![]() ![]() We know, for example, that they probably called their cows something like gous or gwous. But, through studying their language and religion, doing a bit of archaeology, and picking up the story from when we do have records, we can learn something about them. The early Indo-Europeans lived before written history, and so we have no record of them or their migrations. I am writing this article in an Indo-European language from the Germanic sub-family. About half the world’s people speak a language from the Indo-European language family, which includes the Celtic, Germanic, Romance, Greek, Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages, among some smaller groups. Today, we call these people the Indo-Europeans, and their language Proto-Indo-European. Eventually, they concluded that, at some point in the distant past, a people speaking the same language must have spread across Eurasia from Portugal to Ganges. They could find other connections with Persian and the Germanic languages, but none with Arabic and Turkish. ‘Cow’ is bovis in Latin, boũs in Ancient Greek, and gáus in Sanskrit. When they compared the languages of ancient Europe - Latin and Greek - with the language of ancient northern India - Sanskrit - they found even more and closer similarities. In the nineteenth century, with the rise of the discipline of comparative linguistics, researchers realised that these relationships went much deeper than they first thought. And in Portuguese? Sete - oito - nove - dez. In Hindi, they are saat - aath - nau - dus. For example, look at the numbers seven - eight - nine - ten. When the first Europeans began travelling to India in the sixteenth century, they noticed some odd similarities between their native languages and the languages of northern India. Image of Jupiter at Pompeii (Wikimedia Commons) ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |