From: bkannan@ha06.eng.ua.edu (Balaji Kannan)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.tamil
Subject: Proto Indo-European Languages (was Re: ammA/appA)
Date: 27 Aug 1992 00:05:52 -0500
Organization: UTexas Mail-to-News Gateway
NNTP-Posting-Host: cs.utexas.edu




                     The Dawn of Language [II/II]

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  Nor can we read any Indo-European writings, for the simple reason that
  not a scrap exists. Everything we know - or, to be more precise, think
  we know - is based on conjecture, on finding common starnds in modern-day
  languages and tracing these strands to a hypothetical mother tongue, Proto
  Indo-European, which may never even have existed. The lack of documentary
  evidence isn't too surprising when you bear in mind that we are going
  back an awfully long time. The early Indo-Europeans were Neolithic - that
  is, late Stone Age - people who can be dated back to 7000 B.C. The descended
  Indo-Europeans almost always show some kind of kinship in their names for
  primary family relationships, such as mother and father; for parts of the
  body, such as eye, foot, heart and ear; for common animals, such as goat
  and ox; and for natural elements, such as snow, thunder and fire. We can
  deduce something about how these people lived from these cognates. They
  ahd a common word for snow and cold, so the climate obviously was not
  tropical, and yet they appeared to have had no common word for sea.
  Those tribes that reached the sea each came up with words of their own,
  so presumably they began their migration from a point well inland. Among
  the other words held in common are oak, beech,birch, willow,bear,wolf,deer,
  rabbit, sheep,goat,pig, and dog. They had no common word for horse or
  window. By studying the known range of certain flora and fauna,linguists
  have placed their original homeland in various places: the Russian steppes,
  Scandinavia,central Europe,the danube valley,Asia minor - indeed, almost
  everywhere.

  Their common existence is thought to have ended between 3500 and 2500 B.C,
  when they began to fan out across Europe and Asia. For the most part these
  were probably not great exoduses but rather gradual encroachments as each
  new generation sought new pastures and hunting areas. Over the millenia they
  spread over wide areas- even reaching China. Explorers at the turn of the
  century were astonished to find a cache of Buddhist documents written in two
  related but unknown languages in what is now the Chinese province of
  Sinkiang, along the Old Silk Road. The languages which they called
  Tocharian, were, clearly Indo-European, as can be seen, for instance, in
  their words for the number three: tre and trai. As the centuries passed, the
  original Indo-European language split into a dozen broad groups: Celtic,
  Germanic, Indo-Iranian, Slavonic, Thraco-Illyrian, and so on. These
  further subdivided into literally scores of new languages, ranging from
  Latin to Faeroese to Parthian to Armenian to Hindi to Portuegese.
  It is remarkable to reflect that people as various as a Scottish
  Highlander and a Sinhalese speaking Srilankan both use languages that
  can be traced directly back to the same starting point. With this in
  mind, it is perhaps little wonder that the Greeks and Romans had no idea
  that they were cousins of barbarian tongues all around them. The notion
  would have left them dumbfounded. Just within Europe the degree of
  divergency is so great that only relatively recently have two languages
  Albanian and Armenian, been identified as being Indo-European.

  Of all the Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is the one that has
  changed the least - so much so that it is sometimes said a Lithuanian
  can understand simple phrases in Sanskrit. At the very least, Lithuanian
  has preserved many more of the inflectional complexities of the origianl
  Indo-European language than others of the family.

  English is part of the Germanic family, which gradually split into three
  branches. These were North Germanic, consisting of Scandinavian languages;
  West Germanic, consisting principally of English, German and Dutch(but also
  Frisian, Flemish, and other relaetd dialects); and East germanic, whose
  three component languages, Burgundian, Gothic, and Vandalic, died off
  oen by one. Many other European languages disappeared over time, among them
  Cornish, Manx, Gaulish, Lydian, Oscan, Umbrian, and two that once
  dominated Europe, Celtic, and Latin.

                 [stuff on Celtic and Romance languages deleted]

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   anbudan,
   bk
Newsgroups: soc.culture.tamil