Indo-Europeans, their language and why they influence you to this day

The story of the Indo-European language family is that of a plucky little tribe of nomadic or semi-nomadic people who inhabited the southern part of modern-day Ukraine around 2500 BC. Their language was never written down, forcing resourceful historical linguists several millennia later to reconstruct it based on clues and correspondences found in the individual language groups. These linguists prefer to work with the oldest material available and the general motto is: 'the older, the better'.

You may have noticed before that there are quite a few correspondences between English, German and Dutch, as in the following examples:

English	Dutch	German
father	vader	Vater
live	leven	leben
hundred	honderd	hundert

This is not surprising, as these languages are all classified as belonging to the West-Germanic branch of the Germanic language group. But what if we compare the word father, for example, with some other languages? We'll take some old languages and compare them to the word father.

Sanskrit pitā, Greek patēr, Latin pater, Gothic fadar

Gothic is the oldest attested Germanic language. Between vowels, a single d was probably pronounced as the th in Modern English father. Already, we can see an interesting correspondence, namely that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) *p corresponds to an f in Germanic. The sound that is the result of a regular sound change from an older language is called its reflex. So, Germanic f is the reflex of PIE *p (the asterisk * means it is a reconstructed form and therefore not found in any written source). Linguists use the following shorthand:

PIE *p > Germ. f (or rather Proto-Germ. *f)

This process is called sound change. Its principles and finer points are something I'm going to leave for another day.

Now some less transparent forms:

Old Irish athir, Armenian hayr (which comes from a reconstructed earlier form *haþir; þ = th as in thin)

In Armenian PIE *p became h at the beginning of a word and w after vowels. The beginning of a word is often called by the German name Anlaut or anlaut. In shorthand:

PIE *p	Arm.	h / #_
		w / V_

(the slash / means 'under the condition'; # is used to indicate the word boundary, if # is at the beginning, it means the beginning of a word, if it stands at the end, it means the end of a word; V is a shorthand meaning 'any vowel'; and the underscore _ means the position in the word the sound is in. So this shorthand can be read as: Proto-Indo-European *p has the reflex h in Armenian under the condition that *p was in anlaut and it has the reflex w under the condition that it stood after any vowel. This cumbersome and  long sentence explains why historical linguists prefer to work with shorthand notations.)

Old Irish lost the PIE *p completely. So:

PIE *p > OIr ø
(ø means zero, or the disappearance of a sound)

Naturally, the word for father is not the only word that has been reconstructed for PIE, but I used this example to demonstrate that there are regular correspondences that, reason suggests, must have come from the same ancestral language.

A word of caution to this tale: correspondences between words in different languages does not automatically imply kinship. There can be other factors at work, such as borrowing (think of all the words from French and Latin in English that have been borrowed). That is why historical linguists choose the oldest available data for their reconstruction, since the external influences on sounds and lexicon will be minimal and therefore closer to the proto-language they are trying to reconstruct.

The players in the Indo-European language theater

The following is a list of the groups in the Indo-European language family with some of the more important languages used for reconstruction in parentheses. It is by no means exhaustive, but it will give you a rough idea of the scope of languages we are talking about.

• Indic (mainly Sanskrit, the Rigveda are especially important)
• Iranian (Avestan)
• Baltic (Lithuanian, Old Prussian, Latvian to a certain extent)
• Slavic (Old Church Slavonic, Serbo-Croat)
• Anatolian (Hittite, this group is extinct)
• Tocharian (two varieties, indicated with A and B; both are extinct)
• Greek (Homeric, Classical, Mycenaean)
• Italic (Latin)
• Celtic (Old Irish)
• Germanic (Gothic, Old High German, Old Norse, Old English)
• Armenian

There are others, but these are either too poorly attested (mainly names of people or places) or have reached us in written form at a much later date after having undergone many innovations, most notably Albanian.
Bless the Internet, because some brave soul has made an exhaustive overview of all the Indo-European languages (living or dead).

We'll return to Proto-Indo-European, some of the principles behind language reconstruction and sound laws (including many examples of reflexes) at a later time. Until then, I leave you with a map that shows how the Indo-European languages have spread out across the world, largely due to colonialism by the English, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, the Dutch. But also the spread of Russian through the medium of the Russian Empire first and later the Soviet Union has contributed to the fact that Indo-European languages are now spoken in most of world, either as a native language, or as a recognized official language.

Dixi.