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Essay on Family of Indo-European Languages and Their Relationship with Phonetics
The term 'Indo-European' is essentially a geographical label that indicates the eastern (India) and western ( Europe) the Indo-European languages became so different from each other that their common ancestry is readily apparent in only a relatively small number of words and forms. In most cases careful scrutiny and comparison is required to verify cognate elements.
The Indo-European language family is made up of eleven subgroups, though one hastens to add that various scholars see the issue of sub grouping differently, especially on the question of Balto-Slavic, Italo-Celtic, and some of the peripheral languages such as Venetic and Illyrian. In this volume we shall follow a neutral course on these issues; the groupings that follow in most cases do not reflect anything more than a synopsis of prevailing thought. The eleven major groups are Italic, Hellenic (= Greek), Indo-Iranian, Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Armenian, Anatolian, Albanian, and Tocharian. Other important, but largely fragmentary, languages that have been securely interpreted as Indo-European are Thracian, Phrygian, Ligurian, Messapic, Venetic, Illyrian, Lepontic, Sicel, and Raetic.
For a very long time it was common practice in comparative Indo-European linguistics to propose statements about the protolanguage on the basis of mainly three language groups, Italic, Hellenic, and Indo-Iranian, with the strongest secondary support from Germanic and Slavic. Of course, this practice is not scientifically sound, since it tends to relegate the other dialects to a silent secondary status, to be called forth when the need arises for a representative example of lexicon or morphology. Many scholars have condemned this practice (especially those with specializations in language areas other than these three), citing a historical conspiracy of the 'triumvirate' ('trilinguate'?) of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in historical reconstruction. This practice is criticized on yet other grounds, which relate to observed trends of language change. It has long been known that social and political change brings with it an accelerated rate of language change......
