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.

The Celtic or Keltic languages ( usually pronounced but sometimes ) are descended from Proto-Celtic, or " Common Celtic "; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family.

In Hungarian and many Indo-European, Balto-Finnic, and Semitic languages, case is marked on the noun, the determiner, and usually the adjective.

A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of isolate in such cases is usually clarified.

Depending on the date of Zoroaster ( usually placed in the early Iron Age ), this may be one of the earliest documented instances of the emergence of monism in an Indo-European religion.

The name of the river Danube is believed to be Celtic in origin, and Celtic river deities are usually female ; Hindu mythology has a goddess called Danu, who may be an Indo-European parallel.

It is now usually derived from the Indo-European root * dhēi -, " to suck, suckle " and a form dhīśana.

The Caucasoid peoples were usually divided in three groups on linguistic grounds, termed Aryan ( Indo-European ), Semitic ( Semitic languages ) and Hamitic ( Berber-Cushitic-Egyptian ).

In Indo-European languages such as Greek, Sanskrit, Armenian and Macedonian, as well as languages influenced by the Indo-European tradition, such as Georgian, the term is usually used for forms that express perfective aspect and often refer to past events.

In Indo-European languages, a dependent clause usually begins with a dependent word.

Adivasi beliefs vary by tribe, and are usually different from the historical Vedic religion, with its monistic underpinnings, Indo-European deities ( who are often cognates of ancient Iranian, Greek and Roman deities, e. g. Mitra / Mithra / Mithras ), lack of idol worship and lack of a concept of reincarnation.

Furthermore, the majority of researchers have found significant evidence in support of Indo-European migration and even " elite dominance " of the northern half of the Indian subcontinent, usually pointing to three separate lines of evidence: the previously widespread distribution of Dravidian speakers, now confined to the south of India ; the fact that upper caste Brahmins share a close genetic affinity with West Eurasians, whereas low caste Indians tend to have more in common with aboriginals or East Asians ; and the comparatively recent introgression of West Eurasian DNA into the aboriginal population of the post-Neolithic Indo-Gangetic plain.

It was usually ascribed to the speakers of what we now term the Indo-European languages.

* Arabic: Suffixes standing for direct object pronouns and / or indirect object pronouns ( as found in Indo-European languages ) are suffixed to verbs, possessive determiners are suffixed to nouns, and pronouns are suffixed to particles.

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 ).

Both languages have the dual for nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs ; very few known living Indo-European languages retain this feature as a productive aspect of the grammar ( see Slovenian grammar or Lithuanian grammar for other ones ).

Umlaut should be clearly distinguished from other historical vowel phenomena such as the earlier Indo-European ablaut ( vowel gradation ), which is observable in the declension of Germanic strong verbs such as sing / sang / sung.

Nouns, adjectives, and verbs in the Indo-European languages with this vowel are thematic, and those without it are athematic.

Chinese verbs do not conjugate like the verbs of most Indo-European languages such as English or Spanish.

As is typical of verbs in virtually all languages, Spanish verbs express an action or a state of being of a given subject, and like verbs in most of the Indo-European languages, Spanish verbs undergo inflection according to the following categories:

Its structure, what can be recovered from it, was typically Indo-European, with nouns declined for case ( at least four ), gender ( three ) and number ( singular and plural ), while the verbs are conjugated for tense, voice, mood, person and number.

Like most Indo-European languages, including English, Portuguese classifies most of its lexicon into four word classes: verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs.

The Lexicon of the Indo-European verbs edited by Rix appeared in 1997 as a first step towards a modernization of Pokorny's dictionary ; a corresponding tome addressing the noun is in preparation.

Only two verbs are completely irregular, being composed of parts of more than one Indo-European verb.

All Indo-European verbs that passed into Germanic as functioning verbs were strong, apart from the small group of irregular verbs discussed below.

The preterite of strong verbs are the reflex of the Indo-European perfect.

The reduplication characteristic of the Indo-European perfect remains in a number of verbs ( seen most clearly in Gothic ), a distinction by which they are grouped together as the seventh class of Germanic strong verbs.

Since the preterite-present verbs are non-past and signify current states ( temporalized as present tense ), they constitute a retention of the non-past nature of the Indo-European perfect.

Propositions that are expressed in most Indo-European languages by noun qualifiers ( such as adjectives ) are instead expressed by stative verbs in many other languages.

Recent subgrouping calculations of Indo-European branches using a method that accounts for the distribution of PIE verbs ( SLR-D ) reject an early separation of Anatolian languages altogether and yield results that place a genealogical split of Anatolian ( and Tocharian ) within a more recent grouping together with Greek, Albanian and Armenian, in a single branch together with Indo-Iranian, though at distance from the genealogical splits of Balto-Slavic, Italo-Celtic and Germanic that are harboured within another branch, thus supporting proponents of an IE expansion that roughly parallels the adoption of the bronze metallurgy.