Page 157 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

976 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

colonial expansions and the spread of Euro-American The Baltic Languages
culture have been so successful that nearly half the pop- The Balts once occupied a vast territory from the Baltic
ulation of the planet now speaks an Indo-European lan- Sea across northern Russia, but the expansion of Ger-
guage. Even before the first centuries BCE, Indo-European manic speakers from the west and Slavic speakers from
languages extended from the shores of the Atlantic to the south has left only the two modern Baltic languages
eastern India and the westernmost province of China.Yet of Lithuanian and Latvian.
the place of origin of this language family and the course
of its earliest migrations have been topics of heated and The Slavic Languages
inconclusive debate for more than two centuries. During the first millennium CE the Slavs began their his-
torical expansions in central and southeastern Europe.
The major Slavic languages include Russian, Beloruss-
The Early Indo-Europeans ian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Slovenian,
The Indo-European language family can be divided into Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian.
thirteen groups that may be briefly summarized, moving
broadly from west to east. The Balkan Languages
The Indo-European languages of the ancient Balkan
The Celtic Languages region are very poorly attested in inscriptions and in
During the period from about 500 BCE to about 1 BCE the place and personal names recorded in neighboring clas-
Celts occupied much of western and central Europe and sical languages. The major groups were the Dacians and
undertook raids into Italy and as far east as Greece and Thracians, occupying roughly the areas of the modern
Anatolia (present-day peninsular Turkey).Today the Celtic states of Romania and Bulgaria respectively, and the
languages survive only on the periphery of Atlantic Europe Illyrians in the west Balkan region. The only Balkan lan-
as Gaelic (both Irish and Scots),Welsh, and Breton. guage that survives is Albanian, which many suggest
may have derived from the earlier Illyrian language.
The Italic Languages
In ancient Italy, Latin was by far the most successful of a Greek
group of closely related languages. Latin became the sole The language of the ancient Greeks is attested from at
language of the Italian peninsula sometime around 100 CE least the thirteenth century BCE in the Linear B inscrip-
and was then carried by Roman expansions over much tions of Late Bronze Age Greece and Crete. During the
of Europe.The Italic branch survives today in the form of first millennium BCE the Greeks undertook extensive pro-
modern Romance languages of French, Spanish, Por- grams of colonization that carried them as far as Spain
tuguese, Italian, and Romanian, among others such as in the west and to the northern shores of the Black Sea
Catalan and Provençal. in the east.

The Germanic Languages Anatolian
Speakers of these northern and central European lan- By about 1900 BCE documents from Anatolia indicate
guages, such as the Goths, expanded from the north dur- the existence of Indo-Europeans speaking languages of
ing the first millennium CE to occupy lands previously the Anatolian branch.The most notable and best studied
held by the Celts and other groups. The modern Ger- of the early languages is Hittite. Some Anatolian lan-
manic languages include English, Dutch, German, and guages survived to the beginning of the first millennium
the Scandinavian languages. CE, but all are now long extinct.