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62-602: The town was founded before 1214, with the name Alvelde recorded in 1214, 1221, and 1233. The toponymic element "-feld" means "open area", "an undeveloped, open field", or "an untilled field". "Al-" likely derives from the Indoeuropean root "el-/ol-" meaning "water", "damp", or "flowing". In 1426, Alfeld joined the Saxon League of Towns , thus becoming an indirect member of the Hanseatic League . The town

124-695: A language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe , the Iranian plateau , and the northern Indian subcontinent . Some European languages of this family— English , French , Portuguese , Russian , Dutch , and Spanish —have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. 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 . Today,

186-675: A common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European . Membership in the various branches, groups, and subgroups of Indo-European is also genealogical, but here the defining factors are shared innovations among various languages, suggesting a common ancestor that split off from other Indo-European groups. For example, what makes the Germanic languages a branch of Indo-European is that much of their structure and phonology can be stated in rules that apply to all of them. Many of their common features are presumed innovations that took place in Proto-Germanic ,

248-558: A confirmation of de Saussure's theory. The various subgroups of the Indo-European language family include ten major branches, listed below in alphabetical order: In addition to the classical ten branches listed above, several extinct and little-known languages and language-groups have existed or are proposed to have existed: Membership of languages in the Indo-European language family is determined by genealogical relationships, meaning that all members are presumed descendants of

310-424: A cricket context, these countries are often referred to simply as the subcontinent around the world e.g. " Australia's tour of the subcontinent". The word is also sometimes used as an adjective in this context e.g. "subcontinental conditions". The Indian subcontinent was formerly part of Gondwana , a supercontinent formed during the late Neoproterozoic and early Paleozoic . Gondwana began to break up during

372-803: A diplomatic mission and noted a few similarities between words in German and in Persian. Gaston Coeurdoux and others made observations of the same type. Coeurdoux made a thorough comparison of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship among them. Meanwhile, Mikhail Lomonosov compared different language groups, including Slavic, Baltic (" Kurlandic "), Iranian (" Medic "), Finnish , Chinese , "Hottentot" ( Khoekhoe ), and others, noting that related languages (including Latin, Greek, German, and Russian) must have separated in antiquity from common ancestors. The hypothesis reappeared in 1786 when Sir William Jones first lectured on

434-593: A distinct political entity that eventually became a nation-state (today the Republic of India). According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the term subcontinent signifies a "subdivision of a continent which has a distinct geographical, political, or cultural identity" and also a "large land mass somewhat smaller than a continent". Its use to signify the Indian subcontinent is evidenced from

496-461: A linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar innovations in Germanic and Balto-Slavic that are far more likely areal features than traceable to a common proto-language, such as the uniform development of a high vowel (* u in the case of Germanic, * i/u in the case of Baltic and Slavic) before the PIE syllabic resonants * ṛ, *ḷ, *ṃ, *ṇ , unique to these two groups among IE languages, which

558-645: A region or a 'realm' by itself than the Indian subcontinent." This natural physical landmass in South Asia is the dry-land portion of the Indian Plate , which has been relatively isolated from the rest of Eurasia. The Himalayas (from Brahmaputra River in the east to Indus River in the west), Karakoram (from Indus River in the east to Yarkand River in the west) and the Hindu Kush mountains (from Yarkand River westwards) form its northern boundary. In

620-482: A small archipelago southwest of the peninsula, while largely considered a part of the Indian subcontinent, sometimes is mentioned by sources, including the International Monetary Fund , as a group of islands away from the Indian subcontinent in a south-western direction. The population of Indian subcontinent is about 1.912 billion which makes it the most populated region in the world. It

682-534: A term closely linked to the region's colonial heritage, as a cover term, the latter is still widely used in typological studies. Since the Partition of India , citizens of Pakistan (which became independent of British India in 1947) and Bangladesh (which became independent of Pakistan in 1971) often perceive the use of the Indian subcontinent as offensive and suspicious because of the dominant placement of India in

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744-822: Is a peninsular region in South Asia delineated by the Himalayas in the north, the Hindu Kush in the west, and the Arakanese in the east. It extends southward into the Indian Ocean with the Arabian Sea to the southwest and the Bay of Bengal to the southeast. Most of this region rests on the Indian Plate and is isolated from the rest of Asia by large mountain barriers. Laccadive Islands , Maldives and

806-510: Is cited to have been radically non-treelike. Specialists have postulated the existence of higher-order subgroups such as Italo-Celtic , Graeco-Armenian , Graeco-Aryan or Graeco-Armeno-Aryan, and Balto-Slavo-Germanic. However, unlike the ten traditional branches, these are all controversial to a greater or lesser degree. The Italo-Celtic subgroup was at one point uncontroversial, considered by Antoine Meillet to be even better established than Balto-Slavic. The main lines of evidence included

868-535: Is in agreement with the wave model. The Balkan sprachbund even features areal convergence among members of very different branches. An extension to the Ringe - Warnow model of language evolution suggests that early IE had featured limited contact between distinct lineages, with only the Germanic subfamily exhibiting a less treelike behaviour as it acquired some characteristics from neighbours early in its evolution. The internal diversification of especially West Germanic

930-546: Is not considered a part of the subcontinent, while excluding the British Indian Ocean Territory which is geologically associated with the subcontinent. Geologically, the subcontinent originates from Insular India , an isolated landmass that rifted from the supercontinent of Gondwana during the Cretaceous and merged with the landmass of Eurasia nearly 55 million years ago, forming

992-649: Is said to have lived. The assertion that the popular fairy tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was born in Alfeld is false. Even though the miners who mined ore In the Seven Mountains believed in the existence of dwarfs, it is more likely that the cradle of the fairy tale is to be searched in France. The version the brothers Grimm heard and wrote down, as they travelled through the Seven Mountains, on

1054-428: Is somewhat contested as there is no globally accepted definition on which countries are a part of South Asia or the Indian subcontinent. Whether called the Indian subcontinent or South Asia, the definition of the geographical extent of this region varies. Afghanistan , despite often considered as a part of South Asia, is usually not included in the Indian subcontinent. Maldives, an island country consisting of

1116-1096: Is the Fagus Werk , rebuilt in 1910-1915 after the blueprints of architect Walter-Gropius, what is said to be trend-setting for modern architecture. Alfeld is a strategically important town fought over repeatedly by NATO and the Soviet Red Army forces in Tom Clancy's novel Red Storm Rising , due to the bridges over the Leine River. Alfeld is twinned with: Indo-European languages Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European The Indo-European languages are

1178-650: The 26 atolls of the Maldives lie entirely within the Southern Hemisphere. Historically, the region surrounding and southeast of the Indus River was often simply referred to as "India" in many historical sources. Even today, historians use this term to denote the entire Indian subcontinent when discussing history up until the era of the British Raj. Over time, however, "India" evolved to refer to

1240-660: The Chagos Archipelago are three series of coral atolls , cays and Faroes on the Indian Plate along with the Chagos–Laccadive Ridge , a submarine ridge that was generated by the northern drift of the Indian Plate over the Réunion hotspot during the Cretaceous and early Cenozoic times. The Maldives archipelago rises from a basement of volcanic basalt outpourings from a depth of about 2000 m forming

1302-463: The Indian Plate , projecting southwards into the Indian Ocean from the Himalayas . Geographically, it spans the countries of Bangladesh , Bhutan , the British Indian Ocean Territory (United Kingdom), India , Maldives , Nepal , Pakistan , and Sri Lanka . Although the terms "Indian subcontinent" and "South Asia" are often used interchangeably to denote the region, the geopolitical term of South Asia frequently includes Afghanistan , which

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1364-710: The Mesozoic , with Insular India separating from Antarctica 130-120 million years ago and Madagascar around 90 million years ago, during the Cretaceous . Insular India subsequently drifted northeastwards, colliding with the Eurasian Plate nearly 55 million years ago, during the Eocene , forming the Indian subcontinent. The zone where the Eurasian and Indian subcontinent plates meet remains geologically active, prone to major earthquakes. Physiographically , it

1426-719: The Thirty Years' War . Sights in Alfeld include the town hall (1586) with its octagonal tower, the church Saint Nicolai and the Fillerturm, a medieval watchtower, and the Fagus Factory of 1911, a fine example of early modernist architecture by Walter Gropius . More famous are the Seven Hills ( German : Sieben Berge ) in the north and the Lippoldshöhle ("Lippold's cave"), where a legendary robber-knight

1488-741: The Tibetan Plateau to the north, the Indochinese Peninsula to the east, the Iranian Plateau to the west, and the Indian Ocean to the south. Apart from Maritime Southeast Asia (the Malay Archipelago ), the maritime region of the subcontinent ( littoral South Asia ) is the only subregion of Asia that lies partly within the Southern Hemisphere : the British Indian Ocean Territory two of

1550-432: The " wave model " is a more accurate representation. Most approaches to Indo-European subgrouping to date have assumed that the tree model is by-and-large valid for Indo-European; however, there is also a long tradition of wave-model approaches. In addition to genealogical changes, many of the early changes in Indo-European languages can be attributed to language contact . It has been asserted, for example, that many of

1612-407: The 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent began to notice similarities among Indo-Aryan , Iranian , and European languages. In 1583, English Jesuit missionary and Konkani scholar Thomas Stephens wrote a letter from Goa to his brother (not published until the 20th century) in which he noted similarities between Indian languages and Greek and Latin . Another account

1674-411: The 1880s. Brugmann's neogrammarian reevaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure 's development of the laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of "modern" Indo-European studies. The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins , Jochem Schindler , and Helmut Rix ) developed a better understanding of morphology and of ablaut in

1736-533: The Anatolian and Tocharian language families, in that order. The " tree model " is considered an appropriate representation of the genealogical history of a language family if communities do not remain in contact after their languages have started to diverge. In this case, subgroups defined by shared innovations form a nested pattern. The tree model is not appropriate in cases where languages remain in contact as they diversify; in such cases subgroups may overlap, and

1798-452: The Anatolian subgroup left the Indo-European parent language comparatively late, approximately at the same time as Indo-Iranian and later than the Greek or Armenian divisions. A third view, especially prevalent in the so-called French school of Indo-European studies, holds that extant similarities in non- satem languages in general—including Anatolian—might be due to their peripheral location in

1860-574: The Bronze Age in the form of Mycenaean Greek and the Anatolian languages of Hittite and Luwian . The oldest records are isolated Hittite words and names—interspersed in texts that are otherwise in the unrelated Akkadian language , a Semitic language —found in texts of the Assyrian colony of Kültepe in eastern Anatolia dating to the 20th century BC. Although no older written records of

1922-647: The Himalayas. It is one of the most populated regions in the world, holding roughly 20–25 percent of the global population. Geographically, the peninsular region in Southern Asia is located below the Third Pole , delineated by the Himalayas in the north, the Hindu Kush in the west, and the Indo-Burman Ranges in the east. The neighboring geographical regions around the subcontinent include

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1984-468: The Indian coast through the maritime routes on the Arabian Sea. In terms of modern geopolitical boundaries, the subcontinent constitutes Bangladesh , Bhutan , India, Nepal , and Pakistan , besides, by convention, the island country of Sri Lanka and other nearby island nations of the Indian Ocean, such as Maldives and the British Indian Ocean Territory . Unlike "South Asia", sometimes

2046-406: The Indian subcontinent has come to be known as South Asia "in more recent and neutral parlance". Indologist Ronald B. Inden argues that the usage of the term South Asia is becoming more widespread since it clearly distinguishes the region from East Asia. While South Asia , a more accurate term that reflects the region's contemporary political demarcations, is replacing the Indian subcontinent ,

2108-526: The Indo-European language-area and to early separation, rather than indicating a special ancestral relationship. Hans J. Holm, based on lexical calculations, arrives at a picture roughly replicating the general scholarly opinion and refuting the Indo-Hittite hypothesis. Indian subcontinent The Indian subcontinent is a physiographical region in Southern Asia , mostly situated on

2170-666: The Indo-Iranian branch. All Indo-European languages are descended from a single prehistoric language, linguistically reconstructed as Proto-Indo-European , spoken sometime during the Neolithic or early Bronze Age . The geographical location where it was spoken, the Proto-Indo-European homeland , has been the object of many competing hypotheses; the academic consensus supports the Kurgan hypothesis , which posits

2232-482: The central part of the ridge between Laccadives and the Great Chagos Bank . According to anthropologist Patrap C. Dutta, "the Indian subcontinent occupies the major landmass of South Asia." According to historian B. N. Mukherjee , "The subcontinent is an indivisible geographical entity." According to geographer Dudley Stamp , "There is perhaps no mainland part of the world better marked off by nature as

2294-631: The early twentieth century when most of the territory was either part of the British Empire or allied with them. It was a convenient term to refer to the region comprising both British India and the princely states . The term has been particularly common in the British Empire and its successors, while the term South Asia is the more common usage in Europe and North America. According to historians Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal ,

2356-424: The east, it is bounded by Patkai , Naga , Lushai and Chin hills. The Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea form the boundary of the Indian subcontinent in the south, south-east and south-west. Given the difficulty of passage through the Himalayas, the sociocultural, religious and political interaction of the Indian subcontinent has largely been through the valleys of Afghanistan in its northwest,

2418-702: The existence of an earlier ancestor language, which he called "a common source" but did not name: The Sanscrit [ sic ] language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. Thomas Young first used

2480-444: The expression "Indian subcontinent" may exclude the islands of Maldives and Sri Lanka. According to Pawan Budhwar, Arup Varma, and Manjusha Hirekhan, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan constitute the Indian subcontinent. Budhwar, Varma, and Hirekhan also maintain that with Afghanistan and Maldives included the region is referred to as South Asia. The periphery of the subcontinent, including Bangladesh, Pakistan, and

2542-485: The family relationships between the Indo-European languages, and the reconstruction of their common source, was central to the development of the methodology of historical linguistics as an academic discipline in the 19th century. The Indo-European language family is not considered by the current academic consensus in the field of linguistics to have any genetic relationships with other language families, although several disputed hypotheses propose such relations. During

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2604-488: The gender or the verb system) have been interpreted alternately as archaic debris or as innovations due to prolonged isolation. Points proffered in favour of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis are the (non-universal) Indo-European agricultural terminology in Anatolia and the preservation of laryngeals. However, in general this hypothesis is considered to attribute too much weight to the Anatolian evidence. According to another view,

2666-416: The genitive suffix -ī ; the superlative suffix -m̥mo ; the change of /p/ to /kʷ/ before another /kʷ/ in the same word (as in penkʷe > *kʷenkʷe > Latin quīnque , Old Irish cóic ); and the subjunctive morpheme -ā- . This evidence was prominently challenged by Calvert Watkins , while Michael Weiss has argued for the subgroup. Evidence for a relationship between Greek and Armenian includes

2728-571: The homeland to be the Pontic–Caspian steppe in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia , associated with the Yamnaya culture and other related archaeological cultures during the 4th millennium BC to early 3rd millennium BC. By the time the first written records appeared, Indo-European had already evolved into numerous languages spoken across much of Europe , South Asia , and part of Western Asia . Written evidence of Indo-European appeared during

2790-567: The individual Indo-European languages with the most native speakers are English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Hindustani , Bengali , Punjabi , French and German each with over 100 million native speakers; many others are small and in danger of extinction. In total, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion people) speaks an Indo-European language as a first language —by far the highest of any language family. There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to an estimate by Ethnologue , with over two-thirds (313) of them belonging to

2852-417: The island chains of Maldives, features large Muslim populations, while the heartland, including most of India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, are overwhelmingly Hindu or Buddhist. Since most of these countries are located on the Indian Plate, a continuous landmass , the borders between countries are often either a river or a no man's land . The precise definition of an "Indian subcontinent" in a geopolitical context

2914-467: The more striking features shared by Italic languages (Latin, Oscan, Umbrian, etc.) might well be areal features . More certainly, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, because English and continental West Germanic were not

2976-486: The original Proto-Indo-European population remain, some aspects of their culture and their religion can be reconstructed from later evidence in the daughter cultures. The Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as it possesses the second-longest recorded history of any known family, after the Afroasiatic Egyptian language and Semitic languages . The analysis of

3038-557: The perfect active particle -s fixed to the stem, link this group closer to Anatolian languages and Tocharian. Shared features with Balto-Slavic languages, on the other hand (especially present and preterit formations), might be due to later contacts. The Indo-Hittite hypothesis proposes that the Indo-European language family consists of two main branches: one represented by the Anatolian languages and another branch encompassing all other Indo-European languages. Features that separate Anatolian from all other branches of Indo-European (such as

3100-461: The regular change of the second laryngeal to a at the beginnings of words, as well as terms for "woman" and "sheep". Greek and Indo-Iranian share innovations mainly in verbal morphology and patterns of nominal derivation. Relations have also been proposed between Phrygian and Greek, and between Thracian and Armenian. Some fundamental shared features, like the aorist (a verb form denoting action without reference to duration or completion) having

3162-541: The similarity among certain Asian and European languages and theorized that they were derived from a primitive common language that he called Scythian. He included in his hypothesis Dutch , Albanian , Greek , Latin , Persian , and German , later adding Slavic , Celtic , and Baltic languages . However, Van Boxhorn's suggestions did not become widely known and did not stimulate further research. Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665–1666 as part of

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3224-536: The so-called Märchenstrasse (Street Of Fairytales) is just one of many. The most popular beer in Alfeld is Einbecker Brauherrn, from Einbeck , about 12 kilometers or so, away, south of Alfeld. Veltins Pilsner, Flensberger Pils and Gottinger Pils are also popular beers in Alfeld. The biggest employer of the city is the SAPPI (South African Pulp and Paper Industry) factory with its big chimney, which has become one of Alfeld's landmarks. Even more famous than SAPPI

3286-434: The source of all the Germanic languages. In the 21st century, several attempts have been made to model the phylogeny of Indo-European languages using Bayesian methodologies similar to those applied to problems in biological phylogeny. Although there are differences in absolute timing between the various analyses, there is much commonality between them, including the result that the first known language groups to diverge were

3348-605: The standard scientific term. A number of other synonymous terms have also been used. Franz Bopp wrote in 1816 On the conjugational system of the Sanskrit language compared with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic and between 1833 and 1852 he wrote Comparative Grammar . This marks the beginning of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline. The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from this work to August Schleicher 's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann 's Grundriss , published in

3410-482: The striking similarities among three of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin , Greek , and Sanskrit , to which he tentatively added Gothic , Celtic , and Persian , though his classification contained some inaccuracies and omissions. In one of the most famous quotations in linguistics, Jones made the following prescient statement in a lecture to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1786, conjecturing

3472-532: The term Indo-European in 1813, deriving it from the geographical extremes of the language family: from Western Europe to North India . A synonym is Indo-Germanic ( Idg. or IdG. ), specifying the family's southeasternmost and northwesternmost branches. This first appeared in French ( indo-germanique ) in 1810 in the work of Conrad Malte-Brun ; in most languages this term is now dated or less common than Indo-European , although in German indogermanisch remains

3534-534: The term. As such it is being increasingly less used in those countries. Meanwhile, many Indian analysts prefer to use the term because of the socio-cultural commonalities of the region. The region has also been called the "Asian subcontinent", the "South Asian subcontinent", as well as "India" or " Greater India " in the classical and pre-modern sense. The sport of cricket is notably popular in India , Pakistan , Sri Lanka , Nepal and Bangladesh . Within

3596-457: The valleys of Manipur in its east, and by maritime routes . More difficult but historically important interaction has also occurred through passages pioneered by the Tibetans . These routes and interactions have led to the spread of Buddhism out of the subcontinent into other parts of Asia. The Islamic expansion arrived into the subcontinent in two ways: through Afghanistan on land, and to

3658-506: The wake of Kuryłowicz 's 1956 Apophony in Indo-European, who in 1927 pointed out the existence of the Hittite consonant ḫ. Kuryłowicz's discovery supported Ferdinand de Saussure's 1879 proposal of the existence of coefficients sonantiques , elements de Saussure reconstructed to account for vowel length alternations in Indo-European languages. This led to the so-called laryngeal theory , a major step forward in Indo-European linguistics and

3720-726: The west it is bounded by parts of the mountain ranges of Hindu Kush , Spīn Ghar (Safed Koh), Sulaiman Mountains , Kirthar Mountains , Brahui range, and Pab range among others, with the Western Fold Belt along the border (between the Sulaiman Range and the Chaman Fault) is the western boundary of the Indian Plate, where, along the Eastern Hindu Kush, lies the Afghanistan–Pakistan border. In

3782-553: Was made by Filippo Sassetti , a merchant born in Florence in 1540, who travelled to the Indian subcontinent. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian (these included devaḥ / dio "God", sarpaḥ / serpe "serpent", sapta / sette "seven", aṣṭa / otto "eight", and nava / nove "nine"). However, neither Stephens' nor Sassetti's observations led to further scholarly inquiry. In 1647, Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn noted

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3844-655: Was one of the smallest cities in the Hanseatic League , but had become prosperous in the fourteenth and fifteenth century through its trade in beer, hops, linen, and yarn. Alfeld originally belonged to the Diocese of Hildesheim , but was transferred to the Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel after the Hildesheim Diocesan Feud (1519-1523). In retrospect, this Brunswick period constituted Alfeld's Golden Age, its economy and culture flourishing before

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