Indo-European

It turns out that most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia are related into one superfamily, referred to as Indo-European. The various subgroups of Indo-European include:

• Indo-Iranian languages
• Italic languages (including Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages)
• Germanic languages
• Celtic languages
• Baltic languages
• Slavic languages
• Illyrian languages (Albanian and extinct cousins)
• Anatolian languages (extinct, most notable was the language of the Hittites)
• Tocharian languages (extinct tongues of Tocharians)
• Greek language
• Armenian language

The original homeland of the speakers of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is not known for certain, but probably lies somewhere around the black sea. Most of the subgroups diverged and had spread out over much of Europe and the MiddleEast during the fourth and third millenia BC. Discussion of PIE culture has been stalled by its association with the racist doctrines of National socialism, but enormous amounts of work has been done on its structure and vocabulary.

These are all Inflected languages. Some work indicates they may belong to a hypothetical language superfamily called the Nostratic languages. For those interested in such things, the original sounds appear to be

p t ky k kw Voiceless stops

b d gy g gw Voiced stops

bh dh ghy gh ghw Voiced aspirated stops

s z H1 H2 H3 Spirants, laryngeals (quality unknown)

r l y w m n Semi-vowels, nasals (all can be vocalic)

a e i o u Short vowels

â ę î ô? ű? Long vowels