The Indo Europeans

The Indo-European language family and how English, a
Germanic language fits into it
English, like most of the world's more than 5,000 languages, is part of a language
family, a group of languages that are genetically linked and have a common
ancestor. The "genes" they share are hereditary linguistic traits passed down
through the history of the respective languages. The concept of a language family
is based on the observation that two or more languages may share lexicon
(vocabulary), phonology (sound), morphology (word structure), and syntax
(grammar) features that are too numerous, fundamental, and systematic to be the
result of chance, general language design features (typology), or contact
borrowing. The Indo-European (IE) language family includes English, and Proto-
Indo-European (PIE) is the common ancestor of all Indo-European languages. The
Indo-European subgroup to which English belongs is Germanic, specifically West
Germanic.
Linguists have determined that the Indo-European language family is the origin of
many languages around the world, including English. Linguists have traditionally
acknowledged the existence of ten language families originating in Indo-European.
The figure below depicts the ten language families of the Indo-European group.
This statistic does not include all of the Indo-European languages. Around 440
living languages descended from Indo-European. Most European languages are
Indo-European, with a few outliers.
The Indo-Europeans were a nomadic group that inhabited the Eurasian Steppes
about 5,000 years ago. Sir William Jones, the man credited with discovering the
Indo-European language, is frequently mentioned in histories of the language.
When presenting an English history, it is critical to start here. However, the theory
that all of those languages originated from a single ancestral language did not gain
traction until the late 1800s. However, the discovery took place outside of Europe.
It was actually manufactured in India, a continent away. The tale behind this
discovery combines European imperialism, private armies, and tea raids, which
resulted in the loss of British possessions in America and the unintentional
acquisition of a new colony in India.
Jones observed that Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language, has many parallels to
Greek and Latin. These parallels were very similar to those discovered in other
European languages, including Persian. But here's the key: commonalities among
European languages can be explained as the product of long-term borrowing
between nearby cultures. For example, the Latin-speaking Romans interacted with
the Germanic tribes east of the Rhine for centuries before the Roman Empire
crumbled and the Germanic tribes flooded into Roman territory. As a result,
linguistic borrowing was widely accepted across Europe's languages. However,
this could not explain the similarities to Sanskrit. How could Germanic speakers
from the frigid reaches of Scandinavia borrow so many terms from the ancient
residents of India?
Jones emphasized the striking connections between three seemingly dead

languages: ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. He stated that Sanskrit came from
the same source as Greek and Latin. He also felt the three were related to Gothic, a
Germanic language spoken in Europe before the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain.
He also found that Persian shared similarities with Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek.
This discovery spurred a surge in the study of ancient languages across Europe.
Relationships between ancient Sanskrit and European languages may have been
discovered prior to Jones, but it was not until Jones that people began to take the
relationships seriously and study them in depth. The entire field of linguistics was
founded in the 1800s, mostly to determine which languages belong to the Indo-
European family and which don't.
The words father in English and pater in Latin are derived from the same basic
source word. The Greek word patera is pronounced similarly to the Latin form.
Pitar is the Sanskrit form of the term. Padre is the Spanish word for "father."
Linguists discovered that the /p/ sound changed to a /f/ sound in Germanic
languages.
In addition to sharing a fairly similar term for father, each of these languages
shared a common word for God. In Indo-European, the term is déiwo. The Sanskrit
term devá comes from the Indo-European word. The old Irish word is día. The
Latin term is deus, from which English derives divine and divinity, and the Spanish
equivalent is diós.
There are numerous ideas on how and where these people dispersed from their
ancestral homeland. The Kurgan theory (also known as the Steppe theory) is the
most widely recognized explanation. It proposes that the most likely speakers of
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) were Kurgans from the Pontic steppe north of the
Black Sea. According to the Kurgan idea, Indo-Europeans migrated away from
their homeland and established new territories such as Persia, northern India, and
all of Europe. The Indo-Europeans were able to supersede other groups in Europe
(whether by conquest, sheer numbers, domesticated horses, or nutritional benefits),
permanently altering Europe's linguistic environment and eventually giving rise to
English.

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The Indo-European language family and how English, a

Germanic language fits into it

Jones emphasized the striking connections between three seemingly dead

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