The story of the English language
The story of the English languageKathleen Hubbard’s answer to the question “How do we know what we know about Proto-Indo-European and other languages that died out before they were written down? [Kathleen is assistant professor of linguistics at the University of California, San Diego. She describes herself as a “recovering Indo-Europeanist.”] I have also appended some bibliography at the end.
The hard-core indo-europeanist may be interested in the TITUS Indo-European Resources project in Stuttgart (eventually in many languages, but currently only German and Spanish).
Okay, in 1786 Sir William Jones announced to the Asiatick Society of
Calcutta that Sanskrit had to be related to Greek and Latin, touching
off what would come to be known as the Neogrammarian move from
philology (the comparison of texts) to what we now consider
linguistics.
If you were to see a whole huge raft of cognates like the following,
you might come to the same conclusion (Avestan is an ancestor of
Persian, it’s the language of the Zoroastrian texts):
Sanskrit Avestan Greek Latin Gothic English
pita pater pater fadar father
padam poda pedem fotu foot
bhratar phrater frater brothar brother
bharami barami phero fero baira bear
jivah jivo wiwos qius quick
(’living’)
sanah hano henee senex sinista senile
virah viro wir wair were(wolf)
(’man’)
tris tres thri three
deka decem taihun ten
satem he-katon centum hund(rath) hundred
Now, cognates mean “pair/set of words descended from a common
ancestor”, not just words that happen to look like each other — i.e.
“coffee”...
To view the complete essay, you be registered.