Language change
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Language change
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral
language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related.According to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families.[2][3] A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one person. The language families with the most speakers are: the Indo-European family, with many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi, Urdu and Bengali); and the Sino-Tibetan family, mainly due to the many speakers of Mandarin Chinese in China. Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family.[1] Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo- European exists. Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto- language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result.PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC[3] during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of eastern Europe. The linguistic reconstruction of PIE has provided insight into the pastoral culture and patriarchal religion of its speakers. Proto-Indo-European phonology has been reconstructed in some detail. Notable features of the most widely accepted (but not uncontroversial) reconstruction include: three series of stop consonants reconstructed as voiceless, voiced, and breathy voiced;. sonorant consonants that could be used syllabically; three so-called laryngeal consonants, whose exact pronunciation is not well-established but which are believed to have existed in part based on their detectable effects on adjacent sounds; the fricative /s/ a vowel system in which /e/ and /o/ were the most frequently occurring vowels. The Proto-Indo-European accent is reconstructed today as having had variable lexical stress, which could appear on any syllable and whose position often varied among different members of a paradigm (e.g. between singular and plural of a verbal paradigm). Stressed syllables received a higher pitch; therefore it is often said that PIE had a pitch accent. The location of the stress is associated with ablaut variations, especially between normal-grade vowels (/e/ and /o/) and zero-grade (i.e. lack of a vowel), but not entirely predictable from it. Morphology. Proto-Indo-European roots were affix-lacking morphemes that carried the core lexical meaning of a word and were used to derive related words (cf. the English root "- friend-", from which are derived related words such as friendship, friendly, befriend, and newly coined words such as unfriend). Proto-Indo-European was probably a fusional language, in which inflectional morphemes signaled the grammatical relationships between words. This dependence on inflectional morphemes means that roots in PIE, unlike those in English, were rarely used without affixes. A root plus a suffix formed a word stem, and a word stem plus a desinence (usually an ending) formed a word. Late Proto-Indo-European had three grammatical genders: masculine feminine neuter All nominals distinguished three numbers: singular dual plural These numerals were also distinguished in verbs (see below), requiring agreement with their subject nominal. Download 441.66 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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