Discovering IndoEuropean

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Discovering Indo-European

• The Language Detectives

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The BackgroundEarly Interest in Language
Relationships

• 12th c. the First Grammarian of Iceland
• Relationships between Icelandic English
• 14th c. Dante Aligheri
• Greek, Latin, and Germanic families
• Romance languages gt Latin
• Dialects originate in single source language

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More Background16th c.

• 16th c. Scaliger
• Hebrew not the first language
• Eleven mother tongues

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The Case for IE Begins

• Sir William Jones (1786)
• Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Germanic, and Celtic
  Languages all derived from an original
  Indo-European language.
• Friedrich von Schlegel (1808)
• (X) Sanskrit parent of Indo-European
• Regular, structured, causal relationships
  important in historical studies.

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The Case Continues IE to Germanic

• Rasmus Rask (1818)
• Systematic phonological changes
• Interrelationships among IE family
• Jacob Grimm (1822)
• Grimms Law
• All IE voiceless stops voiceless fricatives
• All IE voiced stops voiceless stops
• All IE voiced aspirated stops voiced stops

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Examples of Grimms Law

• Indo-European Latin
• pedis, pater
• tres, tonare
• canis, cornu
• turba
• dentis, duo
• granum, ager
• frater, frango
• foris, fingo
• hortus, hostis

• Germanic English
• foot, father
• three, to thunder
• hound, horn
• OE thorp village
• tooth, two
• corn, acre
• brother, break
• door, dough
• garden, guest

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The Case continues. . .

• Karl Verner (1875)
• Verners Law
• IE consonants p, t, and k shifted to f,
  ?, and h in Germanic, except when between
  voiced sounds and preceded by an unaccented
  vowel, they became voiced (b, d, and g
  instead.
• r might appear where s was expected.

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Examples of Verners Law

• Latin capút head
• Greek klutós
• famous
• Greek dekás
• group of ten
• Sanskrit snusá,
• daughter-in-law

• Gothic haubiþ
• OE hlud loud
• Gothic tigus
• OE snoru

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So What?

• Grimms Law and Verners Law show that the
  Germanic truly shares a large cognate vocabulary
  with the other IE languages.
• Words which seem different because consonants
  differ are actually variants.
• The shifts are systematic and occur consistently
  throughout the original vocabulary.
• We learn to look for similar patterns in other
  language relationships.

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Present Understanding of Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European
Centum Languages
Satem Languages
Germanic Celtic Hellenic Italic (Anatolian) (Tocha
rian)
Balto-Slavic Armenian Albanian Indo-Iranian
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Stammbaumtheorie the Language Tree

• August Schleicher (1861)
• Constructed hypothetical prehistoric
  Indo-European word forms.
• Devised the tree model for language relationships
  and change

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