Hello, everyone. My name is Paul, and I'm from Canada. Oh sh*t...
Hello, everyone welcome to the Langfocus channel, and my name is Paul. Today we'll be going way back to see how we're all connected
...Well, not all of us
But about half of us, around 46% of the people on Earth, speak an Indo-European language as their native language
Throughout Europe, South Asia, the Americas and beyond. The Indo-European language family contains languages as diverse as English, Hindi
Persian, Russian, Armenian, and Greek - languages, which on the surface may seem to have nothing in common, but they actually do.
All Indo-European languages developed from Proto-Indo-European,
According to the most widely accepted theory,
Proto-Indo-European was spoken around
[6500] Years ago on the Eurasian Steppe of Eastern Ukraine Southern Russia and the Caucasus the
Indo-Europeans were the first, or among the first people to domesticate horses which greatly increase their ability to travel and migrate
Over the following three millennia
Indo-European people migrated far and wide
conquering new lands on horseback and bringing their language with them as it developed into different varieties which eventually grew into
different branches [of] the indo-European language family.
The Indo-Europeans first migrated into Europe, Anatolia and Central Asia then later into Northern India and Iran as migration
continued deeper into Europe and Central Asia
There's an alternate theory based more on
archaeological evidence that suggests that the
Indo-European languages began in Anatolia several thousand years earlier and spread with the expansion of agriculture
There are no written records of
Proto-indo-European and it's early offshoots, so the best we can do is to theorize and imagine however they happen to take place during these migrations
Proto-indo-European split into numerous different languages which would gradually develop into entire branches of the Indo-European language family
Those branches are
Anatolian which is now extinct
Tocharian, which is also extinct Italic and Celtic which may share a common, Italo-Celtic
ancestor, Armenian and Albanian which each consists of just one language as far as we know Hellenic,
Germanic, Balto- Slavic which split into the Baltic and Slavic branches and
Indo-Iranian which split into the Iranic and Indic branches
All of these branches and their individual languages have been developing in different regions with different
Influences for thousands of years so they are now very different from each other, but through comparative study
We can see that indo-european languages share a common word stock as well as some phonetic and historically speaking some grammatical
tendencies. There are a significant number of cognate words in
Indo-European languages. By the way the word cognate comes from Latin co+gnatus, which means born together
These words were indeed born together in Proto Indo-european
[and] if we're aware of the sound changes that have taken place we can identify
cognates, for instance the word meaning bear or carry in Sanskrit, [it's] bhar, in Greek
it's pher. In Modern Greek this might be pronounced like an f sound, but in ancient Greek
It was actually an aspirated [ph] sound In Latin
it's fer, in Gothic it's bair, in Old English. it's ber. They all come from Proto-indo-European
bher, and my pronunciation of these different languages is probably not perfect, but I'm just giving it a shot myself
I should point out that the
Proto-Indo-European words are theoretical reconstruction and that there's no way of knowing for sure what they sounded like but these words here are fairly recognizable
Some are a little less recognizable. In English
we have the word work which comes from Old English [wyrcan] in Modern Greek the word for work is ergo
which was [ergon] in Ancient Greek and in some texts there was an alternate form, wergon. They both stem from the proto-indo-European
wergom
Indo-European languages can be divided into two classes the Centum languages and the Satem languages
Satem is the word for 100 in Avestan ancient Iranian language
Centum is the word for 100 in Latin These two words illustrate a sound shift that occurred in Indo European languages
Proto-Indo-European had a palatalized [k] sound that was distinct from the regular velar k sound. A palatalized
consonant sounds kind of like it's followed by a [y] sound like kill as opposed to cut. In the Satem languages this
palatalized sound remained a separate phoneme from [cup] and it became a sibilant sound like a suh or a shuh so the
Proto-Indo-European word for 100 [kmtom] became satam in Sanskrit simtas in
Lithuanian and in many Slavic languages, [it's] sto. These words have all developed [and] diverged quite a bit
but if you're aware of the sound shift from a k sound
to an s sound you can recognize these cognates more easily. In the centum languages the 2 k sounds merged together or
in the case of the Germanic branch shifted to an h sound so kmtom became centum in Latin and
hekaton in Greek cant in Welsh and hund in Old English
So let's take a look at these two words in English [hundred] and [cent]
We usually think of hundred as a native Germanic word and cent as a loanword from Latin, but these are actually cognates. First
let's take away the ending of the word -red
which comes from a suffix meaning count or number. Then let's change the h back to a [k] and now you can kind of see
the resemblance see the resemblance
Remember that the C in cent was originally pronounced like a [k] in Latin
Also, remember that d is the voiced equivalent of t, so you can often see these sounds alternating in related languages?
Some core words have been preserved in many or even all Indo-european languages. These include some animals for example
Proto-indo-European ekwos: this means horse- you know that equestrian animal. In Latin
It's equus, in ancient Greek it was hippos, in
Sanskrit, it's ashvaha and in persian
it's asb. The Latin and Greek examples are centum examples, but in Greek
It seems that the k sound
Assimilated to the p sound next to it. The Sanskrit and Persian
Examples are satem examples since you can see that the k sound became shuh and suh. It also seems that the w sound
Shifted to a V sound in Sanskrit and to a B sound in Persian
And those are sound changes that take place
Frequently in various different languages Other frequent cognates include the numbers from 1 [to] 10 words referring to family members
agricultural words and various natural phenomena like the words for tree and wood. In
proto-indo-European [doru] or [dreu-] in old English treo, in Gothic triu, in ancient Greek [doru]
Which actually meant spear in Sanskrit [Daru] in old church slavonic drevo, in Armenian dzar.
This shared vocabulary might be hard to spot when you're not looking for it
But when you start to notice [the] sounds that commonly alternate in those cognates for example the voiceless t and the voiced d,
Then cognates start to be more [obvious]
Indo-European languages have developed so far from proto-indo-European that grammatically
they are very diverse and they have many features [that] other indo-european languages don't share, but because
Proto-indo-European was a highly inflected language all of its descendants are inflected languages to some extent By inflection
I mean that words change form to reflect
Grammatical functions like number person tense mood case One example is the verb endings we find in various
Indo-European languages. In
proto-indo-European the reconstructed singular forms for the verb to bear are bhero or
bheremi, bheresi, bhereti. And in Sanskrit bharami, bharasi, bharati
In Latin fero, fers, fert
In Old English beru or
bero, biris, birith
In many languages including English these inflections have been lost to a large extent in Modern English we only retained the third-person
Inflection he bears or she bears
but English still had the second person inflection until the early modern English period So if you read a King James Bible
You'll see this sentence - thou barest record of thyself. This is the second person form and thou means you
cases
proto-indo-European nouns had inflections for [8] grammatical cases
Sanskrit maintained all eight cases and so did the ancient Iranian language Avestan
Latin retained six cases and Old English had four Modern English nouns
Do not have case endings
And that's also true for many other indo-european
Languages like most of the romance languages When languages no longer have case
Inflections the function of nouns is indicated more by word order and by the use [of] prepositions
But many modern indo-european languages do have numerous cases like most Balto Slavic languages which have six to eight cases
German and Icelandic which have four cases and Modern Greek which also has four
So the connection between the modern indo-european languages may not be obvious
But when we look back [historically] at how those languages have developed in the different stages of those languages, we can find more
connections The question of the day: if you speak an indo-European
Language did you discover any new connections between your language and others during this video Let us know in the comments down below?
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