... its earliest well- attested member; the languages used were Old Church Slavonic, Lithuanian, Old English, Vedic Sanskrit, Avestan ... daughter languages, as seen in the familiar illustrations, is most unrealistic: as we have already ... Trask’s Historical Linguistics provides an accessible introduction to historical linguistics – the study of language change over time. This engaging book is illustrated with language examples from all six continents, and covers the fundamental concepts of language change, methods for historical linguistics, linguistic reconstruction, sociolinguistic aspects of language change, language contact, the birth and death of languages, language and prehistory, and the issue of very remote relations. The fourth edition of this renowned textbook is fully revised and updated and covers the most recent developments in historical linguistics, including: A thorough reworking of sections on morphological and syntactic change, incorporating progress in areas such as grammaticalization and the discussion o

back to the Proto-Dravidian stage. In addition, a number of grammatical features of Vedic Sanskrit not found in its sister Avestan language appear to have The Dravidian languages are a family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, but also in parts of North India, Bangladesh and Nepal, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets in Afghanistan and Iran. The most commonly spoken Dravidian languages are (in descending order) Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, all of which have long literary traditions. Dravidian languages show extensive lexical (vocabulary) borrowing, but only a few traits of structural (either phonological or grammatical) borrowing from Indo-Aryan, whereas Indo-Aryan shows more structural than lexical borrowings from the Dravidian languages. Many of these features are already present in the oldest known Indo-Aryan language, the language of the Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE), which also includes over a dozen words borrowed from Dravidian, including ulūkhala- 'mortar', khála- 'threshing floor' and mayūra 'peacock'. Vedic Sanskrit has retroflex consonants (ṭ/ḍ, ṇ) with about 88 words in the Rigveda having unconditioned retroflexes. Some sample words are Iṭanta, Kaṇva, śakaṭī, kevaṭa, puṇya and maṇḍūka. Since other Indo-European languages, including other Indo-Iranian languages, lack retroflex consonants, their presence in Indo-Aryan is often cited as evidence of substrate influence from close contact of the Vedic speakers with speakers of a foreign language family rich in retroflex consonants. The Dravidian family is a serious candidate since it is rich in retroflex phonemes reconstructible back to the Proto-Dravidian stage. In addition, a number of grammatical features of Vedic Sanskrit not found in its sister Avestan language appear to have been borrowed from Dravidian languages. These include the gerund, which has the same function as in Dravidian. Some linguists explain this asymmetrical borrowing by arguing that Middle Indo-Aryan languages were built on a Dravidian substratum. These scholars argue that the most plausible explanation for the presence of Dravidian structural features in Indic is language shift, that is, native Dravidian speakers learning and adopting Indic languages due to elite dominance. Although each of the innovative traits in Indic could be accounted for by internal explanations, early Dravidian influence is the only explanation that can account for all of the innovations at once; moreover, it accounts for several of the innovative traits in Indic better than any internal explanation that has been proposed.

Indo-European languages such as Vedic Sanskrit, Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Persian and Old Avestan. Notably, Hittite did not have a masculine–feminine Hittite, also known as Nesite, is an extinct Indo-European language formerly spoken in Anatolia during the Bronze Age. The language is attested in cuneiform texts, primarily from the archives of the city of Hattusa, between the 17th century BC to the 13th century BC. Isolated Hittite words and personal names appear in Old Assyrian documents in Kanesh from as early as the 20th century BC, making it Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language, yet it lacks several grammatical features that are exhibited by other…

upon the study of the Avestan language through the door of the Veda. Entire passages of the Avesta may be turned into good Vedic merely by applying certain