Gramatyka historyczna 23.11.2012
Language families
Turkish, Mongolian, Altaic languages – in Asia, also Yakutan language. They have structural similarity with Uralic languages, so we sometimes talk Uroaltaic languages, and sometimes treat them only as Altaic languages.
Caucasian languages (about 40 of them, they are very consonantal languagaes, there are relatively few vowels in them. We can find words where there are even 7 consonants ! – to compare in Polish we have even 4, like pstryk, wstrętny – there are about 30 consonants in Polish)
Most important is Georgian
Austro-Asiatic languages : Most important is Cambodian and Vietnamese(completely different from Korean and Chinese, it is even a different family, it is also very vocalic)
Austronesian and Indo-Pacific languages : spoken from the Madagascar and end up with Easter Island, so quite a large area. It is the language family with largest number of languages (As there are about 6000 languages, so 1/5 belongs to them, like 1200 languages. Around Papua New Guinea there are around 500 languages, these are mountain regions and many ‘tribes’ or groups live there, and they developed such languages.)
India – not only Hindi, but the Dravidian family is also very important because they have many speakers.
Sino-Tibetan languages – division into Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman languages (Chinese definitely). Taking look into Chinese – when we say Chinese we normally mean Mandarin dialect – as it is the most important one. But there are much more dialects there, and they are completely different (linguists compare it to the daughters of Latin language, like Italian and French, so speakers cannot communicate !!) They are spoken in one country so it keeps them together ( some political reason), but also the common alphabet (Chinese has the longest continuous written history). Mandarin is also important as this is rthe language of the biggest number of native speakers (like 750 mln speakers of this dialect). The sheer number of tones (either high, low, rising, lowering, etc.) is the main difference between Mandarin and other dialects. Generally if a language doesn’t have inflections, it’ll have tones, so that is the reason why they are so important. There are 4 tones in Mandarin, and 7 in Cantonese
Tai languages – Thai is the most important (mind the spelling !!!).
North American and Meso American Indian languages – North America – Eskimo-aleut languages are spoken in Canada
South American Indian Languages – South America of course
Africa - 4 main failies of languages spoken there: Afro-asiatic ( also known as hemitosemitic languages,), but the most important here is Arabic, but what we mean by Arabic is sth rather abstract, because Arabic has very many different dialects, spoken from Maroco to Iraq. Classical Arabic is like Latin, so Koran was written in classical Arabic, and newspapers are in Arabic. Hebrew – is important because:
The only language which was dead and now has been revealed – spoken about 2000 years ago, and revealed after establishment of the Republic of Israel – it was used by only for religious purposes. Originally religious books like Bible was written in Hebrew. (Jesus used Aramaic) .
Nilo Saharan and Niger Congo – Swahili is kind of lingua franca spoken by many tribes in this region.
Khoisan languages use clicks –and it spread to lang. such as Zulu. (there are also few languages in Australian, that use clicks, but they are very rarely met.)
Uralic languages - (with Altaic put together as Uralic languages). It consists of: Finnic, Ugric, Samoyedic
One type of language, language isolates – term referring to languages with no known languages relatives. One of such is spoken in Europe and it’s called Basque – spoken more in Spain but also in France ( as it is on the border). It must have been spoken in Europe before Indo-European invasion. The same with Etruscan. There are about 20 such. The oldest written language (about 4000 B.C.) Samarian (spoken in present day Iraq).
INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
Has been best described.
General facts:
Spoken by about half of the population of the world (number of this languages is fewer than 3%). So one language is spoken by a large number of speakers.
The only language family that increases its number of speakers.
Southern steps of Russia was the home for them. We know it by comparing the vocabulary of different Indo-European languages. Some words tell us about geographical origin of it. (like no common word for the sea signals that they did not have access to it.)
Indo-European could count to 100 – because the common word for this number has been reconstructed
Decimal system of counting (dziesiątkowy) - and the second was the one involving dozens - dual-decimal system (dwunastkowy).
INDO EUROPEAN LANGUAGES (rysunek)
SATEM and CENTUM – are two groups – all the languages classifies as INDO-EUROPEAN belong to them. This division must have taken place before invasion etc. The change contains of the change of K sound – palatal and velar k . (in ProtoIndoEuropean). In SATEM the palatal K became s – so all the palatal k’s became s, and velar K stayed k.
Protoindoeuropean 100 is PIE*k’ (palatal k)
Avestan – satem (100) – in all sister languages it is the same, because the change happened earlier.
Sanskrit – śatam
Lithuanian – šimtas
Polish – sto
Russian – cto
In CENTUM family it starts with K – like CENTUM in Latin – so its daughter won’t have K – because it changed earlier
Latin – centum
French – cent
Italian – cento
Greek – (he)katon
Irish - cēad (pronounced with K – so all the Celtic languages has the same, like Gaelic, Welsh, Irish).
In old English 100 was hund in germanic family K sound became H (but later).
Protoindoeuropean – k’V(vowel)N(nasal)tVN *kmtóm