The Indo-European Family
excerpts from the
works of
Dr. Micheal Crafton
Department of English
State University of West Georgia
(Spring 2000)
Carrollton, Georgia
Here are some highlights on the branches:
Anatolian Branch:
Oldest IE inscription in Hittite 1700 bc in
cuneiform script on clay tablets (technology borrowed from Mesopotamia). Important to linguists who guessed that
there were lost consonants, the laryngeals, in PIE.
Indo-Iranian:
Sanskrit documents (though the documents are
recent, Vedic hymns 1000 bc; Classical Sanskrit 500 bc) record faithfully the
language spoken in India in about the same time as Hittite
Hellenic:
Mycenean Greek inscriptions date from 1400 BC,
but Attic, Ionic and Koine are the dialects most influential
Italic:
Latin and its derivatives:
Celtic:
Gaelic and Welsh –
Germanic:
North (Scandinavia); West (Anglo-Saxon and
German); East, not much
The latest wild speculations about a really first language are related to the search for Nostratic or Proto-World language. For a bibliography on this subject, go the following site:
http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/articles.nostratic.html
http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/PIE.html
The one below is a metapage to information about all IE languages.
http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/families/Indo-European.html
Below is a link to a tree of IE languages.
http://www.georgetown.edu/cball/oe/oe-ie.html
This two sites below are metapages with lots of links of interest to Indo-European.
http://www.indo-european.org/index.html
http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/indoeuro.html
This one below is a slightly heretical view of the Indo-European homeland.
http://www.armenianhighland.com/homeland/chronicle120.html
A more traditional view of IE homeland.
http://www.friesian.com/upan.htm
Focus on the nature of IE. That is, what can we agree on about the this hypothetical language? Basically the answer is three-fold.
Cognates:
We are all familiar with cognates from looking up words in major dictionaries and finding all the linkages from the source word to other words. Likewise when we learn foreign languages, we can’t help but notice that Latin mater and Spanish madre and French mere are all very similar. Thus, in IE we trace cognates back to come up with something of a lexicon or vocabulary of IE. The American Heritage Dictionary has for years produced a lexicon at the back of their largest editions. Also, you might find a copy of Robert Claiborne’s The Roots of English: A Reader’s Handbook of Word Origins, which lists all the IE roots.
The cognates that most scholars feel comfortable with are largely the most conservative words such as numbers, names for members of the family, gods, surroundings.
A nice site below listing some IE cognates.
http://www.friesian.com/cognates.htm
Grammar:
The next item is important for those of you not that keen on grammar. Inflection is morphology, that is, how words change shape in order to effect different meaning. Modern English does not use many inflections, relying on word order more than inflections, but we do have some.
Obviously verb conjugations are inflectional changes: was, were is a change for number; is, was is a change for time. Am, are is a change for person. Is, being is a change in aspect or duration.
We also have clear inflections for pronouns: he, him, his – the subjective, objective, and possessive cases, which correspond roughly to the nominative, accusative, and genitive that you see on pages 80-81.
English has only three now, but Old English was highly inflected and had many, six to seven inflections. Evidently all Indo-European languages were once inflected, and many still are (e.g. German, Italian, Spanish).
Syntax:
Here we have a major categorical difference, the difference between VO languages (verb + object) and OV (object + verb). Modern English is VO and Indo-European was OV.
So we say. "He made a chair." But IE would say "Chair made he."
Culture and Homeland of Indo-European
There is not yet a universal theory or position on this question. However, two of the most powerful assumptions are those put forth by Marija Gimbuttas, mentioned in the text, and Colin Renfrew. Gimbuttas argues that the Indo-Europeans were a horse taming, nomandic, warlike, sky-god worshipping people from the steppes of Russia, that she has identified with the Kurgan peoples, who then moved forward conquering agriculturally based, earth-goddess worshipping people. Renfrew’s thesis is that Indo-Europeans were agricultural people whose language spread as the farmers spread not by violent warriors.
Note also that the identification of the homeland is based on the word-stock, that is the presence or absence of words in the lexicon. No word for ocean must imply they were inlanders; the word for beech and bee indicates a region of Europe.