ABSTRACT
By the term Indo-European we are referring to a family of languages which by about 1000 BCE were spoken over a large part of Europe and parts of southwestern and southern Asia. Indo-European is essentially a geographical term: it refers to the easternmost (India) and westernmost (Europe) pre-colonial expansion of the family at the time it was proven to be a linguistic group by scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the term was first used in 1813). Of course, modern developments which have spread Indo-European languages around the world now suggest another name for the family, but the term Indo-European (German Indogermanisch) is now well rooted in the scholarly tradition. Establishing languages as members of linguistic families is a process which must be
accomplished using proven methods and principles of scientific analysis. During the approximately two centuries in which the interrelationships within the Indo-European family have been systematically studied, techniques to confirm and quantify genetic affiliations among its members have been developed with great success. Chief among these is the comparative method, which takes shared features among languages as its data and provides procedures for establishing protoforms (reconstruction). The comparative method is supplemented by the method of internal reconstruction and the application of principles of typological inference, which can be utilised together with the comparative method to achieve reliable reconstructions. But since space is limited and the focus of this chapter is Indo-European and not methods of reconstruction, we will restrict ourselves here to a brief review of the comparative method as it applies under normal conditions, using only data from Indo-European languages, though it should be pointed out that the method is generally applicable to the world’s languages, regardless of family affiliation. When we claim that two or more languages are genetically related, we are also claiming
that they share common ancestry. And if we make such a claim about common ancestry, then our methods should provide us with a means of recovering the ancestral system, attested or not. The initial demonstration of relatedness is only a first step;
more plex. Among the difficulties are: which features in which of the languages being compared are older? which are innovations? which are the result of contact? how many shared similarities are enough to prove relatedness conclusively, and how are they weighted for significance? what assumptions do we make about the relative importance of lexical, morphological, syntactic and phonological features, and about directions of language change? With these questions in mind, we begin the reconstruction process with the following
assumption: if two or more languages share a feature which is unlikely to have arisen by accident, borrowing or as the result of some typological tendency or language universal, then under normal circumstances (i.e. in contrast with the rare instances of language mixing), the feature is assumed to have arisen only once and to have been transmitted to the two or more languages from a common source. The more such features are discovered and securely identified, the firmer the relationship. In determining genetic relationship and reconstructing proto-forms using the com-
parative method, we usually start with vocabulary. Table 1.1 contains a number of words from various Indo-European languages which demonstrate a common core of lexical items too large and too basic to be explained either by accident or borrowing. A list of possible cognates which is likely to produce a maximum number of common inheritance items, known as the basic vocabulary list, provides many of the words we might investigate, such as basic kinship terms, pronouns, major body parts, lower numerals and other lexical fields which have proven to be resistant to borrowing in this family. From these and other data we seek to establish sets of equations known as correspondences, which represent statements that in a given environment X phoneme of one language will correspond to Y phoneme of another language consistently and systematically if the two languages are descended from a common ancestor.
