1.
Indo-European languages
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The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, the most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, and Punjabi, each with over 100 million speakers. Today, 46% of the population speaks an Indo-European language as a first language. The Indo-European family includes most of the languages of Europe, and parts of Western, Central. It was also predominant in ancient Anatolia, the ancient Tarim Basin and most of Central Asia until the medieval Turkic migrations, all Indo-European languages are descendants of a single prehistoric language, reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European, spoken sometime in the Neolithic era. Several disputed proposals link Indo-European to other language families. In the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan, Iranian, in 1583, English Jesuit missionary Thomas Stephens in Goa wrote a letter to his brother in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin. Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti, a merchant born in Florence in 1540, writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian. However, neither Stephens nor Sassettis observations led to further scholarly inquiry and he included in his hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, later adding Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, Van Boxhorns suggestions did not become known and did not stimulate further research. Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of a diplomatic mission, gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a comparison of Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Thomas Young first used the term Indo-European in 1813, deriving from the extremes of the language family. A synonym is Indo-Germanic, specifying the familys southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches, a number of other synonymous terms have also been used. Franz Bopps Comparative Grammar appeared between 1833 and 1852 and 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 Schleichers 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmanns Grundriss, published in the 1880s. Brugmanns neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussures development of the theory may be considered the beginning of modern Indo-European studies. This led to the laryngeal theory, a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics. Isolated terms in Luwian/Hittite mentioned in Semitic Old Assyrian texts from the 20th and 19th centuries BC, Hittite texts from about 1650 BC, Armenian, writing known from the beginning of the 5th century AD
Indo-European languages
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Franz Bopp, pioneer in the field of comparative linguistic studies.
Indo-European languages
2.
Albanian language
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Centuries-old communities speaking Albanian-based dialects can be found scattered in Greece, Southern Italy, Sicily, and Ukraine. Due to the large Albanian diaspora, the number of speakers is much higher than the native speakers in Southeast Europe. The first audio recording of Albanian was made by Norbert Jokl on 4 April 1914 in Vienna, the Albanian language is part of the Indo-European language group. In general there is insufficient evidence to connect Albanian with one of those languages, Albanian is now considered an isolate within Indo-European, no extant language shares the same branch. The only other languages that are the surviving member of a branch of Indo-European are Armenian. Although Albanian shares lexical isoglosses with Greek, Balto-Slavic, and Germanic languages, in 1995, Ann Taylor, Donald Ringe and Tandy Warnow described as surprising their finding, using quantitative linguistic techniques, that Albanian appears to comprise a subgroup with Germanic. This theory is reinforced by subsequent research by the same authors, Albanian also shares two features with Balto-Slavic languages, a lengthening of syllabic consonants before voiced obstruents and a distinct treatment of long syllables ending in a sonorant. Other conservative features of Albanian include the retention of the distinction between active and middle voice, present tense and aorist. In another but uncommon hypothesis, Albanian is grouped with both Balto-Slavic and Germanic based on the merger of Proto-Indo-European *ǒ and *ǎ into *ǎ in a northern group. However, this shift is now regarded as only part of a larger push chain that affected all long vowels. The earliest loanwords attested in Albanian come from Doric Greek, whereas the strongest influence came from Latin, curtis, the loanwords do not necessarily indicate the geographical location of the ancestor of Albanian language. However, according to linguists, the borrowed words can help to get an idea about the place of origin. The period during which Proto-Albanian and Latin interacted was protracted and drawn out roughly from the 2nd century BC to the 5th century AD. This is borne out into three layers of borrowings, the largest number belonging to the second layer, which may be compared to, for example. The first, with the fewest borrowings, was a time of less important interaction, the final period, probably preceding the Slavic or Germanic invasions, also has a notably smaller number of borrowings. Other formative changes include the syncretism of several case endings, especially in the plural. Such borrowing indicates that the Romanians migrated from an area where the majority was Slavic to an area with a majority of Albanian speakers and their movement is probably related to the expansion of the Bulgarian Empire into Albania around that time. Jernej Kopitar was the first to note Latins influence on Albanian, Kopitar gave examples such as Albanian qiqer from Latin cicer, qytet from civitas, peshk from piscis and shigjetë from sagitta
Albanian language
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Illyrians, Dacians, Getae and Thracians at 200 BCE
Albanian language
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Albanian
Albanian language
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October 1899 issue of the magazine Albania, the most important Albanian periodical of the early 20th century
Albanian language
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Albanian children at school
3.
Armenian language
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The Armenian language is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenians. Like Hellenic Greek, it has its own branch in the language tree. It is the language of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. It has historically been spoken throughout the Armenian Highlands and today is spoken in the Armenian diaspora. Armenian has its own script, the Armenian alphabet, introduced in 405 AD by Mesrop Mashtots. Armenian is an independent branch of the Indo-European languages and it is of interest to linguists for its distinctive phonological developments within that family. Armenian exhibits more satemization than centumization, although it is not classified as belonging to either of these subgroups, Armenia was a monolingual country by the 2nd century BC at the latest. Its language has a literary history, with a 5th-century Bible translation as its oldest surviving text. Its vocabulary has been influenced by Western Middle Iranian languages, particularly Parthian, and to an extent by Greek, Persian. There are two standardized modern literary forms, Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian, with which most contemporary dialects are mutually intelligible and he is also credited by some with the creation of the Caucasian Albanian alphabet. In The Anabasis, Xenophon describes many aspects of Armenian village life and he relates that the Armenian people spoke a language that to his ear sounded like the language of the Persians. W. M. However, unlike shared innovations, the retention of archaisms is not considered conclusive evidence of a period of common isolated development. Some of the terms he gives admittedly have an Akkadian or Sumerian provenance, loan words from Iranian languages, along with the other ancient accounts such as that of Xenophon above, initially led linguists to erroneously classify Armenian as an Iranian language. Scholars such as Paul de Lagarde and F. Müller believed that the similarities between the two meant that Iranian and Armenian were the same language. The distinctness of Armenian was recognized when philologist Heinrich Hübschmann used the method to distinguish two layers of Iranian loans from the older Armenian vocabulary. Meillets hypothesis became popular in the wake of his Esquisse, eric P. Hamp supports the Graeco-Armenian thesis, anticipating even a time when we should speak of Helleno-Armenian. Nevertheless, as Fortson comments, by the time we reach our earliest Armenian records in the 5th century AD, graeco--Aryan is a hypothetical clade within the Indo-European family, ancestral to the Greek language, the Armenian language, and the Indo-Iranian languages. Graeco-Aryan unity would have divided into Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian by the mid-third millennium BC
Armenian language
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Armenian manuscript, 5th–6th century.
Armenian language
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regions where Armenian is the language of the majority
Armenian language
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The Four Gospels, 1495, Portrait of St Mark Wellcome with Armenian inscriptions
Armenian language
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First Armenian language Bible.
4.
Balto-Slavic languages
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The Balto-Slavic languages are a branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It traditionally comprises the Baltic and Slavic languages, Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to a period of common development. Some linguists, however, have suggested that Balto-Slavic should be split into three equidistant groups, Eastern Baltic, Western Baltic and Slavic. One particularly innovative dialect separated from the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum and became ancestral to the Proto-Slavic language, the nature of the relationship of the Balto-Slavic languages has been the subject of much discussion from the very beginning of historical Indo-European linguistics as a scientific discipline. Baltic and Slavic share many phonological, lexical, morphosyntactic. The notable early Indo-Europeanist August Schleicher proposed a solution, From Proto-Indo-European descended Proto-Balto-Slavic. In turn, the Polish linguist Rozwadowski suggests that the similarities among Baltic and Slavic languages are a result of not only genetic relationship, thomas Olander corroborates the claim of genetic relationship in his research in the field of comparative Balto-Slavic accentology. Even though some linguists still reject a genetic relationship, most scholars accept that Baltic and Slavic languages experienced a period of common development, beekes, for example, states expressly that he Baltic and Slavic languages were originally one language and so form one group. Gray and Atkinsons application of language-tree divergence analysis supports a relationship between the Baltic and Slavic languages, dating the split of the family to about 1400 BCE. That this was using a very different methodology than other studies lends some credence to the links between the two. The Balto-Slavic languages are most often divided into Baltic and Slavic groups, with this, Ivanov and Toporov put Baltic unity in question. This model is supported by studies by V. V. Kromer. Onomastic evidence shows that Baltic languages were spoken in much wider territory than the one they cover today, all the way to Moscow. In 626, the Slavs, Persians and Avars jointly attacked the Byzantine Empire, in that campaign the Slavs fought under Avar officers. As of 2009 there was a controversy over whether the Slavs might then have been a military caste under the khaganate rather than an ethnicity. Their language—at first possibly only one local speech—once koinéized, became a lingua franca of the Avar state, however, such a theory fails to explain how Slavic spread to Eastern Europe, an area that had no historical links with the Avar Khanate. That sudden expansion of Proto-Slavic erased most of the idioms of the Balto-Slavic dialect continuum and this secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE. The Baltic and Slavic languages also share some inherited words and this indicates that the Baltic and Slavic languages share a period of common development, the Proto-Balto-Slavic language
Balto-Slavic languages
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Eastern Slavic
5.
Baltic languages
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The Baltic languages belong to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. Baltic languages are spoken by the Balts, mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe, scholars usually regard them as a single language family divided into two groups, Western Baltic, and Eastern Baltic. The range of the Eastern Balts once reached to the Ural mountains, Old Prussian, a Western Baltic language that became extinct in the 18th century, ranks as the most archaic of the Baltic languages. Although related, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, and particularly the Old Prussian vocabularies differ substantially from one another and are not mutually intelligible, the Baltic languages are generally thought to form a single family with two branches, Eastern and Western. However, these two branches are sometimes classified as independent branches of Balto-Slavic, galindian † Old Prussian † Sudovian †. Key evidence of Baltic language presence in these regions is found in hydronyms that are characteristically Baltic, the use of hydronyms is generally accepted to determine the extent of a cultures influence, but not the date of such influence. Though included among the Baltic states due to its location, the language of Estonia, Estonian, is a Uralic language and is not related to the Baltic languages, which are Indo-European. It is believed that the Baltic languages are among the most archaic of the currently remaining Indo-European languages, Lithuanian was first attested in a hymnal translation in 1545, the first printed book in Lithuanian, a Catechism by Martynas Mažvydas was published in 1547 in Königsberg, Prussia. Latvian appeared in a hymnal in 1530 and in a printed Catechism in 1585, during the years of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, official documents were written in Polish, Ruthenian and Latin. However, linguists have had a time establishing the precise relationship of the Baltic languages to other languages in the Indo-European family. Several of the extinct Baltic languages have a limited or nonexistent written record, their existence being known only from the records of ancient historians, all of the languages in the Baltic group were first written down relatively late in their probable existence as distinct languages. These two factors combined with others have obscured the history of the Baltic languages, leading to a number of theories regarding their position in the Indo-European family. The Baltic languages show a relationship with the Slavic languages. This family is considered to have developed from a common ancestor, later on, several lexical, phonological and morphological dialectisms developed, separating the various Balto-Slavic languages from each other. The traditional view is that the Balto-Slavic languages split into two branches, Baltic and Slavic, with each branch developing as a common language for some time afterwards. Proto-Baltic is then thought to have split into East Baltic and West Baltic branches, however, more recent scholarship has suggested that there was no unified Proto-Baltic stage, but that Proto-Balto-Slavic split directly into three groups, Slavic, East Baltic and West Baltic. Under this view, the Baltic family is paraphyletic, and consists of all Balto-Slavic languages that are not Slavic and this would imply that Proto-Baltic, the last common ancestor of all Baltic languages, would be identical to Proto-Balto-Slavic itself, rather than distinct from it. Finally, there is a minority of scholars who argue that Baltic descended directly from Proto-Indo-European and they argue that the many similarities and shared innovations between Baltic and Slavic are due to several millennia of contact between the groups, rather than shared heritage
Baltic languages
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Balto-Slavic languages.
6.
Slavic languages
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The Slavic languages are the Indo-European languages native to the Slavic peoples, originally from Eastern Europe. The Slavic languages are divided intro three subgroups, East, West, and South, which constitute more than twenty languages. Furthermore, the diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world, the number of speakers of all Slavic languages together is estimated to be 315 million. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group, mutual intelligibility also plays a role in determining the West, East, and South branches. Speakers of languages within the branch will in most cases be able to understand each other at least partially. The tripartite division of the Slavic languages does not take account the spoken dialects of each language. For example, Slovak and Ukrainian are bridged by the Rusyn of Eastern Slovakia, similarly, Polish shares transitional features with both western Ukrainian and Belarusian dialects. The Croatian Kajkavian dialect is similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language. Within the individual Slavic languages, dialects may vary to a degree, as those of Russian, or to a much greater degree. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in the period 1500–1000 BCE, the imposition of Church Slavonic on Orthodox Slavs was often at the expense of the vernacular. The use of such media hampered the development of the languages for literary purposes. Lockwood also notes that these languages have enriched themselves by drawing on Church Slavonic for the vocabulary of abstract concepts, the situation in the Catholic countries, where Latin was more important, was different. The Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski and the Croatian Baroque writers of the 16th century all wrote in their respective vernaculars, although Church Slavonic hampered vernacular literatures, it fostered Slavonic literary activity and abetted linguistic independence from external influences. Only the Croatian vernacular literary tradition nearly matches Church Slavonic in age, the most important early monument of Croatian literacy is the Baška tablet from the late 11th century. It is a stone tablet found in the small Church of St. Lucy, Jurandvor on the Croatian island of Krk. The independence of Dubrovnik facilitated the continuity of the tradition, more recent foreign influences follow the same general pattern in Slavic languages as elsewhere and are governed by the political relationships of the Slavs. In the 17th century, bourgeois Russian absorbed German words through direct contacts between Russians and communities of German settlers in Russia, in the 19th century, Russian influenced most literary Slavic languages by one means or another. The Proto-Slavic language existed until around AD500, by the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones
Slavic languages
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Baška tablet, 11th century,
Krk,
Croatia.
Slavic languages
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Countries where an
East Slavic language is the national language
Slavic languages
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14th-century
Novgorodian children were literate enough to send each other
letters written on birch bark.
Slavic languages
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10th–11th century
Codex Zographensis, canonical monument of Old Church Slavonic.
7.
Celtic languages
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The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. Modern Celtic languages are spoken on the north-western edge of Europe, notably in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall. There are also a number of Welsh speakers in the Patagonia area of Argentina. Some people speak Celtic languages in the other Celtic diaspora areas of the United States, Canada, Australia, in all these areas, the Celtic languages are now only spoken by minorities though there are continuing efforts at revitalisation. Welsh is the only Celtic language not classified as endangered by UNESCO, the spread to Cape Breton and Patagonia occurred in modern times. SIL Ethnologue lists six living Celtic languages, of four have retained a substantial number of native speakers. These are the Goidelic languages and the Brittonic languages, the other two, Cornish and Manx, died in modern times with their presumed last native speakers in 1777 and 1974 respectively. For both these languages, however, revitalisation movements have led to the adoption of these languages by adults and children, taken together, there were roughly one million native speakers of Celtic languages as of the 2000s. In 2010, there were more than 1.4 million speakers of Celtic languages, shelta, based largely on Irish with influence from an undocumented source. Some forms of Welsh-Romani or Kååle also combined Romany itself with Welsh language, beurla-reagaird, Highland travellers language Celtic divided into various branches, Lepontic, the oldest attested Celtic language. Anciently spoken in Switzerland and in Northern-Central Italy, from the Alps to Umbria, coins with Lepontic inscriptions have been found in Noricum and Gallia Narbonensis. Celtiberian, anciently spoken in the Iberian peninsula, in parts of modern Galicia, Asturias, La Rioja, Aragón, Cantabria, Old Castile, the relationship of Celtiberian with Gallaecian, in the northwest of the peninsula, is uncertain. Gallaecian, anciently spoken in the former Gallaecia, northwest of the peninsula, Gaulish languages, including Galatian and possibly Noric. These languages were spoken in a wide arc from Belgium to Turkey. Brittonic, including the living languages Breton, Cornish, and Welsh, before the arrival of Scotti on the Isle of Man in the 9th century, there may have been a Brittonic language in the Isle of Man. Goidelic, including the living languages Irish, Manx, and Scottish Gaelic, scholarly handling of the Celtic languages has been rather argumentative owing to scarceness of primary source data. Other scholars distinguish between P-Celtic and Q-Celtic, putting most of the Gaulish and Brittonic languages in the former group, the P-Celtic languages are sometimes seen as a central innovating area as opposed to the more conservative peripheral Q-Celtic languages. In the P/Q classification schema, the first language to split off from Proto-Celtic was Gaelic and it has characteristics that some scholars see as archaic, but others see as also being in the Brittonic languages
Celtic languages
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Classification of Indo-European languages. (click to enlarge)
8.
Germanic languages
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It is the third most spoken Indo-European subdivision, behind Italic and Indo-Iranian, and ahead of Balto-Slavic languages. Limburgish varieties have roughly 1.3 million speakers along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, the main North Germanic languages are Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Faroese, which have a combined total of about 20 million speakers. The East Germanic branch included Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandalic, the last to die off was Crimean Gothic, spoken in the late 18th century in some isolated areas of Crimea. The total number of Germanic languages throughout history is unknown, as some of them—especially East Germanic languages—disappeared during or after the Migration Period. Proto-Germanic, along all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features. Early varieties of Germanic enter history with the Germanic tribes moving south from Scandinavia in the 2nd century BC, to settle in the area of todays northern Germany, furthermore, it is the de facto language of the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. It is also a language in Nicaragua and Malaysia. German is a language of Austria, Belgium, Germany, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg and Switzerland and has regional status in Italy, Poland, Namibia. German also continues to be spoken as a minority language by immigrant communities in North America, South America, Central America, Mexico, a German dialect, Pennsylvania Dutch, is still present amongst Anabaptist populations in Pennsylvania in the United States. Dutch is a language of Aruba, Belgium, Curaçao. The Netherlands also colonised Indonesia, but Dutch was scrapped as a language after Indonesian independence. Dutch was until 1925 an official language in South Africa, but evolved in and was replaced by Afrikaans, Afrikaans is one of the 11 official languages in South Africa and is a lingua franca of Namibia. It is used in other Southern African nations as well, low German is a collection of sometimes very diverse dialects spoken in the northeast of the Netherlands and northern Germany. Scots is spoken in Lowland Scotland and parts of Ulster, frisian is spoken among half a million people who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Luxembourgish is mainly spoken in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, though it extends into small parts of Belgium, France. Limburgish varieties are spoken in the Limburg and Rhineland regions, along the Dutch–Belgian–German border, Swedish is also one of the two official languages in Finland, along with Finnish, and the only official language in the Åland Islands. Danish is also spoken natively by the Danish minority in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, Norwegian is the official language of Norway. Icelandic is the language of Iceland, and is spoken by a significant minority in the Faroe Islands
Germanic languages
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Countries where a Germanic language is the
first language of the majority of the population
9.
Greek language
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Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any living language, spanning 34 centuries of written records and its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the major part of its history, other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, during antiquity, Greek was a widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world and many places beyond. It would eventually become the official parlance of the Byzantine Empire, the language is spoken by at least 13.2 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey, and the Greek diaspora. Greek roots are used to coin new words for other languages, Greek. Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, the earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the worlds oldest recorded living language. Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now extinct Anatolian languages, the Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods, Proto-Greek, the unrecorded but assumed last ancestor of all known varieties of Greek. The unity of Proto-Greek would have ended as Hellenic migrants entered the Greek peninsula sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age, Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Mycenaean civilisation. It is recorded in the Linear B script on tablets dating from the 15th century BC onwards, Ancient Greek, in its various dialects, the language of the Archaic and Classical periods of the ancient Greek civilisation. It was widely known throughout the Roman Empire, after the Roman conquest of Greece, an unofficial bilingualism of Greek and Latin was established in the city of Rome and Koine Greek became a first or second language in the Roman Empire. The origin of Christianity can also be traced through Koine Greek, Medieval Greek, also known as Byzantine Greek, the continuation of Koine Greek in Byzantine Greece, up to the demise of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century. Much of the written Greek that was used as the language of the Byzantine Empire was an eclectic middle-ground variety based on the tradition of written Koine. Modern Greek, Stemming from Medieval Greek, Modern Greek usages can be traced in the Byzantine period and it is the language used by the modern Greeks, and, apart from Standard Modern Greek, there are several dialects of it. In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia, the historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language is often emphasised. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language and it is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, Homeric Greek is probably closer to demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English, Greek is spoken by about 13 million people, mainly in Greece, Albania and Cyprus, but also worldwide by the large Greek diaspora. Greek is the language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population
Greek language
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Idealized portrayal of
Homer
Greek language
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regions where Greek is the official language
Greek language
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Greek language road sign, A27 Motorway, Greece
10.
Indo-Iranian languages
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The Indo-Iranian languages, or Indo-Iranic languages, constitute the largest and easternmost extant branch of the Indo-European language family. It has more than 1 billion speakers, stretching from the Caucasus and the Balkans eastward to Xinjiang and Assam, the common ancestor of all of the languages in this family is called Proto-Indo-Iranian—also known as Common Aryan—which was spoken in approximately the late 3rd millennium BC. The three branches of modern Indo-Iranian languages are Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and Nuristani, additionally, sometimes a fourth independent branch, Dardic, is posited, but recent scholarship in general places Dardic languages as archaic members of the Indo-Aryan branch. Among the Iranian branch, major languages are Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, the Indo-Iranian languages derive from a reconstructed common proto-language, called Proto-Indo-Iranian. The oldest attested Indo-Iranian languages are Vedic Sanskrit, Older and Younger Avestan, a few words from another Indo-Aryan language are attested in documents from the ancient Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia and Syria and the Hittite kingdom in Anatolia. A comparative study of Santali and Bengali, ISBN 81-7074-128-9 Nicholas Sims-Williams, ed. Indo-Iranian Languages and Peoples. Swadesh lists of Indo-Iranian basic vocabulary words
Indo-Iranian languages
11.
Indo-Aryan languages
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The Indo-Aryan or Indic languages are the dominant language family of the Indian subcontinent. They constitute a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family, Indo-Aryan speakers form about one half of all Indo-European speakers, and more than half of all Indo-European languages recognized by Ethnologue. While the languages are spoken in South Asia, pockets of Indo-Aryan languages are found to be spoken in Europe. The largest in terms of speakers are Hindustani, Bengali, Punjabi. Proto-Indo-Aryan, or sometimes Proto-Indic, is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Aryan languages and it is intended to reconstruct the language of the Proto-Indo-Aryans. Proto-Indo-Aryan is meant to be the predecessor of Old Indo-Aryan which is attested as Vedic. Despite the great archaicity of Vedic, however, the other Indo-Aryan languages preserve a number of archaic features lost in Vedic. Vedic has been used in the ancient preserved religious hymns, the canon of Hinduism known as the Vedas. Mitanni-Aryan is of age to the language of the Rigveda. The language of the Vedas – commonly referred to as Vedic Sanskrit by modern scholars – is only marginally different from Proto-Indo-Aryan the proto-language of the Indo-Aryan languages. From the Vedic, Sanskrit developed as the language of culture, science and religion, as well as the court, theatre. Sanskrit is, by convention, referred to by scholars as Classical Sanskrit in contra-distinction to the so-called Vedic Sanskrit. Outside the learned sphere of Sanskrit, vernacular dialects continued to evolve, the oldest attested Prakrits are the Buddhist and Jain canonical languages Pali and Ardha Magadhi, respectively. By medieval times, the Prakrits had diversified into various Middle Indo-Aryan dialects, Apabhramsa is the conventional cover term for transitional dialects connecting late Middle Indo-Aryan with early Modern Indo-Aryan, spanning roughly the 6th to 13th centuries. Some of these dialects showed considerable literary production, the Sravakachar of Devasena is now considered to be the first Hindi book, the next major milestone occurred with the Muslim conquests on the Indian subcontinent in the 13th–16th centuries. Under the flourishing Turco-Mongol Mughal empire, Persian became very influential as the language of prestige of the Islamic courts due to adoptation of the language by the Mughal emperors. However, Persian was soon displaced by Hindustani and this Indo-Aryan language is a combination with Persian, Arabic, and Turkic elements in its vocabulary, with the grammar of the local dialects. The two largest languages that formed from Apabhramsa were Bengali and Hindustani, others include Sindhi, Gujarati, Odia, Marathi, the Indo-Aryan languages of Northern India and Pakistan form a dialect continuum
Indo-Aryan languages
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Dogri–Kangri region
Indo-Aryan languages
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1978 map showing Geographical distribution of the major Indo-Aryan languages. (
Urdu is included under Hindi.
Romani,
Domari, and
Lomavren are outside the scope of the map.)
12.
Iranian languages
–
The Iranian languages or Iranic languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, which in turn are a branch of the Indo-European language family. The speakers of Iranian languages are known as Iranian people, historical Iranian languages are grouped in three stages, Old Iranian, Middle Iranian, and New Iranian. Of the Old Iranian languages, the better understood and recorded ones are Old Persian and Avestan, Middle Iranian languages included Middle Persian, Parthian, and Bactrian. As of 2008, there were an estimated 150–200 million native speakers of Iranian languages, ethnologue estimates there are 86 Iranian languages, the largest among them being Persian, Pashto and Kurdish. The term Iranian is applied to any language which descends from the ancestral Proto-Iranian language, Iranian derives from the Persian and Sanskrit origin word Arya. The use of the term for the Iranian language family was introduced in 1836 by Christian Lassen, robert Needham Cust used the term Irano-Aryan in 1878, and Orientalists such as George Abraham Grierson and Max Müller contrasted Irano-Aryan and Indo-Aryan. Some recent scholarship, primarily in German, has revived this convention, the Eastern Iranian languages subdivided into, Southeastern, of which Pashto is the dominant member, Northeastern, by far the smallest branch, of which Ossetian is the dominant member. All Iranian languages are descended from an ancestor, Proto-Iranian. In turn, and together with Proto-Indo-Aryan and the Nuristani languages, the Indo-Iranian languages are thought to have originated in Central Asia. The Andronovo culture is the candidate for the common Indo-Iranian culture ca.2000 BC. It was situated precisely in the part of Central Asia that borders present-day Russia. Of that variety of languages/dialects, direct evidence of two have survived. These are, Avestan, the two languages/dialects of the Avesta, i. e. the liturgical texts of Zoroastrianism, Old Persian, the native language of a south-western Iranian people known as Persians. Indirectly attested Old Iranian languages are discussed below, Old Persian is the Old Iranian dialect as it was spoken in south-western Iran by the inhabitants of Parsa, who also gave their name to their region and language. The language of the Avesta is subdivided into two dialects, conventionally known as Old Avestan, and Younger Avestan. These terms, which date to the 19th century, are slightly misleading since Younger Avestan is not only much younger than Old Avestan, the Old Avestan dialect is very archaic, and at roughly the same stage of development as Rigvedic Sanskrit. Unlike Old Persian, which has Middle Persian as its known successor, such hypothetical Old Iranian languages include Carduchi and Old Parthian. Additionally, the existence of unattested languages can sometimes be inferred from the impact they had on neighbouring languages, such transfer is known to have occurred for Old Persian, which has a Median substrate in some of its vocabulary
Iranian languages
–
Geographic distribution of modern Iranian languages
Iranian languages
–
Iranian languages family tree
13.
Italic languages
–
The Italic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European language family, originally spoken by Italic peoples. They include Latin and its descendants as well as a number of languages of the Italian Peninsula, including Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan. With over 800 million native speakers, the Italic languages constitute the second most widely spoken branch of the Indo-European family, in the past, various definitions of Italic have prevailed. This article uses the classification presented by the Linguist List, Italic includes the Latin subgroup as well as the ancient Italic languages, venetic, as revealed by its inscriptions, shared some similarities with the Italic languages and is sometimes classified as Italic. However, since it shares similarities with other Western Indo-European branches. In the extreme view, Italic did not exist, but the different groups descended directly from Indo-European and this view stems in part from the difficulty in identifying a common Italic homeland in prehistory. Moreover, there are similarities between groups, although how these similarities are to be interpreted is one of the major debatable issues in the historical linguistics of Indo-European. The linguist Calvert Watkins went so far as to suggest, among ten major groups and these he considered dialectical divisions within Proto-Indo-European which go back to a period long before the speakers arrived in their historical areas of attestation. The main debate concerning the origin of the Italic languages is the same as that which preoccupied Greek studies for the last half of the 20th century, the Indo-Europeanists for Greek had hypothesized that Greek originated outside Greece and was brought in by invaders. The issue was settled in favour of the origin of Greek being that of a language which had developed from all of these elements and then also taken its recognisable form all within Greece. A proto-Italic homeland outside Italy is just as elusive as the home of the hypothetical Greek-speaking invaders, no early form of Italic is available to match Mycenaean Greek. The Italic languages are first attested in writing from Umbrian and Faliscan inscriptions dating to the 7th century BC, the alphabets used are based on the Old Italic alphabet, which is itself based on the Greek alphabet. The Italic alphabets themselves show minor influence from the Etruscan and somewhat more from the Ancient Greek alphabet, the intermediate phases between Italic and Indo-European are still in deficit, with no guarantee that they ever will be found. The question of whether Italic originated outside Italy or developed by assimilation of Indo-European and other elements within Italy, approximately on or within its current range there, remains. Silvestri says. Common Italic. is certainly not to be seen as a language that can largely be reconstructed. Bakkum defines Proto-Italic as a stage without an independent development of its own, but extending over late PIE. Meisers dates of 4000 BC to 1800 BC he describes as as good a guess as anyones, the Roman conquests eventually spread it throughout the peninsula and beyond in the Roman Empire. It is unknown whether the language spoken by the Sicels in Sicily was Italic or not, from Vulgar Latin the Romance languages emerged
Italic languages
–
Approximate distribution of languages in Iron Age
Italy during the sixth century BC. (Note: most of these are not Italic languages.)
14.
Romance languages
–
Today, around 800 million people are native speakers worldwide, mainly in Europe, Africa and the Americas, but also elsewhere. Additionally, the major Romance languages have many speakers and are in widespread use as lingua francas. This is especially the case for French, which is in use throughout Central and West Africa, Madagascar, Mauritius. The five most widely spoken Romance languages by number of speakers are Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian. Because of the difficulty of imposing boundaries on a continuum, various counts of the modern Romance languages are given, for example, Dalby lists 23 based on mutual intelligibility. Between 350 BC and 150 AD, the expansion of the Empire, together with its administrative and educational policies, Latin also exerted a strong influence in southeastern Britain, the Roman province of Africa, western Germany and the Balkans north of the Jireček Line. Despite other influences, the phonology, morphology, and lexicon of all Romance languages consist mainly of evolved forms of Vulgar Latin, however, some notable differences occur between todays Romance languages and their Roman ancestor. With only one or two exceptions, Romance languages have lost the system of Latin and, as a result, have SVO sentence structure. From this adverb the noun romance originated, which applied initially to anything written romanice, the word romance with the modern sense of romance novel or love affair has the same origin. In the medieval literature of Western Europe, serious writing was usually in Latin, while popular tales, often focusing on love, were composed in the vernacular, for example, the Portuguese word fresta is descended from Latin fenestra window, but now means skylight and slit. Cognates may exist but have become rare, such as finiestra in Spanish, the Spanish and Portuguese terms defenestrar meaning to throw through a window and fenestrado meaning replete with windows also have the same root, but are later borrowings from Latin. Galician has both fiestra and the frequently used ventá and xanela. As an alternative to lei, Italian has the pronoun ella, a cognate of the words for she. Sardinian balcone comes from Old Italian and is similar to other Romance languages such as French balcon, Portuguese balcão, Romanian balcon, Spanish balcón, Catalan balcó and Corsican balconi. Documentary evidence is limited about Vulgar Latin for the purposes of research. Many of its speakers were soldiers, slaves, displaced peoples, other scholars argue that the distinctions are more rightly viewed as indicative of sociolinguistic and register differences normally found within any language. Both were mutually intelligible as one and the language, which was true until the second half of the 7th century. Central Europe and the Balkans were occupied by the Germanic and Slavic tribes, as well as by the Huns, over the course of the fourth to eighth centuries, Vulgar Latin, by this time highly dialectalized, broke up into discrete languages that were no longer mutually intelligible
Romance languages
15.
Anatolian languages
–
The Anatolian languages are an extinct family of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language. The list below gives the Anatolian languages in a flat arrangement. This model recognizes only one subgroup, the Luwic languages. Modifications and updates of the order continue, however. A second version opposes Hittite to Western Anatolian, and divides the latter node into Lydian, Palaic, Hittite was the language of the Hittite Empire, dated approximately 1650 to 1200 BC, which ruled over nearly all of Anatolia during that time. The earliest sources of Hittite are the 19th century BC Kültepe texts, the Assyrian records of the kârum kaneš, or port of Kanesh and this collection records Hittite names and words loaned into Assyrian from Hittite. The Hittite name for the city was Neša, from which the Hittite endonym for the language, the records show a gradual rise to power of the Anatolian language speakers over the native Hattians, until at last the kingship became an Anatolian privilege. From then on, little is heard of the Hattians, the records include rituals, medical writings, letters, laws and other public documents, making possible an in-depth knowledge of many aspects of the civilization. Most of the records are dated to the 13th century BC and they are written in cuneiform script borrowing heavily from the Mesopotamian system of writing. However, phonetic syllable signs are present also, representing syllables of the form V, CV, VC, CVC, Hittite is divided into Old, Middle, and New. Fortson gives the dates, which come from the reigns of the relevant kings, as 1570–1450, 1450–1380, all cuneiform Hittite came to an end at 1200 with the destruction of Hattusas and the end of the empire. Palaic, spoken in the north-central Anatolian region of Pala, extinct around the 13th century BC, is only from fragments of quoted prayers in Old Hittite texts. It was extinguished by the replacement of the culture, if not the population, as a result of an invasion by the Kaskas, which the Hittites could not prevent. The term, Luwic, was proposed by Craig Melchert as the node of a branch to include several languages that seem more closely related than the other Anatolian languages. This is not a neologism, as Luvic had been used in the early 20th century to mean the Anatolian language group as a whole, the name comes from Hittite luwili. The earlier use of Luvic fell into disuse in favor of Luvian, meanwhile, most of the languages now termed Luvian, or Luvic, were not known to be so until the latter 20th century. Even more fragmentary attestations might be discovered in the future, Luvian and Luvic have other meanings in English, so currently Luwian and Luwic are preferred. Luwian does not always have the same meaning, for example, Silvia Luraghis Luwian branch begins with a root language she terms the Luwian Group, which logically is in the place of Common Luwian or Proto-Luwian
Anatolian languages
–
The Hittite Empire at its greatest extent under
Suppiluliuma I (ca. 1350–1322 BC) and
Mursili II (ca. 1321–1295 BC)
16.
Tocharian languages
–
Tocharian, also spelled Tokharian, is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family. It is known from manuscripts dating from the 6th to the 8th century AD, identifying the authors with the Tokharoi people of ancient Bactria, early authors called these languages Tocharian. Although this identification is now considered mistaken, the name has stuck. The documents record two closely related languages, called Tocharian A and Tocharian B, a body of loanwords and names found in Prakrit documents have been dubbed Tocharian C. These languages became extinct after Turkic Uyghur tribes expanded into the Tarim Basin, Prakrit documents from 3rd-century Krorän on the southeast edge of the Tarim Basin contain loanwords and names that appear to come from another variety of Tocharian, dubbed Tocharian C. The discovery of Tocharian upset some theories about the relations of Indo-European languages, in the 19th century, it was thought that the division between Centum and Satem languages was a simple west–east division, with centum languages in the west. The theory was undermined in the early 20th century by the discovery of Hittite, a language in a relatively eastern location. Most scholars reject Walter Bruno Hennings proposed link to Gutian, a language spoken on the Iranian plateau in the 22nd century BC, Tocharian probably died out after 840 when the Uyghurs, expelled from Mongolia by the Kyrgyz, moved into the Tarim Basin. The theory is supported by the discovery of translations of Tocharian texts into Uyghur, during Uyghur rule, the peoples mixed with the Uyghurs, to produce much of the modern population of what is now Xinjiang. A colophon to a Buddhist manuscript in Old Turkish from 800 AD states that it was translated from Sanskrit via a twγry language, in 1907, Emil Sieg and Friedrich W. K. Müller guessed that this referred to the newly discovered language of the Turpan area. Sieg and Müller, reading this name as toxrï, connected it with the ethnonym Tócharoi, itself taken from Indo-Iranian, ptolemys Tócharoi are often associated by modern scholars with the Yuezhi of Chinese historical accounts, who founded the Kushan empire. It is now clear that people actually spoke Bactrian, an Eastern Iranian language, rather than the language of the Tarim manuscripts. Nevertheless, it remains the term for the language of the Tarim Basin manuscripts. In 1938, Walter Henning found the term four twγry used in early 9th-century manuscripts in Sogdian, Middle Iranian and he argued that it referred to the region on the northeast edge of the Tarim, including Agni and Karakhoja but not Kucha. He thus inferred that the referred to the Agnean language. Although the term twγry or toxrï appears to be the Old Turkic name for the Tocharians, the apparent self-designation ārśi appears in Tocharian A texts. Tocharian B texts use the adjective kuśiññe, derived from kuśi or kuči, the historian Bernard Sergent compounded these names to coin an alternative term Arśi-Kuči for the family, recently revised to Agni-Kuči, but this name has not achieved widespread usage. Samples of the language have been discovered at sites in Kucha and Karasahr, most of the script in Tocharian was a derivative of the Brahmi alphabetic syllabary and is referred to as slanting Brahmi
Tocharian languages
–
Tocharian B manuscript, c. 7th century AD
Tocharian languages
Tocharian languages
–
"
Tocharian donors", 6th-century AD fresco,
Qizil,
Tarim Basin. These frescoes are associated with annotations in Tocharian and
Sanskrit made by their painters.
Tocharian languages
–
Wooden tablet with an inscription showing Tocharian B in its Brahmic form.
Kucha,
China, 5th–8th century (
Tokyo National Museum)
17.
Dacian language
–
The extinct Dacian language developed from Proto-Indo-European, possibly in the Carpathian region sometime in the period 3000–1500 BC. The language was extinct by AD600. In the 1st century AD, it was probably the predominant language of the ancient regions of Dacia and Moesia, Dacian was a language distinct from Thracian but closely related to it, belonging to the same branch of the Indo-European family. Dacian was a language not closely related to either Thracian or Phrygian, each of these languages belonging to different branches of Indo-European, e. g. Georgiev, the Dacian language is poorly documented. Unlike for Phrygian, which is documented by c.200 inscriptions, the Dacian names for a number of medicinal plants and herbs may survive in ancient literary texts, including about 60 plant-names in Dioscorides. About 1,150 personal names and 900 toponyms may also be of Dacian origin, a few hundred words in modern Romanian and Albanian may have originated in ancient Balkan languages such as Dacian. There is scholarly consensus that Dacian was a member of the Indo-European family of languages, according to both theories, proto-IE reached the Carpathian region no later than c.2500 BC. Supporters of both theories have suggested this region as IEs secondary urheimat, in which the differentiation of proto-IE into the various European language-groups began. There is thus considerable support for the thesis that Dacian developed in the Carpathian region during the third millennium BC, although its evolutionary pathways remains uncertain. From these proto-Thracians, in the Iron Age, developed the Dacians / North Thracians of the Danubian-Carpathian Area on the one hand, many characteristics of the Dacian language are disputed or unknown. No lengthy texts in Dacian exist, only a few glosses and personal names in ancient Greek, no Dacian-language inscriptions have been discovered, except some of names in the Latin or Greek alphabet. What is known about the language derives from, Placenames, river-names and personal names, the coin inscription KOΣON may also be a personal name, of the king who issued the coin. The Dacian names of about fifty plants written in Greek and Roman sources, etymologies have been established for only a few of them. Substratum words found in Romanian, the language that is today in most of the region once occupied by Dacian-speakers. These include about 400 words of uncertain origin, Romanian words for which a Dacian origin has been proposed include, balaur, brânză, mal, strugure. However, the value of the words as a source for the Dacian language is limited because there is no certainty that these are of Dacian origin. An illustration of the latter possibility are pre-Indo-European substratum in Spanish e. g. fox = zorro, from Basque azeri, a pre-Indo-European origin has been proposed for several Romanian substratum words e. g. balaur, brad. About 160 of the Romanian substratum words have cognates in Albanian, a possible example is Romanian brad, Alb. cognate bradh
Dacian language
–
A fragment of a vase collected by
Mihail Dimitriu at the site of
Poiana, Galaţi (
Piroboridava),
Romania illustrating the use of Greek and Latin letters by a Dacian potter (source:
Dacia journal, 1933)
Dacian language
–
Gold
stater coin found in Dacia. Obverse:
Roman magistrate with
lictors. Legend
ΚΟΣΩΝ (Coson) and (left centre) monogram BR or OΛB. Reverse: Eagle clutching laurel-wreath. Probably minted in a Greek
Black sea city (
Olbia?), commissioned by a Thracian or Getan king (
Cotiso? Koson?) or by a high Roman official (
Brutus?), in honour of the other. Late 1st century BC
Dacian language
–
Dacia's map from a medieval book made after
Ptolemy 's
Geographia (c. 140 AD)
Dacian language
–
Map of central Europe including Dacia
18.
Illyrian languages
–
The Illyrian languages are part of the Indo-European language family. The relation of the Illyrian languages to other Indo-European languages—ancient and modern—is poorly understood due to the paucity of data and is still being examined, a grouping of Illyrian with the Messapian language has been proposed for about a century, but remains an unproven hypothesis. The theory is based on sources, archaeology and onomastics. Messapian material culture bears a number of similarities to Illyrian material culture, Some Messapian anthroponyms have close Illyrian equivalents. A grouping of Illyrian with the Venetic language and Liburnian language, once spoken in northeastern Italy, the consensus now is that Illyrian was quite distinct from Venetic and Liburnian. The relation between Venetic and Illyrian was later discredited and they are no longer considered closely related and they also point to other toponyms including Osseriates derived from /*eghero/ or Birziminium from PIE /*bherǵh/ or Asamum from PIE /*aḱ-mo/. For example, Vescleves has been explained as PIE *wesu-ḱlewes, also, the name Acrabanus as a compound name has been compared with Ancient Greek /akros/ with no signs of palatalization, or Clausal has been related to /*klew/. However, it has shown that even in Albanian and Balto-Slavic. Even the name Gentius or Genthius does not help to solve the problem since we have two Illyrian forms Genthius and Zanatis. If Gentius or Genthius derives from *ǵen- this is proof of a Centum language, another problem related to the name Gentius is that nowadays it cannot be stated surely if the initial /g/ of the sources was a palatovelar or a labiovelar. However, the insufficiency of this theory is that so far there is no certainty as to the historical or etymological development of either ardhja/hardhi or Ardiaioi, as with many other words. Bindo/Bindus, an Illyrian deity from Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, cf. Alb. bind to convince or to make believe, bilia daughter, cf. Alb. bijë, dial. I madh big, great mantía bramblebush, Old and dial, Alb. mandë berry, mulberry Ragusa-Ragusium grape, cf. Proto-Alb. Ragusha rhinos fog, mist, cf. Old Alb. ren cloud Vendum place, wen-ta The Greeks were the first literate people to come into frequent contact with the speakers of Illyrian languages. Their conception of Illyrioi, however, differed from what the Romans would later call Illyricum, the Greek term encompassed only the peoples who lived on the borders of Macedonia and Epirus. Pliny the Elder, in his work Natural History, applies a stricter usage of the term Illyrii when speaking of Illyrii proprie dicti among the communities in the south of Roman Dalmatia. For a couple of centuries before and after the Roman conquest in the late 1st century BC, finally it encompassed all native peoples from the Adriatic to the Danube, inhabiting the Roman provinces of Dalmatia, Pannonia and Moesia, regardless of their ethnic and cultural differences. An extensive study of Illyrian names and territory was undertaken by Hans Krahe in the first decades of the twentieth century
Illyrian languages
–
Illyrian tribes in antiquity.
19.
Liburnian language
–
The Liburnian language is an extinct language which was spoken by the ancient Liburnians, who occupied Liburnia in classical times. No writings in Liburnian are known, the only Liburnian linguistic remains are Liburnian toponyms and some family and personal names in Liburnia, in Latinized form from the 1st century AD. Smaller differences found in the material of narrower regions in Liburnia are in a certain measure reflected also in these scarce linguistic remains. This caused many speculations about their language, studying onomastics of Roman province of Dalmatia, Géza Alföldy has concluded that the Liburni and Histri belonged to the Venetic language area. In particular, some Liburnian anthroponyms show strong Venetic affinities, a few names and common roots, such as Vols-, Volt-. Liburnian and Venetic names sometimes also share suffixes in common, such as -icus and -ocus, katičić, who has included Liburnian toponyms into study and have stated that they had been separate entirety, ethnically and by language. S. Čače has noted that appurtenance of the Liburnian language to the North-Adriatic area rather than to Iapodes, the Liburnians were essentially different from Histri and Veneti, culturally and ethnically, seen especially in burial tradition, by which they were the closest to Dalmatae. Toponomastic and onomastic relations to Asia Minor could also refer to possible Liburnian presence in movings of the Sea Peoples, the Liburnian language eventually was replaced by Latin, undergoing language death probably during Late Antiquity. The single name plus patronymic formula common among Illyrians is rare among Liburnians, in a region where the Roman three-name formula spread at an early date, a native two-name formula appears in several variants. Acaica Aetor Avitus, Avita Boninus Cliticus Colatina Curticus Darmo Dumma Hosp Hostiducis Hostiices Lambicus Malavicus Marica Menda Moicus Oclatinus Oeplus Opia Opiavus Oplus Plaetor, found among the Veneti as Plaetorius, among the Illyrians as Plator, genitive Platoris. Attested as Pletor in a found in the area of Ljubljana in Slovenia. The following names are judged to be exclusively Liburnian, yet one is attested among the neighboring Iapodes to the north and northeast. Iaefus Lastimeis Mamaester Pasinus Picusus Tetenus Vesclevesis and it is a compound, the initial element Ves- from PIE in Albanian, hear, the second element -cleves- from PIE *kleu-, to hear. Venetic language Italic languages Illyrian languages Wilkes, John, untermann, J. Venetisches in Dalmatien, Godišnjak CBI, Sarejevo
Liburnian language
–
Approximate distribution of languages in Iron Age
Italy during the sixth century BC.
20.
Messapian language
–
Messapian is an extinct Indo-European language of southeastern Italy, once spoken in the region of Apulia. It was spoken by the three Iapygian tribes of the region, the Messapians, the Peucetians and the Daunians, the language has been preserved in about 300 inscriptions dating from the 6th to the 1st century BCE. Messapian may have related to the Illyrian language. Messapian became extinct after the Roman Republic conquered the region of Apulia, few, if any, Messapic inscriptions have been definitely deciphered. It is similar to Tartarus, a classical Greek name for the realm of Hades, another Messapic inscription from Galatina is dated to the 2nd century BC, klohi zis avithos thotorridas ana aprodita apa ogrebis The separation of the last two elements is uncertain. Zis may be the Messapic Zeus, as in the preceding inscription, aprodita is a loanword from Greek Aphrodite. Avithos Thotorridas is a Messapic anthroponym, showing a personal name plus patronymic or nomen gentile in the genitive and it may be related to Thautori, mentioned in the Vaste inscription. The Messapian language is preserved in a scanty group of perhaps fifty inscriptions, of only a few contain more than proper names. Unluckily very few originals of the inscriptions are now in existence, the only satisfactory transcripts are those given by, Mommsen John P Droop in the Annual of the British School at Athens, xli. 137, who includes, for purposes of comparison, as the reader should be warned, a large number of the inscriptions collected by Gamurrini in the appendices to Fabrettis Corpus inscriptionum italicarum are forgeries, and the text of the rest is negligently reported. It is therefore safest to rely on the texts collected by Mommsen, despite these difficulties, however, some facts of considerable importance have been established. The inscriptions, so far as it is safe to judge from the copies of the older finds, dates were probably within the range of 400-150 BC, the two most important inscriptions—those of Brindisi and Vaste may be assigned, provisionally, to the 3rd century BC. cit. Since 1850 little progress has been made, the same reappears in the Iovilae of Capua and Cumae. W. Deecke in a series of articles in the Rheinisches Museum,373 sqq. xl.131 sqq. xlii. 226 sqq. S. Bugge, Bezzenbergers Beiträge, vol, L. Ceci Notizie degli Scavi, p.86, and one or two others are recorded by Professor Viola, ibid. 1884, p.128 sqq. and in Giornale degli Scavi di Pompei, the place-names of the district are collected by R. S. Conway, The Italic Dialects, p.31, for the Tarentine-Ionic alphabet see ibid. ii.461. Illyrian languages Albanian language Civiltà messapica Archaeologists find western worlds oldest map, telegraph Newspaper Online, November 19,2005
Messapian language
–
Messapian
21.
Phrygian language
–
The Phrygian language /ˈfrɪdʒiən/ was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, spoken in Asia Minor during Classical Antiquity. Phrygian is considered by linguists to have been closely related to Greek. The similarity of some Phrygian words to Greek ones was observed by Plato in his Cratylus, however, Eric P. Hamp suggests that Phrygian was related to Italo-Celtic in a hypothetical Northwest Indo-European group. Phrygian is attested by two corpora, one dated to between about the 8th and the 4th century BCE, and then after a period of centuries from between the 1st and 3rd centuries of the Common Era. The Paleo-Phrygian corpus is further divided into inscriptions of Midas, Gordion, Central, Bithynia, Pteria, Tyana, Daskyleion, Bayindir, the Mysian inscriptions seem to be in a separate dialect. The last mentions of the date to the 5th century CE. Paleo-Phrygian used a Phoenician-derived script, while Neo-Phrygian used the Greek script. Its structure, what can be recovered from it, was typically Indo-European, with nouns declined for case, gender and number, while the verbs are conjugated for tense, voice, mood, person, no single word is attested in all its inflectional forms. Phrygian seems to exhibit an augment, like Greek, Indo-Iranian and Armenian, c. f. eberet, probably corresponding to PIE *e-bher-e-t, to, which is not a past tense form, shows that -et may be from the PIE primary ending *-eti. This hypothesis has been rejected by Lejeune and Brixhe. e, voicing of PIE aspirates and devoicing of PIE voiced stops. The affricates ts and dz developed from velars before front vowels, Phrygian is attested fragmentarily, known only from a comparatively small corpus of inscriptions. A few hundred Phrygian words are attested, however, the meaning, a famous Phrygian word is bekos, meaning bread. According to Herodotus Pharaoh Psammetichus I wanted to determine the oldest nation, for this purpose, he ordered two children to be reared by a shepherd, forbidding him to let them hear a single word, and charging him to report the childrens first utterance. After two years, the shepherd reported that on entering their chamber, the children came up to him, extending their hands, calling bekos. Upon enquiry, the discovered that this was the Phrygian word for wheat bread. The word bekos is also attested several times in Palaeo-Phrygian inscriptions on funerary stelae and it may be cognate to the English bake. Hittite, Luwian, Galatian and Greek all influenced Phrygian vocabulary, according to Clement of Alexandria, the Phrygian word bedu meaning water appeared in Orphic ritual. The Greek theonym Zeus appears in Phrygian with the stem Ti-, perhaps with the general meaning god, the shift of *d to t in Phrygian and the loss of *w before o appears to be regular
Phrygian language
–
Part (about 70%) of Phrygian inscription in
'Midas City'. The inscription reads: “ΒΑΒΑ: ΜΕΜΕϜΑΙΣ: ΠΡΟΙΤΑϜΟΣ: ΚΦΙJΑΝΑϜΕJΟΣ: ΣΙΚΕΝΕΜΑΝ: ΕΔΑΕΣ” (Baba, advisor, leader from Tyana, dedicated this niche).
22.
Thracian language
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The Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times in Southeast Europe by the Thracians, the northern neighbors of the Ancient Greeks. The Thracian language exhibits satemization, it belonged to the satem group of Indo-European languages or it was strongly influenced by satem languages. The language was still in use at least until the sixth century AD, the place where the monasteries were founded was called Cutila, which may be a Thracian name. The further fate of the Thracian language is a matter of dispute, some authors like Harvey Mayer group Thracian and Dacian into a southern Baltic linguistic family. The Thracian language was spoken in what is now Bulgaria, eastern Republic of Macedonia, Northern Greece, European Turkey, eastern Serbia is usually considered by paleolinguists to have been a Daco-Moesian language area. Some of the longer inscriptions may indeed be Thracian in origin but they may not reflect actual Thracian language sentences, but rather jumbles of names or magical formulas. Enough Thracian lexical items have survived to show that Thracian was a member of the Indo-European language family, other ancient Greek lexical items were not specifically identified as Thracian by the ancient Greeks but are hypothesized by paleolinguists as being or probably being of Thracian origin. Other lexical items are hypothesized on the basis of local anthroponyms, toponyms, hydronyms, oronyms, below is a table showing both words cited as being Thracian in classical sources, and lexical elements that have been extracted by paleolinguists from Thracian anthroponyms, toponyms, etc. See also the List of reconstructed Dacian words, significant cognates from any Indo-European language are listed. However, not all items in Thracian are assumed to be from the Proto-Indo-European language. They include the element in Parthenon, balios, bounos, hill. The Thracian horseman hero was an important figure in Thracian religion, mythology, depictions of the Thracian Horseman are found in numerous archaeological remains and artifacts from Thracian regions. From the Duvanli ring and from cognates in numerous Indo-European languages, mezēna is seen to be a Thracian word for horse, deriving from PIE *mend-. Ut- based on the PIE root word ud- and based on several Thracic items, would have meant upon, up, and Utaspios is theorized to have meant On horse, parallel to ancient Greek epi-hippos. The early Indo-European languages had more than one word for horse, for example Latin had equus from PIE *ekwo- and mannus from another IE root, in many cases in current Thracology, there is more than one etymology for a Thracian lexical item. For example, Thracian Diana Germetitha has two different proposed etymologies, Diana of the bosom or Diana of the warm radiance. In other cases, etymologies for the Thracian lexical items may be sound, only four Thracian inscriptions of any length have been found. The first is a ring found in 1912 in the town of Ezerovo, Bulgaria
Thracian language
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Limits of the (southern) Thracian linguistic territory according to Ivan Duridanov,1985
23.
Proto-Indo-European language
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Proto-Indo-European is the linguistic reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, the most widely spoken language family in the world. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language and these methods supply all of the knowledge concerning PIE, since there is no written record of the language. PIE is estimated to have spoken as a single language around 3500 B. C. E. during the Neolithic Age. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe. Work has also gone into reconstructing their culture and religion, PIE had a complex system of morphology that included inflectional suffixes as well as ablaut and accent. PIE nominals and pronouns had a system of declension. The PIE phonology, particles, numerals, and copula are also well-reconstructed, today, the most widely-spoken daughter languages of PIE are Spanish, English, Hindustani, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Punjabi, German, French, and Marathi. There is no evidence of PIE. It has been reconstructed from its present-day descendants using the comparative method, the comparative method is based on the Neogrammarian rule that the Indo-European sound laws are applied without exception. The method compares languages and applies the laws to find a common ancestor. For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English, piede and foot, padre and father, pesce and fish. Since there is a consistent correspondence of the consonants that is far too frequent to be coincidental. Although his name is associated with this observation, he was not the first to make it. In many ways Jones work was less accurate than his predecessors, as he erroneously included Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindi. In 1818, Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated the set of correspondences to include other Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit and Greek, and the full range of consonants involved. In 1816 Franz Bopp published On the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit in which he investigated a common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. In 1833 he began publishing the Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, in 1822, Jacob Grimm formulated what is now known as Grimms law as a general rule in his Deutsche Grammatik. Grimm showed correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages, and showed that sound change affects an entire language systematically, august Schleichers A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages was an early attempt to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European language
Proto-Indo-European language
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Classification of Indo-European languages. Red: Extinct languages. White: categories or unattested proto-languages. Left half:
centum languages; right half:
satem languages
24.
Indo-European sound laws
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As the Proto-Indo-European language broke up, its sound system diverged as well, according to various sound laws in the daughter Indo-European languages. Especially notable is the palatalization that produced the satem languages, along with the associated ruki sound law, bartholomaes law in Indo-Iranian, and Sievers law in Proto-Germanic and various other branches, may or may not have been common Indo-European features. The following table shows the Proto-Indo-European consonants and their reflexes in selected Indo-European daughter languages, for development of the laryngeals and syllabic consonants, see the vowels table below. Notes for table 1, Proto-Indo-European also had numerous consonant clusters, such as *st, in most cases in most languages, each consonant in a cluster develops according to the normal development given in the table above. Many consonant clusters also show special developments in multiple languages. Some of these are given by the table, Notes to Table 2. 11 After r, u, k, i.12 Before a stressed vowel,17 Before a consonant or original laryngeal. 19 After r, l, m, n, t, d,21 At the beginning of a word. 22 Before or after an obstruent,24 Between vowels, or between a vowel and r, l. This table shows the Proto-Indo-European vowels and syllabic consonants, and their reflexes in selected Indo-European daughter languages, Notes 1 Before wa.2 Before r, h. Gothic, but not other Germanic languages, merges /e/ and /i/.3 The existence of PIE non-allophonic a is disputed,7 The so-called breaking is disputed 8 In a final syllable. 9 Before velars and unstressed 10 Before ā in the following syllable,11 Before i in the following syllable. 13 In the neighbourhood of labials,14 In the neighbourhood of labiovelars. 15 ā > ē in Attic and Ionic dialects only,16 Between consonants, or at the end of a word after a consonant. 17 At the beginning of a word, followed by a consonant,20 Before i, ī, or /j/ in the next syllable in Proto-Germanic. 21 Before h, w, or before r, l plus a consonant,22 Before a back vowel in the next syllable. 23 Before a non-high vowel in the next syllable, see the list of Proto-Indo-European roots hosted at Wiktionary. Vedic Sanskrit, tráyas OCS, trьje Lithuanian, trỹs Albanian, tre Greek, treĩs Latin, trēs Irish, trí Arm
Indo-European sound laws
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Map of the main isoglosses between the branches of Indo-European
25.
Graeco-Armenian
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Graeco-Armenian is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Greek and Armenian languages that postdates the Proto-Indo-European language. Its status is comparable to that of the Italo-Celtic grouping, each is considered plausible without being accepted as established communis opinio. The hypothetical Proto-Graeco-Armenian stage would need to date to the 3rd millennium BC, meillets hypothesis became popular in the wake of his Esquisse dune grammaire comparée de larménien classique. G. R. Eric Hamp supports the Graeco-Armenian thesis, anticipating even a time when we should speak of Helleno-Armenian, evaluation of the hypothesis is tied up with the analysis of the poorly attested Phrygian language. While Greek is attested very early times, allowing a secure reconstruction of a Proto-Greek language dating to circa 3rd millennium BC. It is strongly linked with Indo-Iranian languages, in particular, it is a satem language, the earliest testimony of the Armenian language dates to the 5th century AD. The earlier history of the language is unclear and the subject of much speculation and it is clear that Armenian is an Indo-European language, but its development is opaque. In any case, Armenian has many layers of loanwords and shows traces of long language contact with Greek, luay Nakhleh, Tandy Warnow, Don Ringe, and Steven N. Evans compared various phylogeny methods and found that five procedures support a Graeco-Armenian subgroup. This theory has argued for in various publications by scholars such as G. Neumann, G. Klingenschmitt, J. Matzinger. This Balkan subgroup in turn is supported by the method of Hans J. Holm
Graeco-Armenian
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Origin
26.
Graeco-Aryan
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Graeco-Aryan is a hypothetical clade within the Indo-European family, ancestral to the Greek language, the Armenian language, and the Indo-Iranian languages. Graeco-Aryan unity would have divided into Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian by the mid 3rd millennium BC. Graeco-Aryan has comparatively wide support among Indo-Europeanists for the Indo-European Homeland to be located in the Armenian Highland, early and strong evidence was given by Eulers 1979 examination on shared features in Greek and Sanskrit nominal flection. Used in tandem with the Graeco-Armenian hypothesis, the Armenian language would also be included under the label Aryano-Greco-Armenic, by 2500 BC, Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian had separated, moving westward and eastward from the Pontic Steppe, respectively. If Graeco-Aryan is a group, Grassmanns law may have a common origin in Greek. Graeco-Aryan is invoked in particular in studies of mythology, e. g. by West
Graeco-Aryan
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Origin
27.
Proto-Indo-European verb
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Proto-Indo-European verbs had a complex system, with verbs categorized according to their aspect, stative, imperfective, or perfective. The system used multiple grammatical moods and voices, with verbs being conjugated according to person, number, the system of adding affixes to the base form of a verb allowed modifications that could form nouns, verbs or adjectives. Besides the addition of affixes, another way that vowels in the word could be modified was the Indo-European ablaut, for example, the vowel in the English verb to sing varies according to the conjugation of the verb, sing, sang and sung. The system described here is known as the Cowgill–Rix system and, strictly speaking, applies only to what Don Ringe terms Western Indo-European, i. e. IE excluding Tocharian and especially Anatolian. The system also describes Tocharian fairly well, but encounters significant difficulties when applied to Hittite, in particular, despite the fact that the Anatolian languages are the earliest-attested IE languages, much of the complexity of the Cowgill–Rix system is absent from them. In addition, contrary to the situation with other languages with relatively simple systems, such as Germanic. Furthermore, many of the forms that do exist have a different meaning from elsewhere. The original interpretation of the tense and aspect categories has been a thorny issue, PIE verb morphology resembled, in many respects, that of nominals. A verb was formed by adding a suffix onto a root to form a stem, the word was then inflected by adding an ending to the stem. Such verbs expressed the basic meaning of the root. Various suffixes were available to derive new verbs, either by affixing to the root, verbs, like nominals, made a basic distinction between athematic and thematic conjugations. Thematic verbs were characterised by a vowel appearing at the end of the stem, some of the endings differed depending on whether this vowel was present or absent, but by and large the endings were the same for both types. The thematic vowel was either e or o, according to a distribution, e appeared before coronal consonants and word-finally. Athematic verbs appear to be older, and show ablaut within the paradigm, consequently, the athematic verbs became a non-productive relic class in the later Indo-European languages. In groups such as Germanic and Italic, the verbs had almost gone entirely extinct by the time of written records, while Sanskrit. At least the following sets of endings existed, Primary endings, used for, secondary endings, used for, The past tense of the indicative mood of imperfective verbs. The indicative mood of perfective verbs, Stative endings, used for the indicative mood of stative verbs. Imperative endings, used for the mood of all verbs
Proto-Indo-European verb
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The most common present stems types according to
LIV2.
28.
Proto-Armenian
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Proto-Armenian is an earlier, unattested stage of the Armenian language that has been reconstructed by linguists. As Armenian is the only language of its branch of the Indo-European languages. Because Proto-Armenian is not the ancestor of several related languages. It is generally held to include a variety of stages of Armenian between the times of Proto-Indo-European up to the earliest attestations of Classical Armenian. Thus, it is not a proto-language in the strict sense, the earliest testimony of Armenian dates to the fifth century. The earlier history of the language is unclear and the subject of much speculation and it is clear that Armenian is an Indo-European language, but its development is opaque. In any case, Armenian has many layers of loanwords and shows traces of long language contact with Hurro-Urartian, Greek, Indo-Iranian, the Proto-Armenian sound changes are varied and eccentric, and in many cases uncertain. In certain contexts, these stops are further reduced to w, h or zero in Armenian, e. g. PIE *pódm̥ foot > Armenian otn vs. Greek póda. The Armenians according to Diakonoff, are then an amalgam of the Hurrians, Luvians, after arriving in its historical territory, Proto-Armenian would appear to have undergone massive influence on part the languages it eventually replaced. Armenian phonology, for instance, appears to have greatly affected by Urartian. Arnaud Fournet proposes additional borrowed words
Proto-Armenian
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Origin
29.
Proto-Germanic
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Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. The end of the Common Germanic period is reached with the beginning of the Migration Period in the fourth century, the Proto-Germanic language is not directly attested by any coherent surviving texts, it has been reconstructed using the comparative method. Fragmentary direct attestation exists of Common Germanic in early runic inscriptions, the Proto-Germanic language developed in southern Scandinavia, the Urheimat of the Germanic tribes. Proto-Germanic developed out of pre-Proto-Germanic during the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe, Proto-Germanic itself was likely spoken after c. Early Germanic expansion in the Pre-Roman Iron Age placed Proto-Germanic speakers in contact with the Continental Celtic La Tène horizon, a number of Celtic loanwords in Proto-Germanic have been identified. By the 1st century AD, Germanic expansion reaches the Danube and the Upper Rhine in the south, at about the same time, extending east of the Vistula, Germanic speakers come into contact with early Slavic cultures, as reflected in early Germanic loans in Proto-Slavic. By the 3rd century, LPGmc speakers had expanded over significant distance, the period marks the breakup of Late Proto-Germanic and the beginning of the Germanic migrations. The earliest coherent text in Proto-Norse become available c.400 in runic inscriptions, the delineation of Late Common Germanic from Proto-Norse about then is largely a matter of convention. Early West Germanic becomes available in the 5th century with the Frankish Bergakker inscription, between the two points, many sound changes occurred. Phylogeny as applied to historical linguistics involves the descent of languages. The Germanic languages form a tree with Proto-Germanic at its root that is a branch of the Indo-European tree, borrowing of lexical items from contact languages makes the relative position of the Germanic branch within Indo-European less clear than the positions of the other branches of Indo-European. In the course of the development of linguistics, various solutions have been proposed, none certain. In the evolutionary history of a family, philologists consider a genetic tree model appropriate only if communities do not remain in effective contact as their languages diverge. The internal diversification of West Germanic developed in an especially non-treelike manner, Proto-Germanic is generally agreed to have begun about 500 BC. Its hypothetical ancestor between the end of Proto-Indo-European and 500 BC is termed Pre-Proto-Germanic, whether it is to be included under a wider meaning of Proto-Germanic is a matter of usage. The fixation of the led to sound changes in unstressed syllables. For Lehmann, the boundary was the dropping of final -a or -e in unstressed syllables, for example, post-PIE *wóyd-e > Gothic wait. Antonsen agreed with Lehmann about the boundary but later found runic evidence that the -a was not dropped, ékwakraz … wraita, I, Wakraz
Proto-Germanic
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Map of the
Pre-Roman Iron Age culture(s) associated with Proto-Germanic, c. 500 BC. The red area shows the areal of the preceding
Nordic Bronze Age in
Scandinavia; the magenta-colored area towards the south represents the
Jastorf culture of the
North German Plain.
