INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES. The Indo-European (I.E.) languages are a family of kindred dialects spread over a large part of Europe, and of Asia as far as India.
The main branches so far identified fall easily into two groups of four. These groups are distinguished from one another by the treatment of certain original guttural sounds, k(c), g, kh, gh, which one group shows as consonants, while the other converts them into sibilants. The variation is well shown in the word for “hundred”: Gr. ἑ-κατόν, Lat. centum, Old Irish cēt; Sanskrit śatam, Zend satēm, Lithuanian sziḿtas, Old Bulgarian (Old ecclesiastical Slavonic) sŭto. In the first three the consonant is a hard guttural (the Romans said kentum, not sentum), in the others it is a sibilant (the Lithuanian sz is the English sh).
The first group (generally known as the centum-group) is the Western and entirely European group, the second (generally known as the satem-group) with one exception lies to the east of the centum-group and much its largest part is situated in Asia. To the centum-group belong (1) Greek; (2) the Italic languages, including Latin, Oscan, Umbrian and various minor dialects of ancient Italy; (3) Celtic, including (a) the Q-Celtic languages, Irish, Manx and Scotch Gaelic, (b) the P-Celtic, including the language of ancient Gaul, Welsh, Cornish and Breton: the differentiation, which exists also in the Italic languages, turning upon the treatment of original kw sounds, which all the Italic languages save Latin and the little-known Faliscan and the (b) group of the Celtic languages change to p. With these go (4) the Germanic or Teutonic languages, including (a) Gothic, (b) the Scandinavian languages, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic—differentiated in historical times out of a single language, Old Norse,—(c) West Germanic, Including English and Frisian, Low Frankish (from which spring modern Dutch and Flemish), Low and High German.
To the satem-group belongs (1) Aryan or Indo-Iranian, including (a) Sanskrit, with its descendants, (b) Zend, and (c) Old Persian, from which is ultimately descended Modern Persian, largely modified, however, by Arabic words. This group is often divided into two sub-groups, Indo-Aryan, including the languages of India, and Iranian, used as a general title for Zend and Old Persian as the languages of ancient Iran. Although the sounds of Indo-Aryan and Iranian differ considerably, phrases of the earliest form of the one can be transliterated into the other without change in vocabulary or syntax. (2) To the west of these lies Armenian, which is so full of borrowed Iranian words that only in 1875 was it successfully differentiated by Hübschmann as an independent language. It is probably related to, or the descendant of, the ancient Phrygian, which spread into Asia from Thrace by the migration of tribes across the Hellespont. Of ancient Thracian unfortunately we know very little. (3) North of the Black Sea, and widening its borders in all directions, comes the great Balto-Slavonic group. In this there are two branches somewhat resembling the division between Indo-Aryan and Iranian. Here three small dialects on the south-east coast of the Baltic form the first group, Lithuanian, Lettish and Old Prussian, the last being extinct since the 17th century. The Slavonic languages proper themselves fall into two groups: (a) an Eastern and Southern group, including Old Bulgarian, the ecclesiastical language first known from the latter part of the 9th century A.D.; Russian in its varieties of Great Russian, White Russian and Little Russian or Ruthenian; and Servian and Slovene, which extend to the Adriatic. (b) The western group includes Polish with minor dialects, Czech or Bohemian, also with minor languages in the group, and Sorb. In the satem division is also included (4) Albanian, which like Armenian is much mixed with foreign elements—Latin, Greek, Turkish and Slavonic. The relation between it and the ancient Illyrian is not clear.
Besides the languages mentioned there are many others now extinct or of which little is known—e.g. Venetic, found in clearly written inscriptions with a distinctive alphabet in north-eastern Italy; Messapian, in the heel of Italy, which is supposed to have been connected with the ancient Illyrian; and possibly also the unknown tongue which has been found recently on several inscriptions in Crete and seems to have been the language of the pre-Hellenic population, the finds apparently confirming the statement of Herodotus (vii. 170) that the earlier population survived in later times only at Praesos and Polichne. Names of deities worshipped by the Aryan branch are reported to have been discovered in the German excavations at Boghaz-Keui (anc. Pteria, q.v.) in Cappadocia; names of kings appear in widely separated areas elsewhere in Asia,[1] and a language not hitherto known has recently been found in excavations in Turkestan and christened by its first investigators Tocharish.[2] So far as yet ascertained, Tocharish seems to be a mongrel dialect produced by an intermixture of peoples speaking respectively an I.E. language and a language of an entirely different origin. The stems of the words are clearly in many cases I.E., but the terminations are no less clearly alien to this family of languages. It is remarkable that some of its words, like ku, “dog,” have a hard k, while the other languages of this stock in Asia, so far as at present known, belong to the satem-group, and have in such words replaced the k by a sibilant.
Till the latter part of the 18th century it was the universal practice to refer all languages ultimately to a Hebrew origin, because Hebrew, being the language of the Bible, was assumed, with reference to the early chapters of Genesis, to be the original language. Even on these premises the argument was unsound, for the same authority also recorded a confusion of tongues at Babel, so that it was unreasonable to expect that languages thus violently metamorphosed could be referred so easily at a later period to the same original. The first person to indicate very briefly the existence of the Indo-European family, though he gave it no distinctive name, was Sir William Jones in his address to the Bengal Oriental Society in 1786. Being a skilled linguist, he recognized that Sanskrit must be of the same origin as Greek, Latin, Teutonic (Germanic) and possibly Celtic (Asiatic Researches, i. p. 422; Works of Sir W. Jones, i. p. 26, London, 1799). Unfortunately Sir William Jones’s views as to the relationship of the languages were not adopted for many years by later investigators. He had said quite definitely, “No philologer could examine them all three (Sanskrit, Greek and Latin) without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.” Friedrich Schlegel, who learnt Sanskrit from Alexander Hamilton in Paris nearly twenty years later, started the view that Sanskrit, instead of being the sister, was the mother of the other languages, a mistake which, though long since refuted in all philological works, has been most persistent.
Curiously enough the history of the names given to the family is obscure. The earliest known occurrence of the word “Indo-European” is in an article in the Quarterly Review for 1813[3] by Dr Thomas Young. The term has been in use in English and in French almost continuously since that date. But a glance at Dr Young’s article will show that he included under Indo-European many languages like Basque, Etruscan and Arabian (his term for Semitic), which certainly do not belong to this family of languages at all; and if the term is taken to mean, as it would seem to imply, all the languages spoken in India and Europe, it is undoubtedly a misnomer. There are many languages in India, as those of the Dravidians in Southern India and those of Northern Assam, which do not belong to this family. On the other hand there are many languages belonging to the family which exist outside both India and Europe—Zend, Old Persian, Armenian, Phrygian, to say nothing of languages recently discovered. The term most commonly used in Germany is “Indo-Germanic.” This was employed by Klaproth as early as 1823. It is said not to have been invented by him, but by whom and when it was invented is not quite ascertained.[4] It is an attempt to name the family by its most easterly and most westerly links. At the time when it was invented it had not yet been settled whether Celtic was or was not a member of this family. But in any case the term would not have been wrong, for members of the Germanic stock have been settled for above a thousand years in Iceland, the most westerly land of Europe, and for the last four centuries have increasingly dominated the continent of America. As has been pointed out by Professor Buck of Chicago (Classical Review, xviii. p. 400), owing to the German method of pronouncing eu as oi, the word “Indo-Germanic” is easier for a German to pronounce than “Indo-European.” Attempts to discover a more accurate and less ponderous term, such as “Indo-Celtic” or “Celtindic,” have not met with popular favour. Aryan (q.v.) is conveniently brief, but is wanted as the proper term for the most easterly branch of the family. What is wanted is a term which does not confuse ethnological and linguistic ideas. Not all speakers of any given language are necessarily of the same stock. In ancient Rome Latin must have been spoken by many slaves or sons of slaves who had no Latin blood in their bodies, though a slave if manumitted by his master might be the father or grandfather of a Roman citizen with full rights. Plautus and Terence were both aliens, the one an Umbrian, the other an African. The speakers of modern English are even a more multifarious body. A possible name for the family, implying only the speaking of a language of the stock without any reference to racial or national characteristics, could be obtained from the name for man, so widely though perhaps not altogether universally diffused throughout the family—Sanskrit vīras, Lithuanian wyras, Lat. vir, Irish fer, Gothic waír, &c. If the speakers of these languages were called collectively Wiros, no confusion with ethnological theories need arise.
It is customary to talk of the roots, stems and suffixes of words in the Indo-European languages. These languages are distinguished from languages like Chinese by the fact that in the great majority of words suffixes can be separated from roots. But the distinction between them and the so-called agglutinative languages is one of degree rather than of kind. In the agglutinative languages, or at any rate in some of them, some of the post-fixed elements have still an independent value. In the Indo-Germanic languages no one can say what the meaning of the earliest suffixes was. Suffixes which have developed in individual languages or individual sections of this family of languages can often be traced, e.g. the often quoted -hood in English words like “manhood,” or the English -ly in “manly,” which has gradually extended till it is actually attached to its own parent like in “likely.” But all recent investigation goes to show that before the Indo-European languages separated they possessed words with all the characteristics which we recognize in substantives like the Latin dominus or verbs like the Greek δείκνυται. Or, to put the same fact in another way, by the comparative method it is impossible to reach a period when the speakers of Indo-European languages spoke in roots. A “root” is only a convenient philological abstraction; it is merely the remnant which is left when all the elements that can be analysed are taken away; it is therefore only a kind of greatest common measure for a greater or smaller body of words expressing modifications of the same idea. Thus, though by no means the earliest form of the word, the English man might be taken as the “root” from which are derived by various suffixes manhood, manly, mannish, manful, manned (past tense), manned (participle), unman, mannikin, &c. How far the suffixes which can be traced back to Indo-European times (i.e. to a time before the separation of the languages) had existence as separate entities it is impossible to say. From what we see of the later history of the languages it is much more probable that both forms and signification were very largely the result of analogy. For in the making of new words analogy plays a much larger part than any reference to general principles of formation or composition. New words are to a large extent, even in modern times, the invention of persons unskilled in the history of language.
The first to point out that the term Indo-European (or Indo-Germanic) was not used uniformly in one sense was Professor Kretschmer in his Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache (Göttingen, 1896), pp. 9 ff. It is in fact used in three senses. (1) Indo-European is treated as preceding and different from all its descendants, a single uniform speech without dialects. But, strictly, no such language can exist, for even individual members of the same family differ from one another in pronunciation, vocabulary, sentence formation, etc. Thus it appears impossible to ascertain what the Indo-European term for the numeral 1 was, since different languages show at least four words for this, three of them presenting the same root with different suffixes: (a) Sanskrit eka (= *οι-qṷo-); (b) Zend aeva, Old Persian aiva, Greek οι-(ϝ)ο-ς (= *οι-ṷo-); (c) Greek οἰνή, “ace,” Latin unus (older oenus), Old Irish oen, Gothic ains, Lithuanian vénas (where the initial v has no more etymological signification than the w which now begins the pronunciation of the English one), Old Bulgarian inŭ; (d) Greek εἷς, ἔν (= *sem-s). But the Indo-European community must have had a word for the numeral since the various languages agree in forms for the numerals 2 to 10, and the original Indo-European people seem to have been able to count at least as far as 100. On the other hand, if the Indo-European language must have had dialects, the line of differentiation between it and its descendants becomes obliterated. (2) But even when a word is found very widely diffused over the area of the Indo-European languages, it is not justifiable to conclude that therefore the word must have belonged to the original language. The dispersion of the Indo-European people over the areas they now inhabit, or inhabited in the earliest times known to history, must have been gradual, and commerce or communication between different branches must have always existed to some extent; the word might thus have been transmitted from one community to another. When a word is found in two branches which are geographically remote from one another and is not found in the intermediate area, the probability that the word is original is somewhat stronger. But even in this case the originality of the word is by no means certain, for (a) the intervening branch or branches which do not possess the word may merely have dropped it and replaced it by another; (b) the geographical position which the branches occupy in historical times may not be their original position; the branches which do not possess the word may have forced themselves into the area they now occupy after they had dropped the word; (c) if the linguistic communities which possess the word have a seaboard and the intervening communities have not, the possibility of its transmission in connexion with early sea-borne commerce must be considered. At the dawn of European history the Phoenicians and the Etruscans are great seafarers; at a later time the Varangians of the North penetrated to the Mediterranean and as far as Constantinople; in modern times sea-borne commerce brought to Europe words from the Caribbean Indians like potato and tobacco, and gave English a new word for man-eating savages—cannibal. Thus with Kretschmer we must distinguish between what is common Indo-European and what is original Indo-European in language. (3) A word may exist in several of the languages, and may have existed in them for a very long time, and yet not be Indo-European. Hehn (Das Salz, ed. 2, 1901) rejects salt as an Indo-European word because it is not found in the Aryan group, though in this case he is probably wrong, (a) because, as has been shown by Professor Johannes Schmidt, its irregular declension (sal-d, genitive sal-nes) possesses characteristics of the oldest Indo-European words; (b) because the great plains of Iran are characterized by their great saltness, so that the Aryan branch did not pass through a country where salt was unknown, although, according to Herodotus (i. 133), the Persian did not use salt to season his food. Since Kretschmer wrote, this argument has been used very extensively by Professor A. Meillet of Paris in his Dialectes indo-européens (Paris, 1908). In this treatise he brings forward arguments from a great variety of facts to show that in the original Indo-European language there were dialects, the Aryan, Armenian, Balto-Slavonic and Albanian, as we have seen, forming an oriental group with novel characteristics developed in common, although in various other characteristics they do not agree. Similarly Italic, Celtic and Germanic form a Western group, while Greek agrees now with the one group now with the other, at some points being more intimately connected with Italic than with any other branch, at others inclining more towards the Aryan. This grouping, however, is by no means exclusive, members of either group having characteristics in common with individuals of the other group which they do not share with the other languages of their own group (Meillet, p. 131 ff.).