Prof. Ahmed Shafik Elkhatib
17/04/2007, 05:00 PM
The Indo-European Family of Languages
I. Languages Constantly Change
As long as language lives and is in actual use it is in a constant state of change. Speech is produced by certain muscular movements, which are subject to gradual alteration when they are constantly repeated. Any such alteration results in a difference in the sound produced. Thus each individual is constantly, though unconsciously, making slight changes in his/her speech. Although the alteration is mostly gradual, after a period of time the differences become noticeable. For example, in the eighteenth century the words join and divine were both pronounced with the centralized diphthong [əI]. Also the word tea was pronounced as tay, and thus rhymed with obey. Other rhyming pairs were: full – rule; give – believe ; glass – place ; ear – repair ; lost – boast; thought – fault; obliged – besieged; and reserve – starve. But later the pronunciation ofone word or both words in each pair has changed and the pairs no longer rhyme.
II. Dialects May Become Separate Languages
When there is constant communication among the speakers of a language, the individual differences we have referred to in section I merge in the speech of the community, and conformity prevails. But if separation takes place for a long time, such differences increase. If the separation is slight, the differences are also slight and we have merely local dialects. Conversely, if the separation is considerable, the differences are great, and we generally have separate languages.
Even when the separation has gone far, it is possible to recognize a number of features which the resulting languages still retain in common. These common features indicate that at one time such languages were one and the same language. For example, it is easy to notice a close relationship between English and German from the words milk and milch, bread and brot, flesh and fleisch, and water and wasser.
Another example is the connection between English and Latin, which is indicated by such pairs as father and pater, and brother and frāter. Also when we notice that father is similar to vader in Dutch, to fadar in Gothic, to faðir in Old Norse, to vater in German, to patēr in Greek, to pitar- in Sanskrit, and to athir in Old Irish, we are led to the hypothesis that the languages of a large part of Europe and part of Asia were at one time the same.
III. The Discovery of Sanskrit
The most important discovery that led to the hypothesis we have referred to at the end of section II was the recognition that Sanskrit, a language of ancient India, was one of the languages of the group. This hypothesis was first suggested in 1786 by Sir William Jones, and was established by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The literature of India preserves features of the common language. For example, it is easy to notice the similarity between the English word brother and the Sanskrit bhrātar-. Sanskrit also preserves a full system of declensions and conjugations by which it became clear that the inflections of these languages could be traced to the same origin. An example is the following forms of the verb to be , among other forms:
Old English
Gothic
Latin
Greek
Sanskrit
eom (am)
im
sum
eimi
asmi
eart (art)
is
es
ei
asi
is (is)
ist
est
esti
asti
sindon (are)
sijum
sumus
esmen
Sams
The Sanskrit forms in particular permit us to infer that at one time the verb to be had the same endings (mi, si, ti, mas, etc.) as those used in the present tense of other verbs, for example:
Sanskrit
Greek
dádāmi
dídōmi (I give)
dádāsi
dídōs
dádāti
dídōsi
dadmás
dídomen / didomes
The material that Sanskrit offered for comparison with the other languages of the group, both in vocabulary and inflection, was thus very important. And the discovery of Sanskrit greatly contributed to the establishment of the relation that existed among the languages to which it belonged.
IV. Grimm's Law
In addition to the discovery of Sanskrit, another important step was taken in 1822 by a German philologist, Jacob Grimm. Grimm formulated a systematic explanation of the correspondences between certain consonants in the Germanic languages and those found in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, among other languages. According to Grimm, a p in Indo-European, remaining as it is in Latin and Greek, was changed to an f in the Germanic languages. For example, the Latin piscis and pēs became the English fish and foot, respectively. What applies to p also applies to t and k in the sense that these three voiceless stops were changed to the fricatives f, ө, and h, in order. Examples include Latin trēs and centum, which became English three and hundred. This Germanic sound-shift is the most distinctive feature that marks off the Germanic languages form the other related languages.
The formulation of these correspondences, as well as others that involve certain groups of consonants, is known as Grimm's Law.
Karl Verner and others later explained certain exceptions to Grimm’s Law. For example, Verner showed that when the Indo-European stress was not on the vowel immediately preceding a voiceless fricative, it became voiced in Germanic. This explanation was important in accounting for the forms of the past tense in many irregular verbs. The formulation of this explanation is known as Verner's Law.
V. The Indo-European Family
The languages that descend from a parent language are called a family of languages. The term most widely used to designate the group of languages referred to in section IV is the Indo-European family. This term, more than the other terms that were previously used, namely Aryan and Indo-Germanic, suggests the geographical extent of the family. There is no written record of the common Indo-European language, but by a comparison of its descendants, it is possible to form a fair idea of it and to reconstruct its lexicon and inflections. The surviving languages show various degrees of similarity to one another, depending on their geographical distribution. These languages fall into eleven principal groups, which form the branches of the Indo-European family. Fowling is a brief look at each.
A. The Indian Branch
The oldest literary texts preserved in any Indo-European language are the sacred books of India, known as the Vedas. These books fall into four groups, the oldest of which goes back to 1500 B.C. The language in which the books are written is known as Sanskrit, or Vedic Sanskrit. This language is also found in certain prose writing dealing with various aspects of religious and private life. The use of Sanskrit was later extended to writings outside religion. It was given a fixed, literary form under the influence of Panini and other native grammarians in the fourth century B.C. This form is called Classical Sanskrit, which is the medium of extensive Indian literature and numerous scientific and philosophical works. Classical Sanskrit formerly held a place in India similar to that occupied by Latin in Europe during the Middle Ages. At an early date this language ceased to be spoken.
In addition to Sanskrit, there were a large number of local, colloquial dialects, a number of which later attained a literary form, e.g. Pāli, which became the language of Buddhism about the middle of the sixth century B.C. Form these dialects have descended the present languages of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which are spoken by about 600 million people. These languages are the Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali, respectively. Urdu has many elements from Arabic and Persian, and is written in the Perso-Arabic script, instead of Sanskrit characters.
B. The Iranian Branch
This group of languages covers northwest of India and the great plateau of Iran. Migration carried Iranian languages to southern Russia and central China. Form early times the region was subjected to Semitic influence, and many of the early texts are preserved in Semitic scripts.
The oldest remains of the Iranian branch fall into two divisions, represented by Avestan and Old Persian. Avestan is the language of the sacred book of the Zoroastrians, whereas Old Persian is preserved only in cuneiform inscriptions. A later form of this language is known as Middle Iranian or Pahlavi, which is the ancestor of modern Persian. Persian, or Farsi, has been the language of an important culture and an extensive literature since the ninth century. A chief literary work in Persian is the epic the Shahnamah. Persian contains many Arabic elements to the extent that its vocabulary is almost as much Arabic as Iranian.
In addition to Persian, several other languages are today in use, namely Afghan (or Pashto) and Baluchi in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as Kurdish in Kurdistan. There are also several languages and dialects on the shores of the Caspian Sea, and in the valley of the Caucasus.
C. The Armenian Branch
Armenian is found south of the Caucasus Mountains and the eastern end of the Black Sea. Armenians penetrated into this region between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. The language is not linked to any other group of the Indo-European family, and thus occupies an isolated position. Armenian is known from about the fifth century through a translation of the Bible in the language. There is a considerable historical and theological literature. For several centuries the Armenians were under Persian domination. Its vocabulary shows strong Iranian influence to the extent that it was at one time classified as an Iranian language. Contacts with Semitic languages, Greek, and Turkish have contributed to give Armenian vocabulary a rich character.
D. The Hellenic Branch
At the dawn of history the Aegan was occupied by people who differed in race and in language from the Greeks, who entered the region later. And in the second millennium B.C. the eastern Mediterranean was dominated by a Semitic people, the Phoenicians, who influenced the Hellenic world greatly. The Greeks penetrated into the Aegean from the north shortly after 2000 B.C.
The earliest great literary monuments of Greek are Homer's poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, dating from the eighth century B.C.
The conquests of Alexander (336-323 B.C.) established Greek in Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, as the general language of the eastern Mediterranean used for international communication.
Greek is the language of the New Testament , and is the medium of an extensive Byzantine literature.
E. The Albanian Branch
This small branch is found northwest of Greece on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. Knowledge of Albanian generally extends back as far as the fifteenth century. It has a vocabulary mixed with Latin, Greek, Turkish, and Slavonic elements.
F. The Italic Branch
The center of the Italic branch is Italy, where Latin was one of a number of languages once found there. But in southern Italy and Sicily Greek was the language of several Greek colonies. A number of languages spoken in different districts by the sixth century were Indo-European. More important were the languages of the Italic branch, chief among which was Latin. Latin also extended to Spain, Gaul, northern Africa, the islands of the Mediterranean, and even Britain. The various languages that represent the survival of Latin are known as the Romance or Romanic languages, the most extensive of which are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian. However, we should bear in mind that the Romance languages are not derived from Classical Latin, which was a literary language with an elaborate grammar, but rather from Vulgar Latin, i.e. the spoken language of the masses or the common people.
G. The Balto-Slavic Branch
This branch covers a vast area in the eastern part of Europe. It falls into two groups, namely the Baltic and the Slavic, which have numerous features in common. There are three Baltic languages, viz. Prussian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. Prussian no longer exists since it was replaced by German in the seventeenth century. About two million people in Latvia speak Latvian, and Lithuanian is used by about three million people in the Baltic state of Lithuania. Lithuanian preserves some very old features that have disappeared form almost all the other languages of the Indo-European family.
As for the various languages of the Slavic group, there are similarities among them that indicate that they were almost identical during the seventh or eighth century. Now the Slavic languages have three divisions, namely East Slavic, West Slavic, and South Slavic. East Slavic includes three varieties, chief among which is Russian, spoken by about 220 million people as a first or second language. It is found throughout the north, east, and central parts of Russia, and is the official and literary language of the country. The second variety is Belorussian (White Russian), which is the language of about 9 million people in Belarus and parts of Poland. The third variety is Ukrainian, which is spoken by about 50 million people in Ukraine.
West Slavic includes four languages, of which Polish is the largest, spoken by about 36 million in Poland, by about 5 million in the United States, and by smaller numbers in the former Soviet Union and other countries. Next in size are Czech, spoken by about 10 million people, and Slovak, spoken by 5 million. The fourth language is Sorbian, spoken by about 100,000 people in Germany.
As for South Slavic, it includes Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slavone, and modern Macedonian. Bulgarian was spoken in the eastern part of the Balkan peninsula. Modern Bulgarian has borrowed extensively from Turkish for the language of everyday use. Serbo-Croatian resulted from the union of Serbian, formerly the language of Serbia, and Croatian, previously spoken by the Croats of Bosnia and Croatia. Slavone is spoken by about 1,500,000 people in Slavonia.
H. The Germanic Branch
The languages descended from the Germanic branch fall into three groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic. The principal language of East Germanic is Gothic, to which the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament were translated. Also belonging to the East Germanic branch are Burgundian and Vandalic.
North Germanic is found in Scandinavia, Denmark, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. There are runic inscriptions from the third century preserving the earliest traces of this language. The earlier form of the Scandinavian language is known as Old Norse. The Scandinavian languages fall into two groups, an eastern group and a western group. The eastern group includes Swedish and Danish, whereas the western group includes Norwegian and Icelandic. Norwegian stopped to be a literary language in the fourteenth century, and Danish (with Norwegian elements) is one of the written languages in Norway. Icelandic is the most literary language of the early Scandinavian languages.
West Germanic is of chief interest because it is the group to which English belongs. The West Germanic group is divided into two branches, High German and Low German. Low German languages include Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old English. High German includes a number of dialects, and is divided chronologically into Old High German, Middle High German, and Modern High German. There is a translation of the Bible in High German, which has established itself as the literary language of Germany since the sixteenth century.
I. The Celtic Branch
At one time the Celtic languages were one of the most extensive groups in the Indo-European family. The Celts lived in Gaul, Spain, Britain, western Germany, and northern Italy, and thus covered the grater part of Western Europe. A few centuries earlier they had progressed into Greece and Asia Minor. Today Celtic languages are found only in the far corners of France and Britain.
The language of the Celts in Gaul is called Gallic, which was early replaced by Latin. Their language is represented in modern time by Irish, Scottish, Gaelic, and Manx. The later Celts occupied what is now England for some centuries before they were driven westward by Germanic invaders in the fifth century. The modern representatives of Celtic are Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.
The remnants of the Celtic group of languages are spoken by minorities in France and Britain. Cornish became extinct in the eighth century, and Manx has died out since World War I. In Scotland Gaelic is found only in the Highlands, and is spoken by 75,000 people. Welsh is still spoken by about 25 per cent of the people. The spread of English among them made the number of those who speak only Welsh drop from 30 per cent in 1891 to 2 per cent in 1950 and is still slowly decreasing. Irish is spoken by about 500,000 people, most of whom are bilingual.
J. The Hittite Branch
In addition to the nine branches dealt with above, the twentieth century witnessed the discovery of two new groups, namely Hittite and Tocharian, which will be briefly described in this section and the following one. The language of the Hittites was preserved only in a few documents. In 1907, the site of their capital was uncovered in Asia Minor, about ninety miles east of Ankara. Ten thousand clay tablets were discovered. The texts were written in Babylonian cuneiform characters, and some were in the Babylonian language (Akkadian). The most remarkable effect on Indo-Europan studies as the result of discovering Hittite has been the confirmation of the existence of at least one laryngeal sound, and that Hittite represented the Object-Verb structure of Indo- European, which later became a Verb-Object pattern. A large part of the Hittite vocabulary comes form a non-Indo-European source.
K. The Trocharian Branch
Trocharian is the name of the language in which some incomplete texts were discovered early in the twentieth century in western China. The texts make mention of the name of a king who reigned in the early part of the seventh century. The discovery of Trocharian is important because the language belongs with the Hellenic, Italic, Germanic, and Celtic groups, rather than with the eastern groups, with which it was expected to be most closely related.
VI. The Character, Time, and Home of the Indo-Europeans
What about the people who spoke the Indo-European language, and what about their early location? Practically nothing is known about their physical character. There is no definite information about the date at which they lived, either However, the period of their life as a single, coherent community must have been long, and it is customary to consider the end of their common existence somewhere between 3500 and 2500 B.C.
As for the location of the Indo-European community before their dispersal, we may suppose that it was in that part of the world in which the languages of the family are found today. However, we should exclude Africa, Australia, and the Americas, Britain, and parts of Southern Europe, where the extension of Indo-European has occurred much later. Generally, the only regions in which it is reasonable to seek the original home of the Indo-European family are the mainland of Europe and the western part of Asia. The larger part of the languages of this family have been in Europe from the earliest times, and not in Asia as it was assumed prior to the middle of the nineteenth century. From the evidence of language itself, in the sense of the existence of certain words denoting indigenous fauna and flora (e.g. the honeybee) a European home for the Indo-European family has become more probable. During the past forty years archaeological excavations contributed to the belief at present that the location was east of the Germanic area stretching from central Europe to southern Russia.
The Indo-Europeans were not purely nomadic but had houses and some agriculture. They raised grain and wool and knew how to spin and weave. They kept cattle and had for food the fruit and game that served the needs of their primitive communities. They believed in gods and the existence of a soul, and had certain ideas. The Indo-Europeans also attained considerable cultural development.
I. Languages Constantly Change
As long as language lives and is in actual use it is in a constant state of change. Speech is produced by certain muscular movements, which are subject to gradual alteration when they are constantly repeated. Any such alteration results in a difference in the sound produced. Thus each individual is constantly, though unconsciously, making slight changes in his/her speech. Although the alteration is mostly gradual, after a period of time the differences become noticeable. For example, in the eighteenth century the words join and divine were both pronounced with the centralized diphthong [əI]. Also the word tea was pronounced as tay, and thus rhymed with obey. Other rhyming pairs were: full – rule; give – believe ; glass – place ; ear – repair ; lost – boast; thought – fault; obliged – besieged; and reserve – starve. But later the pronunciation ofone word or both words in each pair has changed and the pairs no longer rhyme.
II. Dialects May Become Separate Languages
When there is constant communication among the speakers of a language, the individual differences we have referred to in section I merge in the speech of the community, and conformity prevails. But if separation takes place for a long time, such differences increase. If the separation is slight, the differences are also slight and we have merely local dialects. Conversely, if the separation is considerable, the differences are great, and we generally have separate languages.
Even when the separation has gone far, it is possible to recognize a number of features which the resulting languages still retain in common. These common features indicate that at one time such languages were one and the same language. For example, it is easy to notice a close relationship between English and German from the words milk and milch, bread and brot, flesh and fleisch, and water and wasser.
Another example is the connection between English and Latin, which is indicated by such pairs as father and pater, and brother and frāter. Also when we notice that father is similar to vader in Dutch, to fadar in Gothic, to faðir in Old Norse, to vater in German, to patēr in Greek, to pitar- in Sanskrit, and to athir in Old Irish, we are led to the hypothesis that the languages of a large part of Europe and part of Asia were at one time the same.
III. The Discovery of Sanskrit
The most important discovery that led to the hypothesis we have referred to at the end of section II was the recognition that Sanskrit, a language of ancient India, was one of the languages of the group. This hypothesis was first suggested in 1786 by Sir William Jones, and was established by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The literature of India preserves features of the common language. For example, it is easy to notice the similarity between the English word brother and the Sanskrit bhrātar-. Sanskrit also preserves a full system of declensions and conjugations by which it became clear that the inflections of these languages could be traced to the same origin. An example is the following forms of the verb to be , among other forms:
Old English
Gothic
Latin
Greek
Sanskrit
eom (am)
im
sum
eimi
asmi
eart (art)
is
es
ei
asi
is (is)
ist
est
esti
asti
sindon (are)
sijum
sumus
esmen
Sams
The Sanskrit forms in particular permit us to infer that at one time the verb to be had the same endings (mi, si, ti, mas, etc.) as those used in the present tense of other verbs, for example:
Sanskrit
Greek
dádāmi
dídōmi (I give)
dádāsi
dídōs
dádāti
dídōsi
dadmás
dídomen / didomes
The material that Sanskrit offered for comparison with the other languages of the group, both in vocabulary and inflection, was thus very important. And the discovery of Sanskrit greatly contributed to the establishment of the relation that existed among the languages to which it belonged.
IV. Grimm's Law
In addition to the discovery of Sanskrit, another important step was taken in 1822 by a German philologist, Jacob Grimm. Grimm formulated a systematic explanation of the correspondences between certain consonants in the Germanic languages and those found in Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, among other languages. According to Grimm, a p in Indo-European, remaining as it is in Latin and Greek, was changed to an f in the Germanic languages. For example, the Latin piscis and pēs became the English fish and foot, respectively. What applies to p also applies to t and k in the sense that these three voiceless stops were changed to the fricatives f, ө, and h, in order. Examples include Latin trēs and centum, which became English three and hundred. This Germanic sound-shift is the most distinctive feature that marks off the Germanic languages form the other related languages.
The formulation of these correspondences, as well as others that involve certain groups of consonants, is known as Grimm's Law.
Karl Verner and others later explained certain exceptions to Grimm’s Law. For example, Verner showed that when the Indo-European stress was not on the vowel immediately preceding a voiceless fricative, it became voiced in Germanic. This explanation was important in accounting for the forms of the past tense in many irregular verbs. The formulation of this explanation is known as Verner's Law.
V. The Indo-European Family
The languages that descend from a parent language are called a family of languages. The term most widely used to designate the group of languages referred to in section IV is the Indo-European family. This term, more than the other terms that were previously used, namely Aryan and Indo-Germanic, suggests the geographical extent of the family. There is no written record of the common Indo-European language, but by a comparison of its descendants, it is possible to form a fair idea of it and to reconstruct its lexicon and inflections. The surviving languages show various degrees of similarity to one another, depending on their geographical distribution. These languages fall into eleven principal groups, which form the branches of the Indo-European family. Fowling is a brief look at each.
A. The Indian Branch
The oldest literary texts preserved in any Indo-European language are the sacred books of India, known as the Vedas. These books fall into four groups, the oldest of which goes back to 1500 B.C. The language in which the books are written is known as Sanskrit, or Vedic Sanskrit. This language is also found in certain prose writing dealing with various aspects of religious and private life. The use of Sanskrit was later extended to writings outside religion. It was given a fixed, literary form under the influence of Panini and other native grammarians in the fourth century B.C. This form is called Classical Sanskrit, which is the medium of extensive Indian literature and numerous scientific and philosophical works. Classical Sanskrit formerly held a place in India similar to that occupied by Latin in Europe during the Middle Ages. At an early date this language ceased to be spoken.
In addition to Sanskrit, there were a large number of local, colloquial dialects, a number of which later attained a literary form, e.g. Pāli, which became the language of Buddhism about the middle of the sixth century B.C. Form these dialects have descended the present languages of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, which are spoken by about 600 million people. These languages are the Hindi, Urdu, and Bengali, respectively. Urdu has many elements from Arabic and Persian, and is written in the Perso-Arabic script, instead of Sanskrit characters.
B. The Iranian Branch
This group of languages covers northwest of India and the great plateau of Iran. Migration carried Iranian languages to southern Russia and central China. Form early times the region was subjected to Semitic influence, and many of the early texts are preserved in Semitic scripts.
The oldest remains of the Iranian branch fall into two divisions, represented by Avestan and Old Persian. Avestan is the language of the sacred book of the Zoroastrians, whereas Old Persian is preserved only in cuneiform inscriptions. A later form of this language is known as Middle Iranian or Pahlavi, which is the ancestor of modern Persian. Persian, or Farsi, has been the language of an important culture and an extensive literature since the ninth century. A chief literary work in Persian is the epic the Shahnamah. Persian contains many Arabic elements to the extent that its vocabulary is almost as much Arabic as Iranian.
In addition to Persian, several other languages are today in use, namely Afghan (or Pashto) and Baluchi in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as Kurdish in Kurdistan. There are also several languages and dialects on the shores of the Caspian Sea, and in the valley of the Caucasus.
C. The Armenian Branch
Armenian is found south of the Caucasus Mountains and the eastern end of the Black Sea. Armenians penetrated into this region between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. The language is not linked to any other group of the Indo-European family, and thus occupies an isolated position. Armenian is known from about the fifth century through a translation of the Bible in the language. There is a considerable historical and theological literature. For several centuries the Armenians were under Persian domination. Its vocabulary shows strong Iranian influence to the extent that it was at one time classified as an Iranian language. Contacts with Semitic languages, Greek, and Turkish have contributed to give Armenian vocabulary a rich character.
D. The Hellenic Branch
At the dawn of history the Aegan was occupied by people who differed in race and in language from the Greeks, who entered the region later. And in the second millennium B.C. the eastern Mediterranean was dominated by a Semitic people, the Phoenicians, who influenced the Hellenic world greatly. The Greeks penetrated into the Aegean from the north shortly after 2000 B.C.
The earliest great literary monuments of Greek are Homer's poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, dating from the eighth century B.C.
The conquests of Alexander (336-323 B.C.) established Greek in Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, as the general language of the eastern Mediterranean used for international communication.
Greek is the language of the New Testament , and is the medium of an extensive Byzantine literature.
E. The Albanian Branch
This small branch is found northwest of Greece on the eastern coast of the Adriatic. Knowledge of Albanian generally extends back as far as the fifteenth century. It has a vocabulary mixed with Latin, Greek, Turkish, and Slavonic elements.
F. The Italic Branch
The center of the Italic branch is Italy, where Latin was one of a number of languages once found there. But in southern Italy and Sicily Greek was the language of several Greek colonies. A number of languages spoken in different districts by the sixth century were Indo-European. More important were the languages of the Italic branch, chief among which was Latin. Latin also extended to Spain, Gaul, northern Africa, the islands of the Mediterranean, and even Britain. The various languages that represent the survival of Latin are known as the Romance or Romanic languages, the most extensive of which are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian. However, we should bear in mind that the Romance languages are not derived from Classical Latin, which was a literary language with an elaborate grammar, but rather from Vulgar Latin, i.e. the spoken language of the masses or the common people.
G. The Balto-Slavic Branch
This branch covers a vast area in the eastern part of Europe. It falls into two groups, namely the Baltic and the Slavic, which have numerous features in common. There are three Baltic languages, viz. Prussian, Latvian, and Lithuanian. Prussian no longer exists since it was replaced by German in the seventeenth century. About two million people in Latvia speak Latvian, and Lithuanian is used by about three million people in the Baltic state of Lithuania. Lithuanian preserves some very old features that have disappeared form almost all the other languages of the Indo-European family.
As for the various languages of the Slavic group, there are similarities among them that indicate that they were almost identical during the seventh or eighth century. Now the Slavic languages have three divisions, namely East Slavic, West Slavic, and South Slavic. East Slavic includes three varieties, chief among which is Russian, spoken by about 220 million people as a first or second language. It is found throughout the north, east, and central parts of Russia, and is the official and literary language of the country. The second variety is Belorussian (White Russian), which is the language of about 9 million people in Belarus and parts of Poland. The third variety is Ukrainian, which is spoken by about 50 million people in Ukraine.
West Slavic includes four languages, of which Polish is the largest, spoken by about 36 million in Poland, by about 5 million in the United States, and by smaller numbers in the former Soviet Union and other countries. Next in size are Czech, spoken by about 10 million people, and Slovak, spoken by 5 million. The fourth language is Sorbian, spoken by about 100,000 people in Germany.
As for South Slavic, it includes Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Slavone, and modern Macedonian. Bulgarian was spoken in the eastern part of the Balkan peninsula. Modern Bulgarian has borrowed extensively from Turkish for the language of everyday use. Serbo-Croatian resulted from the union of Serbian, formerly the language of Serbia, and Croatian, previously spoken by the Croats of Bosnia and Croatia. Slavone is spoken by about 1,500,000 people in Slavonia.
H. The Germanic Branch
The languages descended from the Germanic branch fall into three groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic. The principal language of East Germanic is Gothic, to which the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament were translated. Also belonging to the East Germanic branch are Burgundian and Vandalic.
North Germanic is found in Scandinavia, Denmark, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. There are runic inscriptions from the third century preserving the earliest traces of this language. The earlier form of the Scandinavian language is known as Old Norse. The Scandinavian languages fall into two groups, an eastern group and a western group. The eastern group includes Swedish and Danish, whereas the western group includes Norwegian and Icelandic. Norwegian stopped to be a literary language in the fourteenth century, and Danish (with Norwegian elements) is one of the written languages in Norway. Icelandic is the most literary language of the early Scandinavian languages.
West Germanic is of chief interest because it is the group to which English belongs. The West Germanic group is divided into two branches, High German and Low German. Low German languages include Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old English. High German includes a number of dialects, and is divided chronologically into Old High German, Middle High German, and Modern High German. There is a translation of the Bible in High German, which has established itself as the literary language of Germany since the sixteenth century.
I. The Celtic Branch
At one time the Celtic languages were one of the most extensive groups in the Indo-European family. The Celts lived in Gaul, Spain, Britain, western Germany, and northern Italy, and thus covered the grater part of Western Europe. A few centuries earlier they had progressed into Greece and Asia Minor. Today Celtic languages are found only in the far corners of France and Britain.
The language of the Celts in Gaul is called Gallic, which was early replaced by Latin. Their language is represented in modern time by Irish, Scottish, Gaelic, and Manx. The later Celts occupied what is now England for some centuries before they were driven westward by Germanic invaders in the fifth century. The modern representatives of Celtic are Welsh, Cornish, and Breton.
The remnants of the Celtic group of languages are spoken by minorities in France and Britain. Cornish became extinct in the eighth century, and Manx has died out since World War I. In Scotland Gaelic is found only in the Highlands, and is spoken by 75,000 people. Welsh is still spoken by about 25 per cent of the people. The spread of English among them made the number of those who speak only Welsh drop from 30 per cent in 1891 to 2 per cent in 1950 and is still slowly decreasing. Irish is spoken by about 500,000 people, most of whom are bilingual.
J. The Hittite Branch
In addition to the nine branches dealt with above, the twentieth century witnessed the discovery of two new groups, namely Hittite and Tocharian, which will be briefly described in this section and the following one. The language of the Hittites was preserved only in a few documents. In 1907, the site of their capital was uncovered in Asia Minor, about ninety miles east of Ankara. Ten thousand clay tablets were discovered. The texts were written in Babylonian cuneiform characters, and some were in the Babylonian language (Akkadian). The most remarkable effect on Indo-Europan studies as the result of discovering Hittite has been the confirmation of the existence of at least one laryngeal sound, and that Hittite represented the Object-Verb structure of Indo- European, which later became a Verb-Object pattern. A large part of the Hittite vocabulary comes form a non-Indo-European source.
K. The Trocharian Branch
Trocharian is the name of the language in which some incomplete texts were discovered early in the twentieth century in western China. The texts make mention of the name of a king who reigned in the early part of the seventh century. The discovery of Trocharian is important because the language belongs with the Hellenic, Italic, Germanic, and Celtic groups, rather than with the eastern groups, with which it was expected to be most closely related.
VI. The Character, Time, and Home of the Indo-Europeans
What about the people who spoke the Indo-European language, and what about their early location? Practically nothing is known about their physical character. There is no definite information about the date at which they lived, either However, the period of their life as a single, coherent community must have been long, and it is customary to consider the end of their common existence somewhere between 3500 and 2500 B.C.
As for the location of the Indo-European community before their dispersal, we may suppose that it was in that part of the world in which the languages of the family are found today. However, we should exclude Africa, Australia, and the Americas, Britain, and parts of Southern Europe, where the extension of Indo-European has occurred much later. Generally, the only regions in which it is reasonable to seek the original home of the Indo-European family are the mainland of Europe and the western part of Asia. The larger part of the languages of this family have been in Europe from the earliest times, and not in Asia as it was assumed prior to the middle of the nineteenth century. From the evidence of language itself, in the sense of the existence of certain words denoting indigenous fauna and flora (e.g. the honeybee) a European home for the Indo-European family has become more probable. During the past forty years archaeological excavations contributed to the belief at present that the location was east of the Germanic area stretching from central Europe to southern Russia.
The Indo-Europeans were not purely nomadic but had houses and some agriculture. They raised grain and wool and knew how to spin and weave. They kept cattle and had for food the fruit and game that served the needs of their primitive communities. They believed in gods and the existence of a soul, and had certain ideas. The Indo-Europeans also attained considerable cultural development.