Language Families and Indo-European

language family

• cognate languages

Stammbaum vs. Wellentheorie

native vs. loanwords

dialects

World Language Families

• Indo-European
• Uralo-Altaic
  • Finno-Ugric (Uralic): Finnish, Estonian, Lapp, Hungarian
  • Altaic: Turkish, Northern Asian languages (Manchu, Mongolian)
• Basque (unknown family)
• Northern Caucasian: Circassian, Abkhasian, Chechenian, Avarian
• Southern Caucasian: Georgian
• Etruscan (extinct; unknown family)
• Hamito-Semitic (Afro-Asiatic): Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, Somali, Coptic, Ancient Egyptian
• Niger-Congo: Yoruba, Ibo, Ewe, Swahili, Zulu
• Khoisan: Hottentot, Bushman languages
• Sino-Tibetan: Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, Burmese
• Japanese
• Korean
• Dravidian: Tamil, Telugu
• Mon-Khmer: Cambodian, Vietnamese
• Tai: Thai, Lao
• Australian
• Papuan
• Malayo-Polynesian (Austronesian): Malagasy, Indonesian, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, Maori, Samoan, Hawaiian
• American (Pre-European) Families
  • Eskimo-Aleut
  • Athabascan: Navajo, Apache
  • Algonquian: Abnaki, Delaware, Cree, Ojibwa, Cheyenne, Blackfoot
  • Iroquois: Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, Cherokee, Tuscarora
  • Muskogean: Seminole, Choctaw
  • Siouan: Dakota, Crow, Winnebago
  • Uto-Aztecan: Hopi, Shoshone, Nahuatl
  • Mayan: Mayan, Quiché, Yucatec
  • Quechua: Inca
  • Arawak
  • Carib
  • Tupi-Guarani

inflectional languages (e.g. Classical Greek and Latin): inseparable inflections are fused with lexical stems to carry grammatical information

agglutinative languages (e.g. Swahili, Turkish): combine discrete, relatively unchanging grammatical morphemes with lexical stems

isolating languages (e.g. Chinese, Vietnamese): every morpheme is a separate word, individual particles convey grammatical information

Indo-European

Sir William Jones, 1786, hypothesis of lost Indo-European language, ancestor of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Germanic, and Celtic languages; Franz Bopp, 1816, comparisons of verbal systems; Rasmus Rask, notice of systematic phonological changes (1818); A. Schleicher, reconstruction of pre-historic Indo-European forms, Stammbaumtheorie

Common Indo-European: 5000-3000 BC, Eastern Europe/Western Asia, Kurgan culture,

Migrations beginning 3000 BC, in Greece by 2000 BC, northern India by 1500 BC

Subfamilies:

• Indo-Iranian
• Hellenic
• Armenian
• Balto-Slavic
• Albanian
• Celtic
• Italic
• Germanic
• Anatolian
• Tocharian

Transition from Common Indo-European (CIE), 3000 BC to Common Germanic (CGmc), 100 BC:

CIE free, pitch accent vs. CGmc initial syllable, strong stress accent

Consonant Changes from CIE to CGmc

• loss of CIE laryngeal consonants
• First Consonant Shift
  • Grimm's law (Jakob Grimm, 1822): voiceless stops to voiceless fricatives (e.g. Latin pater, English father), voiced stops to voiceless stops (e.g. Latin dentis, English tooth), voiced aspirated stops to voiced stops (Latin hortus, English garden); exceptions to Grimm's law: preservation of voiceless stops after another voiceless stop (e.g. Latin octo, Old English eahta, Present English eight)
  • Verner's Law (Karl Verner, 1877): reversal of Grimm's Law, voiceless stops to voiced stops (when surrounded by voiced sounds and preceded by unaccented vowel), r instead of s; phenomenon explained by Verner as a result of original IE accent falling after consonant in question (e.g. Latin centum, English hundred; Sanskrit snusá, Old English snoru)

Vowels

• Simplification of vowel system (e.g. falling together of 'a' and 'o', tendency for 'i' to replace 'e' in unstressed syllables)
• relative preservation of CIE ablaut system (apophony, vowel gradation): changes in root vowels indicated tense, number, part of speech (cf. English sing, sang, sung); while the position of accent was conditioning factor for a given vowel in CIE, this factor disappeared in the fixed accent situation of the Germanic languages (though the vowel alternations were replaced)

Morphology

IE nouns, adjectives and pronouns inflected for case, number, gender; eight cases:

• nominative: indicating subject
• genitive: indicating possession, source, partition
• dative: indicating indirect object
• accusative: indicating direct object
• ablative: indicating separation or movement away from a source
• instrumental: indicating agency or means
• locative: indicating location
• vocative: indicating person or thing being directly addressed

In Germanic there was a fusion of ablative/locative/instrumental/dative and vocative/nominative; three numbers and genders retained; introduction of weak/strong adjective distinction.

Verbs

IE: verbs had aspect, voice, and mood; six aspects:

• 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)

Gmc: change from aspect to two tenses, present and preterit

IE: three voices: active, passive and middle (reflexive); Gmc lost inflected passive and middle

IE five moods: indicative(fact), subjunctive(will), optative(wish), imperative (command), injunctive (unreality); Gmc retained indicative and imperative and fused subjunctive, injunctive and optative

IE seven verb classes (distinguished by vowels and following consonants); retained in Gmc, added weak verbs (dental preterite verbs)

Syntax

IE flexible word order (tendency to SOV) plus inflections, Gmc retained a relatively free word order, greater use of prepositions to compensate for loss of inflections

Lexicon

inheritance of many basic vocabulary IE words (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), cognates, borrowings from Italic, Celtic and Balto-Slavic languages; Gmc languages: large common unique vocabulary, perhaps borrowed from non-Indo-European languages (e.g. back, blood, body, bone, bride, child, gate, ground, oar, rat, sea, soul); derivative affixes and compounding to create new words