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70-699: The Slavic languages , also known as the Slavonic languages , are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic , spoken during the Early Middle Ages , which in turn is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language , linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in

140-628: A Balto-Slavic group within the Indo-European family. The current geographical distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages includes the Balkans , Central and Eastern Europe , and all the way from Western Siberia to the Russian Far East . Furthermore, the diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world. The number of speakers of all Slavic languages together

210-695: 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,

280-675: 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 ,

350-495: 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

420-408: A different order is used to either emphasize some part of it or to adapt it to a broader context logic. For example, " Roweru ci nie kupię" (I won't buy you a bicycle ), " Od piątej czekam" (I've been waiting since five ). In Turkish , it is normal to use SOV , but SVO may be used sometimes to emphasize the verb. For example, "John terk etti Mary'yi" (Lit. John/left/Mary : John left Mary)

490-803: 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

560-461: 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

630-644: A part of interdisciplinary study of Slavic ethnogenesis, a lexicostatistical classification of Slavic languages. It was built using qualitative 110-word Swadesh lists that were compiled according to the standards of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project and processed using modern phylogenetic algorithms. The resulting dated tree complies with the traditional expert views on the Slavic group structure. Kassian-Dybo's tree suggests that Proto-Slavic first diverged into three branches: Eastern, Western and Southern. The Proto-Slavic break-up

700-521: A partial exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian , they have fully developed inflection -based conjugation and declension . In their relational synthesis Slavic languages distinguish between lexical and inflectional suffixes . In all cases, the lexical suffix precedes the inflectional in an agglutination mode. The fusional categorization of Slavic languages is based on grammatic inflectional suffixes alone. Prefixes are also used, particularly for lexical modification of verbs. For example,

770-553: A recent past. 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 Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic , their immediate parent language , ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European ,

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840-544: A somewhat unusual feature of virtually free word order in a sentence clause , although subject–verb–object and adjective-before-noun is the preferred order in the neutral style of speech . Modern Bulgarian differs from other Slavic languages, because it almost completely lost declension , it developed definite articles from demonstrative pronouns (similar to "the" from "this" in English ), and it formed indicative and renarrative tenses for verbs . Since

910-632: A strong tendency to place adjectives , demonstratives and numerals after the nouns that they modify, but Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian and Indonesian place numerals before nouns, as in English. Some linguists have come to view the numeral as the head in the relationship to fit the rigid right-branching of these languages. There is a strong tendency, as in English, for main verbs to be preceded by auxiliaries: I am thinking. He should reconsider. An example of SVO order in English is: In an analytic language such as English, subject–verb–object order

980-588: Is better for geographically adjacent languages and in the written (rather than oral) form. At the same time, recent studies of mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages revealed, that their traditional three-branch division does not withstand quantitative scrutiny. While the grouping of Czech , Slovak and Polish into West Slavic turned out to be appropriate, Western South Slavic Serbo-Croatian and Slovene were found to be closer to Czech and Slovak (West Slavic languages) than to Eastern South Slavic Bulgarian . The traditional tripartite division of

1050-510: 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

1120-523: Is dated to around 100 A.D., which correlates with the archaeological assessment of Slavic population in the early 1st millennium A.D. being spread on a large territory and already not being monolithic. Then, in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., these three Slavic branches almost simultaneously divided into sub-branches, which corresponds to the fast spread of the Slavs through Eastern Europe and the Balkans during

1190-535: 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

1260-492: Is more complex in languages that have no strict order of V and O imposed by their grammar. e.g. Russian , Finnish , Ukrainian , or Hungarian . Here, the ordering is rather governed by emphasis. Russian allows the use of subject, verb, and object in any order and "shuffles" parts to bring up a slightly different contextual meaning each time. E.g. "любит она его" (loves she him) may be used to point out "she acts this way because she LOVES him", or "его она любит" (him she loves)

1330-399: Is relatively inflexible because it identifies which part of the sentence is the subject and which one is the object. ("The dog bit Andy" and "Andy bit the dog" mean two completely different things, while, in case of "Bit Andy the dog", it may be difficult to determine whether it is a complete sentence or a fragment, with "Andy the dog" the object and an omitted/implied subject.) The situation

1400-487: Is the answer to the question "What did John do with Mary?" instead of the regular [SOV] sentence "John Mary'yi terk etti" (Lit. John/Mary/left ). German , Dutch , and Kashmiri display the order subject-verb-object in some, especially main clauses, but really are verb-second languages , not SVO languages in the sense of a word order type. They have SOV in subordinate clauses, as given in Example 1 below. Example 2 shows

1470-402: Is used in the context "if you pay attention, you'll see that HE is the one she truly loves", or "его любит она" (him loves she) may appear along the lines "I agree that cat is a disaster, but since my wife adores it and I adore her...". Regardless of order, it is clear that "его" is the object because it is in the accusative case . In Polish , SVO order is basic in an affirmative sentence, and

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1540-442: Is within the boundaries of modern Ukraine and Southern Federal District of Russia. The Proto-Slavic language existed until around AD 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones. There are no reliable hypotheses about the nature of the subsequent breakups of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old East Slavic language of Kievan Rus , which existed until at least

1610-598: The Latin script , and have had more Western European influence due to their proximity and speakers being historically Roman Catholic , whereas the East Slavic and Eastern South Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic and, with Eastern Orthodox or Uniate faith, have had more Greek influence. Two Slavic languages, Belarusian and Serbo-Croatian , are biscriptal, i.e. written in either alphabet either nowadays or in

1680-593: The Rusyn language spoken in Transcarpatian Ukraine and adjacent counties of Slovakia and Ukraine. Similarly, the Croatian Kajkavian dialect is more similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language. Modern Russian differs from other Slavic languages in an unusually high percentage of words of non-Slavic origin, particularly of Dutch (e.g. for naval terms introduced during

1750-726: The national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian , Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish , Czech and Slovak (of the West group), Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern members of the South group), and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (western members of the South group). In addition, Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number of Slavic microlanguages : both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well-established Slavic languages. All Slavic languages have fusional morphology and, with

1820-432: 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

1890-587: The 12th century. Linguistic differentiation was accelerated by the dispersion of the Slavic peoples over a large territory, which in Central Europe exceeded the current extent of Slavic-speaking majorities. Written documents of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries already display some local linguistic features. For example, the Freising manuscripts show a language that contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar to Slovene dialects (e.g. rhotacism ,

1960-459: 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

2030-411: 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

2100-533: 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

2170-452: 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

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2240-574: 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

2310-511: 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. Subject%E2%80%93verb%E2%80%93object SVO is the second-most common order by number of known languages, after SOV . Together, SVO and SOV account for more than 87% of

2380-666: 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

2450-1016: The Russian language developed as a convergence of that dialect and the central ones, whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian were continuation of development of the central dialects of East Slavs. Also Russian linguist Sergey Nikolaev, analysing historical development of Slavic dialects' accent system, concluded that a number of other tribes in Kievan Rus came from different Slavic branches and spoke distant Slavic dialects. 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

2520-536: The Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. Within the individual Slavic languages, dialects may vary to a lesser degree, as those of Russian, or to a much greater degree, like those of Slovene. In certain cases so-called transitional dialects and hybrid dialects often bridge the gaps between different languages, showing similarities that do not stand out when comparing Slavic literary (i.e. standard) languages. For example, Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian (East Slavic) are bridged by

2590-594: The ancestor language of all Indo-European languages , via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in

2660-578: The best known being Ewe , use postpositions in noun phrases, the vast majority of them, such as English, have prepositions . Most subject–verb–object languages place genitives after the noun, but a significant minority, including the postpositional SVO languages of West Africa, the Hmong–Mien languages , some Sino-Tibetan languages , and European languages like Swedish, Danish, Lithuanian and Latvian have prenominal genitives (as would be expected in an SOV language ). Non-European SVO languages usually have

2730-458: The effect of verb second order: the first element in the clause that comes before the V need not be the subject. In Kashmiri, the word order in embedded clauses is conditioned by the category of the subordinating conjunction, as in Example 3. mye to.me ees was phyikyir worry yithi.ni lest tsi you temyis to.him ciThy letter dyikh will.give mye ees phyikyir yithi.ni tsi temyis ciThy dyikh to.me

2800-486: The equivalent of English "came out" in Russian is "vyshel", where the prefix "vy-" means "out" , the reduced root "-sh" means "come", and the suffix "-el" denotes past tense of masculine gender . The equivalent phrase for a feminine subject is "vyshla". The gender conjugation of verbs , as in the preceding example, is another feature of some Slavic languages rarely found in other language groups. The well-developed fusional grammar allows Slavic languages to have

2870-702: 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

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2940-485: 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

3010-632: The following sub-branches: Some linguists speculate that a North Slavic branch has existed as well. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group. Although the Slavic languages diverged from a common proto-language later than any other groups of the Indo-European language family , enough differences exist between the any two geographically distant Slavic languages to make spoken communication between such speakers cumbersome. As usually found within other language groups , mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages

3080-488: 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,

3150-416: 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

3220-563: The geographical separation between these two groups, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria ( Moravians ) and those in present-day Styria , Carinthia , East Tyrol in Austria , and in the provinces of modern Slovenia , where the ancestors of the Slovenes settled during first colonization. In September 2015, Alexei Kassian and Anna Dybo published, as

3290-571: 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

3360-567: 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

3430-424: The interwar period, scholars have conventionally divided Slavic languages, on the basis of geographical and genealogical principle, and with the use of the extralinguistic feature of script, into three main branches, that is, East, South, and West (from the vantage of linguistic features alone, there are only two branches of the Slavic languages, namely North and South). These three conventional branches feature some of

3500-442: The last three decades, however, make this view very hard to maintain nowadays, especially when one considers that there was most likely no " Proto-Baltic " language and that West Baltic and East Baltic differ from each other as much as each of them does from Proto-Slavic. The Proto-Slavic language originated in the area of modern Ukraine and Belarus mostly overlapping with the northern part of Indoeuropean Urheimat , which

3570-467: 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

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3640-486: 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

3710-557: 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

3780-422: The period 1500–1000 BCE. A minority of Baltists maintain the view that the Slavic group of languages differs so radically from the neighboring Baltic group ( Lithuanian , Latvian , and the now-extinct Old Prussian ), that they could not have shared a parent language after the breakup of the Proto-Indo-European continuum about five millennia ago. Substantial advances in Balto-Slavic accentology that occurred in

3850-499: The quality Swadesh lists were not yet collected for Slovenian dialects. Because of scarcity or unreliability of data, the study also did not cover the so-called Old Novgordian dialect, the Polabian language and some other Slavic lects. The above Kassian-Dybo's research did not take into account the findings by Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak who stated that, until the 14th or 15th century, major language differences were not between

3920-447: The regions occupied by modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but rather between the north-west (around modern Velikiy Novgorod and Pskov) and the center (around modern Kyiv , Suzdal , Rostov , Moscow as well as Belarus) of the East Slavic territories. The Old Novgorodian dialect of that time differed from the central East Slavic dialects as well as from all other Slavic languages much more than in later centuries. According to Zaliznyak,

3990-461: 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

4060-407: The reign of Peter I ), French (for household and culinary terms during the reign of Catherine II ) and German (for medical, scientific and military terminology in the mid-1800's). Another difference between the East, South, and West Slavic branches is in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages (and Western South Slavic languages – Croatian and Slovene ) are written in

4130-495: The second half of the 1st millennium A.D. (the so-called Slavicization of Europe). The Slovenian language was excluded from the analysis, as both Ljubljana koine and Literary Slovenian show mixed lexical features of Southern and Western Slavic languages (which could possibly indicate the Western Slavic origin of Slovenian, which for a long time was being influenced on the part of the neighboring Serbo-Croatian dialects), and

4200-541: 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

4270-434: 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

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4340-605: 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

4410-482: 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

4480-532: 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

4550-506: 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

4620-658: The word krilatec ). The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin-script continuous text in a Slavic language. The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre-existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of the Hungarians in Pannonia in the 9th century interposed non-Slavic speakers between South and West Slavs. Frankish conquests completed

4690-460: The world's languages. The label SVO often includes ergative languages although they do not have nominative subjects. Subject–verb–object languages almost always place relative clauses after the nouns which they modify and adverbial subordinators before the clause modified, with varieties of Chinese being notable exceptions. Although some subject–verb–object languages in West Africa ,

4760-492: Was estimated to be 315 million at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is the largest and most diverse ethno-linguistic group in Europe. The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features, such as geography) divided into three subgroups: East , South , and West , which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as

4830-606: 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

4900-404: Was worry lest you to.him letter will.give "I was afraid you might give him the letter" English developed from such a reordering language and still bears traces of this word order, for example in locative inversion ("In the garden sat a cat.") and some clauses beginning with negative expressions : "only" ("Only then do we find X."), "not only" ("Not only did he storm away but also slammed

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