...The Indo-European languages are a family (or phylum) of several hundred related languages and dialect,It is composed of 449 languages and dialects, according to the 2005 Ethnologue estimate, about half (219) belonging to the Indo-Aryan sub-branch. including most major languages of Europe, Iran, and India, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia. Attested since the Bronze Age, in the form of Mycenaean Greek and Anatolian languages, the Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as possessing the longest recorded history after the Afroasiatic family. Read full entry
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- 1.Indo-European languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- Indo-European languages. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Jump to: ... The languages of the Indo-European group are spoken by approximately three ...
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I
ndo-European_languages
- 2.Indo-European languages: Definition from Answers.com
- In·do-Ger·man·ic a. [ Indo- + Germanic .] 1. Same as Aryan , and Indo-European ... linguists added other languages to the Indo-European family, and scholars such ...
- http://www.answers.com/topic/i
ndo-european-languages
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How did the Indo-European From Sanskrit and Lithuanian
to Latin and Greek...all these
languages supposedly originate
from one single
mother-language, and indeed
share a certain amount of
common cognates. But they are
utterly unintelligible with
one another...Greek won't help
you with Russan for example.
Any ideas on how the
Indo-European families have
become so distinct from one
another?
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The answer is very simple: distance between communities and the pass of time made all this languages find different sounds and signs for different realities. If you notice, Spanish, French, Italian and Rumanian are not that different. But they're difficult to learn because their words were meant to explain realities we never have experienced before. Also, Greek won't help you with Russian because they come from a different root. But don't worry, that's how languages are supposed to be. Just look at Basque. That's a puzzle of a language. Nobody knows where its origins are. Good question! |
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Can someone please explain to So I've seen this term and
read about it, but I haven't
quite understood how Indo
European languages are
connected, and where they all
came from? For example, I
don't understand how the
Armenian and German language
can be in the same family.
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Linguists noticed many similarities between Sanskrit(an ancient Indic language) and European languages (for ex. the sanskrit word RAJA is close to the latin word REX which became the italian RE) and this suggested a common historical parentage.So they proposed that many of the classical languages (latin, greek, sanskrit, gothic, celtic, persian) derive from the same source and they called this parent language Indo-European.All we know about Indo-European is based on conjectures, on common aspects found in modern-day languages and on tracing a hypothetical mother tongue called Proto-Indo European(which may never have existed). Two or more languages are in the same family because they have similar linguistic aspects (words, grammatical costructions, fonethics...) |
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Are finite verbs peculiar to I have been studying for a few
months and I have noticed that
tenses and moods are
completely absent from the
language. I have also noticed
- from the very few
information that I have have
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No not at all. Chinese is the most extreme example of, and I may be remembering the name wrong, an isolating language, meaning that each morpheme is a separate word. Synthetic languages encode several pieces of information in a particular morpheme (for example "she" means feminine, singular, third-person, subject). Agglutinating languages add morphemes to the main word, each with a meaning. Polysynthetic languages somehow combine features of synthetic and agglutinating languages I think, adding several morphemes that each encompass several meanings to each main word. Most (all?) Indo-European languages are mostly synthetic (English is more isolating than a lot of them, but does have synthetic elements, like "she"). I believe African languages tend to be agglutinating and American (Amerindian) languages are polysynthetic. |
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