Família de História Inglesa

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Armenian like Greek is a single language where speakers of Armenian are recorded as being in what now constitutes eastern Turkey and Armenia as early as the 6th century BCE, but the oldest Armenian texts date from the 5th century BCE. The Persian domination had a strong linguistic impact on Armenian, which mislead many scholars in the past to believe that Armenian actually belonged to the Iranian group.

The now extinct Tocharian languages were spoken in the Tarim Basin more known as north-western China during the first millennium CE. Two different languages belong to this branch, Tocharian A and Tocharian B. In the first one, it was only been found in places where Tocharian B documents have also been found, which would suggest that Tocharian A was already extinct, kept alive only as a religious or poetic language, while Tocharian B was the living language used for administrative purposes. This branch is completely extinct. Among all ancient Indo-European languages, Tocharian was spoken farthest to the east.

Celtic contains two sub-branches, one is Continental Celtic and the other is Insular Celtic. Celtic speaking tribes spread to a major amount of directions like Belgium, Spain, France and the British Isles. The only Celtic languages still spoken today are Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Breton, all come from Insular Celtic.

The grouping of Baltic and Slavic into a single branch is somewhat controversial, but the exclusively shared features outweigh the divergences. The Slavic area was in all likelihood relatively small, perhaps centred in what is now southern Poland. But in the 5th century CE the Slavs began expanding in all directions. By the end of the 20th century Slavic languages were spoken throughout much of Eastern Europe and northern Asia. Only two Baltic languages survived and they are Latvian and Lithuanian. But a large number of Slavic languages also survived, such as Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Polish, Serbian, Slovak, Russian, and many others.

Albanian the language of the present-day republic of Albania is known from the 15th century CE. It presumably continues one of the very poorly attested ancient Indo-European languages of the Balkan Peninsula, but which one is not clear. There are two hypotheses on the origin of Albanian. The first one says that Albanian is a modern descendant of Illyrian, a language which was widely spoken in the region during classical times. Since we know very little about Illyrian, this assertion can be neither denied nor confirmed from a linguistic standpoint. From a historical and geographical perspective, however, this assertion makes sense. Another hypotheses says that Albanian is a descendant of Thracian, another lost language that was spoken farther east than Illyrian.

Another great question is, where did the actual original speakers of Indo-European language lived? Some say that the most likely place is where they are spoken now, but specialists like archaeologists suggest that it wasn’t either western or southern Europe. So probably Asia, since that the ancient language Sanskrit appears to be the most similar to the original Indo-European language. 46% of the present world population speak an IE language.

References

Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable (2002) A History of the English Language, Fifth Edition

Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable (1993) A History of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Luke Mastin (2011) The history of English, online available at: http://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/history_middle.html

Wikipedia, (n.d), Indo-European languages, online at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

Warren Cowgill and Jay H. Jasanoff, (2012) Indo-European languages, online at: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indo-European-languages

Cristian Violatti, (2014) Indo-European languages, online at: http://www.ancient.eu/Indo-European_Languages/

Wikipedia, (n.d) List of English words with dual French and Anglo-Saxon variations, online at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dual_French_and_Anglo-Saxon_variations