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Information about Italic Languages

Indo-European topics
Indo-European languages
Albanian Anatolian Armenian
Baltic Celtic Dacian Germanic
Greek Indo-Iranian Italic Phrygian
Slavic Thracian Tocharian
 
Indo-European peoples
Albanians Anatolians Armenians
Balts Celts Germanic peoples
Greeks Indo-Aryans Indo-Iranians
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Thracians Tocharians
 
Proto-Indo-Europeans
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Hypothetical distribution of languages in Iron Age Italy during the sixth century BC.
The Italic subfamily is a member of the Centum branch of the Indo-European language family. It includes the Romance languages (including Italian, Catalan, Occitan, French, Corsican, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish), and a number of extinct languages.

Phonetic Changes

A partial list of regular phonetic changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Italic:
  • Palatovelars merge with plain velars
  • ḱ > k
  • ǵʱ > ɡʱ
  • ǵ > ɡ
  • Voiced labiovelars unround or lenite
  • ɡʱʷ > ɡʱ
  • ɡʷ > ɡ or w
  • Voiced aspirates become first unvoiced, then fricativize
  • bʱ > pʰ > ɸ > f
  • dʱ > tʰ > θ
  • ɡʱ > kʰ > x
  • s > θ before r; unchanged elsewhere
  • Resonants and remaining stops (m n l r w b d ɡ p t k kʷ) unchanged
Further changes occurred during the evolution of the individual Italic languages, such as f > b between vowels and θ > f in Latin.

Irregular changes include p > kʷ in e.g. Latin quinque "5" from PIE *penkʷe, by analogy with PIE *kʷetwores, "4".

Branches

The Italic family has two known branches: The Italic speakers were not native to Italy, but migrated into the Italian Peninsula in the course of the 2nd millennium BC, and were apparently related to the Celtic tribes that roamed over a large part of Western Europe at the time. Archaeologically, the Apennine culture (inhumations) enters the Italian Peninsula from ca. 1350 BC, east to west; the Iron Age reaches Italy from ca. 1100 BC, with the Villanovan culture (cremating), intruding north to south. Before the Italic arrival, Italy was populated primarily by non-Indo-European groups (perhaps including the Etruscans). The first settlement on the Palatine hill dates to ca. 750 BC, settlements on the Quirinal to 720 BC (see Founding of Rome).

The ancient Venetic language, as revealed by its inscriptions (including complete sentences), was also closely related to the Italic languages and is sometimes even classified as Italic. However, since it also shares similarities with other Western Indo-European branches (particularly Germanic), some linguists prefer to consider it an independent Indo-European language.

The Italic languages are first attested in writing from Umbrian and Faliscan inscriptions dating to the 7th century BC. The alphabets used are based on the Old Italic alphabet, which is itself based on the Greek alphabet. The Italic languages themselves show minor influence from the Etruscan and somewhat more from the Ancient Greek languages.

As Rome extended its political dominion over the whole of the Italian Peninsula, so too did Latin become dominant over the other Italic languages, which ceased to be spoken perhaps sometime in the 1st century AD. From so-called Vulgar Latin the Romance languages emerged.

See also

References

  • Ernst Pulgram: Tongues of Italy, Prehistory and History
  • Rix, Helmut (2004). Ausgliederung und Aufgliederung der italischen Sprachen. Languages in Prehistoric Europe. ISBN 3-8253-1449-9
  • Yves Cortez (2007) "Le français ne vient pas du latin" Edition L'harmattan.Paris ISBN 978-2-296-03O81-7
Indo-European languages comprise a family of several hundred related languages and dialects [1], including most of the major languages of Europe, the northern Indian subcontinent (South Asia), the Iranian plateau (Southwest Asia), and much of Central Asia.
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Albanian (gjuha shqipe IPA /ˈɟuˌha ˈʃciˌpɛ/
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Anatolian languages are a group of extinct Indo-European languages, which were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.

List

  • Hittite (nesili), attested from ca.

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 Armenian}}} 
Writing system: Armenian alphabet 
Official status
Official language of: Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh
Regulated by: National Academy of Sciences of Armenia
Language codes
ISO 639-1: hy
ISO 639-2: arm (B)
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Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe.
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Celtic languages are the languages descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic", a branch of the greater Indo-European language family. During the 1st millennium BC, they were spoken across Europe, from the Bay of Biscay and the North Sea, up the Rhine and down the Danube to the
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 Dacian}}}
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: ine
ISO 639-3: xdc
Indo-European topics
Indo-European languages
Albanian Anatolian Armenian
Baltic Celtic Dacian Germanic
Greek Indo-Iranian Italic Phrygian
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Germanic languages are a group of related languages constituting a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The common ancestor of all languages comprising this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the latter mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age Northern Europe.
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Greek}}} 
Writing system: Greek alphabet 
Official status
Official language of:  Greece
 Cyprus
 European Union
recognised as minority language in parts of:
 European Union
 Italy
 Turkey
Regulated by:
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Indo-Iranian language group constitutes the easternmost extant branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It consists of four language groups: the Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Nuristani, and Dardic.
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Phrygian language was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, a people of the central Asia Minor.

Inscriptions

Phrygian is attested by two corpora, one from around 800 BC and later (Paleo-Phrygian), and then after a period of several centuries from around the
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Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of
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 Thracian}}}
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: ine
ISO 639-3: txh
Indo-European topics
Indo-European languages
Albanian Anatolian Armenian
Baltic Celtic Dacian Germanic
Greek Indo-Iranian Italic Phrygian
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 Tocharian languages}}} 
Writing system: Tocharian script
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: ine
ISO 639-3: either:
xto  — 
txb  —  Tocharian or Tokharian
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Indo-European people are the speakers of the Indo-European languages, a major language family of Eurasia. In the context of linguistics, the term usually refers to Bronze Age (third to second millennia BC) speakers of Indo-European languages that had not yet split into the attested
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For demographic information, see Demographics of Albania.


Albanians
Shqiptarë

Total population Approximately 8 million
Regions with significant populations
 Albania
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This article or section needs copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone and/or spelling.
You can assist by [ editing it] now. A how-to guide is available, as is general .
This article has been tagged since September 2007.
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8 to 10 million[1]
Regions with significant populations
 Armenia
 Russia
 United States
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Balts or Baltic peoples (Latvian: balti; Lithuanian: baltai; Latgalian: bolti
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Celts, normally pronounced /kɛlts/ (see article on pronunciation), is widely used to refer to the members of any of the peoples in Europe using the Celtic languages or descended from those who did.
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Germanic peoples are a historical group of Indo-European-speaking peoples, originating in Northern Europe and identified by their use of the Germanic languages which diversified out of Common Germanic in the course of the Pre-Roman Iron Age.
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17,000,000
Regions with significant populations
 Greece [1]
 United States
 Cyprus
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Indo-Aryans are a wide collection of peoples united by their common status as speakers of the Indo-Aryan (Indic/Indian) branch of the family of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian languages.
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Indo-Iranian peoples consist of the Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Dardic and Nuristani peoples, that is, speakers of Indo-Iranian languages. An archaic term for these peoples is Aryan.
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The Iranian peoples (See[1] for local names) are a collection of ethnic groups defined by their usage of Iranian languages and their descent from ancient Iranian peoples.
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Ancient Italic peoples are all those peoples that lived in Italy before the Roman domination. Not all of these various peoples are linguistically or ethnically closely related.
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Slavic peoples are a branch of Indo-European peoples, living mainly in Europe, where they constitute roughly a third of the population. Since emerging from their original homeland (most commonly thought to be in Eastern Europe) in the early 6th century, they have inhabited most of
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Thracians were a group of ancient Indo-European tribes who spoke the Thracian language - a scarcely attested branch of the Indo-European language family. Those peoples inhabited the Eastern, Central and Southern part of the Balkan peninsula, as well as the adjacent parts of Eastern
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Tocharians were the Tocharian-speaking inhabitants of the Tarim basin, making them the easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language in antiquity.

Archaeology

The Tarim mummies suggest that precursors of these easternmost speakers of an Indo-European language may have
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Proto-Indo-Europeans are the hypothetical speakers of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language, a prehistoric people of the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age or according to some modern theories at Neolithic or even Paleolithic.
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