INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

Approximate locations of Indo-European languages in contemporary Eurasia. family of languages spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of Southwest and South Asia. The term Indo-Hittite is used by scholars who believe that Hittite and the other Anatolian languages are not just one branch of Indo-European but rather a branch coordinate with all the rest put together; thus, Indo-Hittite has been used for a family consisting of Indo-European proper plus Anatolian. As long as this view is neither definitively proved nor disproved, it is convenient to keep the traditional use of the term Indo-European. family of languages spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of Southwest and South Asia. The Indo-European languages are the descendants of a single unrecorded language that is believed to have been spoken more than 5,000 years ago in the steppe regions north of the Black Sea and to have split into a number of dialects by the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC. These dialects, carried by migrating tribes to Europe and Asia, developed in time into separate languages, a number of which have left written records of their various stages. The main branches, past and present, are Anatolian, the major representative of which is Hittite; Indo-Iranian, including Sanskrit, Avestan, and modern Hindi and Persian; Greek; Italic, including Latin and its modern representatives, the Romance languages, namely French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and others; Germanic, including English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian languages; Armenian; Celtic, including Irish and Welsh; Albanian; the extinct Tocharian languages; Baltic, including the extinct Old Prussian and modern Latvian and Lithuanian; and Slavic, including Old Church Slavonic, Russian, Czech, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, and others. In a genetic classification of languages, words suspected of being cognates are compared, and a system of regular sound correspondences is established. For each set of correspondences, a proto-segment is posited, and by the application of sound laws, or phonetic rules, its development is traced down through the daughter languages. Similarity of sound or written form is in itself not diagnostic in establishing cognates: the French feu (fire') and German Feuer (fire') are unrelated, while Armenian erku (two') is related in a very systematic way to English two. The idea of a genetic relationship between certain of the Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Germanic, and Celtic) was first proposed in 1786 by the British orientalist Sir William Jones, who suggested that these languages all derive from some single common source. In the following century the detailed evidence underlying Jones's assertion was presented, and a number of other languages were shown to be members of the Indo-European family. A genetic relationship based on a phonological comparison was established in the early 19th century by the Dane Rasmus Rask and the German Jacob Grimm, who set up correspondences between the sounds of equivalent words in Germanic, on the one hand, and Greek and Latin, on the other. In the course of the 19th century, statements of sound changes accounting for relationships between the parent language and the daughter languages became more accurate and refined. Previously unmotivated exceptions to rules were shown to be regular themselves. Thus Grimm's Law, which establishes a correspondence between stop and spirant consonants in Germanic and the consonants of other Indo-European languages (for example, the stop in p in Latin pater corresponds to the spirant f in English father), leaves a number of forms unaccounted for. These residues, however, were later explained by Grassmann's Law, which treated the dissimilation of aspirates in Greek and Sanskrit, and Verner's Law, which demonstrated the influence of the original place of stress on the reflexes of Indo-European consonants in Germanic. Encouraged by the apparent regularity of sound change, there arose a new school of linguists in the 1870s, the so-called Neogrammarians (Junggrammatiker). The latest full-scale treatment of the Indo-European family is found in the multivolume work of the Neogrammarian Karl Brugmann, Grundriss der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (18971916; Outline of Comparative Indo-European Grammar). The Indo-European parent language possessed a rich, well-developed system of labial, dental, palatal, velar, and labiovelar stops, with voiceless, voiced, and voiced aspirate articulations. Other consonants included the sibilant s (with a voiced variant z) and the three laryngeals H1, H2, and H3, which sometimes lengthened and coloured neighbouring vowels but themselves usually disappeared outside Anatolian. There were also the six sonorants r, l, y, w, m, and n, which had the syllabic variants r, l, i, u, m, and n in some phonetic environments. The vowel system included a, e, o, i, and u, of which the first three, and probably all five, occurred both long and short. A characteristic feature of Proto-Indo-European was the pattern of grammatically conditioned vowel alternation called ablaut, by which the basic vowel e (normal grade) of a root or suffix could be lost (zero-grade), lengthened to e (lengthened grade), changed to o (o-grade), or changed to o and lengthened (lengthened o-grade). Proto-Indo-European was a highly inflected language. Nouns, adjectives, and most pronouns made use of ablaut and suffixed endings to distinguish eight cases and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural); there were also three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter). Verbs were inflected not only for person and number but also for aspect (imperfective, perfective, stative), tense (past, non-past), voice (active, mediopassive), and mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative). The complex morphological system of the parent language was considerably simplified in the later history of the family, partly as a result of the reduction and loss of final syllables through phonetic change. Additional reading Karl Brugmann, Elements of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages, 5 vol. (also published as A Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages, 188895; originally published in German, 18861900), is the latest completed full treatment of the whole family. A. Meillet, Introduction l'tude comparative des langues indo-europennes, 8th ed. corrected (1937, reissued 1978), is dated but still an excellent introduction to the subject. Jerzy Kurylowicz, Indogermanische Grammatik, ed. by Manfred Mayrhofer, especially vol. 1, part 1, Einleitung, by Warren Cowgill (1986), and part 2, Lautlehre (segmentale Phonologie des Indogermanischen), by Manfred Mayrhofer (1986), contains the most up-to-date account of the Indo-European sound system. Andrew L. Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (1995), focuses on the classical languages but provides the fullest introduction to Indo-European linguistics in English. Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wrterbuch, 2 vol. (195169), offers the most recent etymological dictionary of the whole family. Carl Darling Buck, A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages (1949, reissued 1988), assembles a mine of information about Indo-European words for several hundred basic concepts. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, rev. and ed. by Calvert Watkins (1985), focuses on the Indo-European component of English. Holger Pedersen, Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century (1931, reissued as The Discovery of Language, 1962; originally published in Danish, 1924), comprises a very good account of 19th-century work in the field. J.P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans (1989), provides a full and balanced account of the Indo-European homeland problem. The wide-ranging work by Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon (1995), studies aspects of Indo-European comparative poetics, religion, and mythology. Warren Cowgill Jay H. Jasanoff