Introduction to Language Families

Kamo araz ahmad Lebenese french university

What Is a Language Family?• A language family is a group of languages related through

descent from a common ancestor, 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 language.

• Estimates of the number of living languages vary from 5,000 to 8,000, living human languages. A "living language" is simply one that is used as the primary form of communication of a group of people. There are also many dead and extinct languages, as well as some that are still insufficienty studied to be classified .

History:• Filippo Sassetti: (1540–1588) was

a traveller and merchant from a long-established Florentine mercantile family, who was born in Florence in 1540.

• he travelled to the Indian subcontinent, reaching Cochin in November 1583, and remained in Cochin and Goa and the Malabar coast that joins the two, until his death.

• In India he noted that a number of words in sanskrit seemd related to italian words.

History:• Joseph Justus Scaliger: (August 1540 –

21 January 1609) was a French religious leader and scholar.

• He devided languages of Europe into 4 types, named after their words for ‘’God’’:

• 1. Deus (i.e Romance Languages)• 2. Gott (i.e Germanic Languages)• 3 Theos (i.e Greek)• 4 Bog (i.e Slavic languages)

History:• Sir William Jones: he is

generally regarded as father of Historical Linguistics , he spoke 13 languages fluetly plus he knew 28 others well so he was Hyperpolyglot , he is founder of Asiatic society in calcutta .

• And in 1786 he gave a talk to a small group about sanskrit and some european languages that later became an important work in linguistics

History:• Rasmus Rask: (22 November 1787 – 14 November 1832) was

a Danish linguist and philologist. He wrote several grammars and worked on comparative phonology and morphology.

Structure of a family• Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic

units, which referred to as branches of the family because the history of a language family is often represented as a tree diagram.

‘’For example, the Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Romance, and Indo-Iranian language families are branches of a larger Indo-European language family’’

Dialect Continuum • dialect continuum or dialect area was defined by Leonard Bloomfield as a

range of dialects spoken across some geographical area that differ only slightly between neighboring areas, but as one travels in any direction, the differences accumulate in such a way that dialects from opposite ends of the continuum are no longer mutually intelligible. For example chinese,arabic..etc langauges.

• The varieties of Chinese are highly divergent, and are comparable to a language family like that of the Romance languages. However, all the variants more or less share a common written language, though there are vernacular variations in vocabulary, grammar, and orthography.

Isolates• language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no

demonstrable genealogical (or "genetic") relationship with other languages, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. For example korean,sumerian..etc.

Proto-languages

• The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method, a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher.

August Schleicher • August Schleicher (19 February 1821 – 6 December 1868) was a German linguist.

His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language. To show how Indo-European might have looked, he created a short tale, Schleicher's fable, to exemplify the reconstructed vocabulary and aspects of Indo-European society inferred from it.

Proto-Indo-European language

Proto-Indo-European language• Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the linguistic reconstruction of the common

ancestor of the Indo-European languages. There are about 445 living Indo-European (IE) languages, with Spanish, English, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, Punjabi, German, French and Marathi being the ten Indo-European languages with the most native speakers in descending order.

How Many Language Families Are There?!

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