OLD ENGLSH
English is an Indo-European language. Indo-European was discovered to be the parent language of most European, Anterior-Asian, and Indian languages. As a rule, according to prototypical features of some of these languages, two main branches are defined in the Indo-European language tree, namely an eastern branch and a western branch. However, scholars have disputes about where the divisions within the Indo-European language family are to be placed. For example, in examining languages other than the prototypical, it has been found that not all languages can be classified into one of the two main branches, the eastern and western branches, of language families.
How do we recover features of languages which are so old that no speakers live to tell us about them? Historical linguistics deduces that an abundant occurance of features in a daughter language, the presence of which cannot be explained by language universals or by the assumption of them having been borrowed, or adopted, from another tongue, is likely to have been inherited from the parent language. Thus, by inferencing from widespread phenomena on a mother tongue from which these phenomena came, linguists trace back languages. In Indo-European languages, for example, obvious correlations can be found. The Latin (L.) and
Sanskrit (S.) words for "hundred",namely L. "centum" and S. "satem", can be traced back to a common root. Since these two languages were considered to be the most prominent examples for the respective branches, the whole branches were named after them. Also, former scholars believed that they should make judgements about the various languages. Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek were commonly believed to be of a higher quality than the modern languages. Often scholars argued that these languages were more "pure" and praised their "perfection" and "clarity". Today we consider such notions to be outdated.
There is no room in linguistics for the approval or disapproval of a language. If we look for the origin of a word, we call this the word's etymology (etymon = Greek for "root").Within the Indo-European family tree and among the centum languages, we find language families like the Germanic, Celtic, or Latin families. Some authors refer to the early Germanic language as "Proto-Germanic". The Germanic language family is again split up in the West-, East-, and North-Germanic groups.While the Scandinavian tongues derived from the North-Germanic language group, Anglo-Frisian and Modern German came from the West-Germanic group.In the case of English, interaction with other languages was very important during its history,
as we will see. Hence, many influences from foreign sources can be found in Modern English, while the family tree does not suggest these interchanges to have occurred.
