Indo-European Language Family

1. Introduction


A stunning result of lingual research in the 19th century was the recognition that some languages show correspondences of cast of characters that bathroomnot be due to chance convergences, to borrowing among the languages involved, or to global characteristics of human language, and that such correspondences t here(predicate)fore can only be the result of the languages in question having sprung from a common reference point language in the past. Such languages argon said to be related (more specifically, genetically related, though genetic here does not have any connection to the term referring to a biological genetic relationship) and to belong to a language family. It can therefore be convenient to model such linguistic genetic relationships via a family tree, showing the genealogy of the languages claimed to be related.
For example, in the model below, all the languages B through I in the tree argon related as members of the said(prenominal) family; if they were not related, they would not all descend from the same authorized language A. In such a schema, A is the proto-language, the starting signal point for the family, and B, C, and D are offspring (often referred to as fille languages); B, C, and D are thus siblings (often referred to as sister languages), and for each one represents a separate branch of the family tree.



B and C, in turn, are starting points for other offspring languages, E, F, and G, and H and I, respectively. Thus B stands in the same relationship to E, F, and G as A does to B, C, and D. B and C, therefore, are proto- languages too, but are they are modal(a) proto-languages. It is thus possible to determine not only general family relationship, but also degrees of relatedness â€" the languages in a single branch, e.g. E, F, and G, are more closely related to one another than each of them is to a language in a different branch, e.g. H, I, or D.
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Many such language families can be recognized, and the...If you exigency to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com



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