|
Universidade Federal de Pernambuco Depto. de Letras, Programa de Espanhol Disciplina: História da Língua Espanhola |
Centro de Artes e Comunicação Professor: Dr. João Sedycias Código da Disciplina: ______ |
Observação importante: Ao visitarem esta página de novo, não se esqueçam de acionar o dispositivo de "reload, recarregar" (no Netscape Navigator) ou "refresh, atualizar" (no Microsoft Internet Explorer) dos seus browsers para que a informação no cache dos mesmos seja atualizada e vocês possam visualizar os novos dados colocados na página. Caso contrário, verão apenas informação antiga e desatualizada.
 |
¡OJO! – Esta página está actualizada hasta el: 26 de marzo dce 2000. |
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Indo-European Languages
Family of languages spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of Southwest and South Asia. The term Indo-Hittite is used by scholars who believe that Hittite and the other Anatolian languages are not just one branch of Indo-European but rather a branch coordinate with all the rest put together; thus, Indo-Hittite has been used for a family consisting of Indo-European proper plus Anatolian. As long as this view is neither definitively proved nor disproved, it is convenient to keep the traditional use of the term Indo-European.
Languages of the Family
The well-attested languages of the Indo-European family fall fairly neatly into the 10 main branches listed below; these are arranged according to the age of their oldest sizable texts.
1. Anatolian
Now extinct, Anatolian was spoken during the 1st and 2nd millennia BCE in what is presently Asian Turkey and northern Syria. By far the best-known of its members is Hittite, the official language of the Hittite empire, which flourished in the 2nd millennium. Very few Hittite texts were known before 1906, and their interpretation as Indo-European was not generally accepted until after 1915; the integration of Hittite data into Indo-European comparative grammar has, therefore, been one of the principal developments of Indo-European studies in the 20th century. The oldest Hittite texts date from the 17th century BCE, the latest from approximately 1200 BCE.
2. Indo-Iranian
Indo-Iranian comprises two main subbranches, Indo-Aryan (Indic) and Iranian. Indo-Aryan languages have been spoken in what is now northern and central India and Pakistan since before 1000 BCE. Aside from a very poorly known dialect spoken in or near northern Iraq during the 2nd millennium BCE, the oldest record of an Indo-Aryan language is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda (Rgveda), the oldest of the sacred scriptures of India, dating roughly from 1000 BCE. Examples of modern Indo-Aryan languages are Hindi, Bengali, Sinhalese (spoken in Sri Lanka), and the many dialects of Romany, the language of the Gypsies (Rom, Romany).
Iranian languages were spoken in the 1st millennium BCE in present-day Iran and Afghanistan and also in the steppes to the north, from modern Hungary to East (Chinese) Turkistan. The only well-known ancient varieties of Iranian languages are Avestan, the sacred language of the Zoroastrians (Parsis), and Old Persian, the official language of Darius I (ruled 522-486 BCE) and Xerxes I (486-465 BCE) and their successors. Among the modern Iranian languages are Persian (Farsi), Pashto (Afghan), Kurdish, and Ossetic.
3. Greek
Greek, despite its numerous dialects, has been a single language throughout its history. It has been spoken in Greece since at least 1600 BCE, and, in all probability, since the end of the 3rd millennium. The earliest texts are the Linear B tablets, some of which may date from as far back as 1400 BCE (the date is disputed), and some of which certainly date to 1200 BCE. This material, very sparse and difficult to interpret, was not identified as Greek until 1952. The Homeric epics – the Iliad and the Odyssey – probably dating from the 8th century BCE, are the oldest texts of any bulk. For more information, see Greek language.
4. Italic
The principal language of the Italic group is Latin, originally the speech of the city of Rome and the ancestor of the modern Romance languages: Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and so on. The earliest Latin inscriptions apparently date from the 6th century BCE, with literature beginning in the 3rd century. Scholars are not in agreement as to how many other ancient languages of Italy and Sicily belong in the same branch as Latin.
5. Germanic
In the middle of the 1st millennium BCE, Germanic tribes lived in southern Scandinavia and northern Germany. Their expansions and migrations from the 2nd century BCE onward are largely recorded in history. The oldest Germanic language of which much is known is the Gothic of the 4th century CE. Other languages include English, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic.
6. Armenian
Armenian, like Greek, is a single language. Speakers of Armenian are recorded as being in what now constitutes eastern Turkey and Armenia as early as the 6th century BCE, but the oldest Armenian texts date from the 5th century CE.
7. Tocharian
The Tocharian languages, now extinct, were spoken in the Tarim Basin (in present-day northwestern China) during the 1st millennium CE. Two distinct languages are known, labeled A (East Tocharian, or Turfanian) and B (West Tocharian, or Kuchean. One group of travel permits for caravans can be dated to the early 7th century, and it appears that other texts date from the same or from neighbouring centuries. These languages became known to scholars only in the first decade of the 20th century; they have been less important for Indo-European studies than has Hittite, partly because their testimony about the Indo-European parent language is obscured by 2,000 more years of change and partly because Tocharian testimony fits fairly well with that of the previously known non-Anatolian languages.
8. Celtic
Celtic languages were spoken in the last centuries before the Christian era over a wide area of Europe, from Spain and Britain to the Balkans, with one group (the Galatians) even in Asia Minor. Very little of the Celtic of that time and the ensuing centuries has survived, and this branch is known almost entirely from the Insular Celtic languages--Irish, Welsh, and others--spoken in and near the British Isles, as recorded from the 8th century CE onward.
9. Balto-Slavic
The grouping of Baltic and Slavic into a single branch is somewhat controversial, but the exclusively shared features outweigh the divergences. At the beginning of the Christian Era, Baltic and Slavic tribes occupied a large area of eastern Europe, east of the Germanic tribes and north of the Iranians, including much of present-day Poland and what was formerly the western Soviet Union--namely, Belarus, Ukraine, and westernmost Russia. The Slavic area was in all likelihood relatively small, perhaps centred in what is now southern Poland. But in the 5th century CE the Slavs began expanding in all directions. By the end of the 20th century the Slavic languages were spoken throughout much of eastern Europe and northern Asia. The Baltic-speaking area, however, contracted, and by the end of the 20th century Baltic languages were confined to Lithuania and Latvia.
The earliest Slavic texts, written in a dialect called Old Church Slavonic, date from the 9th century CE; the oldest substantial material in Baltic dates to the end of the 14th century, and the oldest connected texts to the 16th century.
10. Albanian
Albanian, the language of the present-day republic of Albania, is known from the 15th century CE. It presumably continues one of the very poorly attested ancient Indo-European languages of the Balkan Peninsula, but which one is not clear.
In addition to the principal branches just listed, there are several poorly documented extinct languages of which enough is known to be sure that they were Indo-European and that they did not belong in any of the groups enumerated above (e.g., Phrygian, Macedonian). Of a few, too little is known to be sure whether they were Indo-European or not (e.g., Ligurian).
Source: Funk and Wagnalls Multimedia Encyclopedia
Indo-European Languages –
The most widely spoken family of languages in the world, containing the following subfamilies: Albanian, Armenian, Baltic, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Italic (including the Romance languages), Slavic, and two extinct subfamilies, Anatolian (including Hittite) and Tocharian. About 1.6 billion people speak Indo-European languages today.
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
Subfamily
Branch
Group
Major Languages and Dialects
*Albanian
Albanian
Anatolian
*Hittite
*Armenian
Armenian
*Baltic
*Latvian, or Lettish
*Lituanian
Old Prussian
*Celtic
Continental
Gaulish
Insular
Gaelic, or Goidelic
Erse, or Scottish Gaelic
Irish, or Irish Gaelic
Manx
Brythonic
Breton
Cornish
Welsh
*Germanic
East
*Gothic
North, or Scandinavian
Eastern
*Danish
*Swedish
Western
Faeroese
*Icelandic
*Norwegian (Bokmål, Nynorsk)
Old Norse
West
Netherlandic-German
SUBGROUP: NETHERLANDIC-
*Afrikaans
LOW-GERMAN
Netherlandic, or Dutch-Flemish
(see DUTCH LANGUAGE; FLEMISH LANGUAGE)
Plattdeutsch, or Low German dialects
SUBGROUP: HIGH GERMAN
*German
*Yiddish
Anglo-Frisian
*English
*Frisian
*Greek
Ancient Greek
(Modern) Greek
*Indo-Iranian
Iranian
Eastern
Avestan
Pashto (Pushto), or Afghan
Western
Baluchi
Kurdish
*Persian, or Farsi
Indic, or Indo-Aryan
(various)
Assamese (see also INDIAN LANGUAGES)
Bengali
Bihari
Gujarati
Hindi-Urdu (including Hindustani)
Marathi
Nepali
Punjabi
Rajasthani
*Sanskrit
Sindhi
Sinhalese
Dardic (sometimes considered a separate branch)
Kashmiri
Romany, or Gypsy
extinct branches
Oscan and others
*Italic
Latinian, or Latin-Faliscan
*Latin
Romance*Catalan
Dalmatian
*French
*Italian
*Portuguese
*Provençal, or Occitan
Rhaeto-Romanic (including *Romansh)
*Romanian
Sardinian
*Spanish (including Judeo-Spanish)
*Slavic
Old Church Slavonic
East
Belarussian, or White Russian
*Russian
*Ukrainian
South
Eastern
*Bulgarian
Macedonian
Western
Serbo-Croatian
Slovenian (see also YUGOSLAV LANGUAGES)
West
Czech-Slovak
*Czech
Slovak
Lekhitic
*Polish
Sorbian
Sorbian, or Wendish
Tocharian
Tocharian
Plus a few extinct ancient languages such as Phrygian and Illyrian that cannot be assigned to any of the above subfamilies.
Terms with an asterisk are the subjects of individual articles. Italics indicate extinct groups or languages.
Establishment of the Family
Proof that these highly diverse languages are members of a single family was largely accumulated during a 50-year period around the turn of the 19th century. The extensive Sanskrit and ancient Greek literatures (older than those of any other Indo-European language except the then-undeciphered Hittite) preserved characteristics of the basic Indo-European forms and pointed to the existence of a common parent language. By 1800 the close relationship between Sanskrit, ancient Greek, and Latin had been demonstrated. Hindu grammarians had systematically classified the formative elements of their ancient language. To their studies were added extensive grammatical and phonetic comparisons of European languages. Further studies led to specific conclusions about the sounds and grammar of the assumed parent language (called Proto-Indo-European), the reconstruction of that hypothetical language, and estimates about when it began to break up into separate languages. (By 2000 BCE, for example, Greek, Hittite, and Sanskrit were distinct languages, but the differences among them are such that the original tongue must have been fairly unified about a millennium earlier, or about 3000 BCE). The decipherment of Hittite texts (identified as Indo-European in 1915) and the discovery of Tocharian in the 1890s (spoken in medieval Chinese Turkestan, and identified as Indo-European in 1908) added new insights into the development of the family and the probable character of Proto-Indo-European.
The early Indo-European studies established many principles basic to comparative linguistics. One of the most important of these was that the sounds of related languages correspond to one another in predictable ways under specified conditions (see Grimm's Law and Verner's Law for examples). According to one such pattern, in some Indo-European subfamilies – Albanian, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, Slavic, and (partially) Baltic – certain presumed q sounds of Proto-Indo-European became sibilants such as s and s (an sh sound). The common example of this pattern is the Avestan (ancient Iranian) word satem ("100"), as opposed to the Latin word centum ("100," pronounced "kentum"). Formerly, the Indo-European languages were routinely characterized as belonging either to a Western (centum) or an Eastern (satem) division. Most linguists, however, no longer automatically divide the family in two in this way, partly because they wish to avoid implying that the family underwent an early split into two major branches, and partly because this trait, although prominent, is only one of several significant patterns that cut across different subfamilies.
Evolution
In general the evolution of the Indo-European languages displays a progressive decay of inflection. Thus, Proto-Indo-European seems to have been highly inflected, as are ancient languages such as Sanskrit, Avestan, and classical Greek; in contrast, comparatively modern languages, such as English, French, and Persian, have moved toward an analytic system (using prepositional phrases and auxiliary verbs). In large part the decay of inflection was a result of the loss of the final syllables of many words over time, so that modern Indo-European words are often much shorter than the ancestral Proto-Indo-European words. Many languages also developed new forms and grammatical distinctions. Changes in the meanings of individual words have been extensive.
Ancient Culture
The original meanings of only a limited number of hypothetical Proto-Indo-European words can be stated with much certainty; derivatives of these words occur with consistent meanings in most Indo-European languages. The study of Indo-European origins involved linguists, archaeologists, and anthropologists. Reconstructed Indo-European vocabulary suggested a material culture familiar with early copper and bronze metallurgy, the wheel, farming, and the domestication of the horse. Numerous hypotheses were formulated concerning the homeland, dating, and direction of the migrations of the bearers of this culture. The British archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe (1892–1957) in The Aryans (1926) viewed the Ukrainian North Pontic (Black Sea) steppes as a probable homeland for Proto-Indo-European languages, and the time for their diffusion before the 2d millennium BCE. Various names were proposed for the archaeological culture itself, based mainly on mortuary practices and ceramics types, the most known of which is the Kurgan ("burial mound") culture. The term was introduced in 1956 by the American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921–94), who applied it to a more extensive homeland for the Proto-Indo-Europeans and for which older dates (between 4500 and 2500 BCE), were established by radiocarbon C-14 and subsequent calibration dating methods. Based on new data provided by Central and Eastern European archaeologists, the dating and spread of this culture are under reconsideration.
Source: Infoplease Encyclopedia (from The Columbia Encyclopedia)
Indo-European Languages –
Family of languages having more speakers than any other language family. It is estimated that approximately half the world's population speaks an Indo-European tongue as a first language. The Indo-European family is so named because at one time its individual members were prevalent mainly in an area between and including India and Europe, although not all languages spoken in this region were Indo-European. Today, however, the Indo-European languages have spread to every continent and a number of islands. It should be stressed that the term Indo-European describes language only and is not used scientifically in an ethnic or cultural sense. The languages classified as Indo-European are sufficiently similar to form one major linguistic division.
The characteristics Indo-European languages share with respect to vocabulary and grammar have led many scholars to postulate that they are all descended from an original parent language, called Proto-Indo-European, which is believed to have been spoken some time before 2000 BCE. Since there are no written records of Proto-Indo-European, it apparently was in use before writing was known to its speakers. Even its existence is an assumption, although a plausible one and the only really satisfactory explanation of the common features of the modern Indo-European languages. There has been much speculation as to the region where the speakers of Proto-Indo-European first lived and the nature of their culture, but nothing definite is known. One theory of the origin of the individual Indo-European languages suggests that as the ancient speakers of Proto-Indo-European migrated or moved away from each other, losing contact, their language broke up into a number of tongues. These tongues later also split up still further, eventually giving rise to the many modern Indo-European languages. For a classification of Indo-European subfamilies, groups, subgroups, and individual languages, see accompanying table. By studying the vocabulary and grammar of the various daughter languages of which there are records, scholars have tried to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European and infer some of its characteristics. It appears to have been highly inflected in a distinctive way. Apparently, it also had three genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter) for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives; no less than six cases for the noun; agreement between adjectives and nouns; and a free accent (i.e., one that could be placed on any syllable).
The descendant languages have all tended to discard to a greater or lesser extent these features of the mother tongue and to become simplified. For example, they substitute increasingly the use of word order and prepositions for inflections to indicate the relationships of words in a sentence. There also exists among the Indo-European languages a similarity of basic words (such as words denoting kinship, numerals, and parts of the body) that points to a common origin. Different forms of writing for the various Indo-European languages used both in ancient and modern times include cuneiform, hieroglyphics, and a number of alphabets, among them the Devanagari, Greek, Roman, and Arabic scripts.
Bibliography:
See also Émile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (tr. 1973);
Philip Baldi, An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages (1983).
Subfamily Group Subgroup Languages and Principal Dialects Anatolian Hieroglypic Hittite*, Hittite (Kanesian)*, Luwian*, Lycian*, Lydian*, Palaic* Baltic Latvian (Lettish), Lithuanian, Old Prussian* Celtic Brythonic Breton, Cornish*, Welsh Celtic Continental Gaulish* Celtic Goidelic or Gaelic Irish (Irish Gaelic), Manx*, Scottish Gaelic Germanic East Germanic Burgundian*, Gothic*, Vandalic* Germanic North Germanic Old Norse* (see Norse): Danish, Faeroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish Germanic West Germanic (see Grimm's Law) High German German, Yiddish Germanic West Germanic (see Grimm's Law) Low German Afrikaans, Dutch, English, Flemish, Frisian, Plattdeutsch (see German language) Greek Aeolic*, Arcadian*, Attic*, Byzantine Greek*, Cyprian*, Doric*, Ionic*, Koine*, Modern Greek Indo-Iranian Dardic or Pisacha Kafiri, Kashmiri, Khowar, Kohistani, Romany (Gypsy), Shina Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan Pali*, Prakrit*, Sanskrit*, Vedic* Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan Central Indic Hindi, Hindustani, Urdu Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan East Indic Assamese, Bengali, Bihari, Oriya Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan Northwest Indic Punjabi, Sindhi Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan Pahari Central Pahari, Eastern Pahari (Nepali), Western Pahari Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan South Indic Marathi (including major dialect Konkani), Singhalese (Sinhalese) Indo-Iranian Indic or Indo-Aryan West Indic Bhili, Gujarati, Rajasthani (many dialects) Indo-Iranian Iranian Avestan*, Old Persian* Indo-Iranian Iranian East Iranian Baluchi, Khwarazmian*, Ossetic, Pamir dialects, Pushtu (Afghan), Saka (Khotanese)*, Sogdian*, Yaghnobi Indo-Iranian Iranian West Iranian Kurdish, Pahlavi (Middle Persian)*, Parthian*, Persian (Farsi), Tajiki Italic (Non-Romance) Faliscan*, Latin, Oscan*, Umbrian* Italic Romance or Romanic Eastern Romance Italian, Rhaeto-Romanic, Romanian, Sardinian Italic Romance or Romanic Western Romance Catalan, French, Ladino, Portuguese, Provençal, Spanish Slavic or Slavonic East Slavic Belorussian (White Russian), Russian, Ukrainian Slavic or Slavonic South Slavic Bulgarian, Church Slavonic*, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian Slavic or Slavonic West Slavic Czech, Kashubian, Lusatian (Sorbian or Wendish), Polabian*, Polish, Slovak Thraco-Illyrian Albanian, Illyrian*, Thracian* Thraco-Phrygian Armenian, Grabar (Classical Armenian)*, Phrygian* * Asterisk indicates a dead language. Tokharian (W China) Tokharian A (Agnean)*, Tokharian B (Kuchean)*
 |
Voltar ao começo da página |
 |
Voltar à página principal |
 |