Page 158 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

indo-european migration 977

Science has done more for the development of Western civilization in one hundred
years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years. • Jeff Burroughs

Phrygian southern France, and the Uralic languages, which occupy
With the collapse of Hittite power (c. 1380 BCE), the a broad area of Europe’s northeastern forest zone.Among
Phrygians established themselves in central Anatolia, the more notable modern Uralic languages are Finnish,
and their language, attested almost entirely in inscrip- Saami (Lapp), Estonian, and Hungarian.
tions, survived into the first millennium CE.
The Proto-Indo-Europeans
Armenian Membership in a language family presupposes an ances-
The Armenian language emerged in eastern Anatolia tral language spoken somewhere at some time in the past
during the first millennium BCE after the collapse of ear- that expanded to such an extent that its speakers came to
lier non-Indo-European states such as those of the Hur- speak regional variants that grew increasingly different
rians and the related Urartians. Although much of its from one another, though those variants were still related.
vocabulary has been borrowed from its neighbors, The fragmentation of the late Latin of the Roman Empire
Armenian still has a core vocabulary inherited directly into a series of increasingly different Romance languages
from its Indo-European ancestors. is a familiar example of how one language diverges into
a number of different languages.A comparison of the gram-
Iranian mars and vocabularies of the various Indo-European
The Iranian languages formed a vast chain of speakers languages provides the evidence that they were once
from 700 BCE onwards that extended from the Scythians genetically related; that is, that they all derive from a
on the Black Sea to the Saka in western China. Most Cen- common source. For example, the words mother, father,
tral Asian languages (Bactrian, for example) are from the brother, and sister are rendered in Latin as m¯ater, pater,
Iranian language family.The most abundant evidence of fr¯ater, and soror; in Greek as mε ´tεr, patε ´r, phrε ´tεr, and
´
the presence of speakers of Iranian languages derives éor; and in Sanskrit as m¯atár, pitár, bhatar, and svásar.
¯
from ancient Persia (Persian), and Iranian languages pre- These correspondences reflect the fact that there was
dominate in modern Iran and Afghanistan. once a common language, which we term Proto-Indo-
European, from which all of the daughter languages are
Indo-Aryan derived. A comparison of the common vocabulary of the
Closely related to Iranian is Indo-Aryan, the vast language Indo-European languages permits linguists to recon-
group of the northern two-thirds of India from which struct something on the order of 1,200–1,800 items of
many of the modern Indic languages, such as Hindi, Urdu, Proto-Indo-European vocabulary. (There were obviously
and Gujarati, derive.This group is abundantly attested in many more words in the proto-language but we can only
Sanskrit literature, which emerges by at least the end of securely reconstruct a portion of these.)
the second millennium BCE. India also includes two non- The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European vocabulary
Indo-European language families, Dravidian and Munda. provides all the semantic classes of words that we would
find in any language, including parts of the body, verbal
Tocharian actions, pronouns, and numerals, for example. Of great-
Extreme outliers, the two Tocharian languages were spo- est cultural interest are those words pertaining to the nat-
ken in oasis towns along the Silk Road in present-day ural world and to the economy, material culture, kinship,
Xinjiang, the westernmost province of China. They be- social structure, and religious beliefs of the Proto-Indo-
came extinct by about 1000 CE. Europeans. We know that the speakers of Proto-Indo-
Europe also houses several non-Indo-European fami- European had domestic animals (linguists have recon-
lies.These include Basque, spoken in northern Spain and structed Proto-Indo-European words for cattle, sheep, goat,