latin (a historical and linguistic handbook) || ii. the indo-european family of languages

n THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY

OF LANGUAGES

Comparative linguistics, formerly called "comparative philol-ogy," is the study of the relationships and differences among lan-guages. It was developed during the early nineteenth Century. Sir William Jones, an English scholar in India, observed as early as 1786 resemblances of Sanskrit, the old sacred language of the Hindus, to Greek, Latin, and German. He proposed that all three had derived from a common original tongue. A Century later, another scholar, Max Müller, who feit that Sanskrit had been brought into India by conquerors, applied the term "Aryan," from the Sanskrit arya = noble, to the Speakers of the presumed original tongue.

Since Community of language is no proof for community of race, because language may readily be imposed by conquest, bor-rowed by contact, or diffused by intermingling, scholars now prefer to call the original tongue "Indo-European," a term first used in 1813 as a purely geographical designation of the wide area Over which this group of related languages is found. Inasmuch as the original tongue is no longer spoken by any of the various peoples using its derivatives, it can only be reconstructed hypothet-ically through analysis of the resemblances among these deriva-tives and by assuming common original sounds from which the

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ORIGIN AND DISPERSION

later languages developed their particular forms according to their individual linguistic laws of sound change.

ORIGIN AND DISPERSION OF INDO-EUROPEAN

The approximate point or period in the development of human dvilization at which the hypothetical Indo-European language first began to be spoken and the geographic area where this occurred are much disputed. Obviously a language is not invented at one moment of time. It must have taken a long time for the animal sounds uttered by the simian ancestors of man to become words. Nor can it be determined whether this development took place in one group of primitive humans located at some point perhaps remote from the centers of the later major linguistic families so that those families were gradually spread and differentiated by the migrations of subgroups branching off from the original speakers, or whether groups of humans in separate localities independently made the transition from animal sounds to the Originals of the various linguistic families.

Thus, even if the area in which the hypothetical Indo-European was spoken could be fixed, this would not prove whether it had come into being there or had been brought there by some nomadic group of primitive humans. There is, indeed, no reason to suppose that the hypothetical original Indo-European was ever in fact a Single language; it may from the beginning have been differentiated into dialects basically similar but dilfering from group to group or from place to place. This would perhaps account best for the dif-ferences between the derivative languages carried to widely separate areas by the dispersen of its speakers.

The original homeland of the first speakers of Indo-European has been variously located somewhere in the general region extend-ing from eastern Germany through western Russia and from the Baltic to the Black Sea. It is not important for the study of Latin to try to define the location more precisely or to review the evidence used. Collaboration between archaeologists and historical linguists now casts doubt on the traditional chronology for the differentia-

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I N D O - E U R O P E A N L A N G U A G E S

tion of the original Indo-European tongue into separate Indo-European languages and on the hitherto accepted correlation be-tween changes of culture in various areas, as indicated by archaeo-logical finds, and the possible movement of new peoples into these areas, who were presumed to have brought with them Indo-European languages. Some scholars now hold that the transition from the neolithic ("new stone") cultures to those of the Bronze Age did not represent a drastic change of culture, or anything more than a regulär local progress, and that the cultural change more likely to have been the consequence of the intrusion of new peoples was that from the Palaeolithic ("old stone") Age to the Neolithic.

This transition, from the use of crudely made tools of stone and bone to the use of more finely shaped ones, was accompanied by another major advance, from the procuring of food by hunting, picking berries, and other forms of gathering natural produce to the deliberate cultivation of cereals and the domestication of ani-mals. The English anthropologist Vere Gordon Childe called this cultural advance "the neolithic revolution," though it was no sudden alteration of life-style but a slow progress over centuries, at different times and at varying speeds in different areas.

It is still generally held that cultivation of crops and domestica-tion of animals were diffused outward from their beginnings in Anatolia (Asia Minor) and the northern Middle East, southerly to Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Egypt, and northerly to the Balkans, the Danube Valley, and western Europe. Nevertheless evidence is accumulating which suggests that these new techniques for food production instead of food gathering may have originated inde-pendently in different areas and that only at later dates did inter-communication between these areas occur. Thus the recent hy-pothesis that the neolithic revolution was diffused by speakers of Indo-European is itself being subjected to reexamination.

Though the neolithic revolution permitted the establishment of more fixed places of residence than had been possible for the palaeolithic hunters and food-gatherers, nomadism remained com-mon, to find either new soil for crops or new pasturage for animals. How far simple nomadism, or instead some such development as climatic change or growth of popuIation, occasioned the dispersion of the Speakers of Indo-European, whenever it began, cannot be

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O R I G I N A N D D I S P E R S I O N

determined. Probably the dispersion should not be thought of as massive migrations, such as those of the Germanic tribes that overwhelmed the Roman Empire in the west from about 400 to about 600 A.D. The Indo-Europeans movements were more likely of small groups seeking better land and slowly infiltrating new territories.

Nor would the diffusion of the Indo-European languages neces-sarily have required displacement of earlier populations. History affords many instances in which either a relatively small number of immigrants have imposed their language on natives by conquest or natives have adopted the language of immigrants as a superior vehicle of communication to their own, as witness the spread of Latin first through Italy and then over western Europe and North Africa. In this case conquest was the primary reason for the adop-tion of Latin by the natives, but the fact that Greek resisted Latin in the east shows that it, unlike the languages of Italy and western Europe, was feit to be a superior vehicle of communication even by the conquering Romans.

Whatever the date and method of the original dispersion of the speakers of Indo-European from their presumed original home-land, by the end of the third millennium B.C. peoples using Indo-European languages were impinging on a wide arc of lands extend-ing from central Asia and northwestern India (Pakistan) through the Middle East, Anatolia, the Balkans, and in due course further west into Italy and Gaul.

At the same time, a significant Cultural advance was occurring, the spread of techniques for smelting and casting or hammering copper to make weapons, tools, and other Utensils. In fact, the Neolithic Age was giving way to the Bronze Age. These techniques seem to have been discovered at the beginning of the fourth mil-lennium B.c., perhaps even earlier, in Asia Minor and somewhat later in Egypt. At first copper was used pure; then it was found that an alloy of copper and tin called bronze was more satisfactoiy. It used to be held that migrating speakers of Indo-European learned these techniques and spread them to Greece, the Balkans, and western Europe, but archaeologists now question whether the intro-duction of the Bronze Age into Greece and Anatolia was necessarily the work of invading speakers of Indo-European. However, in Italy

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the arrival of Speakers of Indo-European does seem to have coin-cided with the beginning of the Bronze Age. In fact, bronze came to Italy not only from the north, but also from the south, imported by traders from the Aegean area during the second millennium B.c. The introduction of copper and bronze by no means displaced stone, bone, or pottery, which remained common materials for making tools, weapons, and Containers throughout antiquity.

Speakers of Indo-European who migrated later, in the course of the second millennium B.c., seem to have brought with them the horse and the war chariot, although wheeled vehicles drawn by animals had been known since early in the second millennium at least in southern Mesopotamia, in ancient Sumer. Some of these later migrants had also learned to smelt iron, perhaps from peoples of eastern Armenia who had invented the necessary techniques. Thus their arrival in any given area signaled the beginning of the Iron Age. However, because iron requires high temperatures for smelting and working, it remained throughout antiquity a less commonly used metal than was the more easily handled bronze.

I N D O - E U R O P E A N S O C I E T Y

Study of the vocabulary common to the various Indo-European languages and of the social and political Organization of the dif-ferent Indo-European speaking peoples when they emerge into historical light shows common elements that must go back to the society of the original speakers. This society was based on the family, and the head of the family was the father, not, as in some societies, the mother. Such a society, ruled by a father, is known as "patriarchal." Larger groups of families were assumed to have descended from a common ancestor, actual or invented. With the passage of time this presumed original ancestor might sometimes come to be regarded as having been superhuman, a deified hero or a god. In such groups of households, presumably related by kinship, leadership was exercised by some forceful head of a family, whose Position as chief was not necessarily hereditary, though it often tended to become so. The chief was assisted, and controlled, by a council of heads of families or households, often known as eiders.

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INDO-EUROPEAN SOCIETY

The Chief also had ultimately to command respect and support from an assembly of the men old enough to fight; women and children had no political rights, nor did such Outsiders as resident strangers er slaves.

So primitive a society had no elaborate political forms or docu-ments. Oral tradition played a large part in establishing custom, the predecessor of law, and in preserving oral folk memories, probably expressed in verse, which became the ancestor of history. Slavery undoubtedly existed. Property belonged rather to the family or whole tribe than to the individual. Worship was of a skygod of the daylight or sun, and probably also of lesser natural powers and phenomena, which may not have been personified but were simply regarded as friendly or hostile forces (Latin numina) to be honored or placated. The dead seem to have been thought to con-tinue a vague existence and to require offerings and placation so that they would not harm the living.

Since from the earliest period the speakers of Indo-European were presumably already separating into nomadic tribes, it may be questioned whether the original forms (sounds) assumed as the source of similar words in the various Indo-European languages were ever actually spoken at the same time as a homogeneous tongue. The development of distinct tongues was presumably caused not by the breakup of an originally unified Speech, as was described in the myth of the Tower of Babel, so much as by the increasing divergence of always somewhat variant dialects. It should not be assumed that all the dialects followed a common course of develop-ment. Those that were more isolated from contact with other lan-guages and cultures preserved a more archaic character. Those whose Speakers moved into highly developed civilizations were much changed in vocabulary, syntax, and pronunciation by the influence of and borrowing from the languages of such civilizations. As the migrant groups spread away from one another, their dialects followed individual patterns of growth until they became distinct languages, usually mutually unintelligible, despite the elements of a common origin that they preserved in vocabulary or structure. The same process was repeated in the later development of the Romance languages from Latin or of the Germanic tongues from a proto-German.

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G R O U P I N G OF I N D O - E U R O P E A N L A N G U A G E S

The surviving languages of the Indo-European family, and also

some no longer spoken which are attested by written record, can

be classified not only into such closely related groups as the Ger-

manic, the Romance, the Slavic, er the Indic, but also into broader

relationships, which presumably represent a more primitive stage

of divergence. The establishment of such broader relationships is

often not precise because different criteria may assign a given lan-

guage partly into one relationship and partly into another.

A major distinction often made within the Indo-European family

of languages is that between languages which preserve an original

hard c ot k sound and those in which this has been softened to a

soft f or j- sound. This division is exemplified by the contrast

between the initial consonants of the Latin centum and the old

Persian (Avestan) satem, both meaning ""hundred"; thus the two

groups of languages are called the centum and the satem. Later

changes may have obscured the original treatment of this sound in

some members of either group. For example, in the Germanic

languages, from the centum group, the original hard c has become

h, as in English "hundred." It used to be held that the centum lan-

guages were western and the satem eastern. But this distinction is

by no means absolute. For instance, two Indo-European languages

of the east, namely Hittite in Anatolia and Tokharian in central

Asia, are centum. Other criteria also cut across the centum/satem

distinction, which makes difficult the establishment of major clas-

sifications of the Indo-European families of languages.

Among the languages that are either still spoken or well attested

by written materials, lesser groups can be established more readily.

The accompanying table of the Indo-European languages assumes,

for simplicity of presentation, the validity of the centum/satem or

east/west division. Moreover it presents the recognizable families

of Indo-European languages in a roughly chronological order,

based on datings that today would be regarded by some scholars as

probably too late. These dates are not those of the earliest attested

evidence for the various languages but the approximate times

at which archaeological and other researches suggest that their

Speakers first occupied the areas in which the languages them-

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G R O U P I N G

selves are later found. Centuries, not to say millennia, may separate the original arrival of the speakers in a given area from the period when evidence for the language is first available. Despite these un-certainties, the table indicates the variety and spread of the Indo-European languages both in time and in Space.

The table in no way purports to offer a "family tree" of the Indo-European languages. The groupings are based on similarities of vocabulary, morphology, syntax, or phonology; and in more recent, well-attested cases, chronological sequence or geographical distribution may show descent, as of the Romance languages from Latin. But the major division into centum/satem or western/east-ern, given the number of other crosscutting criteria, cannot be regarded as representing two major "lines of descent."

Nor for the earlier groupings does the chronological order of appearance in their final homelands establish any sure order of dis-persion from the original Indo-European. The most that can be said is that languages on the geographical fringes of the dispersion tend to be more archaic in character, such as Tokharian in Central Asia or Latin among the Italic languages. But such archaism may be evidence not for early Separation but merely for Isolation from other languages, whether Indo-European or not, which meant that such fringe tongues were not stimulated to develop by outside contacts, whether linguistic, cultural, or intellectual.

In the table, no clear distinction is made between significant dialects and languages, for it would be difficult to determine pre-cisely when a dialect became so unintelligible to a Speaker of a related dialect that it could justly be regarded as a distinct lan-guage. Moreover, still spoken languages are not distinguished from those known today only from written records.

Of languages preserved only in writing, perhaps the least familiar is Tokharian (Tocharian, or Tocharish). This language appears in certain Buddhist and business manuscripts which were found in Chinese Turkestan, north of the Himalayas, between 1890 and 1909. The manuscripts, dating from c. 500-700 A.D., are written in a Hindu Script, but the language itself is a form of Indo-European no longer spoken in the area and not closely related to other nearby Indo-European tongues, such as Sanskrit or Old Persian (Iranian). Tokharian, as well as Hittite, a language spoken

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The Indo-European Languages

Possible earliest data

of use in Wes te rn Eastern areas where or or

attested centum satem

3500 B.c. Anatolian Luwian Hittite (centum) Lydian Lycian

2500 B.c. Armenian

2200 B.c. Hellenic Iranian and Indic Linear B (Mycenaean) Greek Old Persian Sanskrit Homeric Greek (Avestan) (Vedic) Classical Greek Pahlavi Prakrit

1800 B.c.

Doric Aeolic lonian Attic Others

Hellenistic Greek (Koine) Byzantine Greek Modern Greek and its dialects

Persian Pasto Tajik Others

(Pali) Modem Indic

Bengali Hindi Urdu Punjabi Gujerati Sinhalsi Sindhi Marathi Others

Italic and Celtic Latin Irish Oscan Gaelic Umbrian Welsh

Comish Breton

Tokharian (centum)

800 B.C. West German and North & East German Anglo-Frisian

English Frisian

Continental Dutch

Flemish German

Swiss Yiddish

Scandinavian Norwegian Icelandic Swedish Danish

Gothic

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G R O U P I N G

The Indo-European Languages {continued)

Possible earliest date

of use in Western Eastern areas where or or

attested centum satem

l A.D. Baltic and Slavic Lithuanian Russian Latvian Polish Old Prussian Ukrainian

Czech Serbo-Croatian

600-800 A.D. Romance Languages (front Latin) Rumanian Dalmatian Raeto-Rumanian French Provental

Catalan Spanish Portuguese

in Asia Minor (Anatolia) during the second millennium B.c., even have some characteristics of the western or centum branch. Pre-cisely who were the people who spoke Tokharian is not certain, and therefore the date given for their settlement in Chinese Turkes-tan is not a sure one. Tokharian, however, marks the most easterly known migration of speakers of Indo-European. And it serves to illustrate the problem of determining the interrelationship of the various Indo-European languages and the times at which the vari-ous groups of Speakers migrated to their eventual homelands.

In the table, the Italic languages are closely grouped with the Celtic. Although the closeness of their relationship is much dis-puted, the Italic languages are in many respects more similar to the Celtic than they are to Greek, with which Latin is so commonly associated in the modern mind. It is possible that speakers of the two linguistic groups appeared on the central Danube about 1800 B.c. Thence speakers of the Italic group moved southward into the

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Balkans and then around, or across, the Adriatic into Italy. The Speakers of Celtic moved westward into Gaul (France), whence they eventually spread into Spain, northern Italy (the Po Valley), and the British Isles. The movement into the Po Valley seems to have begun only in the fifth Century B.c., and offshoots of it are represented by the Gauls who sacked Rome in the early fourth Century and those who moved through Greece into Anatolia during the third Century. Since the Italic and Celtic groups were probably at best parallel developments from Indo-European, a comparison of the elements common to them is not here made.

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latin (a historical and linguistic handbook) || ii. the indo-european family of languages

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