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No, it is not.
First and foremost, there are many languages recorded long before the advent of Sanskrit, and many religions recorded long before the advent of Hinduism. The oldest surviving texts in Ancient Egyptian are from c. 3000 BCE, while the majority of the Rigveda (the oldest known Sanskrit text) was probably composed between 1500 and 1200 BCE. So ...
40
The claim cited in the quote is definitely wrong. The existence of language families is inferred from the data on extant and ancient languages, and there is a rigorous methodology used in this inferential process. So, it does not matter who looks at the data, experts from all over the world should come to an agreement on the existence and membership of a ...
answered May 23 '19 at 15:45
jk - Reinstate Monica
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40
Short answer: the association between the grammatical genders and sociological genders happened very early in Indo-European, but it was an association rather than an equivalence and had many exceptions.
I read that greek/latin used words that translate to "kind" to describe the noun classes (as we use "gender" today), so maybe the ...
27
Sanskrit is not the mother of all languages. Sanskrit is not even the mother of the modern Indo-Aryan languages of the Northern India. Neither it is their father or grandfather. In fact, no language is a direct descendant of Sanskrit.
Saying that Sanskrit to the modern Indo-Aryan languages is the same as Latin to the modern Romance languages is absolutely ...
25
In Korean, 오른쪽 wolunccwok "right (direction)" comes from 옳- wolh- "correct" + -은 -un (Attributive) + 쪽 ccwok "direction", literally meaning "the correct direction". Another word for "right side", 바른편 palunphyen, literally means "The correct side" as well.
Similarly, 왼쪽 oynccwok "left (direction)" comes from 외- oy- "crooked" + -ㄴ -n (Attributive) + 쪽 ccwok "...
21
Not many. The Romans borrowed plenty of Greek words, but mostly in technical senses; in Antiquity, many Greek words that were used in Latin were also considered a bit fancy and special, for better or worse.
There were also some Greek words that were borrowed by the Romans so early in Roman history that they were probably no longer intuitively (or at all) ...
19
The take of an Israeli linguist:
There must be a consensus among scholars about one thing: Modern Israeli Hebrew emerged as a result of language revival, and as such its development from its so-called origins is different from the development of nearly all other living languages today (and all fully-fledged languages spoken by a monolingual community). At ...
19
There are many possible answers to this question.
Historically, the comparative method was born from observing the regularity of phonological and morphological correspondences between Classical European languages (that is, Latin and Greek), Germanic languages and dialects on one hand and, on the other hand, Sanskrit and Avestan (two "oriental" languages ...
19
The Indo-European family is completely made up, yes. But not for the reason cited in that comment. And the fact it's made up doesn't mean it's not real.
Sciences often posit the existence of things we can't actually directly observe, just because these things explain what we can observe. In Ancient Greece, some simple thought experiments showed that atoms ...
18
The association was certainly firmly in place already during the time that ancient Greek and Latin grammarians were writing about grammatical gender, so the fact that genus can be translated as "kind" is probably not relevant in the way that you suggest.
Latin grammarians tended to lay significance on the fact that genus shares a root with the verb ...
16
The Greeks had most probably noticed a similarity of their language with Phrygian. Socrates at least did so while speaking to Hermogenes: "Well then, consider whether this pyr is not foreign ; for the word is not easily brought into relation with the Hellenic tongue, and the Phrygians may be observed to have the same word slightly changed, just as they have ...
15
Yes, Germanic angst and Latin anxiety are derived from the same Proto-Indo-European root, which was something like *h₂enǵʰ- "constrict, narrow".
Philippa (2003-2009) confirm that they are cognates: under angst they say, "see eng"; under eng they say that the word is related to Latin ango and they give the Proto-Indo-European root as above. Also related is ...
15
It exists in semitic languages. "ymn" has directional right as its radical sense in the Ethiopian semitic languages but is also commonly used for good news, e.g., Yemane is a common name there, like Yaman in arabic languages. (I had always assumed the country name Yemen drew from the same root but Wikipedia claims that is just folk etymology: "One etymology ...
14
The question should probably be restated as something like "When did people begin to believe that Romance and Germanic languages were related with some scholarly basis for that belief?"
The qualification is necessary because in the pre-modern West, the reigning idea about language diversity was that all languages were ultimately descended from Hebrew ...
13
In the monumental Old Turkic Dictionary ("Древнетюркский словарь", Наука, Л., 1969) it is written that Kent/Kənd is really of the Sogdian origin. The dictionary reflects the words found in the Turkic written records of the 7th - 13th centuries.
The word Kent is not there, but the word Kend redirects to Känd, to page 290, and here is the screenshot of the ...
12
It came about like this. (Details about Greek here)
When Greeks adopted the Punic abjad into an alphabet, they changed a lot of the letters, and added some new ones. The Punes hadn't needed vowel letters, for instance, due to the nature of the language, but the Greeks did. On the other hand, the Greeks didn't need the post-velar and emphatic consonants of ...
11
Indefinite articles developed from numerals, and the definite articles developed from demonstratives. This is a very well known process called grammaticalization.
11
Some time after the middle of the 4th millenium BC. As discussed in this article by Luraghi, IE did not develop sex-based gender distinctions until the Anatolian branch split off, which is typically said to be in the mid 4000's BC. §5.2-3 of the article on the development of the differentiation of the feminine in later PIE. This is well before classical ...
10
This is a question that probably has a quite straightforward answer: historical development.
Various European languages adopted the Latin alphabet through different routes and mapped it differently onto their phonological systems.
j is a bit of a special case (similarly to 'u' and some others) since in Latin, it did not represent a separate phoneme but ...
10
These words show no signs of sharing a common suffix, let alone one that we can identify as meaning "add one." Actually, there is another explanation often used for this kind of thing: sound changes by analogy that cause counting numbers next to each other to change their first sound to be more similar. This is thought to be the reason why "four" starts with ...
10
This is a common sound change. [h] has no constriction above the larynx, and involves spreading the glottis so that any noise generated is turbulence as the air flows through the glottis. Most of the hearable stuff of [h] is the low-level effect on surrounding sonorants. (On top of that, h might end up partially voiced). In producing [s] especially (other ...
10
A simply approach to the question is to find which language (if any one language can be determined) has the most similar noun paradigm to PIE. The phonology of the suffixes can also be concidered.
The PIE noun paradigm inflects nouns based on case, number, and gender.
Case: There is some disagreement over how many noun cases exactly PIE had, but it ...
10
Not at all.
Sanskrit, Latin and a few other languages had a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European, which was prevalent around 2500 BC on the southern steppes of Russia.
It is a fact that Sanskrit has enriched most Indian Languages including the Dravidian Languages such as Telugu as Latin enriched some languages like English
Yes, this is true.
...
9
To be honest, I think this is a useless question. All IE languages have preserved certain features of the hypothetical parent language and have lost others. All IE languages need to be taken into account in reconstructing the proto-language. There is no objective way to determine which daughter languages have “best” preserved these features. For example, the ...
9
From the Oxford English Dictionary:
Probably cognate with Dutch fokken to mock (15th cent.), to strike
(1591), to fool, gull (1623), to beget children (1637), to have sexual
intercourse with (1657), to grow, cultivate (1772), Norwegian regional
fukka to copulate, Swedish regional fokka to copulate (compare Swedish
regional fock penis), further ...
9
Potentially, but probably not.
It's true that the oldest Linear A inscriptions (c 1850 BCE) are older than the oldest cuneiform Hittite inscriptions (c 1750 BCE).
However, many linguists over the years have tried to link the "Linear A language" to Indo-European, and none have been particularly successful. Hittite, Luwian, and the "Linear B ...
9
The three genders are found in all the oldest Indo-European languages we know (Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Irish, Old Church Slavonic, Old Norse) with the exception of Hittite.
Hittite had two genders; but the two were neuter and common, rather than masculine and feminine.
Some scholars believe that Hittite represents an earlier stage, and Indo-...
8
Yes, this is true and yes, in most cases indefinite articles indeed developed from numerals, as @MGN already said.
Not only there's no evidence of articles in PIE, the lack of articles is a more common phenomena than it can be expected to be from the Standard Average European point of view. Here's an interesting quote:
The geographical distribution of ...
8
As far as I know, we do not have any Greek or Roman texts discussing an eventual genetic relationship between Greek and Latin. There was however a heated discussion about whether language was “by nature” (physei) or “by convention” (literally: “by setting” thesei). You can read all about it in Plato’s “Cratylus”. If language is “by nature”, then it would ...
8
As I've posted in The Other Place, there was indeed a notion of Latin being a dialect of Greek, which a recent paper has described as "Aeolism". The locus classicus for it is Dionysius of Halicarnassus:
The language spoken by the Romans is neither utterly barbarous nor
absolutely Greek, but a mixture, as it were, of both, the greater part
of which is ...
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