Chart of Indo-European Languages

I found this really well designed chart online for Indo-European languages, both living and extinct, and thought I'd share it with you guys.

Extinct languages are in italics.




Edited by Sirona - 28-Sep-2006 at 13:15

Nice chart Sirona

 

The chart shows the Cornish language dying out, however Cornish is having a bit of a revival.

There are now thought to be about 400-500 fluent speakers and several thousand conversational speakers, with a number of language schools and Cornish meeting evenings taking place.

A lot of road signs in Cornwall are now shown in English and Cornish.

I must say that Balto-Slavic group is pretty hypothetical group.
Linguists are still arguing about if there ever were common group from which Slavic and Baltic branches formed.

Originally posted by Northman Great chart! It just puzzles me a bit that Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic are offsprings from Old Norse, while Swedish and Danish are not? Maybe its because who ever made this chart, has the setting of Old Norse in a later timeframe than I do. It wasnt until after the Viking Age the languages became distinctly different - and the difference between Norwegian, Swedish and Danish is still only marginal. Can anyone shed some light on this?

ive read that baltick is the closest thing to what they think the proto-indo eropean was like. is it fair to be grouped with slavic?

do we know what gaulish is in regards to other celtic languages?

    I'll point at some inaccuracies. The Macedonian language wasn't slavic at all. It has to be either in an independent group of the Indo-European languages or a sub-language in the Hellenic, Thracian or Illyrian groups, but in all cases it must be in Italic. The history tree of the language currently spoken in FYRoMacedonia must look this way:
South Slavic->Old Bulgarian or Slavic Bulgarian(VIth-IXth c.)->Church Slavonic(after IXth c.)-> Middle Bulgarian (12th to 15th century)->Modern Bulgarian(16th century onwards)->"Macedonian" Slavic(1945)

Here're some views on the sublect:
Fr. Scholz, "Slavische Etymologie", 1966, p.61.

"It [Macedonian language] has not created by natural means, as all other languages in the world, but was created by political circumstances. It is an absurd, that it was created on a certain date - namely August 2nd, 1944, and at certain place - the monastery "Prohor Pchinski", with a decree. Such an event has not happened to any other language in the world."

German Balkanologist and linguist, Professor Guslav Wcigand, Ethnographic von Macedonien, 1924

"Whatever segment of this language we analyze, again and again it becomes evident that we deal here not with the Serbian, but the Bulgarian language. All attempts of Serbian chauvinists to design the Bulgarian language as spoken in Macedonia as a Serbian dialect or as a mixed language of indefinite character will therefore end in failure. One could pose the question whether, perhaps, the Macedonian Slavs haven't their own language, something in between Serbian and Bulgarian. Such an assumption, however, would be absolutely unjustified, for, as we have seen, in phonology, morphology and syntax Macedonian Bulgarian and Bulgarian proper harmonize in every respect. Certain exclusively Macedonian peculiarities cannot essentially change this picture. In the lexicon there occurs a number of words of Greek or Turkish origin which do not exist in the Serbian or Bulgarian vocabulary. In proportion to the overall lexicon, however, their number is quite insignificant, as can be seen from the linguistic samples adduced here, which clearly demonstrate that Macedonian can only be considered a Bulgarian Dialect"

"The Federative Republic Of Skopje And Its Language."
Nicholas Andriotis : Professor of Linguistics at the University of Thessaloniki.

"...Similarities with the Bulgarian language.

Apart, however, from the features which the dialect spoken in the State of Skopje possesses in common with Serb, there are other more numerous, and more important characteristics which that dialect shares with
Bulgarian and which are unknown in Serb. These are as follows:

1. The reduction of case endings of nouns to three only, the Nominative, the Dative and the Accusative which further tend to be effectively limited to one. The Serb language, by contrast, has preserved 7 different case endings.

2. The use of prefixes for the formation of the comparative and the superlative degrees, e.g. rano (= early), po-rano (earlier). In Serb, by contrast, suffixes are used for that purpose, e.g. ran-ije.

3. The obsolescence of the infinitive, still used in Serb.

4. The transformation of the indicative pronoun masc. -ot-, fem.- ta-, neut. -to- into an article which follows the nouns as e.g. in angelot (the angel) zena-ta (the woman), selo-to (the village), plural angelite,
zeni-te, sela-ta and the use of a triple article, e.g. maz-ot (= man), maz-ou (the man here), rnaz-on (= the man there). The last two --ou-- and --on-- characterise the Skopje dialect only. ( The appended article is common in Albanian, Rumanian, the Scandinavian languages and Armenian.)

5. The accent of words is dynamic, as in Bulgarian, whilst in Serb it is musical.

6. As in Bulgarian, an identical ending -i- was retained for both masculine and feminine plurals, whereas in Serb the ending -e>-e was generally adopted in feminine nouns.

7. The third person plural ends in -at-. This is also the case in Bulgarian but not in Serb where it ends in -u.

8. It uses the interrogative pronoun Koj = which) instead of --Kto ( = who). However, the same substitution is found in several other Balkan languages including Modern Greek.

9. Like Bulgarian, it uses the form -ni- for the pronoun " we"

10. It uses the aggregative ending -mina- which is also used in Bulgarian.

11. It contains a large number, probably thousands, of Greek words.

This is also true of Bulgarian but not of Serb which has very few..."

"Indeed, the macedonian language is a product essentialy of political origin"-V. Pisani, "Il Macedonico", in, "Paideia" 12 (1957), p.250.

"From a strictly linguistic point of view Macedonian can be called a Bulgarian dialect, as structurally it is most similar to Bulgarian."- Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (1994)

"Macedonian [language] is similar to Bulgarian and is sometimes been regarded as a variety of that language"-'Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education' P. 415, by Colin Baker, Sylvia Prys Jones

Following the same logic the Austrian should be proclaimed as different from the German language, US, Astralian etc. from the English.
Here're some of the official decreets for the creation of "Macedonian" language, including the replacement of all characteristic for the Bulgarian letters with such from Serbo-Croatian:





    
    
Linguistic and ethnographic maps of Europe:




    
    

Edited by Desperado - 04-Oct-2006 at 07:56

deleted

Edited by Anton - 04-Oct-2006 at 13:55

Where is the Scottish language? It is usually put in the "West Germanic" category.

Originally posted by Komnenos It is certainly spoken actively by more people than Manx, for example.

Yes, just as Scottish is spoken by 1.5 million people.

It was better to seperate Iranian languages from Indian ones since they are realy diffrent.