The Italic languages form a branch of the Indo-European language family, whose earliest known members were spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. The most important of the ancient Italic languages was Latin, the official language of ancient Rome, which conquered the other Italic peoples before the common era. The other Italic languages became extinct in the first centuries AD as their speakers were assimilated into the Roman Empire and shifted to some form of Latin. Between the third and eighth centuries AD, Vulgar Latin diversified into the Romance languages, which are the only Italic languages natively spoken today, while Literary Latin also survived.
The Tocharianlanguages, also known as the Arśi-Kuči, Agnean-Kuchean or Kuchean-Agnean languages, are an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family spoken by inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, the Tocharians. The languages are known from manuscripts dating from the 5th to the 8th century AD, which were found in oasis cities on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin and the Lop Desert. The discovery of these languages in the early 20th century contradicted the formerly prevalent idea of an east–west division of the Indo-European language family as centum and satem languages, and prompted reinvigorated study of the Indo-European family. Scholars studying these manuscripts in the early 20th century identified their authors with the Tokharoi, a name used in ancient sources for people of Bactria (Tokharistan). Although this identification is now believed to be mistaken, "Tocharian" remains the usual term for these languages.
The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language.
The Tocharians or Tokharians were speakers of the Tocharian languages, Indo-European languages known from around 7,600 documents from the 6th and 7th centuries, found on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin. The name "Tocharian" was given to these languages in the early 20th century by scholars who identified their speakers with a people known in ancient Greek sources as the Tókharoi, who inhabited Bactria from the 2nd century BC. This identification is now generally considered erroneous, but the name "Tocharian" remains the most common term for the languages and their speakers. Their actual ethnic name is unknown, although they may have referred to themselves as the Agni, Kuči, and Krorän or as the Agniya and Kuchiya known from Sanskrit texts.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages.
Palaic is an extinct Indo-European language, attested in cuneiform tablets in Bronze Age Hattusa, the capital of the Hittites. Palaic, which was apparently spoken mainly in northern Anatolia, is generally considered to be one of four primary sub-divisions of the Anatolian languages, alongside Hittite, Luwic and Lydian.
Kucha or Kuche was an ancient Buddhist kingdom located on the branch of the Silk Road that ran along the northern edge of what is now the Taklamakan Desert in the Tarim Basin and south of the Muzat River.
In Indo-European linguistics, the term Indo-Hittite refers to Edgar Howard Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages split off a Pre-Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages. The prefix Indo- does not refer to the Indo-Aryan branch in particular, but stands for Indo-European, and the -Hittite part refers to the Anatolian language family as a whole.
The Paleo-Balkan languages are a geographical grouping of various Indo-European languages that were spoken in the Balkans and surrounding areas in ancient times. In antiquity, Dacian, Greek, Illyrian, Messapic, Paeonian, Phrygian and Thracian were the Paleo-Balkan languages which were attested in literature. They may have included other unattested languages.
Saka, or Sakan, was a variety of Eastern Iranian languages, attested from the ancient Buddhist kingdoms of Khotan, Kashgar and Tumshuq in the Tarim Basin, in what is now southern Xinjiang, China. It is a Middle Iranian language. The two kingdoms differed in dialect, their speech known as Khotanese and Tumshuqese.
The numerals and derived numbers of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) have been reconstructed by modern linguists based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages. The following article lists and discusses their hypothesized forms.
The ancient Middle Eastern state of Mitanni used a dialect of Hurrian as its main language. This dialect however contains some loanwords of evidently Indo-Aryan origin, i.e. related to Sanskrit, the ancestor of many modern languages of the Indian subcontinent. The loaned vocabulary seems to be related to an elite group in Mitanni society, as they appear in the names of rulers and gods as well as in relation to horse-breeding and the military.
The Tocharian script, also known as Central Asian slanting Gupta script or North Turkestan Brāhmī, is an abugida which uses a system of diacritical marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols. Part of the Brahmic scripts, it is a version of the Indian Brahmi script. It is used to write the Central Asian Indo-European Tocharian languages, mostly from the 8th century that were written on palm leaves, wooden tablets and Chinese paper, preserved by the extremely dry climate of the Tarim Basin. Samples of the language have been discovered at sites in Kucha and Karasahr, including many mural inscriptions. Mistakenly identifying the speakers of this language with the Tokharoi people of Tokharistan, early authors called these languages "Tocharian". This naming has remained, although the names Agnean and Kuchean have been proposed as a replacement.
Jay Harold Jasanoff is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist, best known for his h2e-conjugation theory of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system. He teaches Indo-European linguistics and historical linguistics at Harvard University.
The following is a table of many of the most fundamental Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) words and roots, with their cognates in all of the major families of descendants.
Milyan, also known as Lycian B and previously Lycian 2, is an extinct ancient Anatolian language. It is attested from three inscriptions: two poems of 34 and 71 engraved lines, respectively, on the so-called Xanthian stele (or Xanthian Obelisk, found at Xanthos, and another, shorter, inscription on a sarcophagus at Antiphellus. All three poems are divided in strophes.
The vatër is the domestic hearth in Albanian culture. The fire of the domestic hearth holds divine attributes in Albanian beliefs, being considered the sustainer of the continuity between the world of the living and that of the dead, and ensuring the continuity of the tribe from generation to generation. The absence of fire in a house is traditionally considered a great curse. In Albanian folk beliefs the fire hearth is the symbol of fire as the offspring of the Sun (Dielli). In Albanian tradition the deified fire (zjarri) was evidently also called with the theonym Enji, the god to whom Thursday – e enjte – was dedicated in the Albanian language.
Suvarṇapuṣpa was a King of the Tarim Basin city-state of Kucha from 600 to 625. He was known in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS) as Kucīśvara Suvarṇapuṣpa "Suvarṇapuṣpa, lord of Kucha". He was known in Chinese as Bái Sūfábójué as he sent an embassy to the court of the Tang dynasty in 618 CE acknowledging vassalship.
Melanie Malzahn is a German professor of Indo-European studies at the University of Vienna specializing in the history of the Tocharian languages.
