The Indo-European languages are a family (phylum) of several hundred related languages and dialects

including most major current languages of

Europe,
the Iranian plateau, and
South Asia
Anatolia

Written attestations appearing since the Bronze Age

The Centum languages=the western European languages

The Satem languages=the eastern European and Asian languages

Indo-European Languages
Countries with a majority of speakers of one or more Indo-European languages
Countries with one or more Indo-European minority languages with official status

INDO-EUROPEAN AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

INDO-EUROPEAN HYPOTHESIS
In the 16th century, European visitors to India began to suggest similarities between
Indian and European languages. In 1583 Thomas Stephens, an English Jesuit, missionary
in Goa, in a letter to his brother that was not published until the 20th century, noted
similarities between Indian languages, specifically Sanskrit, and Greek and Latin.
Another account to mention the ancient language Sanskrit came from Filippo Sassetti, a
merchant who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he noted some word
similarities between Sanskrit and Italian (these included devah /dio "God", sarpah /serpe
"serpent", sapta/sette "seven", as t a /otto "eight", nava/nove "nine").
In 1647Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhom noted the similarity
among Indo-European languages, and supposed that they derived from a primitive
common language.
Mikhail Lomonosov compared different language groups of the world including Slavic,
Baltic ("Kurlandic"), Iranian (Median language/Medean/Medic) was the language of the
Medes. It is an Old Iranian language. He emphatically expressed the antiquity of the
linguistic stages accessible to comparative method in the drafts for his Russian Grammar
(published 1755)

 The hypothesis reappeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on the striking
similarities between three of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek,
Sanskrit, to which he tentatively added Gothic, Celtic, Persian
Thomas Young in 1813 first used the term Indo-European, which became the standard
scientific term; Most European languages and others (in India, parts of the Middle East,
and Asia) are cognates (are related, as a family, by common origins)
Franz Bopp: systematic comparison of these and other old languages supported the
theory.
o "Indo-European" =Indo-Germanic = defines the family by indicating its
southeastern most and northwestern most branches. In most languages this term is
dated or less common, whereas in German it is still the standard scientific term
o Comparative Grammar, 1833 and 1852, is the beginning of Indo-European studies as
an academic discipline.
o The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics
August Schleicher: 1861 Compendium and
Karl Brugmann: Grundriss (1880)
Ferdinand de Saussure: laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of
"modern" Indo-European

Rasmus Rask (1818) and Jacob Grimm (1822), notice of systematic phonological
changes
A. Schleicher, reconstruction of pre-historic Indo-European forms,
Stammbaumtheorie (tree stem theory)

DESCENDANTS OF THE COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE

Indo-European Language Subfamilies and examples:

Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Persian)

Hellenic (Greek)
Armenian (Western Armenian, Eastern Armenian)
Balto-Slavic (Russian, Polish, Czech, Lithuanian)
Albanian (Gheg, Tosk)
Celtic (Irish Gaelic, Welsh)
Italic (Latin, Spanish, Italian, French)
Germanic (German, English, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian)
Anatolian (extinct) (Hittite)
Tocharian (extinct) (Tocharian A, Tocharian B)

THE ORIGINAL INDO-EUROPEAN PEOPLE

Kurgan culture

It's speculated that the so called Kurgan were the original Indo-European people; lived northwest of the Caucasus, north of the
Caspian Sea, as early as the fifth millennium B.C.
Their language is known by scholars as Common Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European.

domesticated cattle and horses,

farming, herding,
four-wheeled wagons, - mobility,
mound builders, hilltop forts,
complex sense of family relationship and organization;
counting skills; used gold and silver;
drank a honey based alcoholic beverage, mead;
multiple gods (worship of sky/thunder, sun, horse, boar, snake), belief in life after death,
elaborate burials

(Reference: Maria GIMBUTAS, "The Beginning of the Bronze Age in Europe and the Indo-Europeans" 1973)

Descendants of words for trees (ash, apple, oak, linden, aspen, pine), animals (bear, wolf), and other (honey,
snow, cold, winter, father, mother) allow for hypotheses regarding their original homeland and culture.
Beginning around 3000 BC the Indo-European people abandoned their homeland and migrated in a variety
of directions (found in Greece by 2000 BC, in northern India by 1500 BC)

Sources of Knowledge
Foreign sources

BCE Assyrian cuneiform sources

Herodotus mid-5th century BCE second-hand account of the Perso-Median conflict

In the 1st century BCE, Strabo: relationship between the various Iranian peoples and their language which seem to
speak quite the same language

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

Writing
Old Akkadian is preserved on clay tablets dating back to 2600 BC.
It was written using cuneiform, a script adopted from the Sumerians using wedge-shaped symbols pressed in wet clay. As employed
by Akkadian scribes the adapted cuneiform script could represent either
(a)Sumerianlogograms (i.e. picture-based characters representing entire words),

(b) Sumerian syllables,

(c) Akkadian syllables, or
(d) phonetic

Lexicon
Words derived from the Common Indo-European language are preserved in a large number of languages:
numerals from one to ten;
the word meaning the sum of ten tens (Latin "centum," Avestan "satem," English "hundred");

words for certain body parts (heart, lung, head, foot)

words for certain natural phenomena (air, night, star, snow, sun, moon, mind);

certain plant and animal names (beech, corn, wolf, bear);

certain cultural terms (yoke, mead, weave, sew);

monosyllables that pertain to sex and excretion (example: modern English "fart" likely derived from IndoEuropean "perd";
also modern English slang "f" perhaps derived from Indo-European "peig" or "pu" meaning respectively
"hostile, evil-minded" and "to soil, defile")
Phonology
many stops, voiced, voiceless, and aspirated ([bh] [dh])
poor in fricatives (only [s] and [z])
several laryngeal (h-like) consonants (could double as vowels)
nasals [n], [m], and liquids [l] and [r], and glides [y] and [w] (also could double as vowels)

 vowels: [a],

, [i],

, [u],

Morphology
The Common Indo-European language was inflected. It used suffixes and internal (root) vowel changes
(ablaut system) to indicate grammatical information like
case,
number,
tense,
person,
mood, etc.
Nouns
Indo-European nouns were inflected for eight cases:

nominative: subject of a sentence (The soldiers saw me.)

vocative: person addressed (Students, listen!)
accusative: direct object (They bought a car)
genitive: possessor or source (the dog's bone)
dative: indirect object, recipient (She gave the boy a flower)
ablative: what is separated (He abstained from it)
locative: place where (We danced at the bar)

instrumental: means, instrument (She ate with chopsticks)

Example:
Hypothetical declension of Indo-European word EKWOS ("horse") (ancestor of Modern English, "horse,"
Latin: "equus," and Old English, "eoh")
Nominative: ekwos
Accusative: ekwom

Genitive: ekwosyo
Dative: ekwoy

Verbs
Indo-European verbs had six "aspects" (we would call them "tenses"):

present: continuing action in progress (I go)

imperfect: continuing action in the past (I was going)
aorist: momentary action in the past (I went)
perfect: completed action (I have gone)
pluperfect: completed action in the past (I had gone)
future: actions to come (I shall go)

Indo-European had three voices:

active,
passive and
middle (reflexive)

Indo-European had five moods:

indicative(fact),
subjunctive(will),
optative (wish),
imperative (command),
injunctive (unreality)
Indo-European had seven verb classes (distinguished by root vowels and following consonants)
Syntax
Indo-European had a flexible word order, tendency to Subject-Object-Verb (SOV)
Prosody/Accent
Indo-European accent could be on any syllable and was characterized by pitch rather than loudness

INDO-EUROPEAN Language to GERMANIC (around 3000 BC) to Common Germanic (CGmc) (around 100 BC)
One of the oldest records of a Germanic language is a runic inscription identifying the workman who made a horn about A.D. 400.
Transliterated it reads as follows:
ek hlewagastir holtijar horna tawido
Translated, it roughly means:
I, Hlewagastir Holtson, [this] horn made

Prosody:
Indo-European free, pitch accent became strong stress on the initial syllable in Germanic
Phonology

loss of Indo-European laryngeal consonants, articulation shifting higher up in the vocal tract

1. Grimm's Law (Jakob Grimm, 1822):

o

Indo-European voiceless stops (p, t, k) became Germanic voiceless fricatives (f, th, h):
Indo-European pter, Germanic (English) father (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin
pater)
Indo-European treyes, Germanic (English) three (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin tres)
Indo-European kerd, Germanic (English) heart, (compare with non-Germanic: Latin cord)
Indo-European voiced stops (b, d, g) became Germanic voiceless stops (p, t, k):
Indo-European abel, Germanic (English) apple (contrast with non-Germanic: Russian
jabloko)
Indo-European dent, Germanic (English) tooth (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin dentis)
Indo-European grno, Germanic (English) corn (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin
granum)
voiced aspirated stops(bh, dh, gh) to voiced stops (b, d, g):
Indo-European bhrater, Germanic (English) brother (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin
frater)

2.

Verner's Law (Karl Verner, 1877)

o explanation of an exception to Grimm's Law, sometimes Indo-European voiceless stops (p, t, k )
became Germanic voiced stops (b, d, g) when surrounded by voiced sounds and preceded by
unaccented syllable or accent falling after the consonant in question), also; s became r;
phenomenon explained by Verner as a result of original IE accent falling after consonant in
question:
Indo-European kmtm, English hundred (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin centum)
Indo-European ptr, Germanic (Old English) fder (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin
pater)
Indo-European snuss ("daughter-in-law), Old English snoru (contrast with nonGermanic: Sanskrit snus)

Morphology

Relative preservation of Indo-European ablaut system (also known as apophony or vowel gradation):
changes in root vowels indicated tense, number, part of speech (English sing, sang, sung is a survival of
this system). The stability of this system was however undermined because the position of the IndoEuropean accent was a conditioning factor for the vowel changes and the accent/stress became fixed in
the Germanic languages.

Simplification of the case system: In Germanic there was a fusion of

ablative/locative/instrumental/dative and vocative/nominative; three numbers and genders retained
The deterioration of the case system (i.e. inflectional suffixes) is related to the initial-syllable stress
patterns of Germanic (final syllables became unstressed or weakly stressed and lost their distinctness).
Verbs
o tense/aspect: change from six aspects to only two tenses, present and preterit
o mood: retained indicative and imperative and fused subjunctive, injunctive and optative
o seven verb classes in Indo-European (distinguished by their vowel changes) were retained in
Germanic
o Germanic added weak verbs (also called dental preterite verbs), featuring a dental sound [d] at
the end of a verb to indicate past tense (the ancestor of our regular past tenses: e.g. walk,
walked)

Syntax

Germanic retained a relatively free word order, but made greater use of prepositions to compensate
for the loss of inflections

Lexicon

Germanic inheritance of many basic words of the Indo-European vocabulary (e.g. cold, winter, honey,
wolf, snow, beech, pine, father, mother, sun, tree, long, red, foot, head, and verbs such as be, eat, lie) and
forms for grammatical concepts (negation, interrogation)
borrowings from Italic, Celtic and Balto-Slavic languages
large common and unique vocabulary of the Germanic languages (not present in other Indo-European
languages and perhaps borrowed from non-Indo-European languages) (e.g. back, blood, body, bone,
bride, child, gate, ground, oar, rat, sea, soul)
extensive use derivative affixes and compounding to create new words

West Germanic languages

Dutch (Low Franconian, West Germanic)
Low German (West Germanic)
Central German (High German, West Germanic)
Upper German (High German, West Germanic)

OLD ENGLISH

Old English was spoken in western Britain and southern Scotland until approximately the end of the 11th
century, when it began to evolve into Middle English. At about the same time the Scots language began to
diverge from Old English and eventually became established as a separate language.

English = West Germanic language

heavy influence from Old Norse, Old French, and Romance languages
widely spoken around the world due to previous British exploration and colonization and later
American expansion and cultural influence, including the internet
spoken as a first language by more than 300 million people and as a second language by more than 500
million
in European countries the rate of fluency in English is high