Posted on 10/04/2010 7:10:56 PM PDT by James C. Bennett
ping
New article ping.
This makes a lot of sense to connect to the Indo-Europeans, then. I have heard it is theorized the reason the Indo-Europeans were able to spread their language around was because they were the first to domesticate the horse.
Humans were unable to penetrate and survive in the deep steppes until the horse was domesticated...everything changed with horses and wagons.
Yo. Black Athena. Shove over!
Can you tell me where Hungarian fits into this tree?
Hmmm...the land of Nod, perhaps (re. Cain)?
Hungarian (Magyar) is a member of the Ugric family--the other languages in the group are spoken by small numbers of people in western Siberia. The Ugric languages are related to the Finnic languages (Finnish, Estonian, and a few others) in the "Finno-Ugric" group. The Finno-Ugric languages are grouped with the Samoyed languages to form the Uralic language family (the 4 Samoyed languages combined are said to have only 30,000 speakers).
I think 1500-2000 BC is too recent for the ancestral language from which all the Indo-European languages spring. The Anatolian languages like Hittite were probably in Asia Minor already by around 2000 and proto-Greek may have entered Greece somewhere about 2000. But if they mean Aryan in the narrower sense as the ancestor of the Indo-Iranian languages, then the 2000-1500 BC time frame may be about right.
One point of contact is the word for 100--sata in Finnish, sada in Estonian, and szaz (pronounced "sahz") in Hungarian...all derived from a form similar to the Avestan (Old Persian) word satem meaning "one hundred." Maybe that means the Proto-Finno-Ugric speakers didn't have a word for 100 until they came into contact with the Proto-Indo-European speakers. Or maybe they just thought the PIE word was cooler.
The family tree is fantastic.
O.K. Thanks for the info.
Thanks, Cronos!
Interesting chart but it’s possible to quibble about some of the details. I don’t know why they have Flemish as a separate language from Dutch when they don’t have Walloon as a separate language from French. They omit Sardinian, Galician, and Vlach among the Romance languages (I think Galician is almost identical to Portuguese but it’s treated as a separate language). Tzakonian is a Greek dialect that is very different from standard Modern Greek so it could arguably be treated as a separate descendant of ancient Greek. If Afrikaans is regarded as separate from Dutch, as it should be, why not treat Haitian Creole as a separate language from French?
Very interesting. Thanks for the ping.
Hey, thanks.
No worries —
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