Classification of Old Germanic tribes and Old Germanic languages.

INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY

The languages brought into relationship by descent or progressive differentiation from a parent speech are conveniently calleda family of languages.

Indo-European language fall into eleven principal groups: Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Hellenic, Albanian, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Hittite, and Tocharian

Indian ----the Vedas or sacred books of India(The oldest literary texts)

These fall into four groups:

1)Rig-veda (is a collection of about a thousand hymns)

2)Atharva-veda(a body of incantations and ritual formulas connected with many kinds of current religious practice).

Classical Sanskrit is the medium of an extensive Indian literature including the two great national epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

Pali (colloquial use), about the middle of the sixth century B.C. became the language of Buddhism.

The most important are Hindi, Urdu (the official language of Pakistan), Bengali (the official language of Bangladesh), Punjabi, and Marathi. Romany, the language of the Gypsies, represents a dialect of northwestern India

Iranian ---The earliest remains of the Iranian branch fall into two divisions (an eastern and a western) represented by Avestan( is the language of the Avesta(sometimes called ZEND), the sacred book of the Zoroastrians; Avesta proper, an extensive collection of hymns, legends, prayers, and legal prescriptions that seem to spring from a period several hundred years later. ) and Old Persian (is preserved only in certain cuneiform inscriptions which record chiefly the conquests and achievements of Darius (522-486 B.C.) and Xerxes (486-466 B.C.).

Armenian --- The Armenians for several centuries were under Persian domination, and the vocabulary shows such strong Iranian influence that Armenian was at one time classed as an Iranian language. Numerous contacts with Semitic languages, with Greek, and with Turkish have contributed further to give the vocabulary a rich character.

Hellenic --- Into this mixture of often little-known populations and languages the Greeks penetrated from the north shortly after a date about 2000 B.C. In Athens were assembled the great writers of Greece - the dramatists /Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles in tragedy, Aristophanes in comedy, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the orator Demosthenes, the philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Largely because of the political and cultural prestige of Athens, the Attic dialect became the basis of a koine or common Greek that from the 4th century superseded the other dialects; the conquests of Alexander (336-323 B.C.) established this language in Asia Minor and Syria, in Mesopotamia and Egypt, as the general language of the eastern Mediterranean for purposes of international communication

Albanian ---Northwest of Greece on the eastern coast of the Adriatic is the small branch named Albanian. Our knowledge of Albanian, except for a few words, extends back only as far as the 15th century of our era, and, when we first meet with it, the vocabulary is so mixed Latin, Greek, Turkish, and Slavonic elements - owing to conquests and other causes - that it is somewhat difficult to isolate the original Albanian

Italic ---center in Italy, and to most people in ancient times suggests Rome and the language of Rome, Latin. The most extensive of the Romance languages are French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.The Romance languages, while representing a continuous evolution from Latin. Classical Latin was a literary language with an elaborate and somewhat artificial grammar.

Batio-Slavic --- Balto-Slavic --- covers a vast area in the eastern part of Europe. It falls into two groups, the Baltic and the Slavic.There are three Baltic languages: Prussian( is now extinct), Latvian(about two million people ), and Lithuanian(about three million people )

The earliest form in which we possess a Slavic language is a part of the Bible and certain liturgical texts translated by the missionaries Cyril and Methodius in the 9th c. East Slavic includes three varieties (largest group of Slavic languages). ( Russian (about 220 million people), Belorussian (about 9 million people), Ukrainian (50 million people).

West Slavic includes four languages (Polish (about 36 million people), Czech (about 10 million), Slovak (5 million), Sorbian (over 100,000 people)

South Slavic includes Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian(The two languages are practically identical but use different alphabets.), Slovene, and modern Macedonian.

Germanic--- The following table shows the classification of old and modern Germanic languages.

	East Germanic	North Germanic	West Germanic
Old Germanic languages (with dates of the earliest records)	Gothic (4^thc.) Vandalic Burgundian	Old Norse or Old Scandinavian (2^nd – 3^rdc.) Old Icelandic (12^th c.) Old Norwegian (13^th c.) Old Danish (13^th c.) Old Swedish (13^th c.)	Anglian, Frisian, Jutish, Saxon, Franconian, High German Old English (7^th c.) Old Saxon (9^th c.) Old High German (8^th c.) Old Dutch (12^th c.)
Modern Germanic languages	No living languages	Icelandic Norwegian Danish Swedish Faroese	English German Netherlandish Afrikaans Yiddish Frisian

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