Mindjog Based on the languages provided on the paper, answer the following questions. (1) Compare and contrast the words provided for the languages… which languages are most similar and most different? (2) There are four groups of 2 which are most closely related to each other… group them and be prepared to defend the grouping (3) Do you think that it is possible that all 8 languages are related?

Objective TWW analyze particular words of various languages in order to evaluate the manner in which language was diffused throughout the worlds

Indo-European Language Family a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed long before recorded history World’s most extensive spoken language family by a wide margin nearly 3 billion people speak an Indo-European language as their first language

Indo-European Language Family LANGUAGE BRANCH – a collection of languages related through a common ancestral language that existed several thousand years ago. (1) Germanic Branch (2) Indo-Iranian Branch (3) Balto-Slavic Branch (4) Romance Branch LANGUAGE GROUP – a collection of languages within a branch that share a common origin in the relatively recent past and display relatively few differences in grammar and vocabulary

Discussion Question Using your understanding of cultural diffusion, develop 5 “theories” as to how all 8 of these languages are part of the same language family

Germanic Branch Language A – English Language E – German English’s relationship to the Germanic Branch because of the German Tribes that invaded England 1,500 years ago.

Indo-Iranian Branch Language C – Hindi Language H – Urdu Language branch with the most speakers 100 individual languages spoken by 1 billion people Hindi – actually a collection of various different languages with one official script Urdu – spoken very similar to Hindi but written with Arabic alphabet

Balto – Slavic Branch Language B – Russian Language F – Ukranian Growth of Slavic Languages (primarily Russian) is the result of USSR’s political importance in the 20th century Soviet officials forced native speakers of other languages to learn Russian as a way of fostering cultural unity among the country’s diverse peoples

Romance Language Language D – Italian Language G – Portuguese Expansion of the Roman Empire and the use of Latin Vulgar Latin – spoken form of Latin that diffused throughout the empire Collapse of Roman Empire – lack of communication, increasing the regional variation Geography – rugged mountains mirror the modern boundaries of many Romance Language Countries

Proto-Indo-European Language Developed by William Jones and Jakob Grimm (did not work together) Jones – sound shifts between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin… all had to spring from one common source that no longer existed Grimm – sound shifts, especially the hard consonants, could change over time in a predictable manner Vater Vader Father

How to Discover language hearths! Backward Reconstruction Intense analysis of sound shifts and hardening of consonants backward through the original language Deep Reconstruction - Extinct Language or its preceding Language Nostraic – ancient ancestor of Proto-Indo European… hunter gatherers

Backward Reconstruction Categories Divergence… a lack of spatial interaction among speakers of a language breaks the language into dialects and discrete language when isolation is maintained.

Backward Reconstruction Categories Convergence… collapsing two languages into one, which occurs when interaction increases between the people of the two languages

EXIT DISCUSSION How do the concepts of convergence and divergence permit the Indo-European Language Family to include all of the languages (and even more) that we analyzed today?