What is the centum language group?
The canonical centum languages of the Indo-European family are the “western” branches: Hellenic, Celtic, Italic and Germanic. They merged Proto-Indo-European palatovelars and plain velars, yielding plain velars only (“centumisation”) but retained the labiovelars as a distinct set.
What do all Indo-European languages have in common?
The chief reason for grouping the Indo-European languages together is that they share a number of items of basic vocabulary, including grammatical affixes, whose shapes in the different languages can be related to one another by statable phonetic rules.
Are Germanic languages centum or Satem?
Germanic languages are generally classified as Centum but it’s probably because they are non-Satem.
What are the three main Indo-European languages?
Some European languages of this family, such as English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents….Indo-European languages.
| Indo-European | |
|---|---|
| Glottolog | indo1319 |
What is the meaning of satem?
Definition of satem : of, relating to, or constituting an Indo-European language group in which the palatal stops became in prehistoric times palatal or alveolar fricatives — compare centum.
What languages are included in satem?
The Satem languages include Indo-Iranian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, and perhaps also a number of barely documented extinct languages, such as Thracian and Dacian. This group merged PIE-velars and PIE-labiovelars to develop into velars, and changed PIE-palatovelars into sibilants .
What was the common characteristics of the Indo Europeans?
What are the characteristics of an Indo-European language? Indo-European langauges are usually inflected languages. This means that they have different endings in nouns, adjectives and verbs that show the grammatical function of that word.
What is the most widely used Indo-European language?
The most widely spoken Indo-European languages by native speakers are Spanish, Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu), English, Portuguese, Bengali, Punjabi, and Russian, each with over 100 million speakers, with German, French, Marathi, Italian, and Persian also having more than 50 million.
What does the stem MA mean?
1 : a simple eye present in some insects. 2 : a scroll (as among the ancient Romans) containing a genealogical list. 3 : a tree showing the relationships of the manuscripts of a literary work.
Is Armenian satem or centum?
The Centum languages are all in the west or south-west (Celtic, Lusitanian, Germanic, Venetic, Italic, Greek, maybe Phrygian) and the Satem languages are in the east (Balto-Slavic, Thracian, Indo-Iranian and Armenian), so it looks like a dialectal division.
Why is Indo-European so widespread?
It spread by conquest where there was a diversity of tribes that probably had many different languages. Probably associated with chariots and a warlike culture. The Indo European language family is widely used in many parts of Europe, the Americas, and in Southern and Western Asia.