This is something I’ve been curious about for a long time, but I’ve never been able to find a good description or graphic explaining it. We all know, of course, that English is a member of a large group of languages that evolved from Proto-Indo-European. Within that language family there’s subdivisions such as Slavic, Germanic, Greek, Tocharian, Celtic, etc. But do we know which of those subdivisions are the most closely related to each other? In other words, if you were to represent IE like a family tree, with PIE as the ‘grandmother’ and the subdivisions representing it’s ‘children’, would English and Russian be ‘first cousins’ or ‘second cousins’ or further out? I’m not asking something obvious like are French and Spanish related, but more about how recently the subdivisions themselves split off from PIE.
What you’re looking for is the linguistic equivalent of a phylogenetic tree. In principle, this can be computed, but there’s nothing quite like DNA that would make it easy. Still, that might be something to search on.
Mississippienne, I’ve got books at home with handy-dandy charts that address your OP directly. I will look for similar graphics online.
Meanwhile, have a look at this Wikipedia page. It details one of the early and fundamental splits in the Indo-European family – that between the so-called “satem” languages and the “centum” languages (named after the Avestan and Latin words for “hundred”, respectively). Focus on the second and third paragraphs on that page, as well as the two maps at top – the rest of the article is somewhat technical.
To use two sample languages from your OP, Russian is a satem language, while English is a centum language … so they are pretty well separated in the grand scheme of things.
Here is a family tree for the centum languages. Click at left to bring up the tree of satem languages.
I’ve seen that graphic but what I can’t understand is whether it means that, for example, Italic and Anatolian are Germanic’s closest ‘siblings’ because they happen to be beside one another on the chart, etc. Similarly, on the Satem chart, are Slavic and Indo-Iranian closer to one another than either is to Armenian? If you introduced a Proto-Slav and a Sanskrit speaker, could they learn one another’s language without too much difficulty? On the centum side, you can look at Latin and Gaulish (tauros, tarvos; rex, rix) and see they’re ridiculously similar. Latin is Italic and Gaulish is Celtic. But they’re far apart on that chart. Is that chart just not organized that way, or is Latin really that much closer to Hittite?
I see what you’re getting at. But I don’t think the spatial relationships on the chart are meant to determine phylogenetic distance between languages.
I’m looking at it, and…
I can’t find a connection 'tween Latin* and English and yet a large bulk of English clearly has Latin roots. The chart seems overly simplistic.
*I can’t find a connection from Latin to all Romance languages.
Maybe this tree works a little better.
That’s because we borrowed many words from French after 1066 (after William the Conqueror, French was the language of the government for quite some time) and we deliberately borrowed many words from Latin to describe Religious and Scientific terms-- especially the latter. Additionally, you get some words from other Romance languages (Italian and Spanish).
First major caveat: As I’d think would be obvious but occasionally needs spelling out, the use of 100 as centum (hard C: ‘kentum’) or satem, and their equivalents, is kind of like the jaw/ear ossicles as the line between Synopsid (“mammal-like reptile”) and true mammal. That is, it’s an easily identified marker that is one of a large group of characters that distinguish the two groups.
Within each group, there are some ‘sister’ families that seem to have either split off together and then somewhat later split from each other, or else have been close-relative dialects at the time of the split. These include:
[ul][li]“Indo-Aryan” (I.e., Indo-European languages of greater India) and Iranian (Note that Dardic, a small group of languages from the Western Himalaya-Pamirs area, is regarded by various scholars as a subgroup of Indo-Aryan, a subgroup of Iranian, or an independent third small sister group to the other two.)[/li][li]Baltic and Slavic[/li][li]Italic (with Romance) and Celtic[/ul][/li]
This sort of grouping attempts to derive them phylogenetically – what did they originate from? It’s worth noting that borrowing from neighboring languages can drastically influence a language’s vocabulary, though generally not in the basic fundamental words (numbers, “to be”, articles, terms for close relatives, etc.). English borrowed heavily from Norman and Old French, a bit less heavily from Old Norse, and is famous for grabbing loan words from everywhere. Romanian, a cker Romance language in structure and basic vocabulary, has a large Slavic-derived infusion of words. Galego, the Portuguese-related tongue of northwesternmost Spain, has a vocabulary nearly as extensively Celtic as Modern Welsh (which itself hit Latin, French and English for a lot of borrowed terms). Most of the Finnic and Turkic (non-Indo-European) languages spoken by minorities in Russia have a lot of Russian vocabhulary, while Ossetic (see the current Russian/Georgian conflict), which is an Iranian language, has extensive borrowings from both its big neighbors.
To expand on this, because I’ve seen people have trouble with the concept before: Importing a bunch of words, even if it’s a great big bunch, doesn’t change a language’s grammar. That means it doesn’t change its relationship with other languages living and dead. For example, post-Conquest English lost the declension system present in pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon (also known as Old English, though it isn’t recognizable as English to most people) but did not gain the French conjugation classes or moods along with the massive amount of French vocabulary it took: The French words were made to work in the mutating Germanic grammar of Middle English.
Therefore, English was a Germanic language before 1066 and it is still a Germanic language today, a bunch of new vocabulary and one major sound shift (the Great Vowel Shift) later.
Indeed. OTOH, English syntax (word order) seems closer to that of French than that of German. English also discarded case-marking of nouns (although I think maybe Dutch did too) and has the “going to” future tense that Spanish and French have.