Surgut State University

Foreign Languages Department No. 2 English as an Indo-European Language.

It was done by

Anton Tveretin

Research Adviser

Ass. Prof. Nemirovich O.V.

This paper is dedicated to English language. This topic was chosen because it is interesting.

As we know, there are great communities of languages, called families. Most European languages and several Asian belong to one of the families, Indo-European (exceptions are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, and Livonian, which are Uralic). English is certainly one of them.

Languages of any group are distinct because of divergence. This is a process when a language splits into several: people who formerly spoke one language stop to understand each other. Of course, it takes long time i.e. hundreds and thousands years. So protolanguage may split several times. As a result, a lot of modern speeches are related to few protolanguages.

When first Europeans came to India, they found that Indian speeches are like old European ones, especially Latin and Greek. So Indo-European family was discovered, but its existence wasn't proved enough. One of philologist, August Schleicher, noted that divergence has its own laws, and discovered some phonetical relations. Thus he was able to re-create some words and grammar of proto-Indo-European language. He thought he would finish the re-creation and wrote a fable, A Sheep and Horses, in "new" language. Although, he made some mistakes. New generation of Indo-Europeanists corrected them, but doesn't even try to write something, because it is impossible to re-create everything.

According to Schleicher, at first subfamily of Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic split from their relatives. As calculated later, it was about 7000 years ago. Then Germanic separated from Balto-Slavic. This means that proto-Germanic went under changes, which made it different. These changes are known as Grimm's law or Verner's law.

Unvoiced stops became voiceless fricatives: p