Pre-History (LANGUAGE)

Pre-History

Proto-Indo-European

English is a Germanic language which belongs to the Indo-European languages. The question of the original home of the Indo-Europeans has been much debated, but nowadays most scholars agree that the original group of people that spoke Proto-Indo-European, the language which would later spilt into a number of branches, including the Germanic branch, lived somewhere between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea some 6000 years ago. Most scholars believe that this population then expanded/migrated eastward, westward and northward and thereby came to inhabit most of Europe and parts of Western Asia.

We can learn about the earliest Indo-Europeans from aspects of their reconstructed vocabulary. Some words, for example, describe an agricultural technology whose existence dates back to 5000 B.C. The Indo-European words for barley, wheat, flax, apples, cherries, grapes, vines, mead and beer and words for the various implements with which to cultivate, harvest and produce these products describe a way of life unknown in northern Europe until the third or second millennium B.C. Reconstructed vocabulary also tells us much about the climate and geography of the region where the Proto-Indo-Europeans lived. Such words include words meaning winter, snow, birch, beech, pine, wolf, salmon, bear, and otter, and seem to suggest a northerly, temperate climate.

A Little Note on Language Reconstruction: Cognates

How then can we say anything about a language which existed more than 6000 years ago, before the time of written language? The answer comes from the study of so-called cognates, words of common origin in different languages. These words often resemble each other, and differences that exist between languages tend to be systematic.

By studying cognates, linguists are able to make qualified guesses about what words may have looked like in a proto-language. Cognates also reveal systematic sound changes that have occurred as new languages have emerged. One such famous sound shift is Grimm’s Law. By comparing Germanic languages with Latin languages, Jakob Grimm (and yes, he was one of the Grimm brothers) was able to show that the following systematic changes of the plosive consonants had taken place at some point in history (Latin/English words in brackets):

p → f (ped/foot, pisc/fish, pater/father, pyro/fire)

t → ө (th-sound) (tres/three, tu/thou, frater/bother).

k→ h (centum/hundred, cord/heart, cannabis/hemp, canard/hana, cornu/horn)

d → t (dent/tooth, duo/two, decem/ten)

g → k (genu/knee, genus/kin, gelidus/cold).

An additional systematic sound change was short /o/ →/a/ (noctem/nacht) , and long /ã/ → long /õ/ (mater/moder). Why did such systematic sound changes take place? The most likely explanation is that the Indo-European languages were influenced by the sound patterns of other, older European languages as the tribes moved into new parts of Europe and mixed with the native populations. Such effects are known as substratum effects, where one language is systematically influenced by the languages of a subjugated group. Similar language phenomena exist today and one example is how Swedish pronunciation is being influenced by immigrant groups in suburbs such as Rinkeby.

Germanic

English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. This group began as a common language in the Elbe river region about 3,000 years ago. Around the second century BC, this Common Germanic language split into three distinct subgroups:

• East Germanic was spoken by peoples who migrated back to southeastern Europe. No East Germanic language is spoken today, and the only written East Germanic language that survives is Gothic.

• North Germanic evolved into the modern Scandinavian languages of Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, and Icelandic (but not Finnish, which is related to Estonian and is not an Indo-European language).

• West Germanic is the ancestor of modern German, Dutch, Flemish, Frisian, and English.