68
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 ...
38
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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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
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 ...
18
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 ...
17
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 ...
15
The only theory I know is that prepositions were originally adverbial in nature, and unbound. My professor of historical grammar of Greek suggested this. The idea is that it went something like this:
There was the house. Mother was already in. (Adverbial 'prepositions' aren't even always bound in English.)
Father came in through the front door.
Mother ...
15
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 ...
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 ...
14
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 ...
13
helix: This came through Greek. Most of the Greek dialects underwent /w/-loss (see e.g. Kavitskaya 2002). The Attic-Ionic dialects lost the sound early (e.g. the sound /w/ and its letter ϝ do not appear in Homer); Aeolian retained it longer but lost it as well. This all leads to the result
PIE *u̯el-, *u̯elə-, *u̯lē- 'turn, wind' >w-loss> Gk ἑλίσσω ...
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
None of these can be explained by synchronic rules of Latin grammar, at least not in the classical age. Nor does this seem to be regular Proto-Indo-European ablaut, where one would expect something like **cp-/cep-/cop-*. Somehow many different allomorphs of caput exist; but allomorphs of other stems are plentiful in Latin and in most other languages. Many ...
10
Indefinite articles developed from numerals, and the definite articles developed from demonstratives. This is a very well known process called grammaticalization.
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
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 ...
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
Duden and other sources state that -lich is a grammaticalized form of the Middle High German līch ["body"] (which also gave rise to Leiche). -ly, -lich, -lijk (and Scandinavian forms) are actually all of similar derivation and converge to a single Germanic ancestral suffix (see discussion on details here).
The Turkic -lik appeared already in the Old Turkic ...
8
Hindi gẽd does indeed descend from Skt. genduka-. The latter is considered to be a loan from Dravidian (see Turner 4248). Armenian gund is a borrowing from Parthian or Persian gund < Iranian *gṛnda-. In Middle and New Persian gund is attested only in the meaning ‘testicle’. So the answer to your question is that they are probably not related.
8
In general, anything can be borrowed, given intensive and prolonged language contact (Thomason 2001: 63)
Borrowed relative pronouns (sources didn't mention examples):
Gondi (Dravidian) has borrowed a Hindi relative pronoun (Thomason 2001: 116)
Bodo and Rabha (Tibeto-Burman) have borrowed a relative pronoun from Indo-Aryan (Subharao 2011: 276)
After a ...
8
The easternmost Indo-European language is Assamese, spoken in the extreme east of India.
The now extinct Tocharian language (sc. Turfanian) was spoken around Turfan on the north-east side of the Tarim Basin, at around 89º E, as can be seen in this map from WP which shows the major linguistic groupings in the 3rd Century CE:
Assamese however extends as far ...
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