Indo-European language family – cognate vocabulary, grammatical simi-
larities, and historical/archeological information.
Cognate vocabulary.
The
comparison of
cognate vocabulary
is the hall-
mark of the comparative method. Cognates are words that are passed
down the family tree as languages change and develop and have proven
extremely important for determining not just which languages are sib-
lings within a language family but what the parent language of the sib-
ling languages might have looked like. The comparative method works
best when vocabulary representing common human experiences is com-
pared. Watkins (2000) lists many semantic categories containing words
that were instrumental in developing the Indo-European family (examples
from Modern English are used for purposes of illustration):
for instance,
verbs of existence (e.g.
English be); qualitative adjectives (
old,
new,
thin);
numerals (
one,
two,
three, etc.); pronouns (
I,
me,
you, etc.); seasons (
winter,
spring,
summer,
autumn); body parts (
hands,
nose,
feet, etc.); and so forth. The
advantage of comparing vocabulary such as this is that one can be assured
that it will occur in almost any language. Vocabulary that is very culture-
specific will have a highly restricted occurrence, making it ill-suited to the
comparative method.
As an illustration of how the comparative method works, consider how
cross-linguistic comparisons of words for Modern English
foot can be used
to determine which languages belong in the
Indo-European language fam-
ily, how the Germanic branch can be established as an independent sub-
family of Indo-European, and what form and pronunciation
foot had in
Proto-Germanic and Indo-European. Figure 2.3 contains cognate words for
foot in a variety of modern and older Indo-European languages.
The development of English
25
Old English
fót
Modern English
foot
Modern German
Fuβ
Modern Dutch
voet
Modern Norwegian
fot
Modern Danish
fod
Modern Swedish
fot
Modern French
pied
Modern Italian
piede
Modern Portuguese
pé
Modern Spanish
pie
Sanskrit
pat
Latin
pes
Greek
peza
FIGURE
2.3
Words in modern and
older Indo-European lan-
guages equivalent to
Modern English
foot.
The left-hand column contains words from Germanic languages; the
right-hand column words from other Indo-European languages. At first
glance, the words for
foot in the Germanic languages seem different from
the other languages: the words of Germanic origin begin with ortho-
graphic
f (the Dutch example,
voet, begins with orthographic
v, a written
symbol that in speech would be pronounced as /f/). The other languages,
in
contrast, begin with orthographic
p (a symbol that would be pro-
nounced as /p/).
But rather than use this difference to put the Germanic languages in a
language family other than Indo-European, the nineteenth-century philol-
ogist Jacob Grimm (who along with his brother Wilhelm wrote
Grimm’s
Fairy Tales) postulated a principle of sound change known as Grimm’s Law.
This principle provided evidence for establishing the branch of Germanic
and distinguishing it from the other branches of Indo-European. Although
Grimm’s Law has three parts, of most relevance
is the part that noted that
Indo-European /p/ became /f/ in Germanic. This sound change accounts for
many additional words too. For instance, Modern English
father is
Vater in
German (with
V again pronounced as /f/) and
väder in Dutch but
pater in
Latin,
padre in Spanish, and
pére in French. Of course, in doing comparisons
of this nature, one has to be careful not to confuse
borrowings with cog-
nates. English has words such as
pedal and
pedestrian – each containing the
root
ped or
pod and having something to do with the notion of ‘foot’ (e.g. a
pedal is operated by foot).
At first glance, words such as these might lead
one to conclude that English is more like French or Latin than German or
Dutch. But these words did not arrive in English via proto-Germanic.
Instead, they were borrowed – they came across the language tree, in this
case from Latin as a result of contact with speakers of Latin.
Cognate vocabulary can also be used to reconstruct ancestral languages.
For instance, the
American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots lists the
stem *
ped- as the Indo-European word for Modern English
foot but *
fót as
the Germanic word. (The asterisk before these words indicates that they
are hypothetical,
or reconstructed, word forms.) Since all of the Germanic
languages have words beginning with /f/, it is logical to assume that proto-
Germanic had a word with /f/ as well. However, since all other Indo-
European languages have /p/, proto-Indo-European must have had a word
for
foot beginning with /p/ too: pronunciation with /f/ was obviously
unique to the Germanic languages.
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