rekordy: Greek language

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Greek (Modern Greek: ελληνικά, romanized: elliniká [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek: ἑλληνική, romanized: hellēnikḗ [helːɛːnikɛ́ː]) is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to the territories that have had populations of Greeks since antiquity: Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Turkey, Italy (in Calabria and Salento), southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, the Black Sea coast, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approxima…

Evidence: 24 • authority: 88

Etymology and History: For a Study of ‘Medical Language’ in Indo-European. Abstract ‘The desire to use linguistic facts to reconstruct prehistoric events is old’ (Morpurgo Davies 1998: 174). And it persists. In her vivid and thought-provoking history of nineteenth-century linguistics Anna Davies shows how attitudes to language-based history-writing, or ‘linguistic palaeontology’, changed significantly from the confidence of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, so as to yield in the last part of the nineteenth century a much more cautious approach to the notion of reconstructing Indo-European culture on the basis of reconstructed lexical items. It is tempting to see…

Evidence: 24 • authority: 72

The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia (modern Turkey). The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, the earliest-attested Indo-European language. Only discovered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Anatolian languages are probably the earliest branch to have split from Proto-Indo-European. The presence of the laryngeal consonants ḫ and ḫḫ in Hittite and Luwian provided support for the laryngeal theory of Indo-European linguistics. While Hittite attestation ends after the Bronze Age, hieroglyphic Luwian survived until the conquest of the Neo-Hittite kingdoms by the Semitic Assyrian Empire, and alphabetic inscriptions…

Evidence: 24 • authority: 72

The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the north of the Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and Greater Iran, with additional native branches found in regions such as Armenia, parts of the southern Indian subcontinent (Sri Lanka and the Maldives), and even stretching as far as to mainland Southeast Asia (Rohingya language in Myanmar). Historically, Indo-European languages were also spoken in Anatolia and Northwestern China. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches, of which eight are still spoken: four by hundreds of millions of native speakers each (Indo-Iranian, Italic, Germanic, and Balto-Slavic), and four by fewer than fifteen million native speake…