indo-european-languages

"The classification "the Indo-European branch of humanity" could be defined either as the group of people who spoke some Indo-European language (Latin, Sanskrit, French, Swedish, Persian, and so forth) or as the group of Aryans, who were typically imagined as tall, blond, and blue-eyed specimens of homo sapiens."

"The vast interior of Eurasia is a linguistic spread zone—a genetic and typological bottleneck where many genetic lines go extinct, structural types tend to converge, a single language or language family spreads out over a broad territorial range, and one language family replaces another over a large range every few millennia. The linguistic geography of the central and western grasslands, from at least the Neolithic until early modern times, has consisted of an overall westward trajectory of language spreads... The central Eurasian spread zone... was part of a standing pattern whereby languages were drawn into the spread zone, spread westward, and were eventually succeeded by the next spreading family."

"The new theory of Language has unquestionably produced a new theory of Race . . . If you examine the bases proposed for common nationality before the new knowledge growing out of the study of Sanskrit had popularized in Europe, you will find them extremely unlike those which are now advocated and even passionately advocated in part of the Continent."

"They would not have it, they would not believe that there could be any community of origin between the people of Athens and Rome, and the so-called Niggers of India. The classical scholars scouted the idea, and I still remember the time, when I was a student at Leipzig and begun to study Sanskrit, with what contempt any remarks on Sanskrit or comparative grammar were treated by my teachers ... No one ever was for a time so completely laughed down as Professor Bopp, when he first published his Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin and Gothic. All hands were against him."

"The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family."

"As in its original language we see the roots and shoots of the languages of Greek and Latin, of Kelt, Teuton and Slavonian, so the deities, the myths, and the religious beliefs and practices of the Veda throw a flood of light upon the religions of all European countries before the introduction of Christianity."

"The question of identifying archaeological remains of Indo-European populations in Central Asia has been one of the main questions that has occupied a number of linguists and historians for many years [...] when written records are not available, a reconstructed time-space framework is generally used to substantiate the reconstruction with some relevant illustrative material. The linguistic attributes are mapped onto archaeological correlates: artifacts are selected, like the chariot, as well as ecofacts, like agriculture, or whole archaeological cultures (material assemblages). The archaeological correlates become some sort of labels or tags that one may employ in order to trace the supposed Indo-European populations. But, in fact, very little of the illustrative archaeological material actually exhibits specific Indo-European or Indo-Iranian traits; a question therefore arises: what is the relevance of archaeological material if any sort of assemblage present at the expected or supposed time/space spot can function as the tag of a linguistic group?"

"The biological situation among the speakers of modern Indo-European languages can only be explained through a transfer of languages like a baton, as it were, in a relay race, but not by several thousand miles’ migration of the tribes themselves."

"It is disappointing to have to say that at present there seems to be no hope of estimating objectively and with a useful degree of precision how long an originally homogeneous Indo-European language would have taken to develop into derivative groups or languages which diverged as much as Greek, Sanskrit and Hittite did when the earliest texts in them were composed. Some linguists seem to think that they can make intuitive judgements about the minimum time which a particular phonetic or other change in a language would have taken. But the results of intuition when applied to estimating the minimum time in which a group of cognate languages or dialects would have differentiated to an observed extent vary so much that no useful deductions can be made from them. . . . I sympathize with archaeologists and other prehistorians who are not primarily linguists over this. Linguists are unable to provide the information which would be most useful."

"The nucleus of the Macedonian vocabulary consists of words which have exact correspondence in Greek. The importance of these words and the archaic phonological character of Macedonian lead to the conclusion that these are not borrowings but inherited words: this fact is confirmed by the genetic unity of Macedonian and Greek. Moreover, the numerous lexical and phonological isoglosses in Macedonian and the different Greek dialects confirm the supposition of genetic unity."

"There were two parts of the Greek-speaking world at this time which did not suffer from revolution and did not seek to impose rule over the city states. In Epirus there were three clusters of tribal states, called Molossia, Thesprotia and Chaonia[...]the other part of the Greek-speaking world extended from Pelagonia in the north to Macedonia in the south. It was occupied by several tribal states, which were constantly at war against Illyrians, Paeonians and Thracians."

"Macedonians had their own language related to Greek, but the members that dominated Macedonian society routinely learned to speak Greek because they thought of themselves and indeed all Macedonians as Greek by blood."

"Certainly the Thracians and the Illyrians were non-Greek speakers, but in the northwest, the peoples of Molossis (Epirot province), Orestis and Lynkestis spoke West Greek. It is also accepted that the Macedonians spoke a dialect of Greek and although they absorbed other groups into their territory, they were essentially Greeks."

"...despite ancient and modern controversies it seems clear that the Macedonians as a whole were Greek-speakers. While the elite naturally communicated with other elites in standard, probably Attic, the ordinary Macedonians appear to have spoken a dialect of Greek, albeit with load-words from Illyrian and thracian which gave ammunition to their denigrators[...] if proof needed of the sophistication of Macedonia at this time, one may bring forward the fragments of the earliest surviving Greek literary papyrus, a carbonized book-roll found in a tomb-group of c. 340-320 at Derveni near Thessaloniki. It preserves parts of a philosophical text on Presocratic and Orphic cosmology composed around 400, and surely had a religious significance for the man in whose funeral pyre it was placed. The Derveni roll provides evidence for a high level of culture among the aristocracy."

"Before the times of the national unity installed by the Macedonians around the middle of the 4th century BC, Greece was composed of many regions or city states[...] That they [Dorians] were related to the North-West Dialects (of Phocis, Locris, Aetolia, Acarnania and Epirus) was not perceived clearly by the ancients."

"Whoever does not consider the Macedonians as Greeks must also conclude that by the 6th and 5th centuries BC the Macedonians had completely given up the original names of their nation - without any need to do so - and taken Greek names in order to demonstrate their admiration for Greek civilization. I think it not worth the trouble to demolish such a notion; for any hypothesis of historical linguists which is put forward without taking into account the actual life of a people, is condemned as it were out of its own mouth."

"And now after supervising the ancient Macedonian linguistic thesaurus we are posting the decisive question, if what is adding to the Macedonian language its character, are the hellenic or the barbarian elements of it, the response can not be of any doubts. From the 39 "languages" that according to Gustav Mayer their form was "completely alien" has been proven after this research of mine, that 10 of them are clearly Hellenic, with 4 more possibly dialectical forms of common hellenic words, so from the entire collection are remaining only 15 words appearing to be justifiable or at least suspected of anti-hellenic origins. Adding to those 15, few others which with regards their vocals could be hellenic, without till now being confirmed as such, then their number, in comparison to the number of pure hellenic ones in the Macedonian language, is so small that the general hellenic character of the Macedonian linguistic treasure can not be doubted."

"The names of the genuine Macedonians and those born of Macedonian parents, especially the names of the elit class and nobles, in their formation and phonology are purely Greek."

"For a long while Macedonian onomastics, which we know relatively well thanks to history, literary authors, and epigraphy, has played a considerable role in the discussion. In our view the Greek character of most names is obvious and it is difficult to think of a Hellenization due to wholesale borrowing. ‘Ptolemaios’ is attested as early as Homer, ‘Ale3avdros’ occurs next to Mycenaean feminine a-re-ka-sa-da-ra- ('Alexandra'), ‘Laagos’, then ‘Lagos’, matches the Cyprian 'Lawagos', etc. The small minority of names which do not look Greek, like ‘Arridaios’ or ‘Sabattaras’, may be due to a substratum or adstratum influences (as elsewhere in Greece). Macedonian may then be seen as a Greek dialect, characterized by its marginal position and by local pronunciations (like ‘Berenika’ for ‘Ferenika’, etc). Yet in contrast with earlier views which made of it an Aeolic dialect (O.Hoffmann compared Thessalian) we must by now think of a link with North-West Greek (Locrian, Aetolian, Phocidian, Epirote). This view is supported by the recent discovery at Pella of a curse tablet (4th cent. BC) which may well be the first 'Macedonian' text attested (provisional publication by E.Voutyras; cf. the Bulletin Epigraphique in Rev.Et.Grec.1994, no.413); the text includes an adverb ‘opoka’ which is not Thessalian. We must wait for new discoveries, but we may tentatively conclude that Macedonian is a dialect related to North-West Greek."

"The problem of the nationality of the Macedonians has been studied a great deal. Otto Hoffman with linguistics as his starting point solved it correctly and decisively when he accepted that the Macedonians were Greeks."

"The Ancient Macedonian language: The ancient language of the Macedonian kingdom in N. Greece and modern Macedonia during the later 1st millennium BC. Survived until the early 1st millennium AD. Not to be confused with the modern Macedonian language, which is a close relative of the Slavic Bulgarian."

"The evidence for the language of the Macedonians has been reviewed and discussed by Kalleris and Hammond, Griffith, and many others, all contending that it was a dialect of Greek. The increasing volume of surviving public and private inscriptions makes it quite clear that there was no written language but Greek. There may be room for argument over spoken forms, or at least over local survivals of earlier occupancy, but it is hard to imagine what kind of authority might sustain that. There is no evidence for a different "Macedonian" language that cannot be as easily explained in terms of dialect or accent."

"As a Macedonian [Philip] was looked down upon by the more refined Athenians, but they shared the same Hellenistic culture. How deep this went is evident in aesthetically the least spectacular, but politically the most explosive, of the finds in Vergina. In the Great Tumulus above Philip's tombs, which was raised by the invading Galatians in 274 BC, the archaeologists found fragments of no fewer than seventy-five funeral monuments, or “stelai”. The names on these were entirely Greek, save two, which appeared to be Hellenized versions of Thracian and Phoenician names. The implication is that Philip's Macedonia was thoroughly Hellenized, an outpost of classical Greek culture..."

"The first Greek-speaking people in the southern Balkan Peninsula arrived in Macedonia, Thessaly, and Epirus sometime after 2600 B.C. and developed, probably due to the extreme mountainous nature of the country, their several different dialects."

"Here we have seen that their early history is still largely an open question. They may have had Greek origins: Whatever process produced the Greek-speakers (of that is how one defines "Greek") who lived south of Olympus may have also produced the Makedones who wandered out of the western mountains to establish a home and a kingdom in Pieria."

"The Macedonian people and their kings were of Greek stock, as their traditions and the scanty remains of their language combine to testify."

"That the Macedonians and their kings did in fact speak a dialect of Greek and bore Greek names may be regarded nowadays as certain."

"He was still in a world of Greek gods and sacrifices, of Greek plays and Greek language, though the natives might speak Greek with a northern accent which hardened 'ch' into 'g','th' into 'd' and pronounced King Philip as Bilip."

"Cleopatra VII would have described herself as a Greek. Whatever the racial ingredients of her Macedonian ancestors, her language, like theirs (though they had spoken a dialect), was Greek and so was her whole education and culture."

"That the Macedonians were of Greek stock seems certain. The claim made by the Argead dynasty to be of Argive descent may be no more than a generally accepted myth, but Macedonian proper names, such as Ptolemaios or Philippos, are good Greek names, and the names of the Macedonian months, although differed from those of Athens or Sparta, were also Greek. The language spoken by the Macedonians, which Greeks of the classical period found unintelligible, appears to have been a primitive northwest Greek dialect, much influenced by the languages of the neighboring barbarians."

"The toponyms of the Macedonian homeland are the most significant. Nearly all of them are Greek."

"Hesiod first mentioned 'Makedon', the eponym of the people and the country, as a son of Zeus, a grandson of Deukalion, and so a first cousin of Aeolus, Dorus, and Xuthus; in other words he considered the 'Makedones' to be an outlying branch of the Greek-speaking tribes, with a distinctive dialect of their own, "Macedonian"."

"All in all, the language of the Macedones was a distinct and particular form of Greek, resistant to outside influences and conservative in pronunciation. It remained so until the fourth century when it was almost totally submerged by the flood tide of standardized Greek."

"And indeed, Latin, although conventionally classified as a dead language, is present in every aspect of everyday life. It is part of Catholic rituals, Roman law maxims and procedures, and medieval philosophical traditions. Natural history has borrowed the scientific nomenclature of animals and plants from Latin, just as heraldry uses it for uniforms and mottos. The Bible and the classics provide a constant source of quotations, even for those who are neither priests nor schoolteachers: not only are literary works full of them, but they are also widely used in oratory, both sacred and forensic, as well as civil, whether parliamentary, academic or of other kinds."

"To preserve Latin literature inevitably meant preserving classical mythology."

"A university teaches. What does it teach? It must obviously teach all the languages in which the great literatures which have been preserved were written — Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Scandinavian, and English."

"Latin is a dead language, As dead as it can be; It killed the ancient Romans, And now is killing me."

"Often, what is not collected becomes lost or at least unappreciated. This principle holds true to an extent for the neglect that all of Medieval Latin literature has suffered in publishing over the past century. Classical Latin literature has been gathered into series, which, although not always as inexpensive as potential users might wish, are nonetheless affordable. Consider the rows of blue-backed Oxford Classical Texts or the serried red ranks of the Latin volumes in the Loeb Classical Library."

"The official language used across the Roman Empire was Latin. This did not mean that every person from Antioch to St. Albans spoke to one another in the epigrams of Martial: the classical Latin of the great Roman poets, philosophers and historians was of no more use to ordinary day-to-day speakers than the syntax and vocabulary of Shakespeare’s sonnets would have been to an innkeeper or goatherd in Elizabethan England. In the east of the empire, Latin competed with Greek for the position of the most prevalent, admirable and useful language, particularly after the empire was formally partitioned in the early fourth century. In the west, Latin was adopted, adapted, and interbred with local tongues across the empire – a process that produced what would eventually become the great Romance languages of the second millennium AD. But if it was not exactly a universal tongue, Latin certainly was the first language of imperial business, which allowed educated Romans everywhere to communicate with one another and to advertise their status as sophisticated beings. Learning Latin – and the skills of grammar and rhetoric – formed an elemental part of elite education. It was not possible to contemplate a political or bureaucratic career without a working knowledge of the language. And to the priests, abbots, chancellors, scholars, lawyers, sheriffs, schoolteachers, nobles and kings of the Middle Ages, Latin would also become an indispensable tool."

"The Greeks Had a Word for It"

"Cassius: Did Cicero say anything? Casca: Ay, he spoke Greek. Cassius: To what effect? Casca: Nay, and I tell you that, I’ll ne’er look you i’ the face again. But those that understood him smil’d at one another and shook their heads; but for mine own part, it was ."

"Small Latin and less Greek."

"He was still in a world of Greek gods and sacrifices, of Greek plays and Greek language, though the natives might speak Greek with a northern accent which hardened 'ch' into 'g','th' into 'd' and pronounced King Philip as Bilip."

"A university teaches. What does it teach? It must obviously teach all the languages in which the great literatures which have been preserved were written — Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Scandinavian, and English."

"She knew the Latin—that is, ‘the ,’ And Greek—the alphabet—I’m nearly sure."

"To speakers of modern Greek the Homeric poems of the 7th century BC are not written in a foreign language. The Greek language has enjoyed a continuous tradition from earliest times until now. [...] The only other language which enjoys comparable continuity of tradition is Chinese."