![]() The Nazis assumed a similar stance and thus concluded that the Aryans must be the original Proto-Indo-Europeans. The modern word Iranian is cognate with Aryan and thus most likely developed from the term.īecause the Vedas are some of our earliest texts in any Indo-European language, Sanskrit, the language they were written in, was often thought to be Proto-Indo-European and the myths and rituals described within the texts were believed to be Proto-Indo-European myths and rituals. The author(s) speak of themselves as Aryans, as opposed to other ethnic or cultural groups. The word Aryan is first attested in the Vedas, ancient Hindu religious texts, written in Sanskrit, an early ancestor of many of the modern Indian languages, traditionally spoken in the northern half of the country, such as Hindi and Urdu. The second part, however, has been heavily politicised by nationalists and romanticists in the 19th and 20th centuries, most noteworthy among them the National-Socialists of Nazi Germany, which made them an integral part of their racial ideology. The first part of the term Indo-Aryan is self-explanatory, referring to the Indian language. Ironically, the oldest texts in which Indo-Aryan words are found don’t come from India itself, but rather from the Middle East, where some Indo-Aryans had risen through the social hierarchy to become leaders of local groups. The Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family is the second oldest, going by attestation. Eventually, the Empire was one of the many victims of the mysterious Bronze Age Collapse and with it, the Anatolian languages vanished into history. Some may have heard of the Hittite Empire, which competed for supremacy of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East with such ancient powers as Egypt or Assyria. Whichever theory holds true, the most important among the Anatolian languages was, without a doubt, Hittite. In this scenario, both languages would be descendant of an even older, Proto-Indo-Anatolian language. But because some features, such as the vocabulary for parts of wagons, are not found in Anatolian, some researches proposed that Anatolian is not a descendant of Proto-Indo-European in the first place, but rather a sister language to it. This, and the fact that Anatolian shows some extremely archaic features, has led scholars to believe that these languages were the first to separate from Proto-Indo-European. This branch was, as the name suggests, native to Anatolia, just on the opposite side of the proposed Indo-European Homeland, south of the Black Sea. ![]() At the same time, they are invaluable for the reconstruction of the language ancestral to all Indo-European languages, Proto-Indo-European, because they are the first attested language in the entire family, with the oldest inscriptions dating back to about 2000 BC. By nerdy.maps – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, The Anatolian LanguagesĪs mentioned previously, the Anatolian languages are a branch of Indo-European which is no longer spoken today. ![]() In the following we will take a closer look at the individual branches, focusing on its history and distribution. For example, Germanic can be divided further into North-, West- and East-Germanic whilst Hellenic consists of a singular language: Greek. All of these branches of the Indo-European Family tree can be divided further into either more ‘sub’-branches or individual languages. Among the dead branches of the family the Anatolian languages, formerly spoken in what is now Turkey, and Tocharian, formerly spoken in China, are probably the most noteworthy. The subgroups are: Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Celtic, Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Albanian, Armenian and Greek. These 445 languages form subgroups, whose names may sound familiar to some. ![]() The Indo-European language family consists of about 445 (source: Wikipedia) living languages and a substantial amount of dead ones, which are no longer spoken today. I, page: 22, CC BY-SA 3.0, The Indo-European Family Tree By original: Industrius, deriv: Radosław Botev – own work based on Mapa Lenguas del Mundo.png, originally uploaded on Polish Wikipedia.Source of linguistic data: Geograficzny atlas świata, Państwowe Przedsiębiorstwo Wydawnictw Kartograficznych, Warszawa-Wrocław 1987, t. Distribution of Indo-European languages today. ![]()
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