The summary provides an in-depth description and analysis of the sound systems of every Indo-European family branch. Key historical facts are explored that lead to the evolution of the languages, when and where were they first exactly spoken and when some of them died out. Phonetic reconstructions ...
Chapter 1 - What is Indo - European 3
How can languages sound similar? 3
Chapter 2 - Linguistic genetic relationships 4
How can you tell if two languages are related? 4
Chapter 3 - Language change 4
Internal language change 4
Chapter 4 - Greek 5
Greek dialects 6
Proto-Indo-European vowels 8
Ablaut 8
Chapter 5 - Indic 8
Oral tradition 9
Ashoka’s pillars 9
Devanāgarī 9
Sanskrit and Indo-European linguistics 11
Chapter 6 - Iranian 13
Avestan 13
Old Persian 14
Palatalization of velars and the perfect tense 15
Chapter 7 - Balto-slavic 16
Baltic 17
Slavic 18
Old Russian 18
Indo-European consonants and relative chronology 19
Balto-Slavic and the palatovelars 19
Chapter 8: Italic 21
Oscan 21
Umbrian 21
Latin 22
Exercise: Relative chronology 23
Chapter 9: Celtic 23
Continental Celtic 24
Irish 25
Welsh 25
Italo-Celtic and the labiovelars 26
Chapter 10: Germanic 28
Runes 28
North Germanic 29
East Germanic 29
West Germanic 30
Grimm's Law and Verner’s Law 31
Chapter 11 - Anatolian 33
Hittite 33
, Clay tablets 34
Luwian 35
Anatolian and the PIE laryngeals 36
Chapter 12: Tocharian 39
Tocharian A & B 40
Laryngeals 42
Chapter 13: Phrygian, Armenian, Albanian 43
Phrygian 43
Armenian 44
Albanian 44
Who were the Indo-Europeans? 45
Chapter 14: Dichtersprache 47
Formulas 47
Myths 47
Indo-European religion 48
Greek poetic meter 49
,Chapter 1 - What is Indo - European
● Every language belongs to a language family
● Language family: Group of languages genetically related to each other
● English is from the Indo-European language family
● The notion that languages are related and could belong to a family was first
developed in the Renaissance.
● Until the late Middle Ages, the common belief in Europe was that all languages
derived from Hebrew, the original language of the Genesis
● Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (professor of rhetoric at Leiden) believed Greek and
Dutch came from Scythian, which was an Indo-European language itself
○ He said loanwords shouldn’t be used for language comparison. Instead,
“words which denote matters or things which are used, borne or encountered
on a daily basis” should be used
● The one credited with the beginnings of modern comparative linguistics was Sir
William Jones (1746-1794), a polyglot employed as a judge in Calcutta (India)
● More languages were added to the Indo-European family tree:
○ Albanian (by Josef von Xylander in 1835)
○ Armenian (by Julius Heinrich Petermann in 1837, recognized as a separate
branch by Heinrich Hübschmann in 1875)
○ Tocharian (by Emil Sieg and Wilhelm Siegling in 1908)
○ Hittite (by Bedřich Hrozný in 1915).
How can languages sound similar?
● Loan words
● Inheritance
● Coincidence
, ● Universal (onomatopoeia)
Chapter 2 - Linguistic genetic relationships
How can you tell if two languages are related?
● If languages share a similarity with modern words/ inventions it doesn’t mean they
have to be related, they may be borrowed words
○ Eg. word for ‘car’ is a recent invention, with its introduction, the word was
borrowed into other languages
You can determine genetic relations through:
● Similarities in basic vocabulary like:
○ Body parts
○ Kinship terms
○ Native animals
○ Numbers
○ Verbs/actions
● Grammar
○ Case endings (nominative, accusative, ergative)
○ Grammatical gender endings
○ Verb ending
○ Inflenction → the change in the form of a word (in English, usually the addition
of endings) to mark such distinctions as tense, person, number, gender,
mood, voice, and case
● Shared irregularities
○ Similar endings in irregular verbs
Chapter 3 - Language change
● Substrate influence
○ When non-Romans learned Latin
as their second language, their
native language still influenced
how they spoke Latin (they had a
foreign accent)
Internal language change
It can occur in 2 forms:
● Sound laws - rule-based changes in sounds
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