1.
Sarmatians
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The Sarmatians were a large confederation of Iranian people during classical antiquity, flourishing from about the 5th century BC to the 4th century AD. They spoke Scythian, an Indo-European language from the Eastern Iranian family and their territory, which was known as Sarmatia to Greco-Roman ethnographers, corresponded to the western part of greater Scythia. In the 1st century AD the Sarmatians began encroaching upon the Roman Empire in alliance with Germanic tribes, in the 3rd century AD their dominance of the Pontic Steppe was broken by the Germanic Goths. With the Hunnic invasions of the 4th century, many Sarmatians joined the Goths, a related people to the Sarmatians known as the Alans survived in the North Caucasus into the Early Middle Ages, ultimately giving rise to the modern Ossetic ethnic group. The Sarmatians were eventually assimilated and absorbed by the Proto-Slavic population of Eastern Europe. Sarmatae probably originated as just one of several names of the Sarmatians. Strabo in the 1st century names as the tribes of the Sarmatians the Iazyges, the Roxolani, the Aorsi. The Greek name Sarmatai sometimes appears as Sauromatai, which is almost certainly no more than a variant of the same name, nevertheless, historians often regarded these as two separate peoples, while archaeologists habitually use the term Sauromatian to identify the earliest phase of Sarmatian culture. Any idea that the name derives from the lizard, linking to the Sarmatians use of reptile-like scale armour. Both Pliny the Elder and Jordanes recognised the Sar- and Sauro- elements as interchangeable variants, Greek authors of the 4th century mention Syrmatae as the name of a people living at the Don, perhaps reflecting the ethnonym as it was pronounced in the final phase of Sarmatian culture. Oleg Trubachyov derived the name from the Indo-Aryan *sar-mat, the Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian word *sar-, by this derivation was noted the unusual high status of women from the Greek point of view and went to the invention of Amazons. Other scholars, like Harold Walter Bailey, derived the word from Avestan sar- from tsar- in Old Iranian. It was also derived from the name of Avestan region in the west Sairima, recently R. M. Kozlova derived it from *Sъrm- < Proto-Slavic adjective *sъrmatъ, with the meaning that is rich with sormima i. e. shallows, referring to the rivers. The Sarmatians emerged in the 7th century BC in a region of the steppe to the east of the Don River, for centuries they lived in relatively peaceful co-existence with their western neighbors the Scythians. Then, in the 3rd century BC, they fought with the Scythians on the Pontic steppe to the north of the Black Sea, the Sarmatians were to dominate these territories over the next five centuries. Pliny the Elder wrote that they ranged from the Vistula River to the Danube, in 1947, Soviet archaeologist Boris Grakov defined a culture flourishing from the 6th century BC to the 4th century AD, apparent in late kurgan graves, sometimes reusing part of much older kurgans. It was a nomadic steppe culture ranging from the Black Sea eastward to beyond the Volga, in Hungary, a great Late Sarmatian pottery centre was reportedly unearthed between 2001 and 2006 near Budapest, in the Üllő5 archaeological site. Typical grey, granular Üllő5 ceramics form a group of Sarmatian pottery found everywhere in the north central part of the Great Hungarian Plain region
2.
Scythia
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The Ancient Greeks gave the name Scythia to all the lands north-east of Europe and the northern coast of the Black Sea. The Scythians – the Greeks name for this nomadic people – inhabited Scythia from at least the 11th century BC to the 2nd century AD. Its location and extent varied over time but usually extended farther to the west than is indicated on the map opposite, Scythia was a loose state that originated as early as 8th century BC. Little is known of them and their rulers, the most detailed western description is by Herodotus, though it is uncertain he ever went to Scythia. He says the Scythians own name for themselves was Scoloti, the Scythians became increasingly settled and wealthy on their western frontier with Greco-Roman civilization. It is possible that the dynasty ruled in Scythia during most of its history. The name of Koloksai, a founder of a royal dynasty, is mentioned by Alcman in the 7th century BC. Prototi and Madis, Scythian kings in the Near Eastern period of their history, Herodotus lists five generations of a royal clan that probably reigned at the end of the 7th to 6th centuries BC, prince Anacharsis, Saulius, Idanthyrsus, Gnurus, Lycus, and Spargapithes. After being defeated and driven from the Near East, in the first half of the 6th century BCE, in the second half of that century, Scythians succeeded in dominating the agricultural tribes of the forest-steppe and placed them under tribute. As a result, their state was reconstructed with the appearance of the Second Scythian Kingdom which reached its zenith in the 4th century BC, aggressive external policy intensified exploitation of dependent populations and progressed the stratification among the nomadic rulers. Trading with Greeks also stimulated sedentarization processes, accordingly, the trade became a stimulus for capture of slaves as war spoils in numerous wars. The Scythian state reached its greatest extent in the 4th century BC during the reign of Ateas, isocrates believed that Scythians, and also Thracians and Persians, are the most able to power, and are the peoples with the greatest might. In the 4th century BC, under king Ateas, the structure of the state was eliminated. The later sources do not mention three basileuses any more, strabo tells that Ateas ruled over the majority of the North Pontic barbarians. Written sources tell that expansion of the Scythian state before the 4th century BC was mainly to the west, in this respect Ateas continued the policy of his predecessors in the 5th century BC. During western expansion, Ateas fought the Triballi, an area of Thrace was subjugated and levied with severe duties. During the 90 year life of Ateas, the Scythians settled firmly in Thrace, at the same time, both the nomadic and agricultural Scythian populations increased along the Dniester river. A war with the Bosporian Kingdom increased Scythian pressure on the Greek cities along the North Pontic littoral, materials from the site near Kamianka-Dniprovska, purportedly the capital of the Ateas’ state, show that metallurgists were free members of the society, even if burdened with imposed obligations
3.
Sistan
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Sīstān, known in ancient times as Sakastan, is a historical and geographical region in present-day eastern Iran, southern Afghanistan, and the Nok Kundi region of Balochistan. Sistan derives its name from Sakastan, the Sakas were a Scythian tribe which from the 2nd century BC to the 1st century migrated to the Iranian Plateau and India, where they carved a kingdom known as the Indo-Scythian Kingdom. In the Bundahishn, a Zoroastrian scripture written in Pahlavi, the province is called Seyansih, after the Arab conquest of Iran, the province became known as Sijistan/Sistan. The more ancient Old Persian name of the region - prior to Saka dominance - was zaranka and this older form is also the root of the name Zaranj, capital of the Afghan Nimruz Province. Encyclopædia Iranica says The name of the country and its inhabitants is first attested as Old Persian z-r-k in the great Bīsotūn inscription of Darius I, in the Shahnameh, Sistan is also referred to as Zabulistan, after the region in the eastern part of Iran. In Ferdowsis epic, Zabulistan is in turn described to be the homeland of the mythological hero Rostam, in prehistoric times, the Jiroft Civilization covered parts of Sistan and Kerman Province. Later the area was occupied by Aryan tribes related to the Indo-Aryans, eventually a kingdom known as Arachosia was formed, parts of which were ruled by the Medean Empire by 600 BC. The Medes were overthrown by the Achaemenid Persian Empire in 550 BC, in the 4rd century BC, Macedonian king Alexander the Great annexed the region during his conquest of the Persian Empire and founded the colony of Alexandria in Arachosia. Alexanders Empire fragmented after his death, and Arachosia came under control of the Seleucid Empire, after the fall of the Mauryans, the region fell to their Greco-Bactrian allies in 180 BC, before breaking away and becoming part of the Indo-Greek Kingdom. Indo-Parthian king Gondophares was leader of Sistan around c, 20–10 BCE as it was part of the Indo-Parthian Kingdom which was also called Gedrosia, its Hellenistic name. After the mid 2nd century BC, much of the Indo-Greek Kingdom was overrun by tribes known as the Indo-Scythians or Saka, from which Sistan eventually derived its name. The Kushans were defeated by the Sassanid Persian Empire in the mid 3rd century, first becoming part of a vassal Kushansha state, Sassanid armies reconquered Sistan in by 565 AD, but lost the area to the Arab Rashidun Caliphate after the mid 640s. The province was formed in ca, shapurs son Narseh was the first to appointed as the governor of province, which he would govern until 271, when the Sasanian prince Hormizd was appointed as the new governor. 281, Hormizd revolted against his cousin Bahram II, during the revolt, the people of Sakastan was one of his supporters. Nevertheless, Bahram II managed to suppress the revolt in 283, during his early reign, Shapur II appointed his brother Shapur Sakanshah as the governor of Sakastan. Peroz I, during his reign, put an end to dynastic rule in province by appointing a Karenid as its governor. The reason behind the appointment was to further family conflict in the province. During the Muslim conquest of Persia, the last Sasanian king Yazdegerd III fled to Sakastan in the mid-640s, however, Yazdegerd III quickly ended this support when he demanded tax money that he had failed to pay
4.
Scythia Minor
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The earliest description of the region is found in Herodotus, who identified as Scythia the region starting north of the Danube delta. During later times, the area also witnessed Celtic and Scythian invasions and it was part of the kingdom of Dacia for a period, after which the region was conquered by the Roman Empire, becoming part of the province of Moesia Inferior. With Diocletians reforms, it was split from Moesia as a province of Scythia. After the partition of the Empire in 395, the province was retained by the Byzantine Empire and it maintained the name Scythia Minor, until the regions loss during the early 7th century to the migrating Slavs and Bulgars. After that, the name fell out of use. An ancient episcopal see of the late Roman province of Scythia Minor is included in the list of titular sees in the Annuario Pontificio, defensive strategies and cross border policies. Integration of the Lower Danube area in the Roman civilization Dicţionar de istorie veche a României Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică, pp. 536–537
5.
Alania
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Its capital was Maghas, and it controlled a vital trade route through the Darial Pass. The Alans originated as an Iranian-speaking subdivision of the Sarmatians and they were split by the invasion of the Huns into two parts, the European and the Caucasian. The Caucasian Alans occupied part of the North Caucasian plain and the foothills of the mountain chain from the headwaters of the Kuban River in the west to the Darial Gorge in the east. Alania was an important buffer state during the Byzantine-Arab Wars and Khazar-Arab Wars of the 8th century, theophanes the Confessor left a detailed account of Leo the Isaurians mission to Alania in the early 8th century. Leo was instructed by Emperor Justinian II to bribe the Alan leader Itaxes into severing his ancient friendship with the Kingdom of Abkhazia which had allied itself with Caliph Al-Walid I. He crossed the passes and concluded an alliance with the Alans. Although the Abkhazians spared no expense to have him imprisoned, the Alans refused to convey the Byzantine envoy to his enemies, after several months of adventures in the Northern Caucasus, Leo extricated himself from the precarious situation and returned to Constantinople. After Leo assumed the title, the land of his mountaineer allies was invaded by Umar IIs forces. A Khazar chieftain, Barjik, hastened to their succor and, in 722, the Khazars erected Skhimar and several other strongholds in Alania at this period. In 728 Maslamah ibn Abd al-Malik, having penetrated the Gate of the Alans, eight years later, Marwan ibn Muhammad passed by the Gate in order to ravage the forts in Alania. In 758, as Ibn al-Faqih reports, the Gate was held by another Arab general, as a result of their united stand against the successive waves of invaders from the south, the Alans of the Caucasus fell under the overlordship of the Khazar Khaganate. They remained staunch allies of the Khazars in the 9th century, according to the anonymous author of the Schechter Letter, many Alans were during this period adherents of Judaism. However, in the early 10th century, the Alans fell under the influence of the Byzantine Empire, the conversion is documented in the letters of Patriarch Nicholas Mysticus to the local archbishop, whose name was Peter. When Ibn Rustah visited Alania at some point between 903 and 913, its king was by then Christian and their king is Christian at heart, but all his people are idolaters. Then you travel for ten days among rivers and woods before arriving at a called the Gate of the Alans. It stands on the top of a mountain at the foot of which there is a road, high mountains surround it and a thousand men from among its inhabitants guard its walls day and night. The Byzantines, who had adopted a foreign policy, involved the Alans in a war against the Khaganate during the reign of the Khazar ruler Aaron II. In this war the Alans were defeated and their king captured, according to Muslim sources such as al-Masudi, the Alans abandoned Christianity and expelled the Byzantine missionaries and clergy roughly contemporaneously with these events
6.
Central Asia
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Central Asia stretches from the Caspian Sea in the west to China in the east and from Afghanistan in the south to Russia in the north. It is also referred to as the -stans as the five countries generally considered to be within the region all have names ending with the Persian suffix -stan. Central Asias five former Soviet republics are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Central Asia has historically been closely tied to its nomadic peoples and the Silk Road. It has acted as a crossroads for the movement of people, goods, the Silk Road connected Muslim lands with the people of Europe, India, and China. This crossroads position has intensified the conflict between tribalism and traditionalism and modernization, in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times, Central Asia was predominantly Iranian, peopled by Eastern Iranian-speaking Bactrians, Sogdians and Chorasmians and the semi-nomadic Scythians and Parthians. Central Asia is sometimes referred to as Turkestan, the idea of Central Asia as a distinct region of the world was introduced in 1843 by the geographer Alexander von Humboldt. The borders of Central Asia are subject to multiple definitions, historically built political geography and geoculture are two significant parameters widely used in the scholarly literature about the definitions of the Central Asia. The most limited definition was the one of the Soviet Union. This definition was also used outside the USSR during this period. However, the Russian culture has two terms, Средняя Азия and Центральная Азия. Since then, this has become the most common definition of Central Asia, the UNESCO general history of Central Asia, written just before the collapse of the USSR, defines the region based on climate and uses far larger borders. An alternative method is to define the region based on ethnicity and these areas include Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, the Turkic regions of southern Siberia, the five republics, and Afghan Turkestan. Afghanistan as a whole, the northern and western areas of Pakistan, the Tibetans and Ladakhi are also included. Insofar, most of the peoples are considered the indigenous peoples of the vast region. Central Asia is a large region of varied geography, including high passes and mountains, vast deserts. The vast steppe areas of Central Asia are considered together with the steppes of Eastern Europe as a geographical zone known as the Eurasian Steppe. Much of the land of Central Asia is too dry or too rugged for farming, the Gobi desert extends from the foot of the Pamirs, 77° E, to the Great Khingan Mountains, 116°–118° E. Central Asia has the following geographic extremes, The worlds northernmost desert, at Buurug Deliin Els, Mongolia, the Northern Hemispheres southernmost permafrost, at Erdenetsogt sum, Mongolia, 46°17′ N
7.
Eastern Europe
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Eastern Europe, also known as East Europe, is the eastern part of the European continent. There is no consensus on the area it covers, partly because the term has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, cultural. There are almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region, a related United Nations paper adds that every assessment of spatial identities is essentially a social and cultural construct. One definition describes Eastern Europe as an entity, the region lying in Europe with main characteristics consisting in Byzantine, Orthodox. Another definition was created during the Cold War and used more or less synonymously with the term Eastern Bloc, a similar definition names the formerly communist European states outside the Soviet Union as Eastern Europe. Historians and social scientists generally view such definitions as outdated or relegating, several definitions of Eastern Europe exist today, but they often lack precision or are extremely general. These definitions vary both across cultures and among experts, even scientists, recently becoming more and more imprecise. The Ural Mountains, Ural River, and the Caucasus Mountains are the land border of the eastern edge of Europe. Eurovoc, a multilingual thesaurus maintained by the Publications Office of the European Union, provides entries for 23 EU languages, of these, those in italics are classified as Eastern Europe in this source. Other official web-pages of the European Union classify some of the countries as strictly Central European. The East–West Schism is the break of communion and theology between what are now the Eastern and Western churches which began in the 11th century and lasts until this very day and it divided Christianity in Europe, and consequently the world, into Western Christianity and Eastern Christianity. Since the Great Schism of 1054, Europe has been divided between Roman Catholic and Protestant churches in the West, and the Eastern Orthodox Christian churches in the east, due to this religious cleavage, Eastern Orthodox countries are often associated with Eastern Europe. A cleavage of this sort is, however, often problematic, for example, Greece is overwhelmingly Orthodox, the fall of the Iron Curtain brought the end of the East–West division in Europe, but this geopolitical concept is sometimes still used for quick reference by the media. The Baltic states have seats in the Nordic Council as observer states and they also are members of the Nordic-Baltic Eight whereas Eastern European countries formed their own alliance called the Visegrád Group. Estonia Latvia Lithuania The Caucasus nations may be included in the definitions of Eastern Europe, the extent of their geographic or political affiliation with Europe varies by country and source. All three states are members of the European Unions Eastern Partnership program and the Euronest Parliamentary Assembly, on 12 January 2002, the European Parliament noted that Armenia and Georgia may enter the EU in the future. Georgia — in modern geography, Georgia has been classified as part of Eastern Europe. Under the European Union’s geographic criteria, Georgia is viewed as part of Eastern Europe and is the only Caucasus country to be actively seeking EU membership and it is a member of Council of Europe and Eurocontrol
8.
Scythians
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The Scythian languages belonged to the Eastern branch of the Iranian languages. Ancient Greek historians spoke of Scythians who lived north of the Black Sea, Persians used the term Saka, for approximately the same people who lived further east. Although the ancients did not clearly distinguish the two terms, modern scholars usually use Saka to refer to Iranian-speaking tribes who inhabited the central steppe, the Chinese used the term Sai, for Sakas who had moved into the Tarim Basin. Assyrian sources speak of Iskuzai or Askuzai south of the Caucasus who were probably Scythians, the relationships between the peoples living in these widely separated regions remains unclear. Their westernmost territories during the Iron Age were known to classical Greek sources as Scythia, the Scythians were among the earliest peoples to master mounted warfare. In the 8th century BC they possibly raided Zhou China, soon after they expanded westwards and dislodged the Cimmerians from power on the Pontic Steppe. Based in what is modern-day Ukraine, Southern European Russia, and Crimea, the Scythians established and controlled a vast trade network connecting Greece, Persia, India and China, perhaps contributing to the contemporary flourishing of those civilizations. Settled metalworkers made portable decorative objects for the Scythians and these objects survive mainly in metal, forming a distinctive Scythian art. In the 7th century BC the Scythians crossed the Caucasus and frequently raided the Middle East along with the Cimmerians, around 650–630 BC, Scythians briefly dominated the Medes of the western Iranian Plateau, stretching their power all the way to the borders of Egypt. After losing control over Media the Scythians continued intervening in Middle Eastern affairs, the Scythians subsequently engaged in frequent conflicts with the Achaemenid Empire. The western Scythians suffered a defeat against Macedonia in the 4th century BC, and were subsequently gradually conquered by the Sarmatians. In Eastern Europe, by the early Medieval Ages, the Scythians, Scythians kept herds of horses, cattle, and sheep, lived in tent-covered wagons, and fought with bows and arrows on horseback. They developed a culture characterized by opulent tombs, fine metalwork. Sulimirski views the Histories of Herodotus as the most important literary source relating to ancient Scyths, Herodotus provides a depiction that can be related to the results of archaeological research, but apparently knew little of the eastern part of Scythia. He did say that the ancient Persians called all the Scyths Σάκαι and their principal tribe, the Royal Scyths, ruled the vast lands occupied by the nation as a whole, calling themselves Σκώλοτοι. The restored Scythian name is *Skuda, which among the Pontic or Royal Scythians became *Skula, in which the d has been regularly replaced by an l. Saka, on the hand, Szemerényi relates to an Iranian verbal root, sak-, go, roam. The name does appear somewhat further east than the Achaemenid Empire, whether they adopted the Achaemenid name, or Saka came to be an endonym, it is not clear
9.
Alans
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The Alans were an Iranian nomadic pastoral people of antiquity. The name Alan is an Iranian dialectical form of Aryan, a common self-designation of the Indo-Iranians, possibly related to the Massagetae, the Alans have been connected by modern historians with the Central Asian Yancai and Aorsi of Chinese and Roman sources, respectively. Having migrated westwards and become dominant among the Sarmatians on the Pontic Steppe, at the time they had settled the region north of the Black Sea, and frequently raided the Parthian Empire and the Caucasian provinces of the Roman Empire. In 215–250 AD their power on the Pontic Steppe was broken by the Goths, upon the Hunnic defeat of the Goths on the Pontic Steppe around 375 AD, many of the Alans migrated westwards along with various Germanic tribes. They crossed the Rhine in 406 AD along with the Vandals and Suebi, settling in Orléans, around 409 AD they joined the Vandals and Suebi in the crossing of the Pyrenees into the Iberian Peninsula, settling in Lusitania and Carthaginiensis. The Iberian Alans were soundly defeated by the Visigoths 418 AD, the Alans who remained under Hunnic rule founded a powerful kingdom in the North Caucasus in the Middle Ages, which ended with the Mongol invasions in the 13th century AD. These Alans are said to be the ancestors of the modern Ossetians, the Alans spoke an Eastern Iranian language which derived from Scytho-Sarmatian and which in turn evolved into modern Ossetian. The various forms of Alan – Greek, Ἀλανοί Alanoi, Chinese, 阿蘭聊 Alanliao in the 2nd century, 阿蘭 Alan in the 3rd century – and Iron and later Alanguo are derived from Iranian dialectal forms of Aryan. These and other variants of Aryan were common self-designations of the Indo-Iranians, scarcer spellings include Alauni or Halani. The Alans were also known over the course of their history by another group of related names including the variations Asi, As and it is this name that is the root of the modern Ossetian. The first mentions of names that historians link with the Alani appear at almost the time in texts from the Mediterranean, Middle East. In the 1st century AD, the Alans migrated westwards from Central Asia, the Alans are mentioned in the Vologeses inscription which reads that Vologeses I, the Parthian king c. 51–78 AD, in the 11th year of his reign, battled Kuluk, the contemporary Jewish historian, Josephus supplements this inscription. Now there was a nation of the Alans, which we have formerly mentioned somewhere as being Scythians and these Alans therefore plundered the country without opposition, and with great ease, and proceeded as far as Armenia, laying waste all before them. The fact that the Alans invaded Parthia through Hyrcania shows that at the time many Alans were still based north-east of the Caspian Sea, by the early 2nd century AD the Alans were in firm control of the Lower Volga and Kuban. These lands had earlier occupied by the Aorsi and the Siraces. It is likely that the Alans influence stretched further westwards, encompassing most of the Sarmatian world, in 135 AD, the Alans made a huge raid into Asia Minor via the Caucasus, ravaging Media and Armenia. They were eventually driven back by Arrian, the governor of Cappadocia, in 215–250 AD, the Germanic Goths expanded south-eastwards and broke the Alan dominance on the Pontic Steppe
10.
Classical antiquity
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It is the period in which Greek and Roman society flourished and wielded great influence throughout Europe, North Africa and Southwestern Asia. Conventionally, it is taken to begin with the earliest-recorded Epic Greek poetry of Homer, and continues through the emergence of Christianity and it ends with the dissolution of classical culture at the close of Late Antiquity, blending into the Early Middle Ages. Such a wide sampling of history and territory covers many disparate cultures, Classical antiquity may refer also to an idealised vision among later people of what was, in Edgar Allan Poes words, the glory that was Greece, and the grandeur that was Rome. The culture of the ancient Greeks, together with influences from the ancient Near East, was the basis of art, philosophy, society. The earliest period of classical antiquity takes place before the background of gradual re-appearance of historical sources following the Bronze Age collapse, the 8th and 7th centuries BC are still largely proto-historical, with the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions appearing in the first half of the 8th century. Homer is usually assumed to have lived in the 8th or 7th century BC, in the same period falls the traditional date for the establishment of the Ancient Olympic Games, in 776 BC. The Phoenicians originally expanded from Canaan ports, by the 8th century dominating trade in the Mediterranean, carthage was founded in 814 BC, and the Carthaginians by 700 BC had firmly established strongholds in Sicily, Italy and Sardinia, which created conflicts of interest with Etruria. The Etruscans had established control in the region by the late 7th century BC, forming the aristocratic. According to legend, Rome was founded on April 21,753 BC by twin descendants of the Trojan prince Aeneas, Romulus and Remus. As the city was bereft of women, legend says that the Latins invited the Sabines to a festival and stole their unmarried maidens, leading to the integration of the Latins and the Sabines. Archaeological evidence indeed shows first traces of settlement at the Roman Forum in the mid-8th century BC, the seventh and final king of Rome was Tarquinius Superbus. As the son of Tarquinius Priscus and the son-in-law of Servius Tullius, Superbus was of Etruscan birth and it was during his reign that the Etruscans reached their apex of power. Superbus removed and destroyed all the Sabine shrines and altars from the Tarpeian Rock, the people came to object to his rule when he failed to recognize the rape of Lucretia, a patrician Roman, at the hands of his own son. Lucretias kinsman, Lucius Junius Brutus, summoned the Senate and had Superbus, after Superbus expulsion, the Senate voted to never again allow the rule of a king and reformed Rome into a republican government in 509 BC. In fact the Latin word Rex meaning King became a dirty and hated throughout the Republic. In 510, Spartan troops helped the Athenians overthrow the tyrant Hippias, cleomenes I, king of Sparta, put in place a pro-Spartan oligarchy conducted by Isagoras. Greece entered the 4th century under Spartan hegemony, but by 395 BC the Spartan rulers removed Lysander from office, and Sparta lost her naval supremacy. Athens, Argos, Thebes and Corinth, the two of which were formerly Spartan allies, challenged Spartan dominance in the Corinthian War, which ended inconclusively in 387 BC
11.
Late antiquity
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Late antiquity is a periodization used by historians to describe the time of transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages in mainland Europe, the Mediterranean world, and the Near East. The development of the periodization has generally been accredited to historian Peter Brown, precise boundaries for the period are a continuing matter of debate, but Brown proposes a period between the 3rd and 8th centuries AD. Generally, it can be thought of as from the end of the Roman Empires Crisis of the Third Century to, in the East, the early Islamic period, following the Muslim conquests in the mid–7th century. In the West the end was earlier, with the start of the Early Medieval period typically placed in the 6th century, beginning with Constantine the Great, Christianity was made legal in the Empire, and a new capital was founded at Constantinople. The resultant cultural fusion of Greco-Roman, Germanic and Christian traditions formed the foundations of the subsequent culture of Europe, the term Spätantike, literally late antiquity, has been used by German-speaking historians since its popularization by Alois Riegl in the early 20th century. Concurrently, some migrating Germanic tribes such as the Ostrogoths and Visigoths saw themselves as perpetuating the Roman tradition, Constantine confirmed the legalization of the religion through the so-called Edict of Milan in 313, jointly issued with his rival in the East, Licinius. Monasticism was not the only new Christian movement to appear in Late Antiquity, notable in this regard is the topic of the Fifty Bibles of Constantine. Within the recently legitimized Christian community of the 4th century, a division could be distinctly seen between the laity and an increasingly celibate male leadership. Celibate and detached, the clergy became an elite equal in prestige to urban notables. The Late Antique period also saw a transformation of the political and social basis of life in. The later Roman Empire was in a sense a network of cities, archaeology now supplements literary sources to document the transformation followed by collapse of cities in the Mediterranean basin. Burials within the urban precincts mark another stage in dissolution of traditional urbanistic discipline, overpowered by the attraction of saintly shrines, in Roman Britain, the typical 4th- and 5th-century layer of black earth within cities seems to be a result of increased gardening in formerly urban spaces. A similar though less marked decline in population occurred later in Constantinople. In Europe there was also a decline in urban populations. As a whole, the period of antiquity was accompanied by an overall population decline in almost all Europe. Long-distance markets disappeared, and there was a reversion to a degree of local production and consumption, rather than webs of commerce. The degree and extent of discontinuity in the cities of the Greek East is a moot subject among historians. In the western Mediterranean, the new cities known to be founded in Europe between the 5th and 8th centuries were the four or five Visigothic victory cities
12.
Language family
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A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. Linguists therefore describe the languages within a language family as being genetically related. Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, depending on the precision of ones definition of language, the 2013 edition of Ethnologue catalogs just over 7,000 living human languages. A living language is one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficiently studied to be classified. Membership of languages in a family is established by comparative linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a genetic or genealogical relationship, speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, individuals belonging to other speech communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift process. Genealogically related languages present shared retentions, that is, features of the proto-language that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing, for example, Germanic languages are Germanic in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic, language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, conventionally referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram. A family is a unit, all its members derive from a common ancestor. Some taxonomists restrict the term family to a level. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups, a top-level family is often called a phylum or stock. The closer the branches are to other, the closer the languages will be related. For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, there is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of the phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically as opposed to horizontally. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations, thus, different sources give sometimes wildly different accounts of the number of languages within a family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one language to nearly twenty, most of the worlds languages are known to be related to others
13.
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
14.
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
15.
Iranian languages
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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
16.
Saka language
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Saka or Sakan is a variety of Eastern Iranian languages, attested from the ancient Buddhist kingdoms of Khotan, Kashgar and Tumshuq in the Tarim Basin, in what is now southern Xinjiang, China. It is a Middle Iranian language, the two kingdoms differed in dialect, their speech known as Khotanese and Tumshuqese. Documents on wood and paper were written in modified Brahmi script with the addition of characters over time. The documents date from the fourth to the eleventh century, Tumshuqese was more archaic than Khotanese, but it is much less understood because it appears in fewer manuscripts compared to Khotanese. Both dialects share features with modern Pashto and Wakhi, the language was known as Hvatanai in contemporary documents. Many Prakrit terms were borrowed from Khotanese into the Tocharian languages, the two known dialects of Saka are associated with a movement of the Scythians. The Saka language became extinct after invading Turkic Muslims conquered the Kingdom of Khotan in the Islamicisation and Turkicisation of Xinjiang, in the 11th century, it was remarked by Mahmud al-Kashgari that the people of Khotan still have their own language and script and did not know Turkic well. According to Kashgari some non-Turkic languages like the Kanchaki and Soghdian were still used in some areas and it is believed that the Saka language group was what Kanchaki belonged to. It is believed that the Tarim Basin became linguistically Turkified by the end of the 11th century, Khotanese and Tumshuqese are closely related Eastern Iranian languages. Other than an inscription from Issyk kurgan that it is identified as Khotanese. Khotanese is attested from over 2,300 texts preserved among the Dunhuang manuscripts and these were deciphered by Harold Walter Bailey. The earliest texts, from the century, are mostly religious documents. There were several viharas in the Kingdom of Khotan and Buddhist translations are common at all periods of the documents, there are many reports to the royal court which are of historical importance, as well as private documents. An example of a document is Or. 6400/2.3, international Dunhuang Project A Turkish-Khotanese Vocabulary H. W. Bailey Bulletin of the. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 11, Bailey, H W Dictionary of Khotan Saka, Cambridge University Press Encyclopædia Iranica Iranian Languages http, //www. iranicaonline. org/articles/central-asia-xiii Emmerick, R. E. & Pulleyblank, E. G. A Chinese text in Central Asian Brahmi script, new evidence for the pronunciation of Late Middle Chinese and Khotanese, roma, Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente. History of civilizations of Central Asia
17.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
18.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
19.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
20.
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
21.
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
22.
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
23.
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
24.
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
25.
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
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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
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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
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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
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Italic languages
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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
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Romance languages
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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
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Anatolian languages
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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
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Tocharian languages
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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
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Dacian language
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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
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Illyrian languages
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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
35.
Liburnian language
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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
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Messapian language
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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
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Phrygian language
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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
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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
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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
