Indo-European and Germanic languages. Classification of Germanic tribes.

The family tree of Indo-European languages includes 16 groups. 6 of them are extinct.

1. The Albanian language, the language of ancient Illyria. The oldest monuments belong to the seventeenth century

2. The Armenian language, the oldest monuments of which belong to the fifth century A.D.

3. The Baltic group, embracing (a) Old Prussian, which became extinct in the seventeenth century, (b) Lithuanian, (c) Lettic (the oldest records of Lithuanian and Lettic belong to the sixteenth century)

4. The Celtic [k] group, consisting of: (a) Gaulish (known to us by Keltic names and words quoted by Latin and Greek authors, and inscriptions on coins); (b) Britannic, including Cymricor Welsh, Cornish, and Bas-Breton or Armorican (the oldest records of Cymric and Bas-Breton date back to the eighth or ninth century); (c) Gaelic, including Irish-Gaelic, Scotch-Gaelic, and Manx. The oldest monuments are the old Gaelic ogam inscriptions, which probably date as far back as about A.D. 500.

5. The Germanic group, consisting of :

6. The Greek language, with its numerous dialects.

7. The Indic group, including the language of the Vedas, classical Sanskrit, and the Prakrit dialects;

8. The Iranian group, including (a) West Iranian (Old Persian, the language of the Persian cuneiform inscriptions, dating from about 520-350 B.C.) ; (6) East Iranian (Avesta—sometimes called Zend-Avesta, Zend, and Old Bactrian—the language of the Avesta, the sacred books of the Zoroastrians).

9. The Italic group, consisting of Latin and the Umbrian-Samnitic dialects. From the popular form of Latin are descended the Romance languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Provenfal, French, Italian, Raetoromanic, Rumanian or Wallachian.

10. Slavonic, embracing: (a) the South-Eastern group, including Russian (Great Rus-sian, White Russian, and Little Russian), Bulgarian, and Illyrian (Servian, Croatian, Slovenian); (b) the Western group, including Czech (Bohemian), Sorabian (Wendish), Polish and Polabian.

Extinct Groups and Languages

11. Hittite [‘hitait] – хеттские, another group of extinct languages, which died out in the 2-1 millennium B.C.; spoken on the territory of modern Turkey and Northern Syria. The Hittite language is very important for Indo-European reconstruction.

12. Tocharian [ka:] – тохарскиe, languages which died out after the 8th century A.D.;

spoken in oases of Eastern TurkestanTocharian, now extinct, represented by texts discovered in Chinese Turkestan, which are thought to be anterior to the tenth century A.D.

13. the Illiric(an) language(ancient Balcan)

14. the Phrygian language (2-1 mill. B.C.).

15. the Thrakian (фракийский) language (6-3 c. B. C.)

16. the Venetic language (6-1 c. B. C.)

The Germanic (Teutonic) group divided into three main subgroups: East Germanic, North Germanic and West Germanic. The chief language of East Germanic was Gothic, now known mainly from fragments of the 4th century translation of the Holy Bible by Wulfila (Ulfilas), the Aryan bishop of the West Goths.

(1) East Germanic - Gothic. Almost the only source of our knowledge of the Gothic language is the fragments of the biblical translation made in the fourth century by Ulfilas, the Bishop of the West Goths. See pp. 195-7.
(2) North Germanic or Scandinavian — (a) called Old Norse until about the middle of the eleventh century; (b) East Scandinavian, including Swedish, Danish and Faroese; (c) West Scandinavian, including Norwegian and Icelandic.
The oldest records of this branch are the runic inscriptions, some of which date as far back as the third or fourth century.
(3) West Germanic, which is composed of the following languages:
(a) German1
(b) English
(c) Dutch2
(d)Frisian
(e)Afrikaans (Boerish)
(f)Yiddish
(g) Luxembugian

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 1578