Talk: Indo-European languages
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origin of the term 'Indo-European'
Quote: "Indo-Germanic languages" or sometimes "Aryan". However when it became apparent that the connection is relevant to most of Europe's languages, the name was expanded to Indo-European.
- I contest this. "Indo-European" is not an 'expansion' of "Indo-Germanic". I believe it was simply an alternative used by the french, because they didn't like having 'germanic' in the name. The problem is (was) that 'indo-' may be both a linguistic and a geographical term. "germanic" is a linguistic, "european" a geographical term. "Indo-European" tries to describe the area where the languages are spoken, "Indo-Germanic" tries to encompass the familiy branches by naming two (again, geographical, NW-SE) extremes. I will try to dig up some details on this and amend the article. "Aryan", on the other hand, was an attempt at reconstructing what the Proto-Indo-Europeans called themselves; other names were suggested, e.g. "Japhetite" (building on the semitic/hamitic nomenclature). Note that this controversy predates the third Reich by many decades, so "Indo-Germanic" is not a german nationalistic/chauvinist term at all, and carries no such overtones in german literature -- Dbachmann 08:07, 5 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Satem/Kentum
Could somebody describe Satem-Centum division and basic reconstructed grammar of PIE ? Taw
- See Satem, Centum
- Piotr Gasiorowski
- [deleted statement of my intention to add this] - fair enough, I have nothing to add to that Dbachmann 10:44, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Kentum-Satem has to do with the word for hundred. In some languages the original Kemtum was replaced by Satem. Satem languages include Slavic, Baltic, Indo-Iranian, and Indic. An example would be the Russian word for hundred, "sto".
English "hundred" comes from a different word. In Germanic, Indo-European "k" is sometimes replaced with "h". So, Germanic is a Kentum language. The Latin word for hundred is Centum, so it is a Kentum language too.
An excellent resource for Indo-European is ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INDO-EUROPEAN CULTURE, edited by Mallory.
Satem-Centum, Again
I'm a little puzzled about this being an absolute, since when I took a class in Hittite a few decades ago, one of the facts that stayed with me was that the Anatolian languages split off from PIE either before or during the Satem-Centum split -- which makes this family of interest. (As well as being one of the earliest attested IE languages.) -- llywrch 19:55, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)
Grammar
I am not happy with the paragraph
- The entire body of Indo-European, Aryan or Indo-Germanic languages is derived originally from monosyllabic elements. There are two classes, verbal and pronominal. These two grammatical forms combined, gradually formed the rudiments of vocabulary and grammar.
which I feel is not consistent with the previous one. I don't know what to make of it nor what to do with it. Expert linguists please help. -- Calypso
The paragraph is not consistent with facts either. There are numerous IE nouns, for example, which are not derived from verb roots. Also, "monosyllabic" is not a felicitous description, since roots in a language like PIE are bound morphemes that cannot be pronounced in isolation. Some "roots" may well have disyllabic phonetic realisations. I think the paragraph is simply superfluous, so I'll take the liberty of removing it. If time permits, I'll provide some more concrete info about PIE word structure instead. -- Piotr Gasiorowski
Article organization, wording
The "languages" articles are inconsistently titled. We have "Romance language" but "Indo-European languages". This is a poor show for a group of skilled linguists. It seems clear to me that, going by the article naming guidelines, we should use the singular for everything. Before I go around re-naming all the articles, does anyone have an alternative view? Deb 09:42, 10 Aug 2003 (UTC)
- I prefer the usage of the plural; generally, we are talking about all the languages in a group, not just one of them. The heading Indo-European languages, for instance, might be better titled Indo-European language family; it shows a collective - a group of languages - not a singular language. thefamouseccles 01:14 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)
- Differentiation between 'languages' and 'dialects' is mostly conventional, but such conventions exist; it is not customary, for example, to speak of 'greek languages', but rather of 'greek dialects'. also, for armenian and albanian, arguably only a single language is known in these groups (including various dialects). Dbachmann 11:56, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I think we need to split off the Proto-Indo-European section into its own article. I mean, Latin isn't a section on the Romance languages page. -Branddobbe 08:44, Mar 9, 2004 (UTC)
I contracted baltic and slavic to a single list-entry 'balto-slavic', to reflect 'indo-iranian'. (and since, as indo-iranian, they really do form a single branch of IE, being closer to each other than to any other IE language) Dbachmann 11:56, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Quote: Popular languages in this superfamily include English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, Russian, Persian, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu.
- what's a 'popular' language? shouldn't this be 'modern' or 'spoken today'. NPOV would ask for for sorting by number of living native speakers. wouldn't four or five 'most spoken' be enough (probably English, Spanish, Urdu/Hindi, Russian, but I didn't check) Dbachmann 12:06, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Non-IE languages
What pockets of non-Indo-European languages are left in Europe? Is the basque language the only one? --AxelBoldt
- The [Finno-Ugric languages] such as Hungarian, Finnish, and Saami (Lapp) languages are also non-Indo-European
- There's actually nummerically a whole heap, just most of them have very few speakers.
Estonian is also Finno-Ugric and related to Finnish user:H.J.
Turkish language is not Indoeuropean iirc. --Taw
- You're right. However, it barely counts as European either. But it should probably be included for completeness. Also Maltese. --Zundark, 2001 Dec 6
- Basque is the only "Pocket". All others are later incursions (turkish, hungarian migrations). Non IE-languages in Europe boil down to Basque, Finno-Ugric and Turkic, the latter two having homelands in the east. Dbachmann 13:33, 22 Jul 2004 (UTC)
I'm not sure Basque is the only pocket of speakers of the original languages of Europe - what about welsh? --81.134.180.92 10:33, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)
- Welsh is a Celtic language and the Celtic languages are Indo-European. As an aside, I know that Basque is older than Finnish and Hungarian but I'm not sure how the Celtic languages compare age-wise. — Hippietrail 00:52, 29 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Nostratic
I changed the reference to Nostratic from its previous form, which was along the lines of "Indo-European languages may belong to a superfamily called Nostratic". The consensus is that the Nostratic hypothesis is disproven, but then I was also loathe to removed the link to one of the articles I wrote :) So I just changed it to a "See also". I rationalize that on the basis that there's some discussion of how PIE was reconstructed there. -- Paul Drye
There is no consensus that the Nostratic hypothesis is wrong. Drye seems to be very fanatical about this. I suggest that anyone should simply look up Nostratic in any other encyclopedia and get a more balanced view.
- Well, I don't debate with anonymous editors, but for the benefit of anyone else who's been wondering what I've been up to, the Nostratic hypothesis inhabits the borderlines of linguistics. Essentially it has the life that it does thanks to the troubled scientific history of the Soviet Union. Afer the Russian Revolution, and particularly after Stalin came to power, politics cut off the Russians in a number of fields -- genetics and its troubles with Lysenkoism are the most famous example. In the case of linguistics, Russian scientists went off on a wild hare about Nostratic and were too isolated to benefit from the better work happening in the west. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, they became quite voluble about how right they were, and attracted the attention of the popular press.
- There are very few serious linguists who give Nostratic much time. As with our anonymous proponent up there, I also suggest that the interested reader take a look around. You'll notice that those who speak of Nostratic seriously in 2002 boil down to:
- Russians that no-one takes seriously
- A half-dozen western names that pop up repeatedly
- Popular press articles
- J. Greenberg
- The first three can be dismissed out of hand. Greenberg deserves better if only on the strength of his stellar work on sub-Saharan African languages in his earlier days. Unfortunately, he is generally perceived as another Isaac Newton; brilliant as a young man, off the deep end once he got older. Greenberg's "Eurasiatic"-renaming of Nostratic is seen as the equivalent of Sir Isaac's obsession with alchemy and numerology.
- I would point out that the best documentary evidence our anonymous author is providing is a link to some web discussion forums, and a pro-Nostratic e-mail Listserv. Whee. A quick boo at the professional literature in the field turns up only refutations of the concept, if they even talk about it at all. Close reading of the recent stuff about linguistic diffusion shows that they've moved beyond the possibility of a reconstructable macrofamily "above" the ones we've got.
- Not that you need my permission, but I specifically invite any reader here who looks at what I'm claiming here and disagrees to reverse my reversions. I'm confident enough in this that I believe there won't be any takers. -- Paul Drye, who explains what he does instead of resorting to ad hominem.
- I'd like to endorse Paul Drye's scepticism. It is the more welcome because a lot of macrofamily stuff is being propagated on the Internet and published in the popular press. Most of it makes little sense, but the popular imagination delights in this kind of romantic speculation. I regard this state of affairs as unfortunate. "Nostraticism" (including Greenberg & Ruhlen's "Eurasiatic" variety) remains an insufficiently justified fringe hypothesis, by the accepted standards of historical linguistics. As for Greenberg's mass (a.k.a. lateral) comparison, it is a method that simply cannot produce reliable results, since it has no built-in controls for distinguishing genuine cognates (historically or "genetically" related words) from spurious matches resulting from purely coincidental similarity or from lexical borrowing. As opposed to comparative method, it yields no protolanguage reconstruction, nor does it reconstruct sequences of sound change transforming the protolanguage into its historically documented "offspring" -- which means, in practice, that no-one can verify its results by checking the consistency of the reconstruction. The flaws that make mass comparison scientifically useless have been discussed so many times by so many linguists that one wonders how the method can be taken seriously by anyone. Piotr Gasiorowski
Re: Nostratic redundancy
I've twice deleted an anon's addition of a paragrpah saying Indo-European is "possibly" related to (insert every other language family). This paragraph gets placed after, mind you, the paragraph which discusses the Nostratic theory. I just want a quick check to make sure I'm not being unduly repressive here. -- कुक्कुरोवाच|Talk‽ 05:20, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- No, you're quite right to remove that part. It seems wholly unreasonable to first mention the Nostratic hypothesis and *then* say that PIE may be related to every other language. Vice 20:49, 16 Jun 2004 (UTC)
- such hypotheses may have a place in the nostratic article, or in an article on the world's language families. in this article, a simple link to the nostratic one should be enough. Dbachmann 11:04, 30 Jul 2004 (UTC)
