Família de História Inglesa

What is the ‘Indo-European’ language family? What evidence is used to show the relations between Indo-European languages?

From a long time some people and researchers ask the same question. Why do we have such similar words or even the same words as the other countries, when we are so far away from each other?  Well, people usually find these similarities, in sounds, in meanings, in words, or in grammar in the types of construction and tense systems. And why do you find it? Well, you can take as a reason for this, your biological nature. You can use your vocal organs as way of referring same range of phonemes for a language to select from. You also can use your human perception and brain so you can have same basic things to have words to refer to.

But however you don’t have only your biological nature, you also have culture, and these two categories are different. In culture the relation between a sound and a meaning is arbitrary. Taking as example, in Portuguese ‘cat’ is ‘gato’ and ‘chicken’ is ‘galinha’. So these words aren’t even similar in sound but have the same meaning.

There are other possible reasons for this ‘similar’ factor, and one of them is borrowing words from one language to another. Taking as an example for this, in history of English, we learned that Anglo Saxon or Old English and Norman French were spoken in England, and one of the factors for that was the Norman Conquest, so with this some borrowed words were ‘beef’, ‘pork’, ‘mutton’, ‘pigeon’.

Other reason is that languages have a common historical origin and have since diverged, and that explains quite a little why there are similarities in different geographically places.

With so many languages with similar sounds or meaning we had to have a definition for it, and it was Indo-European languages.

Indo-European languages are a family of languages that are today widely spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of Southwest and South Asia. The languages ‘Portuguese’, ‘French’, ‘Spanish’, and ‘Italian’ are languages that are descended from Latin, but it is also said that common features, especially common words, shared by many of the languages used in Europe, India, and Asia, led scholars to believe that these languages may have developed from the same source, saying that ‘Indo-European languages are believed to derive from a hypothetical language known as Proto-Indo-European, which is no longer spoken.’ (Violatti C., 2014). Proto-Indo-European language is said to be a hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages.

Indo-European languages have a large number of branches, ten main branches to be more precise. Consisting in these branches there are the Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Greek, Italic, Germanic, Armenian, Tocharian, Celtic, Balto-Slavic and Albanian languages.

Anatolian language was predominant in Asian Turkey and northern Syria, now this language is extinct but it was spoken during the first and second millennia BCE. The most predominant and official language in Anatolian language was Hittite that appeared in the second millennium.

Indo-Iranian language is divided into two other sub-branches that are Indic and Iranian. Today these languages still live, being predominant in India, Iran and Pakistan. Sanskrit that is the language belonging to the sub-branch Indic, is one of the best well known and early language of this branch. In the other sub-branch, Iranian, Avestan is the language that makes part of this group, and can be considered ‘sister’ from Sanskit. Today in India and Pakistan, many Indic languages are spoken such as Hindi-Urdo or Punjabi.

Greek instead of being a branch of languages, Greek as numerous dialects but despite its numerous dialects has always been a single language throughout its history. It has been spoken in Greece since at least 1600 BCE and, in all probability, since the end of the 3rd millennium BCE, and Attic was the most standard literacy language during that Classical Period.

In Italic the principal language is Latin, that as its origins in the City of Rome, but although this branch being predominant in the Italian peninsula, the people weren’t Italian natives.

Since Latin was growing in Rome he got more known and became a romance language, and there were great authors who used this language such as Cicero and Marcus Aurelius.

Germanic is divided into three branches, one of these branches is already extinct and it is the East Germanic that had as a principal language, Gothic. The second one is North Germanic that had the ancestor of all modern Scandinavian languages, Old Norse, and as third one, the West Germanic that contained Old English, Old Saxon and Old High German.

Armenian like Greek is a single language where speakers of Armenian are recorded as being in what now constitutes eastern Turkey and Armenia as early as the 6th century BCE, but the oldest Armenian texts date from the 5th century BCE. The Persian domination had a strong linguistic impact on Armenian, which mislead many scholars in the past to believe that Armenian actually belonged to the Iranian group.

The now extinct Tocharian languages were spoken in the Tarim Basin more known as north-western China during the first millennium CE. Two different languages belong to this branch, Tocharian A and Tocharian B. In the first one, it was only been found in places where Tocharian B documents have also been found, which would suggest that Tocharian A was already extinct, kept alive only as a religious or poetic language, while Tocharian B was the living language used for administrative purposes. This branch is completely extinct. Among all ancient Indo-European languages, Tocharian was spoken farthest to the east.