ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the range and history of the Indo-European languages. It begins by reviewing early scholarship on comparative philology, and then moves to a historical account of when and where the Indo-European languages developed, migrated, and separated. It looks at some key phonological and grammatical relationships among the languages, and presents some models for understanding those relationships: branch models, wave models, and tree models. It also introduces students to the concepts of an Indo-European poetics: the ways in which many Indo-European languages share notions of poetic inspiration, phrases keyed to the social function of literature, ideas of heroic fame, and techniques of figurative diction.
