{"id":3753,"date":"2020-03-30T10:22:22","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T14:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3753"},"modified":"2020-03-30T10:22:22","modified_gmt":"2020-03-30T14:22:22","slug":"indo-european-and-germanic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=3753","title":{"rendered":"Indo-European and Germanic"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s such fun to go chasing after the narratives<\/i> of language evolution and distribution, via books like Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World<\/b><\/a> (which is global in scope and well illustrated with maps, and has a fine ear for illustrative quotations from many languages), Kenneth Katzner’s The Languages of the World<\/b><\/a> (which offers brief characterizations of about 200 languages, with exemplary texts), Merritt Ruhlen’s A Guide to the World\u2019s Languages: Volume I, Classification<\/b><\/a> (which is especially concerned with taxonomy of 17 major language families and their subgroupings), and Florian Coulmas’ The Writing Systems of the World<\/b><\/a> (which takes on graphic representations of sound systems, mostly ignored by linguistics). I can’t claim to have assimilated any of these, but I’ve been in and out of all of them quite a bit in the last 40-odd years.<\/p>\n

\nThinking back through a few thousand years of linguistic history is a rainy-day delight:
\nRobert Claiborne’s The Roots of English: A Reader’s Handbook of Word Origins<\/b><\/a> is mostly concerned with Indo-European roots<\/b> in English words (“…two thousand or so basic Indo-European roots have been reconstructed… (which) begot at least ten times that number of actual words…”). Germanic, Latin, French and Greek (all in the Indo-European family) are the primary contributors to the English we use.
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\nAnother fascinating resorce for IE: The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots<\/b><\/a> “enlarges upon the history of 13,000 English words, spanning over 5000 years from Indo-European to Modern English” (cover blurb)<\/p>\n

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\nTwo pages suggest the riches of Watkins:
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\nThe historical epic of the development of modern English (its Anglo-Saxon roots, Norman additions, Latin and Greek ecclesiastical and scholarly elements) are recent enough and well attested in sources like the always-interesting History of English Podcast<\/a>, but the Indo-European and Germanic background to English is further back in the mists of time, and less well-known. English is, after all, a Germanic<\/i> language in its grammatical and syntactical organization (“English sentences are organized with GERMANIC grammar. Subject first, verb after. Prepositional phrases, pronouns, and verb tenses are all used in the Germanic style. English sentences use, the same rules that are used for sentence construction in German and Dutch, Swedish and Icelandic, Norwegian and Danish…”), and in the majority of its high-frequency words, so it’s worthwhile to include explanatory videos like