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Unit 1. Activity 1A. The Indo European Story

Source: Microsoft Encarta 2001

THE INDO EUROPEAN STORY – Activity 1. A.

In the 1780’s, a British judge called Sir William Jones was living and working in India. During his time there he
studied an ancient language called Sanskrit. What’s interesting about that? Well – Sir William noticed something
unusual about several Sanskrit words... namely, how similar they were to their equivalents in Latin. Take mother and
father for example. In Sanskrit they’re matar and pitar. In Latin they’re mater and pater. Could there, he wondered, be
some connections between Sanskrit and Latin?

Over 200 years later experts now believe the answer is definitely “yes”. Their research shows that between 6000-4500
BC a tribe called the Indo-Europeans settled in the northern part of Central Europe. These people kept animals, grew
crops and worked with leather and wool, They also had their own language. Until roughly 3000 BC this language only
existed in Central Europe, but then two things happened. (a) The Indo-Europeans began to ride horses. (b) They
discovered the wheel. As a result, they (and their language) began to travel long distances for the first time. Some went
east (to India) and some went west (to Scandinavia, Britain and the Mediterranean).

During the next 3000/4000 years, languages like Sanskrit and Latin developed in these new areas – each with its own
local vocabulary, expressions and grammar. Meanwhile, as they became stronger, Indo-European itself became weaker,
until in the end it disappeared completely. It’s a curious thought, isn’t it, that modern-day Italian, Danish and Greek all
had a common ancestor and that in the past all Europeans spoke the same language? Curious – but true.

Indo-European Languages, the most widely spoken family of languages in the world, containing the following
subfamilies: Albanian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic (including the Romance
languages), Slavic, and two extinct subfamilies, Anatolian (including Hittite) and Tocharian. About 1.6 billion people
speak Indo-European languages today.

Establishment of the Family

Proof that these highly diverse languages are members of a single family was largely accumulated during a 50-year
period around the turn of the 19th century. The extensive Sanskrit and ancient Greek literatures (older than those of any
other Indo-European language except the then-undeciphered Hittite) preserved characteristics of the basic Indo-
European forms and pointed to the existence of a common parent

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language. By 1800 the close relationship between Sanskrit, ancient Greek, and Latin had been demonstrated. Hindu
grammarians had systematically classified the formative elements of their ancient language. To their studies were
added extensive grammatical and phonetic comparisons of European languages. Further studies led to specific
conclusions about the sounds and grammar of the assumed parent language (called Proto-Indo-European), the
reconstruction of that hypothetical language, and estimates about when it began to break up into separate languages.
(By 2000 BC, for example, Greek, Hittite, and Sanskrit were distinct languages, but the differences among them are
such that the original tongue must have been fairly unified about a millennium earlier, or about 3000 BC.) The
decipherment of Hittite texts (identified as Indo-European in 1915) and the discovery of Tocharian in the 1890s
(spoken in medieval Chinese Turkestan, and identified as Indo-European in 1908) added new insights into the
development of the family and the probable character of Proto-Indo-European.

The early Indo-European studies established many principles basic to comparative linguistics. One of the most
important of these was that the sounds of related languages correspond to one another in predictable ways under
specified conditions (see Grimm's Law and Verner's Law for examples). According to one such pattern, in some Indo-
European subfamilies—Albanian, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Slavic, and (partially) Baltic—certain presumed q sounds of
Proto-Indo-European became sibilants such as s and  (an sh sound). The common example of this pattern is the
Avestan (ancient Iranian) word satem (“100”), as opposed to the Latin word centum (“100,” pronounced “kentum”).
Formerly, the Indo-European languages were routinely characterized as belonging either to a Western (centum) or an
Eastern (satem) division. Most linguists, however, no longer automatically divide the family in two in this way, partly
because they wish to avoid implying that the family underwent an early split into two major branches, and partly
because this trait, although prominent, is only one of several significant patterns that cut across different subfamilies.

Evolution
In general the evolution of the Indo-European languages displays a progressive decay of inflection. Thus, Proto-Indo-
European seems to have been highly inflected, as are ancient languages such as Sanskrit, Avestan, and classical Greek;
in contrast, comparatively modern languages, such as English, French, and Persian, have moved toward an analytic
system (using prepositional phrases and auxiliary verbs). In large part the decay of inflection was a result of the loss of
the final syllables of many words over time, so that modern Indo-European words are often much shorter than the
ancestral Proto-Indo-European words. Many languages also developed new forms and grammatical distinctions.
Changes in the meanings of individual words have been extensive.

Ancient Culture

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The original meanings of only a limited number of hypothetical Proto-Indo-European words can be stated with much
certainty; derivatives of these words occur with consistent meanings in most Indo-European languages. This small
vocabulary suggests a New Stone Age or perhaps an early metal-using culture with farmers and domestic animals. The
identity and location of this culture have been the object of much speculation. Archaeological discoveries in the 1960s,
however, suggest the prehistoric Kurgan culture. Located in the steppes west of the Ural Mountains between 5000 and
3000 BC, this culture had diffused as far as eastern Europe and northern Iran by about 2000 BC.

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