the Italic languages, but also has some affinities with other IE languages, especially Germanic and Celtic.
Membership of languages in the Indo-European language family is determined by genealogical relationships, meaning that all members are presumed descendants of a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European. Membership in the various branches, groups, and subgroups of Indo-European is also genealogical, but here the defining factors are shared innovations among various languages, suggesting a common ancestor that split off from other Indo-European groups. For example, what makes the Germanic languages a branch of Indo-European is that much of their structure and phonology can be stated in rules that apply to all of them. Many of their common features are presumed innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, the source of all the Germanic languages.
In the 21st century, several attempts have been made to model the phylogeny of Indo-European languages using Bayesian methodologies similar to those applied to problems in biological phylogeny. Although there are differences in absolute timing between the various analyses, there is much commonality between them, including the result that the first known language groups to diverge were the Anatolian and Tocharian language families, in that order.