The notion of «protolanguage» Principles of establishing relationships. Classification of Indo-European family

Protolanguage is known or hypothesized language that serves a common ancestor of attested, or documented, known languages. Reconstruction of the parent language is a hypothesis about the specific form of protolanguage that could most reasonably have changed into the documented daughter languages.

The Proto-Indo-European language is the linguistic reconstruction of a common ancestor of the Indo-European languages spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans.

The comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyses the internal development of a single language over time. Ordinarily both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages, to fill in gaps in the historical record of a language and to confirm or refute hypothesized relationships between languages. Principles of establishing relationships: 1)Core vocabulary (terms of kinship, names of animals and plants, natural phenomena, parts of a body, numerals up to 10, simple colours, personal and demonstrative pronouns, etc.) 2)theory of agglutinating (common affixes) by F. Bopp 3)laws of phonetic correspondence Important aspect of the comparative method is the assumption that sound change is regular, that the same sound in the same general environment will develop in the same way. The basic principles of historical phonetic change do not occur at random but in pattern.

The surviving languages show various degrees of similarity to one another, the similarity bearing a more or less direct relationship to their geographical distribution. They accordingly fall into eleven principal groups: Indian (Sanskrit ext, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi), Iranian (Persian, Iranian), Armenian (Armenian), Hellenic (Greek), Albanian (Albanian), Italic (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian), Balto-Slavic (Baltic: Prussian, Latvian, Lituanian; West Slavic: Polish, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian; South Slavic: Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian, Sloven, Macedonian; East Slavic: Russian, Belarusian, Ukranian), Germanic (East G.: Gothic, Burgundian, Vandalic; North G.: eastern group: Swedish, Danish, western group: Norwegian and Icelandic; West G.: Low German: Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, Old English; High German), Celtic (Scotland and Ireland: Scottish, Gaelic, Irish, Manx; Brytonic:Welsh, Cornish, Breton) Hittite, and Tocharian

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