Language and Culture of the Indo-Europeans
Introduction
- Language family= groups of related languages with a common ancestor
- Common ancestor is a proto-language, e.g. Proto-Indo-European
- The prefix proto- indicates that a language is not attested (PIE)
- The biggest language family is Indo-European
- biggest in the number of speakers and languages
- Until the Middle Ages, people thought that all languages derived from Hebrew
because the Bible (specifically Genesis 11)
- Professor Van Boxhorn thought the reason for parallels between certain languages
was because these languages had ‘one mother’, according to him this was
‘Scythian’. (1647)
- He emphasized that loanwords shouldn’t be considered for the purposes of language
comparison, but instead you should look at everyday vocabulary
- He noticed that a large amount of everyday vocabulary derives from his
‘Scythians’, our Indo-Europeans
- Sir William Jones implied that the common ancestor of the Indo-European
languages, Proto-Indo-European, perhaps no longer existed. (1786)
- Indo-European has around 9 branches:
- Albanian
- Greek
- Anatolian → Hittite
- Armenian
- Indo-Iranian
- Tocharian
- Balto-Slavic
- Germanic → Dutch, English
- Italo-Celtic
Genetic relationships & Culture
- To establish a genetic relationship between languages, you have to look at basic,
everyday vocabulary and systematic correspondences
- Don’t look at recently borrowed words (car, computer) or individual word pairs
- Verbs also exhibit correspondences
- Strong proof is shared irregularities in grammar
- Paradigm= term for the pattern of inflection of a word
- Inflection= verbuiging
- We have knowledge of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. This knowledge is
obtained from shared vocabulary and shared cultural features.
- Shared vocabulary (linguistic paleontology):
- Having a common word implies that the concept was known, e.g. words for
animals indicates these animals were known and existed where Indo-
Europeans lived
- Problem with this is that meanings can change and that there were often
shared semantic changes
- ‘Apple’ is often used for a new type of fruit
- Absence of a common word suggest that the concept was unknown
- Culture
, - We know that they lived in clan units in (fortified) settlements, though they
were probably nomads. They knew animals like cows, horses, pigs, sheep,
dogs, ducks, geese and bees because they kept bees for honey.
They had rudimentary agriculture (plow, sowing, millstone) and knew some
metalworking (copper) and had wagons (wheel, axle, yoke, hub, drawbar).
- This means they lived after the invention of the wheel. This points to
the Late Stone Age/Early Bronze Age, so around 3500 BCE, in
Russia/Ukraine.
- Shared cultural features (myths, rituals etc.) provide a window onto PIE culture
- Similarities between the oldest texts of the cultures
- These features have to be unique!
- Social diversification and professions: king/queen, master/mistress, free
(persons), servants, shepherd/carpenter
- Patrilocal culture= woman moves into her husbands family and literally leaves
her own family
- Religion
- Polytheistic, but similar particular patterns: one supreme god
- Heavenly bodies and natural phenomena (sky, dawn, sun, moon)
function as deities
- Story of the ‘wheel of the sun’; the sun travels across the sky in
a wagon moved by horses/oxes (sometimes twins)
Language change & sound laws
- The ‘proto-language’ Latin split up into multiple daughter languages.
- Latin was spoken in a very large area (large diffusion area) → local dialects
arose (local dialectal differences) → differences between dialects grew,
because of this they were no longer mutually intelligible → these dialects
basically became different languages → language split occurs.
- Many speakers of Latin spoke it as a second language. Their first language
influenced their second language (Latin); this influence is called substrate
influence.
- E.g. in France there was a Celtic substrate influence. The superstrate was Celtic
and the substrate was Latin.
- Substrate influence can be realized in the vocabulary, and also by sound shifts.
- Sound changes are regular → thus sound laws can be formulated for these
changes. It can disrupt the regularity of paradigm.
- A sound law…
- is geographically bound
- is productive throughout a certain timespan
- applies to a certain phonetic environment
- The notation of a sound law is: A > B/C (sound A becomes sound B in environment
C)
- Analogy= creation of a word based on a model from elsewhere in the language
- Observe a pattern → apply pattern on words where the pattern isn’t
there yet.
- Occurs unpredictably, but restores the regularity of paradigms
- Sometimes, analogy cancels out sound laws.
- Frequently used words are less susceptible to analogy, e.g. the verb ‘to be’.
