Composition of the Indo-European family of languages. "New" Indo-European languages
Indo-European language family, the most widely spoken in the world. Its distribution area includes almost all of Europe, both Americas and continental Australia, as well as a significant part of Africa and Asia. Over 2.5 billion people speak Indo-European languages. All the languages of modern Europe belong to this family of languages, with the exception of Basque, Hungarian, Sami, Finnish, Estonian and Turkish, as well as several Altaic and Uralic languages of the European part of Russia.
The Indo-European family of languages includes at least twelve groups of languages. In order of geographical location, moving clockwise from northwestern Europe, these are the following groups: Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Tocharian, Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Hitto-Luvian, Greek, Albanian, Italic (including Latin and the Romance languages derived from it, which are sometimes separated into a separate group). Of these, three groups (Italic, Hitto-Luvian, and Tocharian) consist entirely of dead languages.
Indo-Aryan languages (Indian) is a group of related languages, dating back to the ancient Indian language. Included (together with the Iranian languages and closely related Dardic languages) in the Indo-Iranian languages, one of the branches of the Indo-European languages. Distributed in South Asia: northern and central India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Republic of Maldives, Nepal; outside this region - Romani, Domari and Parya (Tajikistan). The total number of speakers is about 1 billion people. (estimate, 2007).
ancient Indian languages.
Ancient Indian language. Indian languages come from dialects of the ancient Indian language, which had two literary forms - Vedic (the language of the sacred "Vedas") and Sanskrit (created by Brahmin priests in the Ganges valley in the first half - the middle of the first millennium BC). The ancestors of the Indo-Aryans came out of the ancestral home of the "Aryan expanse" at the end of the 3rd - beginning of the 2nd millennium. The related Indo-Aryan language is reflected in proper names, theonyms and some lexical borrowings in the cuneiform texts of the state of Mitanni and the Hittites. Indo-Aryan writing in the Brahmi syllabary originated in the 4th-3rd centuries BC.
The Central Indian period is represented by numerous languages and dialects that were in use in oral, and then in written form from the middle. 1st millennium BC e. Of these, Pali (the language of the Buddhist Canon) is the most archaic, followed by Prakrits (the Prakrits of inscriptions are more archaic) and Apabhransha (dialects that developed by the middle of the 1st millennium AD as a result of the development of Prakrits and are a transitional link to the New Indian languages ).
The New Indian period begins after the 10th century. It is represented by about three dozen major languages and a large number of dialects, sometimes very different from each other.
In the west and northwest they border on Iranian (Baluchi, Pashto) and Dardic languages, in the north and northeast - with Tibeto-Burman languages, in the east - with a number of Tibeto-Burmese and Mon-Khmer languages, in the south - with Dravidian languages (Telugu, Kannada). In India, linguistic islands of other linguistic groups (Munda languages, Mon-Khmer, Dravidian, etc.) are interspersed in the array of Indo-Aryan languages.
1. Hindi and Urdu (Hindustani) - two varieties of one new Indian literary language; Urdu - the state language of Pakistan (the capital of Islamabad), has a written language based on the Arabic alphabet; Hindi (state language of India (New Delhi) - based on the Old Indian script Devanagari.
2. Bengal (State of India - West Bengal, Bangladesh (Kolkata)).
3. Punjabi (eastern part of Pakistan, Punjab state of India).
4. Lahnda.
5. Sindhi (Pakistan).
6. Rajasthani (Northwest India).
7. Gujarati - southwest subgroup.
8. Marathas - Western subgroup.
9. Sinhalese - island subgroup.
10. Nepali - Nepal (Kathmandu) - central subgroup.
11. Bihari - Indian state of Bihar - eastern subgroup.
12. Oriya - Indian state of Orissa - eastern subgroup.
13. Assamese - ind. Assam State, Bangladesh, Bhutan (Thimphu) - east. subgroup.
14. Gypsy.
15. Kashmiri - Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan - Dard group.
16. Vedic - the language of the most ancient sacred books of the Indians - the Vedas, formed in the first half of the second millennium BC.
17. Sanskrit - the literary language of the ancient Indians from the 3rd century BC. to 4th century AD
18. Pali - Central Indian literary and cult language of the medieval era.
19. Prakrits - various colloquial Middle Indian dialects.
Iranian languages- a group of related languages \u200b\u200bas part of the Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Distributed mainly in the Middle East, Central Asia and Pakistan.
The Iranian group was formed according to the generally accepted version as a result of the separation of languages from the Indo-Iranian branch in the territory of the Volga region and the southern Urals during the period of the Andronovo culture. There is also another version of the formation of the Iranian languages, according to which they separated from the main body of the Indo-Iranian languages on the territory of the BMAC culture. The expansion of the Aryans in ancient times took place to the south and southeast. As a result of migrations, Iranian languages spread by the 5th century BC. in large areas from the Northern Black Sea region to Eastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Altai (Pazyryk culture), and from the Zagros Mountains, eastern Mesopotamia and Azerbaijan to the Hindu Kush.
The most important milestone in the development of the Iranian languages was the identification of the Western Iranian languages, which spread westward from Deshte-Kevir along the Iranian plateau, and the Eastern Iranian languages opposed to them. The work of the Persian poet Firdousi Shahnameh reflects the confrontation between the ancient Persians and the nomadic (also semi-nomadic) East Iranian tribes, nicknamed by the Persians as Turans, and their habitats as Turan.
In II - I centuries. BC. the Great Central Asian migration of peoples takes place, as a result of which the eastern Iranians populate the Pamirs, Xinjiang, Indian lands south of the Hindu Kush, and invade Sistan.
As a result of the expansion of Turkic-speaking nomads from the first half of the 1st millennium AD. Iranian languages begin to be supplanted by Turkic ones, first in the Great Steppe, and with the beginning of the 2nd millennium in Central Asia, Xinjiang, Azerbaijan and a number of regions of Iran. The relic Ossetian language (a descendant of the Alano-Sarmatian language) in the mountains of the Caucasus, as well as the descendants of the Saka languages, the languages of the Pashtun tribes and the Pamir peoples, remained from the steppe Iranian world.
The current state of the Iranian-speaking array was largely determined by the expansion of the Western Iranian languages, which began under the Sassanids, but gained full strength after the Arab invasion:
The spread of the Persian language throughout the territory of Iran, Afghanistan and the south of Central Asia and the massive displacement of local Iranian and sometimes non-Iranian languages in the respective territories, as a result of which the modern Persian and Tajik communities were formed.
Expansion of the Kurds into Upper Mesopotamia and the Armenian Highlands.
Migration of the semi-nomads of Gorgan to the southeast and the formation of the Baloch language.
Phonetics of Iranian languages shares many similarities with the Indo-Aryan languages in development from the Indo-European state. The ancient Iranian languages belong to the inflectional-synthetic type with a developed system of inflectional forms of declension and conjugation and are thus similar to Sanskrit, Latin and Old Church Slavonic. This is especially true of the Avestan language and, to a lesser extent, Old Persian. In Avestan, there are eight cases, three numbers, three genders, inflectional-synthetic verbal forms of present, aorist, imperfect, perfect, injunctiva, conjunctiva, optative, imperative, there is a developed word formation.
1. Persian - writing based on the Arabic alphabet - Iran (Tehran), Afghanistan (Kabul), Tajikistan (Dushanbe) - southwestern Iranian group.
2. Dari is the literary language of Afghanistan.
3. Pashto - since the 30s the state language of Afghanistan - Afghanistan, Pakistan - East Iranian subgroup.
4. Baloch - Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan (Ashgabat), Oman (Muscat), United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi) - northwestern subgroup.
5. Tajik - Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan (Tashkent) - Western Iranian subgroup.
6. Kurdish - Turkey (Ankara), Iran, Iraq (Baghdad), Syria (Damascus), Armenia (Yerevan), Lebanon (Beirut) - Western Iranian subgroup.
7. Ossetian - Russia (North Ossetia), South Ossetia (Tskhinval) - East Iranian subgroup.
8. Tatsky - Russia (Dagestan), Azerbaijan (Baku) - western subgroup.
9. Talysh - Iran, Azerbaijan - northwestern Iranian subgroup.
10. Caspian dialects.
11. Pamir languages - unwritten languages of the Pamirs.
12. Yagnob - the language of the Yaghnobi, the inhabitants of the Yagnob river valley in Tajikistan.
14. Avestan.
15. Pahlavi.
16. Median.
17. Parthian.
18. Sogdian.
19. Khorezmian.
20. Scythian.
21. Bactrian.
22. Saki.
Slavic group. Slavic languages are a group of related languages of the Indo-European family. Distributed throughout Europe and Asia. The total number of speakers is about 400-500 million people [source not specified 101 days]. They differ in a high degree of closeness to each other, which is found in the structure of the word, the use of grammatical categories, the structure of the sentence, semantics, the system of regular sound correspondences, and morphonological alternations. This proximity is explained by the unity of the origin of the Slavic languages and their long and intense contacts with each other at the level of literary languages and dialects.
The long independent development of the Slavic peoples in different ethnic, geographical, historical and cultural conditions, their contacts with various ethnic groups led to the emergence of differences in material, functional, etc. The Slavic languages within the Indo-European family are closest to the Baltic languages. The similarity between the two groups served as the basis for the theory of the "Balto-Slavic proto-language", according to which the Balto-Slavic proto-language first emerged from the Indo-European proto-language, later splitting into Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic. However, many scientists explain their special closeness by the long contact of the ancient Balts and Slavs, and deny the existence of the Balto-Slavic language.
It has not been established in which territory the separation of the Slavic language continuum from the Indo-European / Balto-Slavic took place. It can be assumed that it took place to the south of those territories that, according to various theories, belong to the territory of the Slavic ancestral homelands. From one of the Indo-European dialects (Proto-Slavic), the Proto-Slavic language was formed, which is the ancestor of all modern Slavic languages. The history of the Proto-Slavic language was longer than the history of individual Slavic languages.
For a long time it developed as a single dialect with an identical structure. Dialect variants arose later. The process of transition of the Proto-Slavic language into independent languages took place most actively in the 2nd half of the 1st millennium AD. e., during the formation of the early Slavic states in the territory of South-Eastern and Eastern Europe. During this period, the territory of Slavic settlements increased significantly. Areas of various geographical zones with different natural and climatic conditions were mastered, the Slavs entered into relationships with the population of these territories, standing at different stages of cultural development. All this was reflected in the history of the Slavic languages.
The history of the Proto-Slavic language is divided into 3 periods: the most ancient - before the establishment of close Balto-Slavic language contact, the period of the Balto-Slavic community and the period of dialect fragmentation and the beginning of the formation of independent Slavic languages.
Eastern subgroup:
1. Russian.
2. Ukrainian.
3. Belarusian.
Southern subgroup:
1. Bulgarian - Bulgaria (Sofia).
2. Macedonian - Macedonia (Skopje).
3. Serbo-Croatian - Serbia (Belgrade), Croatia (Zagreb).
4. Slovenian - Slovenia (Ljubljana).
Western subgroup:
1. Czech - Czech Republic (Prague).
2. Slovak - Slovakia (Bratislava).
3. Polish - Poland (Warsaw).
4. Kashubian is a dialect of Polish.
5. Lusatian - Germany.
Dead: Old Church Slavonic, Polabsky, Pomeranian.
Baltic group.
The Baltic languages are a language group representing a special branch of the Indo-European group of languages.
The total number of speakers is over 4.5 million people. Distribution - Latvia, Lithuania, previously the territory of (modern) north-east of Poland, Russia (Kaliningrad region) and north-west of Belarus; even earlier (before the 7th-9th, in some places the 12th centuries) up to the upper reaches of the Volga, the Oka basin, the middle Dnieper and Pripyat.
According to one theory, the Baltic languages are not a genetic formation, but the result of an early convergence [source not specified 374 days]. The group includes 2 living languages (Latvian and Lithuanian; sometimes the Latgalian language is distinguished separately, which is officially considered the dialect of Latvian); the Prussian language attested in the monuments, which became extinct in the 17th century; at least 5 languages known only by toponymy and onomastics (Curonian, Yatvingian, Galindian/Golyadian, Zemgalian and Selonian).
1. Lithuanian - Lithuania (Vilnius).
2. Latvian - Latvia (Riga).
3. Latgalian - Latvia.
Dead: Prussian, Yatvyazhsky, Kurzhsky, etc.
German group.
The history of the development of the Germanic languages is usually divided into 3 periods:
Ancient (from the emergence of writing to the XI century) - the formation of individual languages;
Middle (XII-XV centuries) - the development of writing in the Germanic languages and the expansion of their social functions;
New (from the 16th century to the present) - the formation and normalization of national languages.
In the reconstructed Proto-Germanic language, a number of researchers single out a layer of vocabulary that does not have Indo-European etymology - the so-called pre-Germanic substratum. In particular, these are the majority of strong verbs, the conjugation paradigm of which also cannot be explained from the Proto-Indo-European language. The displacement of consonants compared to the Proto-Indo-European language - the so-called. "Grimm's law" - supporters of the hypothesis also explain the influence of the substrate.
The development of the Germanic languages from antiquity to the present day is associated with numerous migrations of their speakers. The Germanic dialects of the most ancient times were divided into 2 main groups: Scandinavian (northern) and continental (southern). In the II-I centuries BC. e. part of the tribes from Scandinavia moved to the southern coast of the Baltic Sea and formed an East Germanic group, opposing the West Germanic (formerly southern) group. The East Germanic tribe of the Goths, moving south, penetrated the territory of the Roman Empire up to the Iberian Peninsula, where they mixed with the local population (V-VIII centuries).
Inside the West Germanic area in the 1st century AD. e. 3 groups of tribal dialects were distinguished: Ingveon, Istveon and Erminon. The migration in the 5th-6th centuries of part of the Ingvaeonic tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) to the British Isles predetermined the further development of the English language. The complex interaction of West Germanic dialects on the continent created the prerequisites for the formation of Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Low Frankish and Old High German languages.
Scandinavian dialects after their isolation in the 5th century. from the continental group, they were divided into eastern and western subgroups, on the basis of the first Swedish, Danish and Old Gutnish languages were later formed, on the basis of the second - Norwegian, as well as insular languages - Icelandic, Faroese and Norn.
The formation of national literary languages was completed in England in the 16th-17th centuries, in the Scandinavian countries in the 16th century, in Germany in the 18th century. The spread of the English language outside of England led to the creation of its variants in the USA, Canada, and Australia. The German language in Austria is represented by its Austrian variant.
North German subgroup:
1. Danish - Denmark (Copenhagen), northern Germany.
2. Swedish - Sweden (Stockholm), Finland (Helsinki) - contact subgroup.
3. Norwegian - Norway (Oslo) - continental subgroup.
4. Icelandic - Iceland (Reykjavik), Denmark.
5. Faroese - Denmark.
West German subgroup:
1. English - UK, USA, India, Australia (Canberra), Canada (Ottawa), Ireland (Dublin), New Zealand (Wellington).
2. Dutch - Netherlands (Amsterdam), Belgium (Brussels), Suriname (Paramaribo), Aruba.
3. Frisian - the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany.
4. German - Low German and High German - Germany, Austria (Vienna), Switzerland (Bern), Liechtenstein (Vaduz), Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg.
5. Yiddish - Israel (Jerusalem).
East German subgroup:
1. Gothic - Visigothic and Ostrogothic.
2. Burgundian, Vandal, Gepid, Herul.
Roman group. Romance languages (lat. Roma "Rome") are a group of languages and dialects that are part of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family and genetically ascend to a common ancestor - Latin. The name Romanesque comes from the Latin word romanus (Roman). The science that studies the Romance languages, their origin, development, classification, etc. is called romance and is one of the subsections of linguistics (linguistics).
The peoples who speak them are also called Romance. The Romance languages developed as a result of the divergent (centrifugal) development of the oral tradition of different geographical dialects of the once single folk Latin language and gradually became isolated from the source language and from each other as a result of various demographic, historical and geographical processes.
The beginning of this epochal process was laid by the Roman colonists, who settled the regions (provinces) of the Roman Empire, remote from the capital - the city of Rome, in the course of a complex ethnographic process, called ancient Romanization in the period of the 3rd century BC. BC e. - 5th c. n. e. During this period, the various dialects of Latin are influenced by the substrate.
For a long time, the Romance languages were perceived only as vernacular dialects of the classical Latin language, and therefore were practically not used in writing. The formation of the literary forms of the Romance languages was largely based on the traditions of classical Latin, which allowed them to converge again in lexical and semantic terms already in modern times.
1. French - France (Paris), Canada, Belgium (Brussels), Switzerland, Lebanon (Beirut), Luxembourg, Monaco, Morocco (Rabat).
2. Provencal - France, Italy, Spain, Monaco.
3. Italian - Italy, San Marino, Vatican, Switzerland.
4. Sardinian - Sardinia (Greece).
5. Spanish - Spain, Argentina (Buenos Aires), Cuba (Havana), Mexico (Mexico City), Chile (Santiago), Honduras (Tegucigalpa).
6. Galician - Spain, Portugal (Lisbon).
7. Catalan - Spain, France, Italy, Andorra (Andorra la Vella).
8. Portuguese - Portugal, Brazil (Brazilia), Angola (Luanda), Mozambique (Maputo).
9. Romanian - Romania (Bucharest), Moldova (Chisinau).
10. Moldavian - Moldova.
11. Macedonian-Romanian - Greece, Albania (Tirana), Macedonia (Skopje), Romania, Bulgarian.
12. Romansh - Switzerland.
13. Creole languages are crossed Romance languages with local languages.
Italian:
1. Latin.
2. Medieval Vulgar Latin.
3. Oska, Umbrian, Saber.
Celtic group. The Celtic languages are one of the western groups of the Indo-European family, close, in particular, to the Italic and Germanic languages. Nevertheless, the Celtic languages, apparently, did not form a specific unity with other groups, as was sometimes believed earlier (in particular, the hypothesis of Celto-Italic unity, defended by A. Meie, is most likely incorrect).
The spread of the Celtic languages, as well as the Celtic peoples, in Europe is associated with the spread of the Hallstatt (VI-V centuries BC), and then the La Tene (2nd half of the 1st millennium BC) archaeological cultures. The ancestral home of the Celts is probably located in Central Europe, between the Rhine and the Danube, but they settled very widely: in the 1st half of the 1st millennium BC. e. they penetrated the British Isles, around the 7th century. BC e. - in Gaul, in the VI century. BC e. - to the Iberian Peninsula, in the V century. BC e. they spread to the south, cross the Alps and come to northern Italy, finally, by the 3rd century. BC e. they reach Greece and Asia Minor.
We know relatively little about the ancient stages of the development of the Celtic languages: the monuments of that era are very scarce and not always easy to interpret; nevertheless, data from the Celtic languages (especially Old Irish) play an important role in the reconstruction of the Indo-European parent language.
Goidel subgroup:
1. Irish - Ireland.
2. Scottish - Scotland (Edinburgh).
3. Manx - dead - the language of the Isle of Man (in the Irish Sea).
Brythonic subgroup:
1. Breton - Brittany (France).
2. Welsh - Wales (Cardiff).
3. Cornish - dead - in Cornwall - a peninsula southwest of England.
Gallic subgroup:
1. Gallic - has died out since the formation of the French language; was distributed in Gaul, Northern Italy, the Balkans and Asia Minor
Greek group. The Greek group is currently one of the most peculiar and relatively small language groups (families) within the Indo-European languages. At the same time, the Greek group is one of the most ancient and well-studied since antiquity.
Currently, the main representative of the group with a full set of language features is the Greek language of Greece and Cyprus, which has a long and complex history. The presence of a single full-fledged representative today brings the Greek group closer to the Albanian and Armenian, which are also actually represented by one language each.
At the same time, other Greek languages and extremely isolated dialects existed earlier, which either died out or are on the verge of extinction as a result of assimilation.
1. Modern Greek - Greece (Athens), Cyprus (Nicosia)
2. Ancient Greek
3. Middle Greek, or Byzantine
Albanian group:
Albanian (alb. Gjuha shqipe) is the language of the Albanians, the indigenous population of Albania itself and part of the population of Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Lower Italy and Sicily. The number of speakers is about 6 million people.
The self-name of the language - "shkip" - comes from the local word "shipe" or "shpee", which actually means "stony soil" or "rock". That is, the self-name of the language can be translated as "mountain". The word "shkip" can also be interpreted as "understandable" (language).
Armenian group:
Armenian is an Indo-European language, usually classified as a separate group, rarely combined with Greek and Phrygian. Among the Indo-European languages, it is one of the ancient written languages. The Armenian alphabet was created by Mesrop Mashtots in 405-406. n. e. (see Armenian script). The total number of speakers around the world is about 6.4 million people. During its long history, the Armenian language has been in contact with many languages.
Being a branch of the Indo-European language, Armenian later came into contact with various Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages, both living and now dead, adopting from them and bringing to our days much of what direct written evidence could not preserve. At different times, Hittite and hieroglyphic Luwian, Hurrian and Urartian, Akkadian, Aramaic and Syriac, Parthian and Persian, Georgian and Zan, Greek and Latin came into contact with the Armenian language at different times.
For the history of these languages and their speakers, the data of the Armenian language are in many cases of paramount importance. These data are especially important for urartologists, Iranianists, Kartvelists, who draw many facts of the history of the languages they study from Armenian.
Hitto-Luvian group. The Anatolian languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages (also known as the Hitto-Luvian languages). According to glottochronology, they separated quite early from other Indo-European languages. All languages of this group are dead. Their carriers lived in the II-I millennium BC. e. on the territory of Asia Minor (the Hittite kingdom and the small states that arose on its territory), were later conquered and assimilated by the Persians and / or Greeks.
The oldest monuments of the Anatolian languages are the Hittite cuneiform and Luvian hieroglyphics (there were also brief inscriptions in the Palai language, the most archaic of the Anatolian languages). Through the work of the Czech linguist Friedrich (Bedřich) the Terrible, these languages were identified as Indo-European, which contributed to their decipherment.
Later inscriptions in Lydian, Lycian, Sidetic, Carian, and other languages were written in Asia Minor alphabets (partially deciphered in the 20th century).
Dead:
1. Hittite.
2. Luuvian.
3. Palai.
4. Carian.
5. Lydian.
6. Lycian.
Tocharian group. The Tocharian languages are a group of Indo-European languages consisting of the dead "Tocharian A" ("Eastern Tocharian") and "Tocharian B" ("Western Tocharian"). They were spoken in the territory of modern Xinjiang. The monuments that have come down to us (the first of them were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century by the Hungarian traveler Aurel Stein) date back to the 6th-8th centuries. The self-name of the carriers is unknown, they are called “Tochars” conditionally: the Greeks called them Τοχ?ριοι, and the Turks - toxri.
Dead:
1. Tocharian A - in Chinese Turkestan.
2. Tocharsky V - ibid.
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES, one of the largest language families of Eurasia, spread over the past five centuries also in North and South America, Australia and partly in Africa. Before the Age of Discovery, Indo-European languages occupied an area from Ireland in the west to East Turkestan in the east and from Scandinavia in the north to India in the south. The Indo-European family includes about 140 languages, which are spoken by a total of about 2 billion people (2007, estimate), the first place in terms of the number of speakers is English.
The role of the study of Indo-European languages in the development of comparative historical linguistics is important. The Indo-European languages were one of the first families of languages of great temporal depth postulated by linguists. Other families in science, as a rule, were singled out (directly or at least indirectly), focusing on the experience of studying Indo-European languages, just as comparative-historical grammars and dictionaries (primarily etymological) for other language families took into account the experience of relevant works on the material of Indo-European languages. languages for which these works were first created. It was during the study of Indo-European languages that the ideas of the parent language, regular phonetic correspondences, reconstruction of the linguistic, genealogical tree of languages were first formulated; a comparative-historical method has been developed.
Within the Indo-European family, the following branches (groups) are distinguished, including those consisting of one language: Indo-Iranian languages, Greek, Italic languages (including Latin), descendants of Latin, Romance languages, Celtic languages, Germanic languages, Baltic languages, Slavic languages , Armenian, Albanian, Hitto-Luvian languages (Anatolian) and Tocharian languages. In addition, a number of extinct languages \u200b\u200b(known from extremely scarce sources - as a rule, from a few inscriptions, glosses, anthroponyms and toponyms from Greek and Byzantine authors) belong to it: Phrygian, Thracian, Illyrian, Messapian, Venetian, ancient Macedonian language. These languages cannot be reliably assigned to any of the known branches (groups) and may represent separate branches (groups).
Undoubtedly, there were other Indo-European languages. Some of them died out without a trace, others left a few traces in toponomastics and substrate vocabulary (see Substrate). Attempts were made to restore individual Indo-European languages in these footsteps. The most famous reconstructions of this kind are the Pelasgian language (the language of the pre-Greek population of Ancient Greece) and the Cimmerian language, which supposedly left traces of borrowing in the Slavic and Baltic languages. The identification of the layer of Pelasgian borrowings in the Greek language and Cimmerian borrowings in the Balto-Slavic languages, based on the establishment of a special system of regular phonetic correspondences that are different from those that are characteristic of the original vocabulary, allows us to build a number of Greek, Slavic and Baltic words that had no etymology before Indo-European roots. It is difficult to determine the specific genetic affiliation of the Pelasgian and Cimmerian languages.
Over the past few centuries, during the expansion of the Indo-European languages, on the basis of Germanic and Romance, several dozen new languages \u200b\u200bare formed - pidgins, some of which were subsequently creolized (see Creole languages) and became quite full-fledged languages both grammatically and functionally. These are Tok Pisin, Bislama, Krio in Sierra Leone, the Gambia and Equatorial Guinea (on an English basis); Sechelva in the Seychelles, Haitian, Mauritian and Reunion (on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean; see Creoles) Creoles (French-based); unzerdeutsch in Papua New Guinea (on a German basis); palenquero in Colombia (on a Spanish basis); Cabuverdianu, Crioulo (both in Cape Verde) and Papiamento in Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao (on a Portuguese basis). In addition, some international artificial languages such as Esperanto are basically Indo-European.
The traditional branching scheme of the Indo-European family is shown in the diagram.
The collapse of the Proto-Indo-European base language dates back to no later than the 4th millennium BC. The greatest antiquity of the branch of the Hitto-Luvian languages is not in doubt, the time of the separation of the Tocharian branch is more controversial due to the scarcity of Tocharian data.
Attempts were made to unite the various Indo-European branches among themselves; for example, hypotheses were expressed about the special proximity of the Baltic and Slavic, Italic and Celtic languages. The most commonly recognized is the unification of the Indo-Aryan languages and Iranian languages (as well as the Dardic languages and Nuristani languages) into the Indo-Iranian branch - in some cases, it is possible to restore the verbal formulas that existed in the Indo-Iranian proto-language. The Balto-Slavic unity causes a little more controversy, other hypotheses are rejected in modern science. In principle, different linguistic features segment the Indo-European linguistic space in different ways. Thus, according to the results of the development of Indo-European back-lingual consonants, Indo-European languages are divided into the so-called satem languages and centum languages (the associations are named after the reflection of the Proto-Indo-European word “hundred” in different languages: in satem languages, its initial sound is reflected in the form “s”, “sh” and etc., in centum ones - in the form of "k", "x", etc.). The use of different sounds (bh and sh) in case endings divides the Indo-European languages into the so-called -mi-languages (Germanic, Baltic, Slavic) and -bhi-languages (Indo-Iranian, Italic, Greek). Different indicators of the passive voice unite, on the one hand, the Italic, Celtic, Phrygian and Tocharian languages (indicator -d), on the other hand, Greek and Indo-Iranian languages (indicator -i). The presence of an augment (a special verbal prefix that conveys the meaning of the past tense) contrasts the Greek, Phrygian, Armenian and Indo-Iranian languages with all others. For almost any pair of Indo-European languages, you can find a number of common linguistic features and lexemes that will be absent in other languages; the so-called wave theory was based on this observation (see Genealogical Classification of Languages). A. Meie proposed the above diagram of the dialect division of the Indo-European community.
The reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language is facilitated by the presence of a sufficient number of ancient written monuments in the languages of different branches of the Indo-European family: from the 17th century BC, the monuments of the Hitto-Luvian languages are known, from the 14th century BC - Greek, approximately by the 12th century BC it belongs (recorded significantly later) the language of the hymns of the Rigveda, by the 6th century BC - monuments of the ancient Persian language, from the end of the 7th century BC - of the Italic languages. In addition, some languages that received writing much later retained a number of archaic features.
The main correspondences of consonants in the languages of different branches of the Indo-European family are shown in the table.
In addition, the so-called laryngeal consonants are being restored - partly on the basis of the consonants h, hh attested in the Hitto-Luvian languages, partly on the basis of systemic considerations. The number of laryngeals, as well as their exact phonetic interpretation, varies among researchers. The structure of the system of Indo-European stop consonants is presented differently in different works: some scientists believe that the Indo-European proto-language distinguished between voiceless, voiced and voiced aspirated consonants (this point of view is presented in the table), others suggest a contrast between deaf, abruptive and voiced or deaf, strong and voiced consonants (in the last two concepts, aspiration is an optional feature of both voiced and voiceless consonants), etc. There is also a point of view according to which 4 series of stops were distinguished in the Indo-European proto-language: voiced, deaf, voiced aspirated and deaf aspirated - just as is the case, for example, in Sanskrit.
The reconstructed Indo-European proto-language appears, like the ancient Indo-European languages, as a language with a developed case system, rich verbal morphology, and complex accentuation. Both the name and the verb have 3 numbers - singular, dual and plural. The problem for the reconstruction of a number of grammatical categories in the Proto-Indo-European language is the lack of corresponding forms in the ancient Indo-European languages - Hitto-Luvian: this state of affairs may indicate either that these categories developed in Proto-Indo-European quite late, after the separation of the Hitto-Luvian branch, or that the Hittite-Luvian languages have undergone significant changes in the grammatical system.
The Indo-European proto-language is characterized by rich possibilities of word formation, including compounding; using reduplication. The alternations of sounds were widely represented in it - both automatic and performing a grammatical function.
The syntax was characterized, in particular, by the agreement of adjectives and demonstrative pronouns with definable nouns by gender, number and case, the use of enclitic particles (placed after the first fully stressed word in a sentence; see Clitics). The word order in the sentence was probably free [perhaps the preferred order was "subject (S) + direct object (O) + verb-predicate (V)"].
The ideas about the Proto-Indo-European language continue to be revised and refined in a number of aspects - this is due, firstly, to the emergence of new data (the discovery of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages in the late 19th and early 20th centuries played a special role), and secondly, to the expansion of knowledge about the device human language in general.
The reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European lexical fund makes it possible to judge the culture of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, as well as their ancestral home (see Indo-Europeans).
According to the theory of V. M. Illich-Svitych, the Indo-European family is an integral part of the so-called Nostratic macrofamily (see Nostratic languages), which makes it possible to verify the Indo-European reconstruction by external comparison data.
The typological diversity of the Indo-European languages is great. Among them, there are languages with a basic word order: SVO, such as Russian or English; SOV, as, for example, many Indo-Iranian languages; VSO, such as Irish [compare the Russian sentence "The father praises the son" and its translations in Hindi - pita bete kl tarif karta hai (literally - 'The father of the son who makes praise is') and in Irish - Moraionn an tathar a mhac (literally - 'A father praises his son')]. Some Indo-European languages use prepositions, others use postpositions [compare Russian 'near the house' and Bengali baritar kache (literally 'at home')]; some are nominative (like the languages of Europe; see Nominative system), others have an ergative construction (for example, in Hindi; see Ergative system); some retained a significant part of the Indo-European case system (like Baltic and Slavic), others lost cases (for example, English), others (Tocharian) developed new cases from postpositions; some tend to express grammatical meanings within a significant word (synthetism), others - with the help of special functional words (analyticism), etc. In Indo-European languages, one can find such phenomena as izafet (in Iranian), group inflection (in Tocharian), opposition of inclusive and exclusive (tok-pisin).
Modern Indo-European languages use scripts based on the Greek alphabet (languages of Europe; see Greek script), Brahmi scripts (Indo-Aryan; see Indian script), some Indo-European languages use scripts of Semitic origin. For a number of ancient languages, cuneiform writing was used (Hitto-Luvian, Old Persian), hieroglyphics (Luvian hieroglyphic language); the ancient Celts used the Ogham alphabet.
Lit. : Brugmann K., Delbrück V. Grundriß der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen. 2. Aufl. Strasbourg, 1897-1916. Bd 1-2; Indogermanische Grammatik / Hrsg. J. Kurylowicz. HDlb., 1968-1986. Bd 1-3; Semereni O. Introduction to Comparative Linguistics. M., 1980; Gamkrelidze T. V., Ivanov Vyach. Sun. Indo-European language and Indo-Europeans: Reconstruction and historical-typological analysis of proto-language and proto-culture. Tb., 1984. Part 1-2; Beekes R.S.P. Comparative Indo-European linguistics. Amst., 1995; Meie A. Introduction to the comparative study of Indo-European languages. 4th ed., M., 2007. Dictionaries: Schrader O. Reallexikon der indogermanischen Altertumskunde. 2. Aufl. AT.; Lpz., 1917-1929. Bd 1-2; Pokorny J. Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch. Bern; Munch., 1950-1969. Lfg 1-18.
Indo-European family consists of Indian group, Iranian group, Slavic group (divided into eastern subgroup, western, southern), Baltic group, Germanic group (divided into northern or Scandinavian subgroup, western, eastern or east Germanic), Romanesque group, Celtic group, Greek group Indian group, Hindi, Urdu, Gypsy, Bengali (dead - Vedic, Sonskrit, Pali, Prakrit).
Iranian group, Persian (Farsi), Afghan (Pashto), Tajik, Ossetian (dead - Old Persian, Avestan, Khorezmian, Scythian).
Slavic group. Eastern subgroup (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian). Western subgroup (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lusatian), dead - Popabian, Pomfian dialects. Southern subgroup (Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian; Macedonian, Slovenian), dead - Old Church Slavonic.
Baltic group. Latvian, Lithuanian (dead - Prussian).
German group. Northern (Scandinavian) subgroup (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Faroese). Western subgroup (English, German, Frisian, Yiddish, Afrikaans). Eastern (East Germanic) subgroup, only the dead - Gothic (divided into Visigothic and Ostrogothic), Burgunian.
Roman group, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Moldavian, Romanian, Macedonian-Romanian, Romansh, Provencal, Sardinian, Galician, Catalan, Dead - Latin, Medieval Vulgar Latin. Celtic group, Irish, Scottish, Welsh (Welsh), Cornish, Breton.
Greek group, only the dead - Ancient Greek, Middle Greek, Modern Greek.
Albanian group- Albanian.
Armenian group- Armenian.
Analytical languages- this is the name in their classification of languages, the brothers Friedrich and August Schlegel gave the new Indo-European languages.
In the ancient world, most of the languages were of a strong synthetic nature, for example. lang. Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc. From the history of the development of languages, it is clear that all languages tend to acquire an analytical character over time: with each new era, the number of characteristic features of the analytical class increases.
The new Indo-European languages experienced significant simplifications in their grammatical system. Instead of a large number of forms, replete with all sorts of anomalies, simpler and more standard forms appeared.
Comparing the old Indo-European languages with the new ones, O. Jespersen (a Danish linguist) found a number of advantages in the grammatical structure of the latter. Forms have become shorter, requiring less muscular tension and time to pronounce them, there are fewer of them, memory is not overloaded with them, their formation has become more regular, the syntactic use of forms shows fewer anomalies, the more analytical and abstract nature of the forms makes them easier to express, allowing for the possibility of multiple combinations and constructions that were previously impossible, the cumbersome repetition known as agreement has disappeared, a fixed word order provides clarity and unambiguity of understanding.
The so-called synthetic structure characteristic of the ancient Indo-European languages (where grammatical meanings are expressed within the word itself, affixation, internal inflection, stress) in many modern Indo-European languages \u200b\u200bwas replaced by an analytical system (grammatical meanings are mainly expressed outside the word, about the sentence, the order of the layer in the sentence , service words, intonation). O. Jespersen argued that these processes mean the victory of a higher and more perfect linguistic form. Independent particles, auxiliary words (prepositions, auxiliary verbs), in his opinion, are a higher technical means of expressing thought than the old inflection.
The new languages took on an analytic character; Most of the European languages moved in this direction, the language of English, which left only small remnants of declensions and conjugations. There are almost no declensions in French either, but there are still conjugations that are also quite strongly developed in German, where the declension is preserved on a wider scale than in the Romance languages. However, two groups of new languages differ from all of them: Slavic and Baltic. Synthetic character traits still prevail here.
5. Macrocomparatives. Macrofamilies of world languages (Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian, Amerindian, etc.). Macrocomparative studies * The theory of distant relationship of languages.
At present, discussions on the issue of the distant relationship of languages (macro-comparative studies) are beginning to play an increasingly important role in comparative studies. The successful development and application of the comparative historical method has led to the fact that the vast majority of taxonomic units have already been identified, and attempts to deepen comparisons seem quite natural. The definition of linguistic kinship, in principle, does not depend on the time of the collapse of the proto-language. It is clear, however, that with very small proportions of coincidences (that is, with very distant kinship), it is difficult to establish regular correspondences in comparison.
The scientific stage of the development of the Nostratic theory began in the 60s with a series of articles by our scientists - V.M. Illich-Svitych and A.B. Dolgopolsky. Illich-Svitych established a detailed system of correspondences between the proto-languages of six language families of the Old World - Semitic-Hamitic, Kartvelian, Indo-European, Uralic, Dravidian and Altaic. According to the generally accepted opinion, the main core of the Nostratic family is the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic languages. The similarity of pronominal systems is especially significant, as well as a large number of parallels in the basic vocabulary.
Another macrofamily, the existence of which was revealed by S.A. Starostin, - the so-called Sino-Caucasian. The Sino-Caucasian hypothesis suggests the existence of an ancient genetic relationship between rather geographically distant language families: North Caucasian, Yenisei and Sino-Tibetan. A rather complex system of correspondences was also established here and a large number of parallels were found in the basic vocabulary. It is possible that before the speakers of the Nostratic languages settled in the territory of Eurasia, the Sino-Caucasian languages were much more widespread. The Sino-Caucasian hypothesis is still at the beginning of development, but this direction seems to be very promising.
Hypotheses about the existence of other macrofamilies have been developed to an even lesser extent.
The Austrian hypothesis suggests a relationship between the Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Thai, and Miao Yao languages. There are a number of parallels between these language families in the field of basic vocabulary.
The Khoisan macrofamily includes all the languages of Africa in which there are special clicking sounds (“clixes”) and which, at the same time, do not belong to other language families, i.e. the languages of the Bushmen, Hottentots, and also, possibly, San-Dave, Hadza and the (extinct) Quadi.
There are also a number of assumptions by J. Greenberg (American linguist) regarding the existence of other macrofamilies: Amerindian, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian and Indo-Pacific. However, unlike those hypotheses that I have already mentioned, these assumptions are based mainly on the "mass comparison" method, and therefore are still much more hypothetical.
The Amerindian hypothesis assumes the kinship of all American aboriginal languages, except for the languages of the Dene (Indian languages of North America) and the Eskimo-Aleutian (Arctic belt of North America). This hypothesis does not have a sufficiently rigorous linguistic justification, but it correlates well with anthropological data. In addition, there are some similarities in the field of grammar between the Amerindian languages.
The Niger-Kordofanian family includes the languages of Africa that have conciliatory classes, the Nilo-Saharan family includes other African languages that are not included in either the Afro-Asiatic, or the Khoisan, or the Niger-Kordofanian macrofamily. A hypothesis has been put forward about the special proximity of the Saharan languages \u200b\u200bto Afroasian.
It has been suggested that all the languages of Australia are related (Australian macrofamily). Almost all other languages of the world are united by J. Greenberg into the Indo-Pacific macrofamily (this hypothesis, apparently, is the least substantiated).
The chronological depth of each of these families is about 11 13 thousand years. The proto-language, to which they all go back, dates back to about 13-15 millennia BC. Naki;.,.eno has enough material to get a detailed picture of the formation and settlement of the majority of the ethnic groups of Eurasia and North America.
1.2. Formation of the Indo-European family of languages
An important component of linguistic history is the emergence and spread of Indo-European languages. This process began in ancient times, and it is happening now, in the form of the spread of already existing languages - English, Russian, Spanish and some others.
During the Paleolithic period, the distant ancestors of the Indo-Europeans lived between the Volga and the Danube. This is evidenced by the fact that the Indo-European names are "Ra (the so-called Volga), Don, Bug, Danube, Balkans, Carpathians, Black Sea), as well as birch - the only Indo-European name for a tree. The words winter and snow are common Indo-European; in many Indo-European languages \u200b\u200bthere are common names for animals (sheep, bull, deer, hare, hedgehog. otter, wolf), birds (goose, duck, eagle, crane), insects (fly, gadfly, wasp. bee, louse, flea).
In the first half of the Stone Age, until the IV-III millennium BC. e., three zones of Indo-European languages were formed: 1) southern, 2) central, 3) northern.
The southern zone consisted of: the Etruscan language of ancient Italy (displaced by the beginning of the new era by the completely Latin language), Lycian, Lydian, Luwian, Hittite languages of Asia Minor. Hittite cuneiform writing dating back to the 18th-13th centuries. BC e., - the most ancient written monuments in the Indo-European language; Hittite hieroglyphic writing refers to the XIV-X1I1 centuries. BC e.
The central zone has undergone a more significant division into branches: on the one hand, the Italian (Romance) and Germanic branches are separated, and on the other hand, the Illyrian-Thracian (it is now represented by the Albanian language), Greek and Indo-Iranian, which, in turn, is divided into Iranian and the Indian branches of the Indo-European languages.
Germanic, Romance and Slavic (the latter emerged from the northern zone) branches form groups of closely related languages.
Consider the formation of three groups of Slavic languages - West Slavic, South Slavic and East Slavic.
The Common Slavic (Proto-Slavic) language consisted of closely related dialects and dialect zones located south of the Prinyat River, between the Western Bug River and the middle reaches of the Dnieper. To the west and north of the Slavs lived the Baltics, east and north of the Finno-Ugric tribes, in the south - the Iranians.
The common Slavic language existed for many centuries: from the second half of the 1st millennium BC. e. until the VI-VII centuries. n. e. The Indo-European heritage was not only preserved, but also modified. Incessant communication maintained commonalities. But in the VI-VII centuries. Slavic tribes settled in vast areas from Ilmen in the north to Greece in the south, from the Oka in the east to the Elbe in the west.
The settlement of the Slavs over a vast territory led to the formation of three groups of Slavic languages, differing in different manifestations of common Slavic sound laws and inflection rules, as well as the emergence of new words and roots, phonetic and grammatical patterns. For example, the name of Charlemagne (the Frankish king, since 800 - the emperor) as a title receives a different phonetic design in the Slavic languages: other-lugs. krol, Polish. krol, Slovak kral, Czech. kral, Slovenian kralj, Serbo-Chorv. kral, bulg. stole, other Russian. king, Russian king, Ukrainian king, white; Karol. Typical features are the structure of an open syllable, inherent in the Slavic languages, and the fullness of the East Slavic languages.
The settlement of the Slavs in the Balkans eventually led to the formation of the South Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Slovenian) and the Balkan language union. Related languages retain their original common features. Common features of a linguistic union arise as a result of prolonged contact of languages.
The Balkan Language Union covers Indo-European languages belonging to different branches of this family - Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Modern Greek, Romanian (the latter was formed on the basis of folk Latin, which was spoken by the colonists in Dacia and the Balkan Peninsula). The grammatical features of the Balkan language union are: the post-positive article, the formation of the future tense with the help of the auxiliary verb to want, the replacement of va with an analytical form, analyticism in the declension of bodies.
Article examples: rum. omul - man (from homo ille), fratele - brother (from frater ille); Bulgarian chovekt - a person, momtsite - guys, momata - a girl, momcheta - a boy, momicheto - a girl. Examples of the future tense: rum. voi cinta or cinta voi - I will sing (voi from voiu< voleo–хочу); болг. ш,е пея - буду петь, ще пеешь – будешь петь (частица ще есть застывшая форма 3-го л. ед. ч. глагола ща – хотеть).
Not only the history of the Indo-European languages, but also the history of other families of languages shows that the formation of related languages took place in stages and is closely connected with the history of the peoples - speakers of these languages. The emergence of tribal dialects and, on their basis, related families and groups of languages is an important fact in the history of mankind, as well as the origin of human speech.
Glossaries (collections of terms) on the themes: sky, water, earth, peoples. The name of the compiler of the ancient Egyptian encyclopedia is the scribe Amenemope, son of Amenemone (New Kingdom). 3. Culture of Ancient Mesopotamia The vast fertile country, located between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, is known collectively as Mesopotamia or Mesopotamia. Here, in the lower reaches of these rivers, in ancient times ...
With another. But this continued only until the 70s of the 4th century, when a new terrible and previously unseen enemy appeared from the east, in front of which the “power of Germanarich” turned out to be powerless. ancient civilization of the Huns-Khazars 4. The Hun invasion and its consequences The concept of the "Great Migration of Peoples" has long been established in science, which is usually dated to the 4th-7th centuries. Obviously, its chronological framework...
And Bonampake are considered one of the most beautiful. The beauty of the depiction of people on the frescoes makes it possible to compare these cultural monuments with the cultural monuments of the ancient world. Therefore, this period of development of the Mayan civilization is considered to be classical. Unfortunately, many of the cultural monuments have not survived to this day, as they were either destroyed by the Inquisition or time. Architecture For Art...
Astral deities include: Shamash (Sumer. Utu) - the god of the Sun; Sin (Sumer. Nanna) is the god of the moon. Each had 2 main centers in Mesopotamia: Shamash - in Lars and Sippar, Sin - in Ur and Harran. Both retained their importance throughout Mesopotamian civilization. Shamash had an exceptional position. He is not only the god of the sun, but also the supreme judge - earthly and heavenly, took care of the poor ...
In fact, the concept of the Indo-European linguistic community is comprehensive, since there are practically no countries and continents in the world that would not be related to it. The peoples of the Indo-European family of languages inhabit a vast territory from Europe and Asia to both American continents, including Africa and even Australia! The entire population of modern Europe speaks these languages, with only a few exceptions. Some common European languages are not part of the Indo-European language family. These include, for example, the following: Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian and Turkish. In Russia, part of the Altaic and Uralic languages also have a different origin.
Origin of the languages of the Indo-European group
The very concept of Indo-European languages was introduced at the beginning of the 19th century by the German scholar Franz Bopp in order to designate a single group of languages of Europe and Asia (including northern India, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh), which have strikingly similar features. This similarity has been confirmed by numerous studies by linguists. In particular, it has been proven that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Hittite, Old Irish, Old Prussian, Gothic, as well as some other languages, were remarkably identical. In this regard, scientists began to put forward various hypotheses about the existence of a certain parent language, which was the progenitor of all the main languages \u200b\u200bof this group.
According to some scholars, this proto-language began to develop somewhere in Eastern Europe or Western Asia. The Eastern European theory of origin connects the beginning of the formation of the Indo-European languages with the territory of Russia, Romania and the Baltic countries. Other scientists considered the Baltic land to be the ancestral home of the Indo-European languages, others connected the origin of these languages with Scandinavia, northern Germany and southern Russia. In the 19th-20th centuries, the Asian theory of origin became widespread, which was subsequently rejected by linguists.
According to numerous hypotheses, the south of Russia is considered the birthplace of the Indo-European civilization. To be more precise, its distribution area covers a vast territory from the northern part of Armenia along the coast of the Caspian Sea up to the Asian steppes. The most ancient monuments of the Indo-European languages are the Hittite texts. Their origin dates back to the 17th century BC. Hittite hieroglyphic texts are ancient evidence of an unknown civilization, giving an idea about the people of that era, about their vision of themselves and the world around them.
Groups of the Indo-European family of languages
In general, Indo-European languages are spoken by 2.5 to 3 billion people in the world, with the largest poles of their distribution being in India, which has 600 million speakers, in Europe and America - 700 million people in each country. Consider the main groups of the Indo-European family of languages.
Indo-Aryan languages
In the large family of Indo-European languages, the Indo-Aryan group constitutes the largest part of it. It includes about 600 languages, these languages are spoken by a total of 700 million people. Indo-Aryan languages include Hindi, Bengali, Maldivian, Dardic and many others. This linguistic zone stretches from Turkish Kurdistan to central India, including parts of Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.
Germanic languages
The Germanic group of languages (English, German, Danish, Dutch, etc.) is also represented on the map by a very large territory. With 450 million speakers, it covers northern and central Europe, all of North America, part of the Antilles, Australia and New Zealand.
Romance languages
Another significant group of the Indo-European family of languages are, of course, the Romance languages. With 430 million speakers, the Romance languages are linked by their common Latin roots. Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and others) are distributed mainly in Europe, as well as throughout South America, in parts of the USA and Canada, in North Africa and on individual islands.
Slavic languages
This group belongs to the fourth largest place in the Indo-European language family. Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Bulgarian and others) are spoken by more than 315 million inhabitants of the European continent.
Baltic languages
In the Baltic Sea area, the only surviving languages of the Baltic group are Latvian and Lithuanian. There are only 5.5 million speakers.
Celtic languages
The smallest language group of the Indo-European family, whose languages are on the verge of extinction. It includes Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Breton and some other languages. The number of Celtic speakers is less than 2 million.
Linguistic isolates
Languages such as Albanian, Greek and Armenian are isolate languages within the modern Indo-European languages. These are perhaps the only surviving languages that do not belong to any of the above groups and have their own characteristic features.
History reference
Between about 2000 and 1500 BC, the Indo-Europeans, thanks to their highly organized militancy, managed to capture vast areas of Europe and Asia. Already at the beginning of 2000, the Indo-Aryan tribes penetrated into India, the Hittites settled in Asia Minor. Subsequently, by 1300, the Hittite empire disappeared, according to one version, under the onslaught of the so-called "people of the sea" - a pirate tribe, which, incidentally, had an Indo-European origin. By 1800, in Europe, on the territory of modern Greece, the Hellenes settled, the Latins settled in Italy. A little later, the Slavs, and then the Celts, Germans and Baltics captured the rest of Europe. And already by 1000 BC, the division of the peoples of the Indo-European language family was finally completed.
All these peoples spoke different languages by that time. Nevertheless, it is known that all these languages, which had a supposed common common language of origin, were similar in many ways. Having numerous common features, over time they acquired more and more new differences, such as, for example, Sanskrit in India, Greek in Greece, Latin in Italy, the Celtic language in central Europe, Slavic in Russia. In the future, these languages, in turn, broke up into numerous dialects, acquired new features and eventually became the modern languages that today are spoken by most of the world's population.
Considering that the Indo-European family of languages is one of the most numerous language groups, it represents the most studied linguistic community. Its existence can be judged, first of all, by the presence of a large number of ancient monuments. The existence of the Indo-European language family is also supported by the fact that all these languages have established genetic ties.