Introduction to Linguistics, Session 1, Thursday, 2006-10-19

Introduction to Linguistics, Session 1, Thursday, 2006-10-19



Introduction to Linguistics


What is a language family?
A language family is a group of different languages that are related to each other by one single ancestor.
Thus Roman languages (like Latin) and Germanic languages (like Proto-Germanic) are ascendants from Indo-European.


Who are the Grimm Brothers?
The Grimm Brothers are very famous and leading linguists. They collected fairy tales of different languages in order to find out how these languages were related to language families and different dialects.



What are the following languages and how old are they?


Indo- European
The Indo-European language family consists of several hundred related languages. Most of the major languages of Europe belong to this family and there are even more languages in the Indian subcontinent and in Asia that are related to this large family. Languages belonging to the Indo-European language family are world wide spoken by more than 3 billion native speakers. Indo- European has the world’s largest number of speakers today.
Indo-European contains ten main subgroups of language families:

-Germanic languages including Old English (Proto-Germanic languages)
-Celtic languages including Gaelic that was spoken in Gaulle (which is France today)
--and Old Irish
-Italic languages whose roman dialect developed to Latin and later to differentiated in Romance languages
-Greek
-Anatolian languages
-Indo- Iranian languages
-Armenian
-Tocharian languages
-Balto- Slavic languages (divided into Slavic and Baltic languages)
-Albanian

In addition to these well know languages with Indo-European origin, there are many little known or already extinct languages which belong to this family as well:
For example:

-Venetic (which is close to Italic)
-Phrygian (which is close to Greek)
-Paionian (extinct language, spoken in Macedon)



The Indo-European language family
(picture taken from: www.wikipedia.com)




Legend
Orange: Countries with a majority of speakers of Indo-European languages.
Yellow: Countries with an Indo-European minority language with official status.


Many scholars classify the Indo-European language family in two sub-branches, the Satem group and the Centem group. Whereas eastern languages such as Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic belong to the Satem, western languages like Germanic, Italic or Celtic belong to the Centem.



Legend:
Diachronic map showing the Centum (blue) and Satem (red) languages.
(picture taken from www.wikipedia.com)
Scholars are not sure about a definite linguistic origin of Indo-European. Most of them do not suggest that a kind of Proto-Indo-European might have existed. They rather claim that there are different opportunities of geographic location from where the evolution of Indo- European could have taken place.
Scholars who believe that Indo-European has developed from Kurgan date its early origin to 5000 BC. Other linguists think that it has an Anatolian origin and date its appearance therefore several millennia earlier.
There are no written documents of Indo-European.



Proto- Germanic
Proto-Germanic is the ancestor of all Germanic languages and includes therefore English and German. The language itself is a direct descendent from Indo-European.
Proto-Germanic was not written and therefore all linguistic knowledge of this language has been obtained by comparative studies. Old inscriptions of Proto-Norse and the inventory of loanwords in neighbouring non-Germanic languages admit a reconstruction of the Proto-Germanic phase (f.ex: Finish, Astonian: kuningas: king).
After the arrival of Indo-European speakers at the plains of southern Sweden and Denmark which are regarded as original dwelling-places of the Germanic people, the evolution of Proto-Germanic began.



Old English
Old English was spoken in the parts of Great Britain that are England and Scotland now.
It was extinct when it developed into Middle English by the 12th century.
It belongs to the Indo- European language family and is related to the branch of Germanic and West-Frisian languages.
Old English was used for about 700 years. Its evolution began when the Anglo-Saxons started migrating to England and was used until the Norman invasion of 1066. Old English was not static and assimilated therefor many aspects of foreign languages it was in contact with. Celtic languages and dialects of Old Norse spoken by the Vikings influenced Old English a lot.
Old English vocabulary, syntax and grammar is close to other languages that descent from Germanic.
But it was also highly influenced by Latin, which was the lingua franca of Europe.


Middle English
Middle English developed from the Anglo-Friesian branch of West Germanic and succeeds the evolution of Old English. It was spoken in England and southern Scotland between the Norman invasion of 1066 and the mid-to-late 15th century.
Middle English is a written language that contains a wide variety of (dialectal) word forms.
We can thus observe the emergence of more distinct local scribal styles and written dialects.
Although Middle English was the vernacular language of most English people, it was not the tongue of high prestige. After Latin, Anglo-Norman French became a learned tongue at the court.



Early Modern English
Early Modern English was spoken from the end of the Middle English period in the 15th to 1650. This means that the Shakespeare’s writings also are associated with the late phase of Early Modern English.
It only differentiates from current English in partial grammar changes, changes in the meaning of some words and spelling differences. Current speakers of English are thus able to understand Early Modern English without greater problems.
The development from Middle English to Early modern English was accompanied by the evolution of printing technology. This means that more books have been published and that more people were able to get into contact with written documents. This means that a standard spelling could be spread within the English speaking population.
Now, English was also used in church services rather than Latin which had become a rather incomprehensible language.
In the 17th century England was exposed to many political and social changes. A lot of forms of pronunciation and vocabulary lost their prestige and came out of use. Political changes and globalisation promoted the development from Early Modern English to Modern English.