The Indo-European family of languages - статья на английском языке

The Indo-European Family. The languages thus brought into relationship by descent or progressive differentiation from a parent speech are conveniently called a family of languages. Various names have been used to designate this family. In books written a century ago the term Aryan was commonly employed. It has now been generally abandoned and when found today is used in a more restricted sense to designate the languages of the family located in India and the plateau of Iran. A more common term is Indo-Teutonic or Indo-Germanic, the latter being the most usual designation among German philologists, but it is open to the objection of giving undue emphasis to the Germanic languages. The term now most widely employed is Indo-European, suggesting more clearly the geographical extent of the family. The parent tongue from which the Indo-European languages have sprung had already become divided and scattered before the dawn of history. When we meet with various peoples by whom these languages are spoken they have lost all knowledge of their former association. Consequently we have no written record of the common Indo-European language. By a comparison of its descendants, however, it is possible to form a fair idea of it and to reconstruct with approximate accuracy its vocabulary and inflections.
The surviving languages show various degrees of similarity to one another, the similarity bearing a more or less direct relationship to their geographical distribution. They accordingly fall into eleven principal groups: Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Hellenic, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Hittite, and Tocharian. These are the branches of the Indo-European family tree, and we shall look briefly at each.
Indian. The oldest literary texts preserved in any Indo-European language are the Vedas or sacred books of India. These fall into four groups, the earliest of which, the Rig-veda, is a collection of about a thousand hymns, the latest, the Atharva-veda, a body of incantations and magical formulas connected with many kinds of current religious practice. <...> The language in which they are written is known as Sanskrit, or to distinguish it from a later form of the language, Vedic Sanskrit. <...>
Alongside of Sanskrit there existed a large number of local dialects in colloquial use, known as Prakrits. A number of these eventually attained literary form; one in particular, Pali, about the middle of the sixth century В. C. became the language of Buddhism. From these various colloquial dialects have descended the present languages of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, spoken by some 600 million people. The most important of these are Hindi, Urdu (the official language of Pakistan), Bengali (the official language of Bangladesh), Punjabi, and Marathi. <...>
Iranian. Northwest of India and covering the great plateau of Iran is the important group of languages called Iranian.
...From early times the region has been subjected to Semitic influence, and many of the early texts are preserved in Semitic scripts which make accurate interpretation difficult. <...>
The earliest remains of the Iranian branch fall into two divisions, an eastern and a western, represented respectively by Avestan and Old Persian. <...>
Persian has been the language of an important culture and an extensive literature since the ninth century. Chief among the literary works in this language is the great Persian epic, the Shahnamah. Persian contains a large Arabic admixture so that today its vocabulary seems almost as much Arabic as Iranian. In addition to Persian, several other languages differing more or less from it are today in use in various provinces of the old empire — Afghan or Pushtu and Be-luchi in the eastern territories of Afghanistan and Beluchistan, and Kurdish in the west, in Kurdistan. Besides these larger groups there are numerous languages and dialects in the highlands of the Pamir, on the shores of the Caspian, and in the valleys of the Caucasus, of which we have still but an imperfect knowledge.
Armenian. Armenian is found in a small area south of the Caucasus Mountains and the eastern end of the Black Sea. The penetration of Armenians into this region is generally put between the eighth and sixth centuries В. C. <...>
Armenian is known to us from about the fifth century of our era through a translation of the Bible in the language. There is a considerable Armenian literature, chiefly historical and theological, extensive rather than important. The Armenians for several centuries were under Persian domination and the vocabulary shows such strong Iranian influence that Armenian was at one time classed as an Iranian language. Numerous contacts with Semitic languages, with Greek, and with Turkish have contributed further to give the vocabulary a rather mixed character.
Hellenic. <...> In Asia Minor the Hittites, who spoke an Indo-European language, possessed a kingdom which lasted from about 2000 to 1200 B. C; and in the second millennium В. С the eastern Mediterranean was dominated, at least commercially, by a Semitic people, the Phoenicians, who exerted a considerable influence upon the Hellenic world. <...> The entrance of the Hellens into the Aegean was a gradual one and proceeded in a series of movements by groups speaking different dialects of the common language. They spread not only through the mainland of Greece, absorbing the previous populations, but into the islands of the Aegean and the coast of Asia Minor. The earliest great literary monuments of Greek are the Homeric poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, believed to date from the eighth century В. C. Of the Greek language we recognize five principal dialectal groups. <...> Attic, the dialect of the city of Athens, is by far the most important. It owes its supremacy partly to the dominant political and commercial position attained by Athens in the fifth century, partly to the great civilization which grew up there. <...> Largely because of the political and cultural prestige of Athens, the Attic dialect became the basis of a koine or common Greek which from the fourth century superseded the other dialects. <...> At the present time two varieties of Greek (commonly called Romanic, from its being the language of the eastern Roman Empire) are observable in Greece. One, the popular or demotic, is the natural language of the people; the other, the "pure", represents a conscious effort to restore the vocabulary and even some of the inflections of ancient Greek. Both are used in various schools and universities, but the demotic seems to be gaining favor among the younger intellectuals.
Albanian. Northwest of Greece on the eastern coast of the Adriatic is the small branch named Albanian. It is possibly the modern remnant of Illyrian, a language spoken in ancient times in the northwestern Balkans, but we have too little knowledge of this early tongue to be sure. Moreover our knowledge of Albanian, except for a few words, extends back only as far as the fifteenth century of our era, and, when we first meet with it, the vocabulary is so mixed with Latin, Greek, Turkish, and Slavonic elements owing to conquests and other causes, that it is somewhat difficult to isolate the original Albanian. For this reason its position among the languages of the Indo-European family was slow to be recognized. It was formerly classed with the Hellenic group, but since the beginning of the present century it has been recognized as an independent member of the family.
Italic. The Italic branch has its centre in Italy, and to most people Italy in ancient times suggests Rome and the language of Rome, Latin. But the predominant position occupied by Latin in the historical period should not make us forget that Latin was only one of a number of languages once found in this area. <...> As Rome colonized Spain and Gaul, the district west of the Black Sea, northern Africa, the islands of the Mediterranean, and even Britain, Latin spread into all these regions until its limits became practically co-terminous with those of the Roman Empire. And in the greater part of this area it has remained the language, though in altered form, down to the present day.
The various languages which represent the survival of Latin in the different parts of the Roman Empire are known as the Romance or Romanic languages. Some of them have since spread into other territory, particularly in the New World. The most extensive of the Romance languages are French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian. French is primarily the language of northern France although it is the language of literature and education throughout the country. <...> Since the thirteenth century the Paris dialect has been standard French. <...> In the Iberian peninsula Spanish and Portuguese, because of their proximity, and the similar conditions under which they have developed, have remained fairly close to each other. In spite of certain differences of vocabulary and inflection and considerable differences in the sounds of the spoken language, a Spaniard can easily read Portuguese. The use of Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South America and in Mexico has already been referred to. Italian has had the longest continuous history in its original location of any of the Romance languages, since it is nothing more than the Latin language as this language has continued to be spoken in the streets of Rome from the founding of the city. It is particularly important as the language of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and the vernacular language in which the cultural achievements of the Renaissance first found expression. <...>
Balto-Slavic. The Balto-Slavic branch covers a vast area in the eastern part of Europe. It falls into two groups, the Baltic and the Slavic, which, in spite of differences, have sufficient features in common to justify their being classed together.
The Baltic languages are three in number: Prussian, Lettish, and Lithuanian. Prussian is now extinct, having been displaced by German since the seventeenth century. Lettish is the language of about two million people in Latvia. Lithuanian is spoken by about three million people in the Baltic state of Lithuania. It is important among the Indo-European languages because of its conservatism. It is sometimes said that a Lithuanian peasant can understand certain simple phrases in Sanskrit. While the statement implies too much, Lithuanian preserves some very old features which have disappeared from practically all the other languages of the family.
The similarities among the various languages of the Slavic group indicate that as late as the seventh or eighth century of the Christian era they were practically identical or at least were united by frequent intercourse. At the present time they fall into three divisions: East Slavic, West Slavic, and South Slavic. The first two still cover contiguous areas, but the South Slavs, in the Balkan peninsula, are now separated from the rest by a belt of non-Slavic people, the Hungarians and the Romanians.
The earliest form in which we possess a Slavic language is a part of the Bible and certain liturgical texts translated by the missionaries Cyril and Methodius in the ninth century. The language of these texts is South Slavic, but it probably approximates with considerable closeness the common Slavic from which all the Slavic languages have come. It is known as Old Church Slavonic or Old Bulgarian and it continued to be used throughout the Middle Ages and indeed well into modern times as the ecclesiastical language of the Orthodox Church.
The East Slavic includes the three varieties of Russian. Chief of these is Great Russian, the language of about 200 million people. It is found throughout the north, east and central parts of the Soviet Union, was formerly the court language, and is still the official and literary language of the country. It is what is understood when in ordinary use we speak of "Russian". White Russian is the language of about 9 million people in the Belorussian S.S.R. and adjacent parts of Poland. Little Russian or Ukranian is spoken by about 40 million people in the south.<...>
West Slavic includes four languages. Of these Polish is the largest, spoken by about 36 million people within Poland, by about three million in the United States, and by smaller numbers in the Soviet Union and other countries. Next in size are the two official, mutually intelligible languages of Czechoslovakia: Czech, spoken by about 10 million people, and Slovak, spoken by 5 million. <...>
South Slavic includes Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovenian. Bulgarian was spoken in the eastern part of the Balkan peninsula when the region was overrun by a non-Slavic race. But the conqueror was absorbed by the conquered and adopted his language. Modern Bulgarian has borrowed extensively from Turkish for the language of everyday use, while the literary language is even more heavily indebted to Russian.<...>
The Slavic languages constitute a more homogeneous group than the languages of some of the other branches. They have diverged less from the common type than those, for example, of the Germanic branch, and in a number of respects preserve a rather archaic aspect. Moreover the people speaking the Baltic languages must have lived for many centuries in fairly close contact with the Slavs after the two had separated from the parent Indo-European community.
Germanic. The common form which the languages of the Germanic branch had before they became differentiated is known as Germanic or Proto-Germanic. It antedates the earliest written records of the family and is reconstructed by philologists in the same way as is the parent Indo-European. The languages descended from it fall into three groups: East Germanic, West Germanic and North Germanic. <...>
West Germanic is of chief interest to us as the group to which English belongs. It is divided into two branches, High and Low German<...> Accordingly in early times we distinguish as Low German tongues Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, and Old English. <...> High German, especially as spoken in the midlands and used in the imperial chancery, was popularized by Luther's translation of the Bible into it (1522—1532), and since the sixteenth century has gradually established itself as the literary language of Germany.
Celtic. The Celtic languages formed at one time one of the most extensive groups in the Indo-European family. At the beginning of the Christian era the Celts were found in Gaul and Spain, in Great Britain, in western Germany, and northern Italy — indeed, they covered the greater part of western Europe. A few centuries earlier their triumphal progress had extended even into Greece and Asia Minor. The steady retreat of Celtic before advancing Italic and Germanic tongues is one of the surprising phenomena of history. Today Celtic tongues are found only in the remoter corners of France and the British Isles; in the areas in which they were once dominant they have left but the scantiest trace of their presence.
(From "A History of the English Language" by Albert С Baugh and Thomas Cable)