The Indo-European languages are a language family native to western and southern Eurasia. It comprises most of the languages of Europe together with those of the northern Indian subcontinent and the Iranian Plateau. Some European languages of this family, such as English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic; and another six subdivisions which are now extinct.
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related.
M, or m, is the thirteenth letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is em, plural ems.
Nostratic is a hypothetical macrofamily, which includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, although its exact composition and structure vary among proponents. It typically comprises Kartvelian, Indo-European and Uralic languages; some languages from the disputed Altaic family; the Afroasiatic languages spoken in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Near East as well as the Dravidian languages of the Indian Subcontinent.
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in West Asia. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, and latterly also North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, in small pockets in the Caucasus as well as in often large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
Grimm's law is a set of sound laws describing the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC. First systematically put forward by Jacob Grimm but first remarked upon by Rasmus Rask, it establishes a set of regular correspondences between early Germanic stops, fricatives, and the stop consonants of certain other centum Indo-European languages.
Verner's law described a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives *β, *ð, *z, *ɣ, *ɣʷ. The law was formulated by Karl Verner, and first published in 1877.
The Phoenician alphabet is an alphabet known in modern times from the Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region.
The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages.
Proto-Germanic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Ef or Fe is a Cyrillic letter, commonly representing the voiceless labiodental fricative, like the pronunciation of ⟨f⟩ in "fill, or fall". The Cyrillic letter Ef is romanized as ⟨f⟩. In some languages it is known as Fe.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the theorized common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists.
Proto-Norse was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic in the first centuries CE. It is the earliest stage of a characteristically North Germanic language, and the language attested in the oldest Scandinavian Elder Futhark inscriptions, spoken from around the 2nd to the 8th centuries CE. It evolved into the dialects of Old Norse at the beginning of the Viking Age around 800 CE, which later themselves evolved into the modern North Germanic languages.
Proto-Sinaitic is considered the earliest trace of alphabetic writing and the common ancestor of both the Ancient South Arabian script and the Phoenician alphabet, which led to many modern alphabets including the Greek alphabet. According to common theory, Canaanites who spoke a Semitic language repurposed Egyptian hieroglyphs to construct a different script. The script is attested in a small corpus of inscriptions found at Serabit el-Khadim in the Sinai Peninsula, Egypt dating to the Middle Bronze Age.
The Proto-Celtic language, also called Common Celtic, is the ancestral proto-language of all the known Celtic languages, and a descendant of the Proto-Indo-European language. It is not directly attested in writing, but has been partially reconstructed through the comparative method. Proto-Celtic is generally believed to have been spoken between 1300 and 800 BC, after which it began to evolve into individual Celtic languages. Proto-Celtic is usually associated with the Urnfield or Hallstatt archaeological cultures. Celtic languages share common features with Italic languages that are not found in other branches of Indo-European, suggesting the possibility that an earlier Italo-Celtic linguistic unity may have existed.
Northwest Germanic is a proposed grouping of the Germanic languages, representing the current consensus among Germanic historical linguists. It does not challenge the late 19th-century tri-partite division of the Germanic dialects into North Germanic, West Germanic and East Germanic, but proposes additionally that North and West Germanic remained as a subgroup after the southward migration of the East Germanic tribes, only splitting into North and West Germanic later. Whether this subgroup constituted a unified proto-language, or simply represents a group of dialects that remained in contact and close geographical proximity, is a matter of debate, but the formulation of Ringe and Taylor probably enjoys widespread support:
There is some evidence that North and West Germanic developed as a single language, Proto-Northwest Germanic, after East Germanic had begun to diverge. However, changes unproblematically datable to the PNWGmc period are few, suggesting that that period of linguistic unity did not last long. On the other hand, there are some indications that North and West Germanic remained in contact, exchanging and thus partly sharing further innovations, after they had begun to diverge, and perhaps even after West Germanic had itself begun to diversify.
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated and unattested once-spoken ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or in some cases only partially attested. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method.
Proto-Nahuan is a hypothetical daughter language of the Proto-Uto-Aztecan language. It is the common ancestor from which the modern Nahuan languages have developed.
The Timor–Alor–Pantar (TAP) languages are a family of Papuan (non-Austronesian) languages spoken in Timor, Kisar, and the Alor archipelago in Southern Indonesia.
The Proto-Italic language is the ancestor of the Italic languages, most notably Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages. It is not directly attested in writing, but has been reconstructed to some degree through the comparative method. Proto-Italic descended from the earlier Proto-Indo-European language.
