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Iranian languages:

Their origins and historical development.

The Iranian languages are an important group originating from the great plateau of Iran, with a population that settled in the region and that probably migrated with the Indian branch of Indo-European languages. This shared history explains common linguistic features.

They are spread to territories like southern Russia and central China. Early texts were written in Semitic scripts, making interpretation difficult. Recent discoveries of documents have helped in understanding this language group.

The Iranian branch is divided into: Eastern and Western groups, represented by Avestan and Old Persian.

• Avestan: is the language of the Avesta, the sacred book of Zoroastrians, sometimes inaccurately called Zend. Zend refers to commentaries on the sacred text. The Avesta has two parts: the Gathas (hymns and sermons by Zoroaster, possibly dating back to 1000 B.C.) and the Avesta proper (hymns, legends, prayers, and legal prescriptions from a later period).

• Old Persian is known from cuneiform inscriptions, primarily detailing the conquests of Darius (522-486 B.C.) and Xerxes (486-466 B.C.). A notable example is a trilingual inscription at Behistan in Media.

• A later form of Old Persian, known as Middle Iranian or Pahlavi, emerged in the early centuries A.D. It was the official language during the Sassanid dynasty (226-652 A.D.) and is the ancestor of modern Persian.

• Modern Persian, also called Farsi, has a rich culture and literature dating back to the ninth century, with the Shahnamah being a prominent epic. Persian vocabulary has a significant Arabic influence.

Other Iranian languages spoken today include Pashto and Baluchi in eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Kurdish in western Kurdistan. Additionally, numerous languages and dialects are found in the Pamir highlands, along the Caspian Sea, and in the valleys of the Caucasus.

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Germanic branch of languages - Arellano Paula

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The Germanic branch of languages originates from a shared language called Germanic or Proto-Germanic. This language existed before any written records of the family and has been reconstructed by language experts. The languages that developed from Proto-Germanic are divided into three groups: East Germanic, North Germanic, and West Germanic.

East Germanic: The primary language is Gothic. Our knowledge of Gothic comes mostly from a translation of the New Testament by a missionary named Ulfilas, which is the earliest record of a Germanic language we have, apart from some runic inscriptions.

North Germanic: This group includes the languages of Scandinavia, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands. The earlier form of the common Scandinavian language is called Old Norse. Modern languages in this group are split into an eastern group (Swedish and Danish) and a western group (Norwegian and Icelandic).

West Germanic: This is the group to which English belongs. It is divided into High and Low German by a sound-shift that occurred around A.D. 600. Low German tongues include Old English, Old Frisian, Old Saxon, and Old Low Franconian. High German, which comprises many dialects, was popularized as a literary language by Martin Luther's translation of the Bible.

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The oldest Indo-European literary texts are the Vedas, sacred books of India dating back to nearly 1500 B.C. Written in Vedic Sanskrit, these texts, including the Rig-veda (hymns) and Atharva-veda (incantations), formed the foundation of Brahman philosophy and were initially preserved orally.

Sanskrit later developed into Classical Sanskrit, a standardized literary form influenced by grammarians like Panini in the fourth century B.C. This form became the language for extensive Indian literature, including epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, drama, poetry, and scientific works. Classical Sanskrit was a learned language in India, much like Latin in medieval Europe, but it eventually ceased to be spoken.

Alongside Sanskrit, numerous local colloquial dialects called Prakrits existed. Some Prakrits, like Pāli (the language of Buddhism), developed literary forms. From these colloquial dialects emerged the modern languages of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, spoken by about 600 million people. Key modern languages include Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, and Marathi. Urdu and Hindi are closely related, both derived from Hindustani, but Urdu incorporates more Persian and Arabic vocabulary and uses the Perso-Arabic script. Finally, Romany, the language of the Gypsies, originated from a northwestern Indian dialect and spread globally from around the fifth century A.D.

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Machuca Gianella - Italic languages

The Italic branch has its center in Italy, and to most people Italy in ancient times suggests Rome and the language of Rome, Latin. But the predominant position occupied by Latin in the historical period should not make us forget that Latin was only one of a number of languages once found in this area by the sixth century before our era. In the west, especially from the Tiber north, a powerful and aggressive people spoke Etruscan, a non-Indo-European language. In northwestern Italy was situated the little known Ligurian. Venetic in the northeast and Messapian in the extreme southeast were apparently offshoots of Illyrian. And in southern Italy and Sicily, Greek was the language of numerous Greek colonies. All these languages except Etruscan were apparently Indo-European.

As Roman power expanded, Latin replaced these languages across Italy and spread throughout the Roman Empire, reaching regions like Spain, Gaul, North Africa, and Britain.

The modern languages that evolved from Latin are called Romance languages. The most widespread are French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian. French developed from the dialect of Paris, while Provençal, once a vibrant literary language in southern France, declined. Spanish and Portuguese remained similar due to shared history and proximity, and spread widely in the Americas. Italian has the longest continuous history in its original region and played a key role in Renaissance culture. Romanian reflects the Latin legacy in Eastern Europe.

These languages come not from Classical Latin but from Vulgar Latin, the spoken language of the common people, which had simpler grammar and different vocabulary. As Latin spread, it evolved differently in each region due to time of colonization and influence from local languages. This led to the development of distinct Romance languages, providing a clear historical example of language diversification from a common source.

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The Hellenic language, commonly known as Greek, is not merely an ancient tongue; it is the cradle of Western civilization, the vehicle for some of the most profound ideas in philosophy, democracy, science, and art. Its evolution and spread are a testament to the vibrant history of the peoples who spoke it and carried it across continents and millennia.
Origins and First Steps

Arrival in the Aegean: Greeks (Hellenes) began to penetrate the Aegean region from the north around 2000 BC, bringing with them various forms of a common language.

Pre-Greek Influences: Before their arrival, the region was inhabited by populations with diverse languages. The Phoenicians, a Semitic people, also exerted a notable commercial influence on the Hellenic world.

Development and Dialectal Diversity

Earliest Literary Works: The oldest and most fundamental literary monuments of Greek are the Homeric poems (the Iliad and the Odyssey), dating approximately to the 8th century BC.

Principal Dialects: Early Greek was characterized by five main dialectal groups:

- Ionic (including Attic)

- Aeolic

- Arcadian-Cyprian

- Doric

- Northwest Greek

The Rise of Attic and the Koine

Attic's Supremacy: The Attic dialect (of Athens) achieved a dominant position due to Athens' political, commercial, and cultural preeminence in the 5th century BC.

The Age of Pericles: This period witnessed extraordinary achievements in architecture, sculpture, science, philosophy, and literature, with figures such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle.

Birth of the Koine: Thanks to Athens' prestige, the Attic dialect became the basis of the koiné (Common Greek) from the 4th century BC onwards, gradually replacing other dialects.

Alexandrian Expansion: The conquests of Alexander the Great (336-323 BC) consolidated the koiné as the lingua franca for international communication throughout the eastern Mediterranean (Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt).

Legacy and Modern Forms

Historical Importance: The koiné is notably the language of the New Testament and served as the medium for extensive Byzantine literature in the Eastern Roman Empire.

Modern Greek: The dialects of modern Greek evolved from the koiné. Currently, there are two main varieties:

- Demotic: The natural, popular spoken language.

- "Pure": A more conservative form, a conscious effort to restore elements of ancient Greek.

- Although both forms coexist in education, the official position generally favors the demotic variety.

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Tocharian is the name given to a language in which fragmentary texts were discovered in the early part of the 20th century. These texts were found in western China, specifically in the region of Xinjiang Uygur. The documents included references to a king who, according to Chinese historical evidence, ruled during the early seventh century of our era.

From a philological perspective, the discovery of Tocharian is important because of its unexpected linguistic classification. Despite its geohgraphical location in the East, the Tocharian language belongs to the "centum" group of the Indo-European family. This links it more to the Hellenic, Italic, Germanic, and Celtic groups, rather than to the "statem" languages of the eastern Indo-European branches, with which one might expect it to be more closely related.

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CELTIC

The Celtic languages, once a vast and dominant branch of the Indo-European family, had spread across much of Western Europe by the beginning of the Christian era, reaching as far as Greece and Asia Minor in earlier centuries. However, their historical trajectory has been one of surprising retreat, steadily giving way to the expansion of Italic and Germanic tongues. Today, their presence is confined to isolated pockets in France and the British Isles, leaving minimal traces in areas where they once flourished. The ancient Gallic language, spoken by Celts conquered by Caesar, largely vanished, surviving only in scant inscriptions and a few French words. In Britain, Celtic languages branched into Gaelic, which includes modern Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, and Brythonic, comprising Cornish and Welsh. Sadly, Cornish became extinct in the 18th century, and Manx followed after World War II. Scottish Gaelic endures among a minority, predominantly bilingual speakers. Similarly, Irish is spoken by approximately 500,000 individuals, most of whom are also bilingual. Welsh, while still spoken by a quarter of the Welsh population, is experiencing a gradual decrease in its monolingual speakers.

The future of these languages remains uncertain, as they struggle against the pervasive influence of more widely communicated languages, raising concerns that another branch of the Indo-European family may eventually disappear.

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Albanian - Cardozo, Paula.

Albanian is a small but independent branch of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken on the eastern coast of the Adriatic Sea, northwest of Greece, and is possibly a modern remnant of Illyrian, an ancient language once spoken in the Balkans. However, there is limited information about its early history.

Reliable knowledge of Albanian begins only in the 15th century CE. By that time, its vocabulary was already heavily influenced by Latin, Greek, Turkish, and Slavic languages due to various conquests and cultural interactions. This blending has made it difficult to identify the original form of the language.

Albanian was once mistakenly classified within the Hellenic group (alongside Greek), but since the early 20th century, it has been officially recognized as an independent and distinct member of the Indo-European language family.

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HITTITE

Hittite was one of the two new Indo-European languages discovered in the 20th century. Previously, the Hittites were known mainly from references in the Old Testament. Their language was preserved only in a few uninterpreted documents. In 1907, an archaeological expedition uncovered the Hittite capital in Asia Minor, at Boghazköi, about 90 miles east of Ankara. The site contained royal archives with nearly 10,000 clay tablets.

The tablets were written in Babylonian cuneiform characters. Some were in the Babylonian language (Akkadian), which was the diplomatic language of the time, but most were in an unknown language: Hittite. Although a number of different languages seem to have been spoken in the Hittite area, nine-tenths of the tablets are in the principal language of the kingdom.The discovery of these tablets enabled major progress in studying the Hittite language. The most remarkable effect upon Indo-European studies has been the confirmation of a hypothesis made by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879. Twenty years after the discovery of the Hittite tablets it could be demonstrated that Saussure’s phonological units, which had become known as “laryngeals,” occurred in Hittite much as he had proposed for Indo-European. In terms of syntax, Hittite offers valuable evidence, supporting the idea that Indo-European used an Object-Verb (OV) word order, while languages like Classical Greek and Latin later shifted to a Verb-Object (VO) pattern.
A significant part of Hittite vocabulary comes from non-Indo-European sources, reflecting a strong linguistic blend, much like in Albanian. By some scholars Hittite is treated as a coordinate with Indo-European, and the period of joint existence is designated as Indo-Hittite. However, it’s sufficient to think of Hittite as having split off from the Indo-European community several centuries (perhaps 500 years or more) before other groups began separating.

Fantino, Antonella Milagros

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Balto-Slavic Languages

The Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family covers much of Eastern Europe and is divided into two groups: Baltic and Slavic. Despite their differences, both groups share enough features to be considered closely related.

●Baltic Languages:

Include *Prussian** (now extinct), Latvian, and Lithuanian.

* Lithuanian is especially notable for preserving many ancient features of Indo-European, sometimes compared to Sanskrit for its archaism.

* Latvian is spoken by about 2 million people.

● Slavic Languages:

Originally very similar up to the 7th or 8th century, the Slavic languages later developed into three main branches:

1. East Slavic:

* Russian (175 million speakers), Ukrainian (50 million), and Belorussian (9 million).

* Russian is the official and literary language of Russia.

* Ukrainian and Belorussian have strong national identities, especially in contrast to Russian.

2. West Slavic:

* Polish (36 million in Poland, 5 million abroad), Czech (10 million), Slovak (5 million), and Sorbian (100,000 in Germany).

* Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible.

3. South Slavic:

* Bulgarian, Macedonian, Slovene, and Serbo-Croatian (now often separated into Serbian and Croatian).

* Bulgarian has Turkish influences in everyday speech but is closer to Russian in literary form.

* Serbo-Croatian shows how political changes can divide one language into several national ones.

🕮 Old Church Slavonic:

* The oldest Slavic written language, developed by missionaries Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century.

* Used for religious texts and remained the liturgical language of the Orthodox Church for centuries.

Overall, Slavic languages have preserved many archaic features and remain more uniform compared to other Indo-European branches. Baltic and Slavic peoples likely lived in close contact after their initial separation from the common Indo-European ancestor.

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Map of the present day distribution of the Armenian language in the Caucasus.

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Vigner, Leyhen. Armenian Language. Armenian is found south of the Caucasus Mountains and the eastern end of the Black Sea. Armenians arrived between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C., likely via the Balkans and the Hellespont. Their language shows consonant shifts like Germanic and lacks gender, resembling Caucasus languages. It is isolated in the Indo-European family group but has certain affinities with Phrygians. Armenian is known to us from the fifth century A.D. through Bible translations.

The Armenians for several centuries were under Persian domination, and the vocabulary shows such strong Iranian influence that Armenian was at one time classed as an Iranian language. Numerous contacts with Semitic languages, with Greek, and with Turkish have contributed further to give the vocabulary a rich character.