To: ClearCase_guy
I'm not sure the journalist said "English is one of four early offshoots"; what he said was that "the ancestral Indo-European language... split into different branches leading to Celtic, Latin, Greek, and English," and presumably to German, Flemish, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, etc. etc.
There is a difference.
29 posted on
07/01/2003 6:40:08 AM PDT by
Redbob
To: Redbob
Yes, but for someone not familiar with some of the basics associated with the origins of the major world languages (not us, but others, of course), the sentence was dreadfully constructed, ambiguous and misleading.
33 posted on
07/01/2003 6:52:36 AM PDT by
Pharmboy
(Dems lie 'cause they have to...)
To: Redbob
What actually happened is that Indo-European split into a number of subbranches. One of these gave rise to the Italic Languages, another to the Celtic, another to the Germanic, another to ancient Greek and another to Tocharian.
The Italic Languages consisted of languages like Osco-Umbrian, Sicanian, etc. and were eventually entirely replace by Latin. Latin then evolved into the modern Romance Languages. Early Germanic split into Old Norse or North Germanic which became Icelandic, Norweigan, Swedish, Faroese, and Danish, East Germanic or Gothic (extinct) and West Germaic which comprised Frisian, Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Franconian, and Old High German among many others).
Celtic gave rise to the various languages mentioned above.
Somehow a subgroup called Tocharian spread into Central Asia and evolved into two separate languages, Tocharian A and Tocharian B and died out by the end of the first millenium as a spoken language.
62 posted on
07/01/2003 8:27:39 AM PDT by
ZULU
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