The Origin of the English Language - Part V

 Language Families of the World

Language Family

• a group of languages related by a common origin;
• members of a family are said to be cognate languages (Latin co-gnatus 'born together');

• INDO-EUROPEAN, examples: English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Latin, Greek, Hindi, Sanskrit;
• URALO-ALTAIC
• URALIC (Finno-Ugric), examples: Finnish, Estonian, Lapp, Hungarian;
• ALTAIC, examples: Turkish, Manchu and Mongolian (in northern Asia);
• BASQUE, only one language, Basque (in northern Spain), in this family;
• CAUCASIAN:
• NORTHERN CAUCASIAN: Circassian, Abkhasian, Chechen/Chechnian, Avarian;
• SOUTHERN CAUCASIAN: Georgian;
• ETRUSCAN, only one language, Etruscan (now extinct but once spoken in northern Italy), in this family;
• HAMITO-SEMITIC (Afro-Asiatic), examples: Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, Tuareg, Somali, Coptic, Ancient Egyptian;
• NIGER-CONGO (spoken in central, southern, and southeastern Africa);
• BANTU, examples: Swahili (in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Burundi, etc), Zulu (in parts of South Africa);
• KWA, examples: Yoruba (in Nigeria), Ewe (in Ghana) Ibo (in Togo);
• KHOISAN (spoken in southwestern Africa), examples: Kxoe (Black Bushman), !O!ung, Nama (Hottentot);
• SINO-TIBETAN, examples: Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, Burmese;
• JAPANESE, examples: Standard Japanese, Okinawan;
• KOREAN, examples: Standard Korean;
• DRAVIDIAN (spoken in southern India), examples: Tamil, Telugu;
• MON-KHMER, examples: Cambodian, Vietnamese;
• TAI, examples: Thai, Lao;
• AUSTRALIAN ABORIGINE, examples: Mabuiag, Warumungu, Gooniyandi;
• PAPUAN (in Papua New Guinea), examples: Buin, Nasioi;
• MALAYO-POLYNESIAN (Austronesian): Malagasy, Indonesian, Javanese, Malay, Tagalog, Maori, Samoan, Hawaiian;
• NATIVE AMERICAN (many different and seemingly unrelated families):
• ESKIMO-ALEUT, examples: Inuit
• ATHABASCAN, examples: Navajo, Apache
• ALGONQUIAN, examples: Abnaki, Delaware, Cree, Ojibwa, Cheyenne, Blackfoot
• IROQUOIS, examples: Mohawk, Oneida, Seneca, Cherokee, Tuscarora
• MUSKOGEAN, examples: Seminole, Choctaw
• SIOUAN, examples: Dakota, Crow, Winnebago
• UTO-AZTECAN, examples: Hopi, Shoshone, Nahuatl
• MAYAN, examples: Mayan, Quiché, Yucatec
• QUECHUA, examples: Quechua (in parts of Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina)
• ARAWAK, examples: Arawak (in Surinam and Guyana)
• CARIB (in parts of Venezuela, Brazil, Surinam, Guyana, French Guiana), examples: Carib (in Venezuela), Wayana (in Surinam)
• TUPI-GUARANI, examples: Guarani (in parts of Paraguay, Argentina)

 

INDO-EUROPEAN AND THE INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

INDO-EUROPEAN HYPOTHESIS

Sir William Jones, 1786, hypothesis that most European languages and others (in India, parts of the Middle East, and Asia) are cognates (are related, as a family, by common origins) notion of a common ancestor language, the Indo-European language, which was the origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Latin, Greek, Romance, Germanic and Celtic languages, and othersdevelopment of Indo-European theory in the early 19th century:

• Franz Bopp (1816), comparisons of verbal systems
• 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.

Aspects of Kurgan culture: 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 honeybased alcoholic beverage, mead; multiple gods (worship of sky/thunder, sun, horse, boar, snake), belief in life after death, elaborate burials (Reference: Marija 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)

 

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE

Proto-Indo-European or Common Indo-European (CIE): spoken around 5000-3000 BC in areas of Eastern Europe/Western Asia

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 bodily 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 Indo-European "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], [ɛ], [i], [ɔ], [u], [ə]

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, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative, and instrumental.

     · 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

Hypothetical declension of Indo-European word KWON ("dog") (ancestor of Modern English "canine" and Latin "canis")

Nominative: kwon
Accusative: kwónm
Genitive: kunés

If the Indo-European verb "gwhenti" is the third person singular present of "to kill," what is the meaning of the following expressions:

kwon gwhenti ekwom

ekwom gwhenti kwon

gwhenti kwon ekwom

kwon ekwom gwhenti

How about:

ekwos gwhenti kwónm

gwhenti ekwos kwónm

kwónm gwhenti ekwos

If the Indo-European noun "pastrom" meant "shepherd,"and if we assume something like "pastres" was its genitive case, what is the meaning of:

pastres kwon

pastres ekwos

kunés pastrom

pastrom kunés

ekwos gwhenti pastres kwónm

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

FROM COMMON INDO-EUROPEAN TO GERMANIC

Transition from Common Indo-European (CIE) (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
• Grimm's Law (Jakob Grimm, 1822):
• Indo-European voiceless stops (p, t, k) became Germanic voiceless fricatives (f, th, h):
• Indo-European pœter, 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 grœno, 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)
• Verner's Law (Karl Verner, 1877)
• 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 kmtóm, English hundred (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin centum)
  §  Indo-European pœtér, Germanic (Old English) fæder (contrast with non-Germanic: Latin pater) 
  §  Indo-European snusós ("daughter-in-law), Old English snoru (contrast with non-Germanic: Sanskrit snusá)

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 Indo-European 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
• tense/aspect: change from six aspects to only two tenses, present and preterit
• mood: retained indicative and imperative and fused subjunctive, injunctive and optative
• seven verb classes in Indo-European (distinguished by their vowel changes) were retained in Germanic
• 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.