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Explore the timline of Indo-European Languages. The Indo-European languages are a family of related languages that today are widely spoken in the Americas, Europe, and also Western and Southern Asia. Just as languages such as Spanish, French, Portuguese...
The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; another nine subdivisions are now extinct .
- † indicates this branch of the language family is extinct
- Proto-Indo-European
- One of the world's primary language families
People also ask
When did Indo-European languages become sub-families?
How did Indo-European language evolve?
Do Indo-European languages have loanwords?
Are all Indo-European languages derived from a single prehistoric language?
Classification. Finnish is a member of the Finnic group of the Uralic family of languages; as such, it is one of the few European languages that is not Indo-European. The Finnic group also includes Estonian and a few minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in Russia's Republic of Karelia .
eLinguistics.net will publish step by step timeline maps of the evolution of languages. As a first beta edition you can see the timeline for the Indo-European languages as well as Altaic and Uralic languages, as designed on the basis of the eLinguistics data.
- Overview
- Characteristic developments of Indo-European languages
- Changes in phonology
- Changes in morphology
As Proto-Indo-European was splitting into the dialects that were to become the first generation of daughter languages, different innovations spread over different territories.
As Proto-Indo-European was splitting into the dialects that were to become the first generation of daughter languages, different innovations spread over different territories.
Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, Armenian, and Albanian agree in changing the palatal stops *ḱ, *ǵ, and *ǵh into spirants (s, ś, th, etc.) or affricates—e.g., Sanskrit aśri- ‘sharp edge,’ Old Church Slavonic ostrŭ ‘sharp,’ Armenian asełn ‘needle,’ Albanian athëtë ‘bitter’ beside Greek ákros ‘tip,’ Latin acidus ‘biting,’ all from a basic element *H2eḱ- ‘sharp, pointed.’ (Spirants, also called fricatives, are sounds produced with audible friction as a result of the airstream passing through a narrow, but unstopped, passage in the mouth—e.g., English s, f, v. Affricates are sounds that begin as stops, with complete stoppage of the airstream, but are released as spirants, or fricatives—e.g., the ch in church, the j in jam.) The languages that change the palatal stops to spirants or affricates are known as “satem” languages, from the Avestan word satəm ‘hundred’ (Proto-Indo-European *kmtóm), which illustrates the change. The languages that preserve the palatal stops as k-like sounds are known as “centum” languages, from centum (/kentum/), the corresponding word in Latin. The satem languages are not geographically separated from one another by any recorded languages that preserve the palatals as stops; it is therefore inferred that the change to affricates (whence later spirants) occurred just once and spread over a cohesive dialect area of Proto-Indo-European.
Of the languages that share this change, however, Balto-Slavic shares with Germanic (including English) an m in certain case endings where other Indo-European languages, including Indo-Iranian, Armenian, and Albanian, have bh or a sound regularly developed from bh. Examples of the m ending include English the-m and Old Church Slavonic tě-mŭ ‘to those ones’; the bh and related sounds (ph, v, b) are illustrated in the following: Sanskrit té-bhyas ‘to those ones,’ Armenian noro-vkʿ ‘with new ones,’ Albanian male-ve ‘to mountains,’ Greek ókhes-phin ‘with chariots,’ Latin omni-bus ‘for all.’ Because Balto-Slavic and Germanic are neighbours, it is inferred that m replaced bh in these case endings just once in the parent language and that the area over which this innovation spread only partly overlapped the area that adopted affricated pronunciation of the palatals.
This pattern is general for changes dating from the time the parent language was breaking up into distinct languages. Each of the resulting languages shares some innovations with some of its neighbours, but only rarely do different innovations shared by two or more branches of Indo-European cover exactly the same territory.
Once the dialects had become differentiated enough to be distinct languages—certainly by 2500 bce in most cases—each largely went its own way, and agreements in developments since then are either due to borrowing across language boundaries (as in the notable convergences between Modern Greek, Albanian, Romanian, and the southernmost Slavic languages) or due to parallel but independent workings out of the same base material.
As a result of the fact that much of the marking of Proto-Indo-European inflectional categories was done in final syllables, loss and reduction of these syllables have often had serious grammatical consequences. In the noun, loss of endings has generally led to loss or great reduction of the case and gender systems, while ways have generally been found to salvage the distinction between singular and plural. In Modern Persian, for example, where all final syllables have been lost, the old case and gender distinctions have disappeared also, but plural number is still regularly marked, either with -an (originally the genitive plural ending of some nouns) or with -ha (of obscure origin).
In the verb, where more endings originally had two syllables, loss of final syllables has had less serious consequences for morphology. Even here, however, some languages, including English, have totally or almost totally given up the marking of subject by personal endings. Compare English “I, we, you, they love” and “he, she loves” with the Spanish conjugation for ‘love’—amo, amas, ama, amamos, amáis, aman—or the Russian version—ljubljú, ljúbish, ljúbit, ljúbim, ljúbite, ljúbjat.
Changes in noun inflection have generally involved simplification. Almost everywhere the dual number has been lost; in many languages the noun genders have been reduced from three to two (as in French, Swedish, Lithuanian, and Hindi) or lost entirely (as in English, Armenian, and Bengali). Only Slavic has complicated the gender system by imposing on the inherited distinctions contrasts of animate versus inanimate or of personal versus nonpersonal.
Everywhere except in the oldest Indo-Iranian languages the original eight Indo-European cases have suffered reduction. Proto-Germanic had only six cases, the functions of ablative (place from which) and locative (place in which) being taken over by constructions of preposition plus the dative case. In Modern English these are reduced to two cases in nouns, a general case that does duty for the vocative, nominative, dative, and accusative (“Henry, did Bill give John the letter?”) and a possessive case continuing the old genitive (“Bill’s letter”). In languages such as French and Welsh, nouns are no longer inflected for case at all. In some languages, to be sure, nouns have begun fusing with words placed directly after the nouns to create new case systems, coexisting with relics of the old. Thus, Old Lithuanian had in addition to seven inherited cases an illative (place into), made by adding -n(a) to the accusative (peklosna ‘into hell’), an allative (place to, toward), made by adding -p(i) to the genitive (Jesausp ‘to Jesus’), and an adessive (place at which), made by adding -p(i) to the locative (Joniep ‘in John’).
Changes in the verb have been more complex. Besides loss or merger of old categories, many new forms have been created and many old forms have acquired new values. In Ancient Greek the focus of the stative aspect (perfect) has largely shifted from the present state (“he is dead”) to the previous event that led to this state (“he has died”). As a result, the perfect came to mean the same as the perfective past (aorist), and it has therefore disappeared from Modern Greek. New forms created in Ancient Greek include future and future perfect tenses, based on the desiderative present forms (such as “he wants to walk”) of the parent language.
In Germanic the principal new creation was the weak past tense (ending in a t or d), such as English loved, thought, German liebte, dachte, made by combining the verb stem with a past tense of the Germanic verb for ‘do.’ (The strong past tense formed by vowel alternations, like “sing, sang,” “run, ran” comes from the Proto-Indo-European stative aspect.)
Finnish is the only non-Indo-European language in the European Union, and is thus interesting precisely because of its uniqueness. Through Finnish, the European Union has a link to places as far afield as Siberia, for some speakers of Uralic languages related to Finnish are herdsmen in the tundra.
There are many hypotheses, placing the Proto-Indo-European language (the common ancestor of all sub-families) between 7000 and 3500 BC. All the nodes in the tree represent a stage at which languages split from each other, forming new sub-families. Estimating the dates of theses nodes is an interesting job, because it can be in line with ...