Kroeber and Sapir's focus on Native American languages helped establish linguistics as a truly general science and free it from its historical focus on Indo-European languages.

Altogether, Starostin concluded that the Altaic grouping was substantiated, though " older than most other language families in Eurasia, such as Indo-European or Finno-Ugric, and this is the reason why the modern Altaic languages preserve few common elements ".

All of these methods remain to be applied to the languages attributed to Altaic with the same degree of focus and intensity they have been applied to the Indo-European family ( e. g. Mallory 1989, Anthony 2007 ).

However Juhanen ( 1992 ) is skeptical about an affiliation of Japanese to Altaic languages, while Róna-Tas ( 1998: 77 ) remarked that a relationship between Altaic and Japanese, if it ever existed, must be more remote than the relationship of any two of the Indo-European languages.

The Mitanni appeared in the 17th century BC and spoke an Indo-Aryan language related to the Indo-European languages eventually to be found in India.

The Turkish language and the Islamic religion were gradually introduced as a result of the Seljuk conquest, and this period marks the start of Anatolia's slow transition from predominantly Christian and Indo-European and Semitic-speaking, to predominantly Muslim and Turkish-speaking ( Although some ethnic groups such as Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and Georgians retained Christianity and their native languages ).

English 2. 9 % ( closely related to German and other Indo-European languages ).

Vowels and their corresponding semivowels alternate in many languages depending on the phonological environment, or for grammatical reasons, as is the case with Indo-European ablaut.

The accusative case existed in Proto-Indo-European and is present in some Indo-European languages ( including Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, German, Polish, Swedish, Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian ), in the Uralic languages, in Altaic languages, and in Semitic languages ( such as Classical Arabic ).

He particularly criticized the Indo-European languages for promoting a mistaken essentialist world view, which had been disproved by advances in the sciences, whereas he suggested that other languages dedicated more attention to processes and dynamics rather than stable essences.

Though geographically surrounded by Indo-European Romance languages, Basque is classified as a language isolate.

Little is known of its origins but it is likely that an early form of the Basque language was present in Western Europe before the arrival of the Indo-European languages to the area.

* Vasconic substratum hypothesis: This proposal, by the German linguist Theo Vennemann, claims that there is enough toponymical evidence to conclude that Basque is the only survivor of a larger family that once extended throughout most of Europe, and has also left its mark in modern Indo-European languages spoken in Europe.

The Baltic languages are a subbranch of the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family.

It is also believed that Baltic languages are among the most archaic of the remaining Indo-European languages, despite their late attestation.

Linguists have had a hard time establishing the precise relationship of the Baltic languages to other languages in the Indo-European family.

These two factors combined with others have obscured the history of the Baltic languages, leading to a number of theories regarding their position in the Indo-European family.

Indo-European languages usually inflect verbs for several grammatical categories in complex paradigms, although some, like English, have simplified verb conjugation to a large extent.

Due to its marked differences in its structure and phonology, some early philologists, most notably Warren Cowgill even argued that it should be classified as a sister language to Indo-European languages ( Indo-Hittite ), rather than a daughter language.

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.

In some nations, the term Indo-Germanic is in use ; in Germany as the standard scientific term, while in other languages " Indo-European " is the more common term.

It is not discernibly related to other North American or northeast Asian indigenous languages, although some have proposed that it is related to Uralic languages such as Finnish and Saami in the proposed Uralo-Siberian grouping, or even Indo-European languages as part of the hypothetical Nostratic superphylum.

Marathi has the fourth largest number of native speakers in India Marathi has some of the oldest literature of all modern Indo-European, Indic languages, dating from about 1000 AD.

( Indeed, Pedersen's older contemporary Henry Sweet attributed some of the resistance by Indo-European specialists to hypotheses of wider genetic relationships as " prejudice against dethroning from its proud isolation and affiliating it to the languages of yellow races ".

It included the same " Euraltaic " core ( Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic ), but excluded some of the above-listed families, most notably Afroasiatic.

There is some limited evidence in favor of the assumption that the Philistines did originally speak some Indo-European language.

There is some limited evidence in favor of the assumption that the Philistines did originally speak some Indo-European language.

In order to explain the common features shared by Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages, many scholars have proposed migration hypotheses asserting that the original speakers of what became Sanskrit arrived in what is now India and Pakistan from the north-west some time during the early second millennium BCE.

This proposal received some of its initial impetus from the fact that these languages, unlike most of the other languages spoken in Europe, are not part of the Indo-European family.

He posits that this ancestral language, together with Indo-European and Kartvelian, descends from a " Eurasiatic " protolanguage some 12, 000 years ago, which in turn would be descended from a " Borean " protolanguage via Nostratic.

Although it has been lost by many modern Indo-European languages, some languages have retained the vocative case to this day.

In his Man into Wolf ( 1948 ), anthropologist Robert Eisler drew attention to the fact that many Indo-European tribal names and some modern European surnames mean " wolf " or " wolf-men ".

The Myceneans probably entered Greece with a pantheon of deities headed by some ruling sky-deity which linguists speculate might have been called * Dyeus in early Indo-European.

The modern English name pine derives from Latin pinus which some have traced to the Indo-European base * pīt-‘ resin ’ ( source of English pituitary.

According to some writers, Bactria was the homeland of Indo-European tribes who moved south-west into Iran and into North-Western India around 2500 – 2000 BC.

Russian belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and is one of three ( or, according to some authorities, four ) living members of the East Slavic languages, the others being Belarusian and Ukrainian.

Many Indo-European languages, for example, obey " Wackernagel's Law ", which requires clitics to appear in " second position ", after the first syntactic phrase or the first stressed word in a clause:

" Indo-European reconstructions can be made using " cow " as a basis, such as.

The origins of the Indo-European copulae can be traced back to four different stems * es-(* h < sub > 1 </ sub > es -), * sta-(* steh < sub > 2 </ sub >-), * wes-and * bhu-(* bʰuH -) in most Indo-European languages.

In this way, word roots have been found that can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Proto Indo-European language.

The main difference from other ancient Indo-European languages, such as Latin, is that verbs can be conjugated in only two tenses ( vs. the six " tenses " – really tense / aspect combinations – of Latin ), and have no synthetic passive voice ( although it did still exist in Gothic ).

The difficulty in making any statement on particulars of Proto-Human lies in the time depth involved, which is far beyond what linguists can trace back today ( between five and ten millennia in the cases of Indo-European and Afroasiatic ).

Some researchers such as John A Lucy, Barbara Saunders and Stephen C Levinson have argued that Berlin and Kay's study does not in fact show that linguistic relativity in color naming is impossible, because of a number of basic unsupported assumptions in their study ( such as whether all cultures in fact have a category of " color " that can be unproblematically defined and equated with the one found in Indo-European languages ) and because of problems with their data stemming from those basic assumptions.

Epenthesis can be regular, as when the Indo-European " tool " suffix *- tlom everywhere becomes Latin-culum ( so speculum " mirror " < * speḱtlom, pōculum " drinking cup " < * poH < sub > 3 </ sub >- tlom.

Dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European, persisted in many of the now extinct ancient Indo-European languages that descended from it — Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Gothic for example — and can still be found in a few modern Indo-European languages such as Slovene.

Other Iron Age attestations of the swastika can be associated with Indo-European cultures such as the Indo-Iranians, Celts, Greeks and Germanic peoples and Slavs.

In this way, word roots that can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family have been found.

The alleged ( or certain, as certain as historic linguistics can be ) contact similarities are seen in such phenomena as the existence of definite adjectives, which exist in both Baltic and Slavic and nowhere else in the Indo-European family ( languages such as Albanian and the Scandinavian languages developed definite adjectives only in more recent times ), that are not reconstructible for Proto-Balto-Slavic, meaning they are most likely to have had to have developed through language contact.

The dual number existed in Proto-Indo-European, persisted in many of the now extinct ancient Indo-European languages that descended from it — Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Gothic for example — and can still be found in a few modern Indo-European languages such as Scottish Gaelic, Slovenian, Sorbian, and Frisian.

This came down unchanged from Indo-European and can be seen in quite distantly related Indo-European languages: Russian знаешь, znayesh, thou knowest ; Latin amas, thou lovest.

From Safinim, Sabinus, Sabellus and Samnis an Indo-European root can be extracted, * sabh -, which becomes Sab-in Latino-Faliscan and Saf-in Osco-Umbrian: Sabini and * Safineis.

His argument was not generally accepted, partly because the morphological similarities he observed between Hittite and Indo-European can be found outside of Indo-European, and partly because the interpretation of the letters was justifiably regarded as uncertain.

The sky father can be the complement of the earth mother and appears in some creation myths, many of which are Indo-European or ancient Near Eastern.

Suffixes such as-ascum ,-asca ,-osca ,-incus, can just as well be Indo-European.

Georgiev ( 1977 ) argues that the meaning of an ancient placename in an unknown language can be deciphered by comparing it to its successor-names and to cognate placenames and words in other Indo-European languages, both ancient and modern.

Little more can be said of the languages of Illyria than that they were Indo-European.