English as an Indo-European Language

Surgut State UniversityForeign Languages DepartmentNo. 2Indo-EuropeanLanguage.It was done byAnton TveretinResearch AdviserAss. Prof. Nemirovich O.V.This paper is dedicated toEnglish language. This topic was chosen because it is interesting.As we know, there are greatcommunities of languages, called families.Most European languages and severalAsian belong to one of the families, Indo-European exceptions are Hungarian,Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, and Livonian, which are Uralic . English iscertainly one of them.Languages of any group aredistinct because of divergence.

This is a process when a language splits intoseveral people who formerly spoke one language stop to understand each other.Of course, it takes long time i.e. hundreds and thousands years. Soprotolanguage may split several times.As a result, a lot of modern speechesare related to few protolanguages.When first Europeans came toIndia, they found that Indian speeches are like old European ones, especiallyLatin and Greek. So Indo-European family was discovered, but its existencewasn t proved enough.

One of philologist, August Schleicher, noted thatdivergence has its own laws, and discovered some phonetical relations. Thus hewas 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 andHorses, in new language. Although, he made some mistakes.Newgeneration of Indo-Europeanists corrected them, but doesn t even try to writesomething, because it is impossible to re-create everything.

According to Schleicher, atfirst subfamily of Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic split from their relatives. Ascalculated later, it was about 7000 years ago. Then Germanic separated fromBalto-Slavic. This means that proto-Germanic went under changes, which made itdifferent.These changes are known as Grimm s law or Verner s law. Unvoiced stops became voicelessfricatives p f,t th, k h Voiced stops became unvoiced d t,b p,g k Aspirated stops became non-aspirated.This is Grimm s law. Vernerlaw is more specific.When Angles and Saxons andJutes and Frisian which were Germanic came to the Great Britain, they metCeltic particularly Britts people. So, Old English is primarily Germaniclanguage with Celtic buries.

Including such words as down . Old Englishgrammar was difficult enough it is the reason why it was simplified in MiddleEnglish period.The period began after NormanConquest 1066 . French became the dominant language, so English grammarchanged, and many words were buried. Some scholars believe that English isGerman-Roman language not just Germanic , and some do not accept it. Latinalphabet was used instead of runes a specific writing of Germanic evenearlier, but Norman suggested new orthography.

The last step of the languageis called Modern English. It began with Great Vowel Shift. However, orthographyremained so pronunciation became different from spelling.The shift began in1350 or 1500 more exactly and finished about 1600. The shift causedconvergence of some sounds.

As a result, spelling of Modern English is sodifficult, as you know.Thus neither consonants norvowels in English words do not match with their origins, but there is a set ofrules which helps you to re-create protolanguage words.Li s t o f L i t e r a t u r e 1. Funk amp Wagnalls Encyclopedia, 19932. Schleicher, August. Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatikder Indogermanischen Sprachen, 18623. Webster, Noah. Third NewInternational Dictionary, 1981.