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English Language & Linguistics

English Language

 

 

Indo-European Family Tree

The Indo-European language which is the earliest known ancestor of modern English is also the ancestor of most modern Western languages. Read about how Indo-European was discovered and look at the family tree below which shows those connections. At least fourteen other families of languages have been discovered in addition to Indo-European.

 Indo-European
 Germanic
 Celtic
Italic
 Hellenic
 Balto-
Slavonic
 Indo-
Iranian
Low German
Old Norse
Anglo-Saxon
 
 Latin
 Classical Greek
   
Old English
Frisian
Flemish
Dutch
German


Icelandic
Norwegian
Swedish
Danish

 Breton

Manx

Scots Gaelic

Irish Gaelic

Welsh

Romanian

French

Portuguese

Spanish

Italian

Modern Greek
 Lithuanian

Russian

Serbo-Croat

Polish

Czech

 Hindi

Punjabi

Bengali

Romany

Sanskrit

From the family tree you can see that a surprising number of modern languages are related by way of a common ancestor.

This does not mean that they can be understood by each other - in fact one major test of a language is that languages should be "mutually unintelligible" - but they will have some words in common, remaining from their common heritage. The word salmon is a brief case study.

You will see that modern English does not appear in the table above. This is because modern English, uniquely amongst Indo-European languages in the last thousand years, is a blend of French and Old English (with elements of Latin and Scandinavian) making it both Italic (or Romance) and Germanic. It is this blend which gives us such a large vocabulary and a flexibility to adapt to circumstances. The "mongrel" language continues to adapt while other languages try to keep out foreign influences.

 

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