The Indo-European family of languages

Edition of 2007.06.04 , © 1998Ð2007 by Arden Schaeffer, 1932-2032?, author & webster
at URL http://www.nola.house.name/lang/en/i/idiom/indo-european.html

Table of Contents

 

Tocharian

Two Tocharian dialects (called, very imaginatively, Tocharian A and Tocharian B) are attested by documents found in jars in the crypt of a monastery in Chinese Turkestan in the early 1900s; cf the Nordic Caucasoid-faced blond Mummy-People of the Takla-Makan desert at the foot of the Tien-Shan mountains on the Silk Road in BCE 1000± who wore clothing cut in the Middle Iranian style and woven very finely, in Celtic tartan or plaid patterns, of very high quality sheep's wool imported from the Tien-Shan mountains, when the Chinese still lacked such weaving techniques; and the Nordic Caucasoid-faced red-haired blue-green-eyed speakers of the Indo-European Tocharian language who inhabited the same region in BCE 300±. (Return to the Table Of Contents, or continue.)
 

Indo-Iranian

Indo-Iranian is spoken in the lands conquered by folk who called themselves Arya, meaning 'noble' (in English, Aryans).
  • the eastern branch, called Indic, is spoken in northern India.
    • The Old Indic dialects include Sanskrit which is an artificial priestly written language.
    • The Middle Indic languages include Pali, in which the Buddhist scriptures were originally written.
    • The modern Indic languages comprise some two dozen dialects, including Hindi, Panjabi, Bengali, &c.
  • the western branch, called Iranian
    • Old Iranian
    • Middle Iranian languages include Sogdian and Khwarezmian.
    • modern Iranian (spoken in Iran, and in western India by the Parsis) is called Farsi.
(Return to the Table Of Contents, or continue.)
 

Hittite

Hittite was spoken in Anatolia, the historical homeland of the Hittites. By about 1250 BCE the Hittite empire, which had already lost Syria, began to collapse in Anatolia even. The Hittite language has been extinct for almost three millennia, during most of which time its very existence was forgotten. (Return to the Table Of Contents, or continue.)
 

Armenian

Armenian is spoken in Armenia, in northwestern Turkey, in the Taurus mountains, and in Fresno, CA, US. (Return to the Table Of Contents, or continue.)
 

Slavic

  • Bulgarian
  • Croatian
  • Serbian
  • Polish
  • Ukrainian
  • Russian which is the interlanguage of most of northeastern Europe and all of Siberia.
(Return to the Table Of Contents, or continue.)
 

Albanian

Albanian is spoken in Albania, which lies northwest of Macedonia. (Return to the Table Of Contents, or continue.)
 

Hellenic (Greek)

Hellenic (Greek) developed in Macedonia and Greece;
and a simplified form of it, called the koin‘, was spoken from Egypt to India after the Macedonian king Alexander III, called the Great, conquered the vast empire which created Hellenistic civilization.
(For more information on Greek, see pages "Greek" or "Greek vocabulary" or "Greek encodings";
or return to the Table Of Contents, or continue to "Italic" on this page.)
 

Italic

  • Osco-Umbrian was extinguished by the expansion of the Roman empire.
  • Samnite was extinguished by the expansion of the Roman empire.
  • Latin, the language of Latium and of its capital, Rome, is the mother of the modern Romance languages.
For more information, see page "Italic" (or return to the Table Of Contents, or continue to Celtic).
 

Celtic

Ask a Cornishman, a Welshman, an Irishman, or a Breton about these. (Return to the Table Of Contents, or continue to Germanic.)
 

Germanic

Germanic was spoken at one time from the Black Sea (where it was spoken in the early 1700s but is now extinct) to the North Sea where it is still spoken, and in North Africa on the Mediterranean where it has long been extinct; and now a West Germanic language called English is spoken in North America, Central America (Belize), South America (Guyana), Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and India. (See page "Germanic", return to the Table Of Contents, or continue to Appendix.)
 

Appendix

 
Acknowledgement
  • The border graphic of a geometric fret, and the HTML code for mounting it, were contributed by Dan Meriwether.
  • (Table Of Contents)
 
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