Dr. Fee's Introduction to Indo-European

English 209: Introduction to Indo-European

· What do we mean by “language family”? Languages which display significant evidence of having descended from a common ancestor; problems with this definition,but we’ll use it with the caveat that a biological model is an imperfect analogy for language
· Define stammbaum theory (family tree)
· Define wellentheorie (waves of innovation; concentric ripples model)
· What is another major model for classifying languages into categories (besides the genetic “family” model)?
· One based on morpheme or word formation (three divisions):
· Inflectional languages (inseperable inflections are fused with lexical stems to carry grammatical information) [Greek,Latin]
· Agglutinative languages (grammatical morphemes are combined with lexical stems; these affixes are discrete, relatively unchanged fromword to word,and strung onto the stem one after the other) [Swahili, Turkish]
· Isolating languages (every morpheme forms a separate word; individual particles are used to convey grammatical information) [Chinese, Vietnamese]
· How useful is this system for our study of the history English? (Limited: we’re studying the “life history” of English, and so are interested in genetic relationships; English is a mixed language, according to this system)
· How do we decide that two languages are related to each other by a common origin?
· Patterned, consistent relationships between the two
· Concentrate on basic, essential words; these are less likely to be borrowed from other languages
· Define native word
· Define loanword
· Define dialect
· How many major language families are there in the world? (100-several hundred)
· How many distinct languages within these families? (several thousand)
· What were some major theories, dates, and people associated with the development of historical linguistics in Europe?
· Medieval/Renaissance: Adamic theory of language (Hebrew)
· First Grammarian of Iceland (12th century; Icelandic and English)
· Dante (14th century; Greek,Latin, Germanic subfamilies, descent of Romance languages from Latin, origin of dialects in single source language)
· Scaliger (late 16th century; refuted Adamic language; divided European languages into 11 “mother tongues”)
· Leibniz (17th century; Hebrew/Arabic, Finnish/Hungarian relationships)
· ***Sir William Jones (1786; reaffirms relationship between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Germanic,Celtic; postulates all of them derived from a lost Indo-European parent language)***
· How early are the earliest written records of any IE tongue? (ca. 1500 BC)
· Are there any records left from the original IE tongue?
· Then how are we able to reconstruct it? (Extrapolation backwards)
· When was the IE language spoken? (ca. 5000-3000 BC)
· What do we know about the lives of the IE peoples?
· Original home was inland, relatively cool, probable eastern Europe/western Asia
· Late Stone Age, perhaps seminomadic
· Domesticated animals, some agriculture
· Religious
· How could we possibly gather all of this information about people the language of whom is entirely lost?
· Surviving IE tongues share a number of telling words
· List some of these words
· Words for cold, winter, honey, wolf, snow, beech, pine
· Not conclusive evidence (people often use an existing word for a new phenomenon—Robin, etc.--, once common words may be lost—sky, etc.--,, but a large sample of common roots tend to substantiate these assumptions
· When did the IE parent group begin to split up? (Migrations began ca. 3000 BC)
· Who went first? Who was last? (Hittites/Germanic amongst last)
· What are the recognized subdivisions of IE? (10, some extinct):
· Indo-Iranian
· Tocharian
· Armenian
· Anatolian
· Balto-Slavic
· Hellenic
· Albanian
· Celtic
· Italic
· Germanic
· Define satem/centum (roughly east/west: “100” in Avestan and Latin,respectively)