Indo-European

This page forms part of an etymology course that gives an outline of the development of English. It is written in a sequence that you may want to follow. The best place to start, if you want to follow the whole course, is Etymology course, or, if you are only interested in English, Development of English. You may also arrive at any of these articles from other links. For more information about the history of English, you should of course read a good history of the language, such as Baugh (1993), Strang (1970), or Crystal (2005)

Indo-European is a term used in the study of the history of languages. It is the name of a very large 'super-family'. As its name suggests, it includes, as members of the family, languages from India and from Europe. It was the resemblances between Sanskrit, a religious language still used in India as well as being the language of the oldest known Hindu texts, and Latin and Greek that led William Jones (1746-1794), a judge in British India and a language scholar, to propose the idea of Indo-European. (He said in 1786, "The Sanskrit language whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.")

A reconstructed proto-Indo-European common ancestor language is useful at times in tracing meanings and etymologies across the whole family.

The Indo-European 'super family' contains the Indian languages of Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, as well as the languages of Iran (Farsi, or Persian) and Afghanistan (Pashto or Pukhtun): all these are grouped into Indo-Iranian. Many other groupings exist within Indo-European.

For the purposes of study or writing in the English language, we are principally concerned with two families:

• the Germanic, and particularly West Germanic and North Germanic; and
• the Romance group of the Italic family.
  • Although the Celtic group are spoken in parts of the British Isles (and some two thousand years ago were the predominant languages spoken here), they have left little trace on Modern English.