Indo-European Language Family

Sir William Jones, as a Supreme Court Justice in India, studied Sanskrit and was struck by the affinity among Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. In 1786, in a paper delivered to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, he proposed that these languages, as well as Germanic and Celtic languages were descended from a common source, Indo-European (IE), which was probably spoken between 5,000 and 3,000 B.C.E.

Further Indo-European studies were conducted by Franz Bopp, 1816, who conducted comparisons of verbal systems of different languages; Rasmus Rask, who noticed systematic phonological changes (1818); A Schleicher, who made attempt to reconstruct pre-historic Indo-European forms.

Many scholars classify the Indo-European sub-branches into a Satem group and a Centum group (from the word for hundred in Latin and Avestan (old Persian)).

Satem denotes the group of Indo-European languages in which original velar stops became palatalized ([k]  [s] or [ʃ]). These languages belong to the Indic, Iranian, Armenian, Slavonic, Baltic, and Albanian branches and are traditionally regarded as the Eastern group.

Centum denotes Indo-European languages in which original velar stops ([k]) were not palatalized, namely languages of the Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Anatolian, and Tocharian branches.

Figure 1

Indo-European languages tree

The IE family comprises some 140 languages out of a total of approximately 10,000 languages world-wide, yet it is believed that half of the people in the world speak an IE language.

Germanic Languages

The English language is a member of the Germanic family of languages, which is itself a subset of the Indo-European family of languages.

One group of IE speakers developed a variety of the language that eventually diverged far enough from its parent language to be recognizable as a distinct language, referred to variously by present-day scholars as "Primitive Germanic," "Common Germanic," or "Proto-Germanic." This language in turn underwent changes and branched into three identifiable speech communities: North Germanic (witnessed by present-day Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and the language of the Faeroese Islands); West Germanic (present-day High German, Low German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English); and East Germanic, the records for which establish only one, now-extinct written witness, Gothic.

Germanic poses significant problems for historical linguists trying to place it on the Indo-European family tree. A group of scientists, employing computational cladistics, have recently proposed that Germanic emerged as a discrete linguistic community as part of the Satem branch of the IE tree (the branch including Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian), but very early on its speakers borrowed from the vocabulary of Pre-Proto-Celtic and Pre-Proto-Italic, with the result that Germanic exhibited key characteristics associated with the Centum branch of the family.

Figure 2

Germanic languages tree

Note: Languages in italic are extinct.

Learn more about Germanic languages, modern and extinct at the Germanic Languages site, http://softrat.home.mindspring.com/germanic.html#topofdoc