Ancient proto-language. An alternative view of a linguist: the Old Russian language is the parent language of all other languages! What is hell and heaven

Finally, we got to the topic of linguistic kinship. I understand in general terms what it is, but still I would like you to demonstrate it somehow.

Yes Easy! Ti chula at least once, how do Ukrainians move?

Haha! Yes. They speak in language.

Then it’s not enough to explain why you were so quick on the food chain. Ukrainian language very similar to Russian, its grammar differs not so much, vocabulary also basically coincides with Russian. There are some differences that make it difficult to understand, but in general we understand Ukrainian speech well and can even get used to it just by listening and imitating it.

The same cannot be said about the speech of other Slavic peoples, who have left us much further linguistically. I'll ask you in Czech: Věříš na zázraky? How will you answer?

I understood the first two words: do you believe And on the. For some reason I don't like the last one. Did you just say something bad?

No. I just asked if you believe in miracles.

Yah you! I don't believe in any miracles.

Okay, not a very good example. Let's simplify the task. Try to translate Polish: Zawsze niech będzie słońce, zawsze niech będzie niebo, zawsze niech będzie mama, zawsze niech będę ja!

Yes, this is a children's song: "Let there always be sunshine ...". It's just not clear how exactly to translate the words zawsze And niech.

Word zawsze means "always" niech- "let be". You can see for yourself that there are languages that you can partially understand without even knowing them. All this is due to linguistic kinship. Here's a miracle for you.

In this case, I gave examples from Slavic languages. But there are more distant languages. Try translating, for example, this simple Greek phrase:

I didn't understand anything at all.

I said that Greek is rather difficult. It is really difficult and very different from the Slavic languages, although it is also related to them at a deep level.

There are words in this sentence that you may be familiar with. For example, the Greek word γλώσσα (glóssa) "language", goes back to Ancient Greek γλῶσσα (glôssa) "language" from which words are derived gloss And glossary. Attic form γλῶττα (glôtta) is also present in the word polyglot.

Exactly! But I never would have guessed. If I knew the translation from the very beginning, then maybe I would have thought about the connection of the word γλώσσα (glossa) with Russian gloss. And so my fantasy just does not work.

But there are no words in this sentence that are related to Russian precisely at the ancient level? What other words in this "alien" Greek can I know? I don't think there are any more.

Still as it is, Marin. You just can't see it without preparation. Words that have been borrowed and look similar to words in the source language are easy to identify. Words that come from the parent language are quite difficult to determine by eye. Word είναι (eínai) here is a relative of a well-known Russian verb. Can you guess what verb I'm talking about?

No, I can't figure out this mystery with my mind.

So be it, I will reveal the age-old secret. Word είναι (eínai) is the 3rd person form singular verb είμαι (eímai) "to be", which comes from ancient Greek εἰμί (eimi) "to be". (Words είμαι (eimai) and εἰμί (eimí) are not infinitives at all, but forms of the 1st person singular, but I usually translate this personal form into Russian as an infinitive, since this form is the main one in our country.) This very verb εἰμί (eimí) is supposed to have evolved from the form *εσμί (esmi).

Now look at the following table and find ten differences.

Russian	Staroslav.	ancient greek	Latin	Sanskrit
am	I am	εἰμί (eimi)		अस्मि (ásmi)
thou art		εἶ (eî)		असि (asi)
eat	yes	ἐστί (ν ) (estí(n))		अस्ति (ásti)
Esme	ѥsm	ἐσμέν (esmen)		स्मस् (smás)
yeste	Yeste	ἐστέ (este)		स्थ (sthá)
essence	network	εἰσί (ν ) (eisí(n))		सन्ति (santi)

These forms of the verb "to be" in different languages are among the most ancient. They partially retained their appearance in modern languages, but this can only be found in comparison. By the way, it is comparison, if you remember, that underlies comparative historical linguistics.

Wow! I have now seen the light a little, but I suddenly had two questions. First, what did these, as you say, ancient forms look like then? Second, why forms English verb be so different from those that you brought? After all, English, as far as I understand, is also related to Russian?

Undoubtedly, English is related to Russian. All Germanic languages are also Indo-European. And the corresponding Germanic verb forms also go back to the general ancient paradigm of the conjugation of the verb "to be", but there the changes are of a slightly different nature.

Here's another table for you to compare. It presents Proto-Indo-European (PIE), Proto-Germanic, Gothic, modern English and German forms.

	Teutonic	Gothic	English	German
h₁ esmi*
h₁ esi*
h₁ esti*
h₁ sm̥os*
h₁ ste*
h₁ senti*

As you have probably already noticed, some English and German forms of the verb "to be" do not fit into the general scheme. This is explained quite simply. English word are goes back to Old English earon and is, in fact, a form of a completely different verb that has replaced the original forms. German forms bin, best are forms of the Proto-Germanic verb *beuna, which, by the way, is related to the Russian word to be. Linguists call this phenomenon suppletivism.

You know, now I feel like I know everything. Only I have one more question to this table. It might sound stupid, but I'll ask anyway. Russian word eat related to English is? Did I understand correctly?

English is, French est, Italian è , Czech je, Persian است (ast), Armenian է (ē) - all these are words that are related to Russian eat. (Of course, this verb form should not be confused with the infinitive eat meaning "to eat". These are common homonyms.)

Now also Armenian? Yes, this is generally somewhere in the Caucasus! I got confused. So which languages are considered Indo-European?

The Indo-European language family extends from India in the east to Iceland in the west. This is its historical area, today Indo-European languages are also common on other continents. It is the largest language family in the world. The classification of Indo-European languages is quite extensive, so I will only mention the largest and most famous languages.

The Indo-Iranian (Aryan) branch of the Indo-European language family includes: Nuristani (Ashkun, Waigali, Kati, Prasun), Indo-Aryan (Bengali, Gujarati, Maldivian, Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Sinhalese, Sindhi, Hindi), Dardic (Kalash, Kashmiri, Khovar, Pashai, Sheena) and Iranian languages (Baluchi, Dari, Kurmanji, Leki, Persian, Sorani, Tajik, Khazar, Central Iranian, South Kurdish). The ancient languages of this branch: Avestan, Old Indian, Old Persian, Median, Mitannian.

Armenian (ancient Armenian) and Greek (ancient Greek) are distinguished separately. Sometimes they, together with the Illyrian (Albanian, dead Illyrian and Messapian), Thracian (dead Dacian and Thracian) and Phrygian languages (dead Paeonic and Phrygian) are combined into a paleo-Balkan branch.

Slavic languages are divided into three subgroups: Western (Upper and Lower Lusatian, Kashubian, Polish, Slovak, Czech, dead Polabian), Southern (Bulgarian, Bosnian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and also Old Church Slavonic) and Eastern (Belarusian, Russian , Ukrainian, also Old Russian and Old Novgorod). Together with the Baltic (or Baltic) languages (Latgalian, Latvian, Lithuanian, dead Prussian), the Slavic languages are often combined into the Balto-Slavic branch.

The Germanic languages are also divided into two subgroups: Western (English, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Luxembourgish, German, Dutch, Low German, Frisian) and Northern (Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Faroese). Historically, there was also an eastern subgroup of the Germanic languages (Burgundian, Vandal, Gothic), but it has completely died out to this day. The Germanic branch also includes the ancient Germanic languages: Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German, Old Norse and others.

The Italic branch of the Indo-European languages included two groups: Osco-Umbrian (Osk, Umbrian) and Latino-Faliscan (Latin, Faliscan). To date, all these languages have died out, but from Latin, as you know, the modern Romance languages have developed. They include several subgroups: Balkan-Romance (Aromunian, Istro-Romanian, Megleno-Romanian, Moldavian, Romanian), Gallo-Romance (Norman, French and its dialects), Ibero-Romance (Spanish, Portuguese and other languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Aragonese, Asturleone, Galician , Ladino), Italian-Romance (Italian and numerous dialects of Italy: Venetian, Corsican, Lombard, Neapolitan, Piedmontese, Sardinian, Sicilian), Occitan-Romance (Catalan, Provencal), Romansh (Ladin, Romansh, Friulian).

The Celtic branch barely survives today, but it once included a large number of languages and spread over large areas of Europe. It is customary to single out continental (all dead: Galatian, Gaulish, Celtiberian, Lepontian, Lusitanian), Goidelic (Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic) and Brittonic Celtic languages (Breton, Welsh, Cornish, dead Cumbrian).

Two more large branches have not survived to this day: Tocharian (eastern Tocharian A and western Tocharian B) and Anatolian (Isaurian, Cilician, Lydian, Lycian, Luwian, Palaian, Pisidian, Sidetic, Hittite). By the way, they are very interesting for linguists, because they give a very good material for analysis, including etymological.

It would never have occurred to me to combine Persian or Old Indian with Russian. Of course, I am not a connoisseur of these languages, but it seems to me that they can in no way be similar to Russian. These are languages of completely different cultures. And the belonging of Armenian to the Indo-European languages became unexpected news for me. I always thought that it is closer to other languages of the Caucasus.

I think if you are shown some simple Sanskrit text, its transliteration and translation, then you can easily determine which words of the ancient Indian language correspond to Russian. Sanskrit can hardly be called similar to Russian, but many words in this language are similar in form and meaning to Russian.

Look at least for these words: उदन् (udán), ग्ना (gnā), धूम (dhūmá), नभस् (nábhas), त्रि (TRI), जीवति (Jīvati), भरति (Bhárati), स्मयते (smáyate). How would you translate them?

I managed to find matches only for some words: ग्ना (gnā) - "wife", धूम (dhūmá) - "thought", नभस् (nábhas) - "sky", त्रि (tri) - "three", जीवति (jīváti) - "chew", भरति (bhárati) - "take", स्मयते (smáyate) - "laugh". The meaning of the word उदन् (udán) is somehow difficult for me to determine.

I guessed almost everything, only धूम (dhūmá) is “smoke”, and जीवति (jīvati) is “live”. The word उदन् (udán) means "water" and the word नभस् (nábhas) means "cloud, sky".

Can you be more specific about proto-languages? You have already called Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Slavic, Proto-German. I don't quite understand what it is? When and where did they exist at all?

Proto-language is some ancient language from which modern languages began to emerge. Each language group has its own parent language.

Proto-Slavic is the parent language for all modern Slavic languages. It existed somewhere in the II-I millennium BC on the territory of Eastern Europe and began to break up into dialects somewhere by the 5th century AD, when the Slavs began to migrate to the south and east. The final collapse of the Slavic languages is attributed only to the XII century, when the so-called fall of the reduced ones took place.

Proto-Germanic is the parent language for all modern Germanic languages. It existed at about the same time as the Proto-Slavic, and spread from the north (Southern Scandinavia, Denmark, partly Northern Germany) to the south, west and east.

For all modern Romance languages, the proto-language was Latin (if you look deeper - Proto-Italic). We know a lot about Latin, since the heritage of Ancient Rome is great, we have many written monuments in this language.

The Proto-Indo-European language, in turn, is the parent language for Proto-Slavic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Italic, as well as Pro-Celtic, Proto-Indo-Iranian and some other ancient proto-languages.

There are many hypotheses, each of which places the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans in its area: the Kurgan hypothesis of M. Gimbutas (originally the Volga steppes, then the northern Black Sea region), the Balkan hypothesis (the Balkan Peninsula), the Anatolian hypothesis of K. Renfrew (western Anatolia, Turkey), the Armenian hypothesis T. V. Gamkrelidze and Vyach. V. Ivanov (Armenian Highlands). There are several less popular hypotheses today, which are shared only in some countries. For example, many Hindus think that the ancestral home of the Proto-Indo-Europeans is in India, but today this hypothesis is no longer valid.

In Indo-European studies, disputes are still ongoing about when and where the Proto-Indo-European language arose. The collapse of the proto-language is usually dated to the 3rd millennium BC, but it is possible that this happened even earlier.

Yeah. What has science come to? And after all, what is interesting is that such antiquities are being studied and even dated. Archaeologists at least have in their hands a material antiquity that can be subjected to radiocarbon analysis. How can you date proto-languages? It's not a thing, is it?

Glottochronology answers this question. This application of lexicostatistics, which determines the time of divergence of two or more languages, sets the "half-life" of the vocabulary. That is, linguists can also conduct an analysis similar to radiocarbon.

The American linguist M. Swadesh proposed a hypothesis according to which in the languages of the world there is a vocabulary that is relatively stable, that is, it may not be replaced by borrowings or native words with other roots for a long time. If such words are forced out, then this happens rarely and (theoretically) evenly, linearly.

Based on this hypothesis, mathematically calculate the time of divergence of languages. I will not describe the technique itself, it is rather complicated. If you want, you can find a description of the methodology in the works and articles of our domestic linguist S. A. Starostin. He dealt with this topic a lot.

Here you go. And I just wanted to ask how the calculation is carried out. Alright, let's skip the math part. Explain to me at least what kind of vocabulary is this, which has "relative stability"? Can I have specific examples?

In the vocabulary of all languages there are words that are not associated with any particular culture or characteristics of local life. These are nouns associated with nature ( sky, Earth, stone, wind, water, wood, Sun, star, day, night), human ( Man, female, a heart, head, leg, eye), kinship ( mother, father, brother, sister), all living creatures ( the beast, a fish, bird), as well as simple pronouns ( I, you, we), adjectives ( warm, cold, old, new), Verbs ( eat, drink, breathe, see, hear, know), numerals ( one, two, three, four, five). In many closely related languages, such words are similar.

Take a look at this table of lexical correspondences for Slavic languages.

Russian	Ukrainian	Bulgarian	Serbian	Polish


one	one	one	yodan
			two
			three
female	woman	wife	wife
Man	man		muskarats	mężczyzna
mother	mother	T-shirt	mȃјka
father	father	bascha	otatz
wood	wood	darvo	other
eye			eye
			nose
a heart	heart	sirce	middle
eat	isti		ј̏sti
see	bachichi	seedam	view(ј )children	widziec
Sun	sun	slantse	sun	slońce
Earth	Earth	land	land
night			but
day	day		Dan

In this table, most of the words are the same. However, there are words that just don't fit into the big picture. For example, Russian word eye(it is used more often than the original obsolete word eye) has nothing to do with Ukrainian eye or Polish eye. Polish word kobieta obviously not the same root as Russian female or Serbian wife.

Some words of the language, as I said, drop out over time, are replaced by others. The farther apart the languages, the more such dropouts. Here is the same table for you, which already presents Russian, Lithuanian, German, Italian and Irish (all languages belong to different language groups).

Russian	Lithuanian	German	Italian	Irish


one


female	motheris
Man
mother				mathair
father	tevas
wood
eye

a heart
eat	valgyti		mangiare
see
Sun
Earth	žẽmė
night
day

I want to immediately draw attention to the fact that some words that seem unlike Russian are actually related to them. For example, the Irish word bean comes from the Pro-Celtic *benā, where is the initial *b originated from Proto-Indo-European labiovelar consonant *gʷ. The whole word goes back to the Proto-Indo-European word *gʷḗn"woman" from which the Proto-Slavic originates *zena"woman" (hence the Russian wife, Ukrainian woman, Serbo-Croatian wife etc.), Proto-Germanic words *kwenǭ"woman" and *kweniz"wife" (hence the English queen"queen"), ancient Greek γυνή (gunḗ) "woman, wife", as well as the Sanskrit ग्ना (gnā) "wife", which you guessed recently. German Frau(from Proto-Germanic *frawjǭ"Madam") and Italian donna(from Latin domina"Madam") have a completely different origin.

German Hertz, which is difficult to compare so easily with Russian a heart, goes back to the Proto-Germanic word *herto"heart" (hence the English heart) and further to Proto-Indo-European *ḱḗr"heart", where the Proto-Slavic originates *sürdce"heart" (hence the Russian a heart, Ukrainian heart, Serbo-Croatian middle etc.), Latin cor"heart" (hence the French cœur, Italian cuore, Spanish corazon), ancient Greek καρδία (kardía) "heart", Sanskrit हृदय (hṛdaya) "heart". Irish croi and Lithuanian sirdis, of course, also here.

Also quite interesting is the case with the word day. It goes back to the Proto-Slavic word *day"day", further to the Proto-Indo-European root *dyew-'heaven', from which also comes the Latin dies"day". From the latter, as you might guess, Spanish dia and Portuguese dia. Italian Giorno and French jour, as it may seem, they have nothing to do with these words at all, but this is not so. Both words come from the Latin adjective diurnus"day", which, in turn, is formed from dies. This is not quite a direct etymology, but still the words have the same root. There are also such confusing cases.

As you can see, the number of hits in this table is also quite high, but the number of dropouts is much higher than in the first table. Complete tables of one hundred or two hundred words are called Swadesh lists. According to them, the exact number of dropped words is calculated, then the time of divergence of the languages whose vocabulary is analyzed is calculated. The results of calculations do not always give a satisfactory result, but in general, the use of such a technique gives linguists a lot.

German Tag and English day, it turns out, are also associated with the Russian word day?

No, these words are not related to Russian day. They come from the Proto-Germanic word *dagaz"day", which goes back to the Proto-Indo-European root *dʰegʷʰ-"burn". Hence the Lithuanian degti"burn", Russian burn, Latin foveō"warm", Irish daig"fire", Sanskrit दहति (dahati) "to burn, to burn". I have heard this question many times. Apparently, many consider these words related.

Then my soul is at peace. For many years I thought that day And day somehow connected. Didn't sleep at night. But it turned out that everything is so simple. And all I had to do was learn Lithuanian, Latin, Ancient Greek, Irish, Sanskrit, and Proto-Indo-European to boot. And then also think of linking these words from the listed languages. What a trifle!

Do you want to humor? Sanskrit alone, by the way, is taught for many years and is not always mastered. Ancient languages are an order of magnitude more complex than modern ones.

You brought so many words from the Proto-Indo-European language that it seems that it is well known. Do we really know everything about him?

Proto-Indo-European language is hypothetical. It was reconstructed on the basis of living languages, since none of us heard it. Proto-Slavic, Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic and many other proto-languages were reconstructed in the same way.

You may have noticed that words from these languages start with an asterisk (*). This icon is called an asterisk, it indicates that this word has not been attested anywhere and that scientists only assume such a form. Therefore, we cannot know everything about the Proto-Indo-European language, but we can assume a lot.

How can a whole language be reconstructed? I still believe that it is possible to somehow determine its age, but it seems to me that it is simply impossible to recreate from scratch what was once a living language.

Linguists are just doing the impossible - they revive the dead. Reconstruction of the parent language is quite difficult. A lot of contradictory facts give us different languages, besides, much has been lost over time, so that the picture is incomplete in all respects.

The phonetics of the Proto-Indo-European language, as it may seem at first glance, is well known, but this is not so. Linguists use a compromise model. The consonant system in this model includes labials * m, * p, * b, * bʰ , * w, dental * n, * t, * d, *dʰ, * s, * r, * l, middle language * y, three rows of posterior lingual: palatovular *ḱ , *ǵ , *ǵʰ , velar *k, *g, *gʰ and labiovelar *kʷ, *gʷ, *gʷʰ, as well as laringals * h₁ , *h₂ , *h₃ . Five short vowels *i, *e, *a, *o, *u opposed to long *ī , *ē , *ā , *ō , *ū . Some linguists believe that long vowels arose after the laryngeal was dropped. Also suggest the presence of four syllabic sonatas *ṛ , *ḷ , *ṃ And *ṇ (consonants *r, *l, *n And *m between vowels), diphthongs from vowel combinations * e, * a And * o with non-syllabic *i̯, *u̯(same as * w, * y) and some reduced *ə (it is considered by some to be a vocalized laryngeal).

It is not always possible to reconstruct the grammar accurately and completely, since some nominal or verbal forms could disappear without a trace, and it is simply impossible to restore them on the basis of modern data. Similarly, if we did not know Latin grammar, then we would not be able to recreate at least one of the two forms of the passive voice in Latin on the material of all known Romance languages, since it has not been preserved anywhere.

Nevertheless, on the basis of the available data, it was found that the Proto-Indo-European language had a three-gender system (masculine, feminine and neuter), the noun changed in eight cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental, local, depositional) and three numbers ( singular, dual, plural). The verb had the categories of person, number, tense (present, imperfect, aorist and perfect), voice (active and middle) and mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative). It is also known that the noun, adjective and verb could be thematic (stems ended in *o, alternating with *e) and non-thematic (they did not have such a vowel).

During the reconstruction of vocabulary, many difficulties arise; it is not always possible to establish the exact meaning of the ancient root. But what can be "saved" from the destructive influence of time, they try to build into the reconstructed system of the parent language. Thus, it is constantly being improved. The most brilliant scientists of the whole world have been working on this for decades.

How does lexical reconstruction work in general? Tell me at least briefly so that I understand where these words under the asterisk come from.

Linguists have a good visual model - all the same Latin. We know that the Latin word factum[ˈfaktum] "fact; done" became French fait, Italian fatto, Spanish hecho, Portuguese feito, Romanian fapt. But if we didn’t know Latin at all, if all written monuments in this language were destroyed in due time, and nothing at all came down to us, we could theoretically guess what the word with the meaning “made” looked like in this language: we would know that it started with * f, followed by some vowel (most likely it was * a), and after the vowel there would be a combination of some consonant (plosive * k; compare also borrowings: English fact, German factum, Russian fact) And * t. We could reconstruct a hypothetical root * fact- or something similar. Comparing the following words with the meaning of "milk" in the Romance languages: French lait, Italian latte, Spanish leche, Portuguese liete, Romanian lapte, we would, by analogy with the previous example, say that their common root in Latin looked like * lakt- . And indeed, these words come from the Latin form lactem("milk" in Latin) lac), which we are well aware of.

Linguists act in a similar way when reconstructing the Proto-Indo-European foundations. The only difference is that we know the Latin language, so we can check any of our guesses about the form of some obscure words, based on what we know. However, in the case of the Proto-Indo-European language, everything is much more complicated, since we had no initial data about it, except for modern words in Indo-European languages.

Consider such an example for the Proto-Indo-European language. Let's take a number of words with the meaning "door" from the Slavic languages: Russian a door, Ukrainian doors, Old Church Slavonic door, Serbian doors, Bulgarian doors, Polish Drzwi, Czech doors. Based on them, the Proto-Slavic word is quite simply reconstructed * door"a door". This word in form and meaning resembles the ancient Greek θύρα (thúra) "door", Latin foris"door, gate", Sanskrit द्वार् (dvār), द्वार (dvā́ra) "door, gate", English door door, gothic Daur"door", Persian در (dar) "door", Albanian dere"door", Armenian դուռ (duṙ) "door" and Old Irish dorus"a door". It can be assumed that they are all related.

To determine what the common Proto-Indo-European root looked like, each phoneme of the given words should be analyzed. Initial * d could be in Proto-Indo-European, but the ancient Greek θ (th) and Latin f talk about his inhalation character. Thus, the Proto-Indo-European root begins with *dʰ. Also, by comparisons and assumptions, it is determined that it was followed by a semivowel *w, also at the root there was a smooth *r. Between *w And *r there was a vowel *e or *o. That is, the whole root looked like *dʰwer- or *dʰwor-(the Russian word also comes from the latter yard).

The Indo-European root could acquire various suffixes, forming new words (as in Russian: a door, door, door etc.). Partly for this reason, some forms of cognates do not always coincide with each other. Vowels in the root could alternate in different ways (in linguistics this is called ablaut), giving a different result in modern languages, so sometimes the same root is presented in different versions.

Today, reconstruction does not take much time, since almost all correspondences between modern languages and Proto-Indo-European have long been known. With a thorough reconstruction, each phoneme should be substantiated by referring to similar cases, some laws, exceptions, of which there have been a lot of recent accumulations. One such justification can take ten pages. Thank God, almost all this work has already been done. Back in the 19th century, it was wandering in the dark, but it gave a result.

Yeah. I imagine how much information scientists had to process, who were looking for these words, finding matches for them. And all this without computers!

It was routine work. But whole dictionaries of such roots and words were created, which glorified the names of their authors. For example, the dictionary of the Indo-European language by Y. Pokorny, published in 1959, is very popular all over the world and is still considered one of the best.

Is it possible to speak in the Proto-Indo-European language, or at least write some kind of letter? Or has it not yet been reconstructed to such an extent as to be used for practical purposes?

You can talk and write a letter. They tried to do this back in those years when the Proto-Indo-European began to be actively reconstructed. The German linguist A. Schleicher, already familiar to us, wrote a whole fable in this language, which today is known as the "Schleicher's fable". Here is her text.

Avis akvasas ka

Avis, jasmin varna na ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vāgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhāram magham, tam, manum āku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams ā vavakat: kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam. Akvāsas ā vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant-svas: manus patis varnām avisāms karnauti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varnā na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram a bhugat.

Sheep and horses

The sheep, [on] which there was no wool (sheared sheep), saw horses carrying a heavy wagon [with] a large load, quickly carrying a man. The sheep said to the horses: my heart is crowded [in] me (my heart is sad), seeing the horses carrying a man. The horses said: listen, sheep, the heart is oppressed [from] what we have seen (our heart is sad, because we know): man is the master, he makes the wool of the sheep warm clothes [for] himself and [the] sheep have no wool (sheep no longer have wool , they are shorn, it is worse for them than for horses). Hearing this, the sheep turned [in] the field (she ran away).

Schleicher's text, in fact, is far from a modern reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language, since it was written almost a century and a half ago and reflects mainly the features of Sanskrit, which Schleicher himself considered the closest to the Proto-Indo-European language.

Today, almost every year, new versions of this fable appear, each trying to leave its mark on linguistics. But Schleicher will not be surpassed by anyone, because he became a pioneer, a crazy experimenter who sought to revive a long-extinct language and capture it in this text.

I liked the fable, but I can hardly read it correctly. But I easily learned the word card"a heart". I now recognize him in any language.

But what about spoken Proto-Indo-European? If I want to learn it to "talk to my ancestors" or just for fun, then where can I find learning material?

Some linguists today create their own projects of the spoken version of the Proto-Indo-European, but I have doubts that the language they offer is close to the language that was spoken five or six thousand years ago. In addition, there are many simpler and more popular languages in the world that really should be taught. For example, Spanish or Portuguese.

If you really want to touch the ancient proto-language in its modern version, then you can look for the book of the Spanish polyglot K. Quiles "Grammar of the modern Indo-European language." Also quite interesting is the book by F. Lopez-Menchero "Preliminary Syntax of the Modern Indo-European Language". I have these books in English, but, to be honest, I have not mastered them to the end. In addition, I do not agree with all the provisions of these books, they contain very controversial statements.

I will definitely look for them and read them. And Spanish and Portuguese are next in line. So be calm.

In general, if we collect what we talked about above, it turns out that almost all the linguistic diversity of our planet in the historical perspective is compressed into some single proto-language. But we named mostly European and partly Asian languages. But what about other languages? For example, it is not at all clear to me where the place in this system is for Japanese or Chinese. Did they develop separately or are they also related to the Indo-European languages?

I was waiting for you to ask about it. This question has been of particular interest to me lately. The fact is that in addition to the Indo-European language family, there are several more large families in the world: Uralic (Samoyedic and Finno-Ugric languages), Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian, Tungus-Manchu languages, as well as Korean and Japanese), Kartvelian (Georgian), Sino-Tibetan (Chinese and Tibeto-Burmese languages), Dravidian (mainly the languages of South India), Afroasian (Berber-Libyan, Cushitic, Omotian, Semitic, Chadic languages, as well as the ancient Egyptian language), Austronesian (numerous languages in Taiwan, South - East Asia, Oceania and Madagascar) and others. For some of them, their proto-languages were also reconstructed.

At the beginning of the 20th century, quite a lot was already known about proto-languages. The well-known Danish linguist H. Pedersen back in 1903 in one of his articles expressed the idea that there are languages related to Indo-European at a more ancient level. His guess was very bold for that time.

Later, this idea of Pedersen was developed in the works of our domestic scientists: first, V. M. Illich-Svitych, then A. B. Dolgopolsky, V. A. Dybo, and S. A. Starostin. Based on the material of the Indo-European, Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Kartvelian, Dravidian and Uralic languages, they were able to reconstruct in general a significant part of this second-level proto-language using the same comparative method, but not in relation to living languages, but in relation to proto-languages. We can say that they reconstructed the "great-proto-language" that existed more than ten thousand years ago. Illich-Svitych even wrote a short poem on it, repeating the feat of A. Schleicher. Here is her text.

There is something philosophical in this poem...

There is not only philosophy, but also a challenge to scientists. Illich-Svitych, in fact, encrypted the instruction to future generations of linguists. I interpret it like this: "language is a ford across the river of time" - in order to understand it, you need to cross this river, that is, to overcome time; “he leads us to the dwelling of the dead” - he will reveal to us the secrets of antiquity, will give us the opportunity to look at the world through the eyes of those who spoke the ancient language; “but one who is afraid of deep water will not be able to reach there” - who is afraid or does not want to look and see beyond what has been reached (the Proto-Indo-European level), will never reveal these secrets.

Does this “great-proto-language” have a name?

I almost forgot about the most important thing... This "great-proto-language" in the scientific literature is called Nostratic (from the Latin pronoun Noster"our"). Have you never heard such a name?

No, I've never heard of such a thing. Unless in terrible dreams, but I usually don’t remember them.

But are there such correspondences in the various languages from the families represented that can be recognized? I even in Indo-European languages distinguish them with difficulty. How to find some correspondences in this sea of words?

To be honest, I don't always notice them either. But using the already known correspondences between the parent languages, I can connect, for example, the Proto-Indo-European word *wodr̥"water" (from where the Russian water, English water"water", Lithuanian vanduu"water", ancient Greek ὕδωρ (húdōr) "water", Latin unda"wave") with the Proto-Uralic word *weti"water", where the Finnish vesi"water" and Hungarian viz"water". In the Pranostratic, this word looked like * wete(compare with the last word in the poem by Illich-Svitych).

Your favorite Proto-Indo-European word *ḱerd"heart" (I already represented it in the form *ḱḗr without *d and with a long root vowel) is very similar to Georgian მკერდი (mkerdi) "chest", going back to Proto-Kartvelian *mk̕erd-(initial consonant - prefix). For them I met reconstructions *k̕ærd And *kerd(in other notation systems, the reconstruction may look different, for example, as *k̥ärd∇).

There are a lot of such coincidences, but this is still not enough to argue that such a similarity is not due to an accidental coincidence or ancient contacts of native speakers of proto-languages. Nevertheless, the very possibility of the existence of an ancient Nostratic proto-language seems very likely, I personally believe in it.

According to the theory of monogenesis, all people with their languages came from a single tribe and subsequently, settling around the planet, began to lose cultural and linguistic ties. The carriers of the Nostratic proto-language are one of the branches of these nomadic people who continued to divide into other tribes. This division is still going on.

So, if everything is summarized, it turns out that the languages of the world are in varying degrees of kinship. The Slavic languages go back to a certain Proto-Slavic language, which, in turn, together with Proto-Germanic, Proto-Celtic and other ancient proto-languages, goes back to some Proto-Indo-European language. The latter (together with other proto-languages) can also go back to some more ancient "proto-proto-language", which is called Nostratic. Did I understand the meaning correctly?

Yes, that is right. I will add to the above that there is also a hypothesis about the existence of the Borean language, on which the same S. A. Starostin worked. According to this hypothesis, all known terrestrial languages (or most of them) can go back to a single ancient proto-language, which was spoken by our ancestors back in the period of settlement in Eurasia or even in Africa. Actually, such a picture emerges if one adheres to the theory of monogenesis.

For a long time there has been work comparing Nostratic and Sino-Caucasian languages (the latter include Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian, Dene-Yenisei, ancient Hurrian-Urartian languages, Basque and Burushaski, which are considered by many to be isolates, as well as some other ancient languages). Other hypothetical macrofamilies of languages are being actively explored: Austrian (Austroasiatic, Austronesian, Tai-Kadai languages, as well as the Miao-Yao languages) and Ameridic (languages of the American Indians). This is the very last level of comparison, the most "deep water".

Here you go! Also, the “great-great-great-language” appeared.

As you see. Only for the time being, the proto-languages of the Proto-Indo-European level are being seriously discussed. The existence of Nostratic and even more so Borean languages is disputed by many linguists. But it seems to me that this is wrong. If such proto-languages really existed, and if linguists manage to get close to them, then this will seriously advance us in the study of primitive society.

I already understand this. If scientists know what was in the ancient language, then this will allow us to understand what surrounded the ancient people, what they did. And we will finally be able to find out how ancient people grunted after their pigs.

It is also not entirely clear to me what kind of similarities are taken as the basis for comparing the grammars of languages. I doubt terribly that the grammar of the Russian language can be compared with the grammars of some other languages. Even English grammar seems too dissimilar to us.

The grammar of languages is also subject to comparison, but mostly not based on it. If you remember, we said that there is a linguistic typology that classifies languages according to the types of expression of grammatical meanings and types of morphological structure. In general, this science also compares languages, but looks for those similarities that are not due to kinship.

I will give a simple example. Many languages have the article part of speech. We usually talk about the prepositive article (definite or indefinite): English a(n) , the, German ein, eine, ein, der, die, das, die, French un, une, des, le, la, les etc. However, there are languages in which articles strangely leave the word, becoming part of it. Such articles are called postpositive. They are, for example, in the Bulgarian language. Yes, the Bulgarian word husband"husband" with the article has the form mzhut, word hail"city" with the article has the form grade. Here the article -ut corresponds to the particle -then In russian language ( husband, city). Compare also the Bulgarian articles for neuter and feminine nouns: iron"iron" - iron-nitrogen, lato"summer" - latoto, wife"wife" - married, mountain"Forest" - Gorata. You can find the same thing in Swedish: hus"House" - huset, bok"book" - boken, bjorn"bear" - bjornen. Such a strange similarity in the structures of Bulgarian and Swedish is completely accidental.

It happens that the similarity is due to long-term contacts of languages. The Bulgarian language belongs to the so-called Balkan linguistic union, which also includes Macedonian, Greek, Albanian and Romanian. According to a number of characteristics, Serbo-Croatian, Romani languages and some dialects of Turkish are also included in this union. It turns out that the emergence of the postpositive article is a common innovation in some of these languages. It is also in Albanian ( shtepi"House" - shtypia, tryez"table" - tryeza, kerci"shin" - kercyri) and Romanian ( loop"Wolf" - lupul, copil"child" - copilul, fereastră"window" - fereastra). Here it is no longer possible to speak of an accidental similarity, but the presence of a postpositive article does not speak of the relationship of languages either. It's just that the languages got closer, something in them coincided. These and some other similarities of the languages included in the Balkan linguistic union have attracted linguists throughout the 20th century.

Grammatical similarities that come from antiquity, of course, exist, they are detectable in the same forms of words in different languages. But the grammar changes quite quickly, sometimes even beyond recognition. Remember what I said at the very beginning about English and Bulgarian. Grammar can change unpredictably, old grammatical categories disappear, new ones appear.

Does word order somehow help linguists determine the relationship of languages? For example, if in one language the verb always stands in one place, and in another - in a different place, does this mean something?

Syntax, word order, in some cases allows us to make some assumptions about kinship, but then we should talk about comparison not by one syntactic feature (for example, the place of a particular member of a sentence), but by a whole set of features. It's the same with grammar.

The position of the verb in the sentence is of interest to the same typologists, that is, linguists who explore similarities that are not related to linguistic kinship. The verb in the sentence, of course, can be in different places, and other members of the sentence can be located in different ways relative to the verb. Still, the number of combinations is limited, and therefore the same order is easy to find in languages distributed in different hemispheres of the blue planet.

Word order typology data suggests that almost half of all languages have an order of the SOV type (that is, "subject, subject - object, object - verb, predicate"). These include completely different languages: Hindi, Armenian, Turkish, Tatar, Uzbek, Mongolian, Japanese, Korean, Tibetan, Basque and many others. In all these languages, the verb comes after the object.

For example, the phrase "I don't speak Japanese" in Japanese looks like this: "私は日本語は話せません (わたしはにほんごははなせません, watashi wa Nihongo wa hanasemasen)". Here the word 話す (はなす, hanasu) is just the verb "to speak" (the form 話せません (なせません, hanasemasen) is negative for the present-future tense). The word 私 (わたし, watashi) is the pronoun for "I", the word は (wa) is a special particle, and the word 日本語 (にほんご, Nihongo) is translated as "Japanese". To say in Hindi "I don't speak Hindi", we build a similar construction: "मैं हिन्दी नहीं बोलता हूँ (maĩ hindī nahī̃ boltā hū̃)". Somehow we already met with the verb हूँ (hū̃) at the very beginning. It is an auxiliary verb, the verb form होना (honā) "to be", which is used together with the masculine participle बोलता (boltā) "speaking", the verb form बोलना (bolnā) "to speak". Thus, the entire last part of the sentence बोलता हूँ (boltā hū̃) is the predicate, and everything before it is the subject and object (the negation नहीं (nahī̃) refers to the verb, but we will not drag it into the predicate).

There are languages of the SVO type (“subject – verb – object”), which include many European languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Czech, Finnish, etc.), as well as Russian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Hausa, Swahili and some other languages. There are also many such languages.

You don't have to look far for examples. For the Russian language, the order in which the verb comes after the subject will be basic: “I don’t speak Russian.” We can also say differently: “I don’t speak Russian”, “I don’t speak Russian”. These are possible variants of the statement, but they, as a rule, have a special style. In English, there is only one way to say: “I don’t speak English”. In German we would say: "ich spreche kein Deutsch", in French: "je ne parle pas français", in Spanish: "yo no hablo español", in Polish: "nie mówię po polsku", in Finnish: "en puhu suomea". In these utterances, the verb is everywhere after the subject (real or implied) and before the object.

There are four more word orders that are less common. I will not explain them, I do not see the need for this. It is already clear that such a characteristic as the place of a verb in a sentence cannot serve as an indicator of kinship. We compared Hindi and Japanese, which belong to completely different language families, but have a common feature - the position of the verb at the end. At the same time, for example, the Celtic languages have a completely different order (VSO, "verb - subject - object"), which is not typical for European languages at all, but is found in Arabic and Filipino.

It turns out that grammar and syntax do not compare at all? I don't quite understand something. After all, you said that the grammar of the Proto-Indo-European language is being actively reconstructed. How so?

Grammar is also compared, but, as I said, not very well and not very willingly. On the material of closely related Slavic languages, one can understand what the conjugation or declension was in Proto-Slavic. On the material of the Germanic languages, the Proto-Germanic grammar is restored. Then all this is compared with each other in order to understand what the grammar of the Proto-Indo-European language was. If the grammar were not subject to comparison at all, then Schleicher would probably not have dared to write something in the Proto-Indo-European language. Grammar comparison is difficult for the reasons already mentioned, but possible.

Syntax is still more difficult than grammar, but a lot of theoretical work comes out on it, we know something about it. For example, Proto-Indo-European is known to have a basic SOV-type word order, although in general the order was relatively free, as in Russian, since Proto-Indo-European was an inflectional language.

Can you give an example of some particular comparison of grammar, so that it is clear where exactly to look for similarities?

I have already cited forms of the verb "to be", which are of rather ancient origin. Here's another example for you. From the Proto-Indo-European root *bʰer-"carry" occur Russian verb take(in Old Church Slavonic - take), ancient Greek φέρω (phérō) "to wear", Latin ferō"wear". Now compare the forms of these words in the table.

	St.-glor.	Russian	Latin	Other Greek
*bʰeroh₂	take	I take	ferō	φέρω (ferō)
*beresi	take	take		φέρεις (phereis)
*bereti	beret	beret		φέρει (pherei)
*bʰeromos	take	take		φέρομεν (pheromena)
*berete	take	take		φέρετε (phérete)
*beronti	take	take		φέρουσῐ (ν ) (pherousi(n))

Only the so-called thematic forms of the singular and plural of the Proto-Indo-European verb are given here (it was also conjugated in the dual). They have just been reconstructed on the material of modern and ancient classical languages, known to science pretty good. You can find the similarity of inflections, which are grammatical indicators.

Yet the most preferred object of study and comparison is phonetics. Between different languages various phonetic correspondences can be established. Previously, I hardly paid your attention to them, but now I want you to find them here yourself.

Have you ever heard how Ukrainians speak?

Then it is not necessary to explain why you answered this question so quickly.

Do you believe in miracles?

May there always be sun, may there always be sky, may there always be mother, may there always be me!

Greek is difficult.

INTERVIEW WITH A MODERN LINGUIST.

We are accustomed to the fact that the main world language is English, and our native Russian has recently been doing nothing but borrowing a word from there, a word from here. But is it?

A graduate of the Oriental Faculty of Leningrad State University, a linguist, the author of several sensational books, Alexander Dragunkin, claims that everything was just the opposite. Moreover, he came to the conclusion that the Old Russian language was the parent language of the whole Earth!

Are the English descendants of the Russians?

It all started with the English language, which I taught for many years, - Alexander Dragunkin told MK in St. Petersburg the background to his discovery. - The further, the more I was not satisfied with the method of his teaching - and latently some new ideas appeared. In 1998, I sat down to write my first book, a guide to the English language. I stopped going to the office, closed myself at home, and on the most primitive computer in a month I tapped SOMETHING, from which I was stunned. In that work, I proposed my own way of quickly memorizing English words - by analogy with Russian ones. And, while developing it, I came across the obvious: English words are not just similar to Russian ones - they are of Russian origin!

Can you prove it?

Certainly. Just remember the three simple basic rules of philology first. First: you can ignore the vowels in the word, the most important thing is the backbone of the consonants. Second: consonants are very clearly grouped according to the place of formation in the mouth - for example, L, R, H are formed by different movements of the tongue, but in the same part of the palate. Try to pronounce them - and see for yourself. There are several such chains of consonants: v-m-b-p-f, l-r-s-t-d-n, x-c-k-g-z-zh, v-r-x, s-c-h (jj). When a word is borrowed, it is possible to replace letters in accordance with these chains. And the third rule: when moving from one language to another, a word can only be shortened, and most often the first syllable disappears.

And now examples.

Please. The English word girl (girl - girl) has no origin in her homeland. But in Old Russian there was a wonderful word that young people were called - Gorlitsa! The backbone of consonants is the same, and English word in short - so who took the word from whom? Another example is the English REVOLT. Let's say you don't know what it means - now let's see who stole from whom. Any Latinist will tell you that RE is a prefix, VOL is a root and "mysterious T". Where it came from, Western philologists do not even say. But I am a simple person: let's assume an idiotic option - that the British took this word from someone and distorted it over time. Then, if RE is a prefix meaning "repetition", and the British took this prefix from someone, then in a thousand years it could only become shorter (recall the philological law). So, it can be assumed that it was originally longer. So, all over the world there is only one prefix, which meant the same thing, but was longer - Russian TRANS-! L and R are interchangeable consonants from the same chain. We rewrite the word in Russian - PERE-VOR-ot. REVOLT in translation means "coup, rebellion" - so who borrowed from whom? And the “mysterious T”, on which all English linguists stumble, turns out to be the most common Russian suffix. There are an incredible number of such examples.

And why should the British, who live on an island far from our vast homeland, get by with Russian words - they didn’t have their own?

The British may well be the descendants of the ancient Russians. There is absolutely official data (which, however, is often hushed up) that the Saxons - the ancestors of the British - did not come from anywhere, but from the Volga River. In the scientific world, this is an axiom. Saxons is the plural of the word "Sak". That is, on the Volga they were SAKs. Further, according to the law on the shortening of a word during the transition to another language, we conclude that this word could have been originally longer. I do not see any other explanation for the origin of the word SAKI, except from the truncated RUSAKI.

Mat was not invented by the Tatars

Okay, but what about other languages? You don't claim to know every language in the world, do you?

I do not approve. But I know many languages. I can easily communicate in English, French, Italian, German, Swedish, Polish. I know Japanese, but I don't speak it. At the university he studied ancient Chinese, in his youth he seriously studied Hindi. So I can compare. Here's an example for you. Take the Latin word SECRET (secret, something hidden). The whole world is staring at this word, but its origin is unknown. In addition, it is not decomposed into components - there is no prefix or suffix. Some see the same "mysterious suffix T". The most dashing Western philologists single out the root CR - this is the Latin CER, "to see." But why on earth is the “secret”, what is being hidden, based on the root “see”? This is absurd! I do it differently - I become impudent and write the same letters in Old Russian - СъКРыТ. And I get a complete similarity of meaning, a clear prefix C-, a beautiful root and our native suffix. Remember that vowels are completely unimportant for philology.

Or else - the word "harem". The fact that Russian princes before the Romanovs had whole crowds of concubines is a historical fact. Now, if I have many beautiful wives, where will I keep them? In the best rooms, which in Russia were called KhoroMy - let's remember the chains of alternating consonants - so where did the word GAREM come from?

So it means that everything was borrowed from us, and not we from strangers?

Naturally! I even refuted the prevailing "Tatar" theory of the origin of Russian obscenity.

Were there any Tatars?

It wasn't - it's just our invention. I can demonstrate. We have the word star - this is a star, yes. A star is a distorted "light". That is, a star is that "light-it". And if you follow this word-formation scheme, what will be the name of what they “write”? This is one word. Further - where did the word "stick" come from? Initially, it was called "pkhalka", because it was pkhali, shoved. The English stick (stack, stick) is clearly our poke, “poke”. Let's go back to the word "phat" - form an imperative mood, as with the word "poke": poke - sui, pkhat - what? And "p" eventually disappeared. The most interesting thing with the verb is that only in Russian you can say: "I fucked her." M and B, as you remember, are alternating - replace the letter M in the word "fuck" and see what happens:

Well, mate is not proof that Old Russian is the parent language of the whole world:

Okay, here's another thing: the names of all sacred religious books are of Russian origin.

Even the Quran?

Yes. In the Arab world, it is believed that this word has no etymology. But she is. The Quran, as you know, is the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad, collected by the scribe Zeid - and SAVE by him! The Quran is So-preserved. With the Jewish Torah it is even simpler: this is a book about CREATION - the Torah is T(v)ora.

The Bible is a little different - you need to know that it is written on paper, and paper is made from cotton. Cotton in Slavic is called BaVeLna - BiBLe. The Bible is just a stack of paper! I am not talking about the Indian "Vedas" at all: here the origin from the word to know is obvious. Each of these explanations can be disputed separately, but it is interesting that all the names have the correct interpretation only through the Russian language.

Well, what about the names of gods and servants?

Allah... If we assume that this word is not Arabic and eventually lost its first consonant, then there is only one word that also corresponds to the meaning - WALLAH - Magi, and the Magi were priests. There is also the Russian root MOL, from which the word "pray" appeared. MoL - the same as MuL - MULLA who asks God. In English, the priest PRIEST - in Russian letters ASK: I do not believe that there can be so many coincidences. The fact that the words are similar and at the same time have the same meaning is half the battle. But pay attention: in all cases when a word in its “native” language cannot find an origin, in Russian it acquires a completely logical etymology - and all its riddles, suffixes that come from nowhere that traditional philology cannot explain, become completely normal parts words in Russian! Our language is amazing. It brings us to the bottom of the world - I am sure that it was created artificially and the matrix of the universe is encrypted in it.

What is hell and heaven

Have you been able to decipher anything?

Very interesting things. For example, only in Russian the whole world surrounding a person was described using one syllable with the root BL (taking into account the chains of consonant alternation). What was around the ancient man? Bor, Sea, Field, Swamp, Par (as the air used to be called) and so on.

Whole animal world described on a geometric basis only in Russian: in other languages these are words taken out of context, in ours they add up to a system. Living beings have been described with three roots, which are the forms of the body. For example, everything Round is described using the root KR / GL and its derivatives - Head, Eye, Throat, Knee, Lower Leg.

Further - only in the Russian language man was separated from the rest of the animal world according to the main feature - the mind. The mind is in the head, which used to have another name - HUMAN. How we were singled out from the world - we were called HUMAN-Century!

So what, from the language itself, our ancestors received knowledge about the world?

Our ancestors knew everything, because everything was described in a simple language. Paradise is nothing but a stripped-down EDGE, where everything is great and cool. Hell is just what is BELOW us. Let's remember the word "star" - light, yes - long before telescopes, people who spoke Russian knew that stars are not just holes in the sky, but that which shines, radiates light!

You said that the language was created artificially. Why even create it at all? After all, love could well be expressed in the number of killed mammoths.

The Russian language also answers this question. Remember Tyutchev's famous phrase: "A thought uttered is a lie"? What did the poet want to say? I'll show you. There are three verbs in Russian that mean the process of speech - to speak, to say, to utter (or expound). But what is interesting, only in Russian three verbs meaning lies have the same roots: speak - lie, expound / expound - lie / lie, say - distort. The language was originally created not for the exchange of information, but as a tool for its distortion, a way of influence. Now, of course, we already use it for communication. However, be sure - of all the peoples of the world, only we speak the most direct descendant of the parent language.

And who created it?

The ones who created humanity.

Kolobok exposed

These words are considered borrowed by the Russian language in recent centuries. However, Alexander Dragunkin is convinced of their Russian "origin".

Galaxy - from the Russian dialect "GaLaGa" (fog)

Dollar - from Share

Calculator - from how much

Laboratory - from Work (L and R alternate)

LeDi - from Lada (Old Russian goddess)

HoTel (hotel) - from HaTa

NeGR - from Not Beautiful

ELEMENT - from unbreakable

SMOG - from MGL

GLOBUS - from KoLoBok (G and K alternate)

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MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

federal state budgetary educational institution higher professional education

Nizhny Novgorod State University them. N.I. Lobachevsky

By discipline: Introduction to Slavic Philology

On the topic: Origin and meaning of terms: Proto-language, Proto-Slavic language, Proto-Indo-European language, Old Slavonic language, dead language

Nizhny Novgorod

"What is Proto-Language" . Prerequisites for the creation of the theory of the parent language

pre-literate historical Slavic

The comparative historical study of languages is one of the most advanced linguistic sections, both in terms of the depth of penetration into the mechanism historical development languages, and the development of its methodological techniques, conceptual apparatus and terminology, the establishment of laws that have sufficient explanatory power. At present, it can be stated with certainty that historical comparison method(interlingual and intralingual) within the framework of linguistic comparative studies, a fundamental linguo-historical theoretical discipline has been formed - diachronic linguisticomparativistics(Neroznak, 1986).

One of the central issues in the theory of diachronic linguistics and the general theory of reconstruction is still the problem of recreating the pre-written (prehistoric) previous linguistic state - the parent language. At the same time, using the reference points of linguistic time, i.e. the time of the appearance of sounding human speech, the linguist reconstructs the proto-linguistic state of various chronological depths. And the farther away from us is the plane projected in time, on which the grid of linguistic data is superimposed, the more hypothetical the reconstructed parent-language model becomes. The common Slavic parent language (proto-Slavic language) appears as a reality verified by linguistic facts, in comparison with which the Indo-European parent language should already be considered as a hypothetical construction, the verification of which is much more complicated due to the heterogeneity and different temporal location of the data.

Two approaches to understanding neither yu essence of the parent language

In modern linguistic dictionaries, the definition of the term "proto-language" reflects two understandings of the essence of the proto-language. One of them defines the parent language as an abstract model, which is hypothetical in nature: "The parent language (base language). The oldest of a number of genetically related languages as an object of comparative historical reconstructions: an abstract model, conceivable as the source of all other languages that developed on its basis in one family or group. Proto-language is common Russian; proto-language is common Slavic; proto-language is Slavic-Baltic; proto-language is Indo-European". As follows from the above definition, the Indo-European proto-language is defined as a hypothetical common language of the Indo-Europeans, restored by a comparative historical method. Such a definition is focused on the point of view of researchers of the historical state of languages, who believe that the parent language can be reconstructed only as a certain model, the sum of linguistic reconstructions available at a given stage, but not as a real linguistic state.

Another approach is that the parent language is the language state that existed in the past reality: "Protolanguage, base language, ancestor language ...

In the classification of languages by families, this is the name given to the language from which this or that language in question arose in a normal way: Latin is the ancestral language of French ... moreover, the descendant language is not a new language, but a new state of an evolved language" (Maruso, 1960 , 223) Such an understanding of the parent language presupposes its real existence in the past.

This difference in approaches goes back to the time of the formation of the theory of proto-linguistic states. The formation and development of comparative historical linguistics and its methodology is associated with the works of F. Bopp, J. Grimm, R. Rusk and others. They are credited with scientific proof of the relationship of the Indo-European languages and the establishment of patterns of similarities and differences between them.

The first theoretical substantiation of the model of the proto-linguistic Indo-European state was undertaken in mid-nineteenth in. A. Schleicher in a number of his works. Based on the theory of the evolutionary development of living organisms by Charles Darwin, he put forward the theory of the development of Indo-European languages in the form of a genealogical tree. According to this theory, the common trunk depicted the "primary organism" of the proto-language, which in the process of development was divided into branches. Large branches were divided into smaller branches. "The languages that arose first from the proto-language, we call base languages; almost each of them differentiates into languages, and languages can further break up into dialects and dialects - into subdialects.

All languages originating from one parent language form a linguistic genus, or language tree, which is then divided into language families, or language branches. "Given all the diversity of the world's languages, Schleicher argued that" it is impossible to establish a common parent language for all languages, most likely existed many proto-languages". The Indo-European proto-language presented in the theory of the genealogical tree, according to Schleicher, "alive, like all natural organisms", had the appearance of a holistic, homogeneous linguistic state, not divided into dialects. At the same time, linguistic reality contradicted such an ideal prototype of the most ancient linguistic The forms of existence of a living language abounded in its various variants, represented by dialects, subdialects, dialects, supradialectal Koine, social dialects, etc. The theory of the genealogical tree put forward by Schleicher as a real reconstructable proto-language was called the "Schleicher paradigm" in the history of linguistics.

Another concept of the term "Protolanguage"

LANGUAGE is one of the important concepts of linguistics and philosophy of language. In linguistics, this term denotes a language from whose dialects a group of related languages originated. The currently existing language families are traced back to the proto-languages of these families, the origin of which, in turn, is explained by the historical divergence of dialects of the P. macrofamily. Thus, on the one hand, the classification of the languages of the world (group, family, macrofamily) existing in synchrony is built, and on the other hand, the hierarchy of languages and proto-languages deployed in diachrony. According to some hypotheses, the proto-languages of macrofamilies go back to a single human Proto-Language. The time of existence of such a language is determined in the range from 100 to 30 thousand years ago.

Comparative-historical methodology

The very idea of the Proto-Language is connected with the need to explain the empirically fixed similarities and differences of languages. The principle of explanation is to reduce empirical diversity to a common foundation. The method of reduction, which is also used in modern linguistics, began to take shape as early as the end of the 18th century. and is a special case of applying a general methodological setting that has been widely used (and is still used) both in the humanities and natural sciences. The essence of this methodology is an attempt to describe the continuous diachronic change of forms that occurs naturally. The stimulus for change can be both external factors and internal characteristics of the changing object. The variability of the ways of change leads to a constant increase in the diversity of forms, since from one initial form many new ones can occur, differing in some features. In linguistics, this methodology is called comparative historical. It could also be successfully called evolutionary. Interestingly, the development of evolutionism in biology occurs at about the same time as the formation of the comparative historical method in the study of languages. The application of this kind of methodology necessarily leads to the hypothesis of a "common ancestor" for a group of different objects that have similar shapes. If we are talking about languages close in certain respects, then such a common ancestor is the Proto-language.

In a number of cases, the hypothesis about the Proto-Language turns out to be an empirically established fact. This happens when there are written sources that make it possible to fix, firstly, the indicated language itself, and secondly, the ways of its transformation into the currently existing languages of one group or family. This is exactly the case with Latin as the basis language of the Romance language group. In other cases, the parent language is reconstructed on the basis of a comparative analysis of modern languages. A number of formal methods have been developed that make it possible to reconstruct the units of the Proto-Language based on the system of correspondences between the units of individual languages originating from it. In this case, the parent language acts as an abstract object of linguistic research.

"Protolanguage as a language, expressing the truth"

Within the framework of some philosophical concepts, the idea of the Proto-Language has a metaphysical (and sometimes mythological) aspect. The Proto-Language is understood as the original language of mankind, which has the ability to express true knowledge. In ancient philosophy (in particular, among the Stoics), the idea of a true language was considered, the words of which are the true names of things that convey their essence. Ideas of this kind also suggest that the language in common use is the result of a corruption of the original language. Therefore, the task of knowing the truth requires the restoration of the true language, freeing it from later layers that obscure true knowledge. In the philosophy of language of the 20th century. there are also concepts of true language capable of expressing truth. Ultimately, such a language is always regarded as an ideal language, whose sentences are unambiguously interpretable and have obvious meaning. The project of such a language is presented, for example, by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The implementation of this project was undertaken within the framework of logical positivism. Despite the fact that the ideas of the philosophers of this trend seem to have little in common with the mythology of the true language or with the metaphysics of the Stoics, their attitude towards language also bears the features of the myth of real names, distorted by misuse.

There are, however, completely different concepts that revive the idea of a true language. The most striking of them is expressed in Heidegger's thesis about language as the "house of being". According to this thesis, language, in its undistorted sound, allows being to speak. Through it, the truth about things is spoken, hidden under the layers of being and appearing in the word as “the unhiddenness of being”. Unlike the positivists, who insist on unambiguity and logical rigor, Heidegger sees the main sign of genuine speech about being in its ambiguity. Accuracy in the expression of truth is possible only through laxity of speech. If positivism considers the language of science (however, ideal, and not real) as the true language, then Heidegger considers the language of poetry as such. A common feature, however, is the belief in the corruption of the "ordinary" use of language and the need for some special effort to find the true language. (G.B. Gutner)

"ABOUT pan-Slavic » And « Proto-Slavic » ( synonyms or independent terms ?)

The term “Common Slavonic” and its equivalents in other languages (English Common Slavic, etc.), used in a diachronic plan, that is, in relation to one of the stages of Slavic linguistic evolution, is one of two competing terms that are intended to denote the commonly postulated proto-language (ancestor language) underlying the process of development of all Slavic languages. If this term were used panchronically (or anachronistically), that is, in relation to all stages of Slavic linguistic evolution, then it would obviously have a different content. It could refer to some or all of the features common to all Slavic languages at one time or another. Such a meaning of the term would be mainly typological in nature, while in many cases the historical reasons for the structural similarity that stems from the genetic relationship of the Slavic languages \u200b\u200btogether would be ignored. A similar meaning would be put into the term “common Slavic language” if the latter were used synchronously, i.e., relative to a certain period of time in the Slavic language evolution, for example, in the period corresponding to approximately 1000 BC, or the beginning of the 13th century or modern period. However, if such meanings of this term are meant, then, in order to avoid possible confusion, it seems more appropriate to introduce another term, such as, "proto-Slavic language"(despite the fact that this term could evoke certain historical and ideological associations) or “generalized Slavic language”, a term preferred in the modeling-typological approach; the term “Proto-Slavic language” competes with the term “common Slavic language”. To some extent, the preference for one or another term is the business of every linguist or scientific tradition. Thus, for example, the French term slave commun is more widely used than proto-slave, due at least in part to the influence of Meillet's classic work. The Russian term "proto-Slavic" is apparently still more common than "general Slavic", although the latter was preferred by some scholars, including the Fortunatovs, and became especially common after the appearance of the translation of Meye's book.

Therefore, if the terms "Common Slavic" and "Proto-Slavic" can in fact be considered as synonyms, then the very existence of these two terms (and their equivalents in other languages) may suggest a somewhat different use of them. For example, in order to distinguish between two main phases in the development of the Slavic parent language, namely: First stage its development - immediately after its separation from some larger linguistic unit, such as the Balto-Slavic language or part of the late Indo-European language - and the final stage of its more or less homogeneous existence, immediately preceding the subsequent breakup into several Slavic language groups. Recently it has been proposed to keep the term "Proto-Slavic" for the earlier phase of the Common Slavic proto-language, and "Common Slavic" for its later phase. However, an absolutely clear division of the Slavic proto-language into earlier and later periods remains incomprehensible in view of the relative and often contradictory chronology of many sound changes, on which an attempt at such a division can be based.

These terminological considerations, if they do not meet with objections, rest on the problem of the relationship between those linguistic realities that lie under the concepts of “early Proto-Slavic” and “(general) Balto-Slavic”, on the one hand, and “late Common Slavic” and differentiated “early Slavic” - on the other hand, or rather, the problem of the relationship between each individual dialect of the late Common Slavic and a separate pre-literate Slavic language or language subgroup .... it is methodologically difficult to draw a clear line between what can be considered as late (common) Balto-Slavic, and what is regarded as an early Proto-Slavic language. The latter - to the extent that its main phonological and morphological structures are reconstructed on internal grounds - is essentially derivable from a hypothetical Baltic linguistic model. The reverse construction of a common (rather generalized) Baltic language structure to its early Proto-Slavic correspondence seems virtually impossible. It should also be noted that the temporal "boundary of the late Common Slavic language fluctuates, it is difficult to determine it with the help of irrefutable criteria, since many of the changes are consistent with the general trends that have already prevailed in previous centuries of Slavic linguistic development. The development of specific Slavic languages and subgroups, of course, was preceded by a divergent evolution of the late Common Slavic language in the pre-literate period, which, therefore, confirms the theoretical assumption about the existence of specific Slavic languages before they were fixed in writing.Thus, it is possible to establish only the time of the Late Common Slavic language, which is different for certain parts of the Slavic language area, - - the time of the “fall of weak ers” and the “vocalization (clarification) of strong ers” accompanying this process or immediately following it. Of course, there are no intralinguistic reasons that could cause the coincidence in time of the end of the Common Slavic period and the number then a random event - the emergence of Slavic writing in the second half of the 9th century as a result of the mission of Constantine and Methodius in 863. However, if we exclude from consideration the entire Slavic linguistic evolution, which was characterized by some spatial variability, the end of the more or less homogeneous development of the Slavic as a whole could be dated approximately 500 AD

However, since the purpose of this work is to review and evaluate recent and current discoveries and observations related to the reconstruction of the pre-literate Slavic proto-language, as well as the formulation of some as yet unresolved or obscure problems of this postulated language, the term "Common Slavic" is used as a general conditional term. to designate the entire length of the Slavic (but not pre-Slavic) linguistic evolution up to its fixation in written monuments.

P Raslavic language

Slavic languages go back to the same source. This common Slavic ancestor language is conditionally called Proto-Slavic; conditionally because it is not known how the people who spoke this language called themselves in ancient times.

The Proto-Slavic language is the parent language from which the Slavic languages originated. No written monuments of the Proto-Slavic language exist, so the language was reconstructed on the basis of a comparison of reliably attested Slavic and other Indo-European languages.

The Proto-Slavic language was not something static, it changed over time and its forms can be reconstructed in different ways, depending on the chosen chronological cut.

The Proto-Slavic language was a descendant of the Proto-Indo-European. There is a hypothesis according to which the Proto-Balts and Proto-Slavs survived a period of commonality, and the Proto-Balto-Slavic language is being reconstructed, which has already split into Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic.

About the name

The term “Proto-Slavyamnsky” was formed with the help of the prefix pre- from the word “Slavyamnsky”. Regarding the etymology of the self-name of the Slavs (singular *slovмninъ, plural *slovмne), there are discussions in science. There are several main hypotheses:

from the noun *slovo "word" or the verb *sluti (1st person singular *slovo) "to speak clearly";

from the hypothetical hydronym *Slovo, *Slova or *Slovje, which is traced back to Proto-I.E. *?le?- / *?lo?- “to be clean, transparent” (K. Moshinsky believed that this was the Dnieper, the Slavic folklore epithet of which in the period of Kievan Rus and known from the Tale of Igor's Campaign - other Russian Slovumtich, in the meaning of "glorious, famous, famous, originally. possibly full-flowing"); recently: from the hydronyms Slavuta, Slavka and others to Slav-.

from gre-i.e. *(s)-lau?-os "people" (with Indo-European "mobile s").

Also, some scientists used the term "common Slavic language" or "Slavic base language" to designate the Proto-Slavic language.

The Proto-Slavic language was a descendant of the Proto-Indo-European. There are many similarities between the Baltic and Slavic languages.

This forced many scientists (A. Schleicher, K. Brugmann, E. Kurilovich, A. Vaian) to believe that the Proto-Balts and Proto-Slavs survived the period of commonality, and to reconstruct the Proto-Balto-Slavic language, which had already split into Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic. At the same time, a number of other scientists (I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay, A. Meie, H. S. Stang) believe that these convergences are caused by parallel development and mutual influence due to living in neighboring territories.

There are several main localizations of the ancestral home of the Slavs:

Eastern European (Ya. M. Rozvadovsky, A. A. Shakhmatov)

central (L. Niederle, Yu. T. Rostafinsky, M. Yu. F. Fasme)

western "autochthonous" (Yu. Kostshevsky, L. Kozlovsky, Y. Chekanovsky, M. Rudnitsky)

Asian (early works by K. Moshinsky)

Later, K. Moshinsky placed the area of the Proto-Slavic language in the period around 500 BC. e. in the western-central Dnieper region. From there, according to the scientist, the Slavs settled to the north and west.

F. Slavsky and L. Moshinsky date the period of the Balto-Slavic community to ca. 2000--1500 BC e. After 1500 B.C. e. the history of the Proto-Slavic language proper begins. F. Slavsky connects the beginning of the dialectal differentiation of the Proto-Slavic language with the beginning of large migrations of the Slavs in the 5th century. L. Moshinsky dates the end of the existence of the Proto-Slavic language to the time of the Slavic expansion to the Balkan Peninsula and the formation of the western, southern and eastern groups of Slavic languages.

The idea of the development of the Proto-Slavic language. Although the Proto-Slavic language existed for a very long time and no written texts remained of it, nevertheless, we have a fairly complete picture of it. We know how its sound system developed, we know its morphology and the basic fund of vocabulary, which is inherited from the Proto-Slavic by all Slavic languages. Our knowledge is based on the results of a comparative historical study of the Slavic languages: it allows us to restore the original appearance (protoform) of each studied linguistic fact. The reality of the restored (original) Proto-Slavic form can be verified and refined by the testimony of other Indo-European languages. Especially often correspondences to Slavic words and forms are found in the Baltic languages, for example, in Lithuanian. This can be illustrated by the roots, which include combinations of sounds that changed in different ways in different Slavic languages after the collapse of Proto-Slavic, but remained unchanged in the Lithuanian language.

Many words are common to all Slavic languages, therefore, they were already known to the Proto-Slavic language. The common protoform for them has undergone unequal changes in different Slavic languages; and the design of these words in Lithuanian (and in other Indo-European languages) suggests that the vowel was originally in all roots before I or r. "a°n, *golv-a, *kolt-iti, *vort-a, *gord-b, *korva. The established relationships allow us to formulate a historical phonetic law, according to which it is possible to reconstruct ( presumably to restore) the original proto-form: Russian norov, Bulgarian character, etc. give the basis for the reconstruction of the Proto-Slavic *pogu-b (compare the Lithuanian narv-ytis - "stubborn"), peas, grah, etc. - Proto-Slavic * gorx-b (compare the Lithuanian garb "a - a type of grass), etc. It is in this way that the appearance of the decayed Proto-Slavic language is restored.

One can speak of Proto-Slavic as a kind of Indo-European language insofar as it is characterized by a complex of features inherent only to it and combined with a series of features known to one degree or another to other languages of Europe and South Asia.

At some stage of their life, a group of European tribes who spoke dialects close to the ancient Baltic, Iranian, Balkan, German, united into a fairly strong alliance, within which for a long time there was a convergence (leveling, alignment) of dialects necessary to develop mutual understanding. between members of a tribal union. It can be assumed that in the I millennium BC. e. an Indo-European language already existed, characterized by features later known only to Slavic languages, which allows us, modern researchers, to call it Proto-Slavic.

The originality of the Proto-Slavic language is largely due to the fact that its historical changes were determined by development trends inherent only to it. The most common of these was the tendency to syllabic articulation of speech. At a late stage in the development of the Proto-Slavic language, the same type of syllable structure was formed, leading to the restructuring of former syllables in such a way that they all ended in vowels.

The Proto-Slavic language existed until the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e., when the tribes who spoke it, having settled in the vast territories of Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, begin to lose ties with each other. The language of each of the isolated groups of tribes continued to develop in isolation from others, acquiring new sound, grammatical and lexical features. This is the usual way of forming “related” languages from a single source language (proto-language), noticed by F. Engels, who wrote: “Tribes, dismembering, turn into peoples, into whole groups of tribes ... languages change, becoming not only mutually incomprehensible but also losing almost every trace of the original unity.

"Proto-Indo-European language"

Proto-Indo-EuropemEnglishmto-- a hypothetical ancestor of the languages of the Indo-European family, including Slavic, Germanic, Romance and others. Some linguists classify Proto-Indo-European as part of the Nostratic macrofamily of languages.

Nostratic languages (from lat.nostrвs,genus. n. nostrintis "ours”, “our circle”, “local”) is a hypothetical macrofamily of languages, uniting several language families and languages of Europe, Asia and Africa, which go back to a single Nostratic parent language.

Disintegration and dialect division of the Proto-Indo-European language. In connection with the resettlement of Indo-European tribes, by a certain point in time, a single Proto-Indo-European language ceased to exist, reborn into the proto-languages of separate groups. The Proto-Anatolian language was the first to separate. According to the kurgan theory, its bearers left the territory of their ancestral home to the west, to the Balkans (Cernavode culture and Usatov culture). Given the antiquity of this branch, E. Sturtevant proposed to introduce a new term "Indo-Hittite language" for the period in the history of the proto-language before the departure of the Proto-Anatolians, and use the word "Proto-Indo-European" for the period after the departure. Probably, the next after the Anatolians, the Pratocharians separated, who went to the east. The rest of the Indo-European tribes were in contact with each other for some time.

Periodization and chronology . There is currently no generally accepted periodization.

Periodization by V. Maida

the early Indo-European period (6000-4500 BC), which ends with the separation of the Anatolian branch;

Middle Indo-European period (4500-3500 BC);

late Indo-European period (3500-2500 BC).

From the Proto-Indo-European language continuum to different time there was a branch of separate groups of dialects. The degree of linguistic isolation can be determined by the peculiarities of vocabulary, morphology and specific laws of phonetic changes. The reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language is based on the oldest linguistic monuments of different groups of the Indo-European language family.

buildlanguage. Almost all modern and known ancient Indo-European languages are languages of the nominative system. However, many experts put forward the hypothesis that the Proto-Indo-European language in the early stages of its development was the language of the active system; subsequently the names of the active class became masculine and feminine, and those of the inactive class became neuter. This, in particular, is evidenced by the complete coincidence of the forms of the nominative and accusative cases of the neuter gender. The remnants of the active system are preserved to the greatest extent in the Anatolian languages; in other Indo-European languages, the division into active and passive is not rigid.

Constructions resembling an active system in modern English (he sells a book - he sells a book, but a book sells at $20 - a book sells for $ 20) are secondary and not directly inherited from Proto-Indo-European.

Commonality of successor languages. Since no direct evidence of the Proto-Indo-European language has been preserved, linguists, using the comparative method, analyzed the vocabulary and phonology of the successor languages. A large number of words in modern Indo-European languages come from Proto-Indo-European roots, but these words have received regular phonetic changes. Even more similarities are revealed in the early forms of modern Indo-European languages. There are also many similarities at the grammar level. After the first researchers in this field, such as Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm, systematized the common features of the Indo-European languages, August Schleicher tried in 1861 to reconstruct the hypothetical common roots. Thanks to new discoveries and methods, work is still ongoing to refine and deepen the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European language.

Degrees of relationship. The Proto-Indo-European language had a complex and developed system of naming degrees of kinship. In particular, it contained the words: grandfather, father (*btta), father, mother (*mеh?tзr), parent, son (*suHnъs), brother (*bhrйh?tзr), grandson, nephew, daughter (*dhugh ?t?r), sister (*swйsfr), daughter-in-law, father-in-law (*swe?uros), mother-in-law, build or build (paternal uncle), uy or vui (*h?ewh?yos, maternal uncle), brother-in-law , brother-in-law, daughter-in-law, son-in-law, sister-in-law, yatrov.

History of study. The acquaintance of Europeans with Sanskrit and its systematic comparison with the ancient Greek, Latin and Germanic languages made it possible to lay the foundations for the comparative study of the Indo-European languages. The importance of Sanskrit for the creation of Indo-European studies lay in two things: its archaism and its study in the works of ancient Indian grammarians.

At the dawn of Indo-European studies, relying mainly on Sanskrit data, scientists reconstructed a four-line system of stop consonants for the Proto-Indo-European language. This scheme was followed by many scientists. Later, when it became clear that Sanskrit was not the equivalent of the proto-language, there were suspicions that this reconstruction was unreliable. Indeed, there were quite a few examples that made it possible to reconstruct a series of voiceless aspirates. Some of them were of onomatopoeic origin. The remaining cases, after F. de Saussure put forward the laryngeal theory, brilliantly confirmed after the discovery of the Hittite language, were explained as reflexes of the combinations voiceless stop + laryngeal. Then the stop system was reinterpreted. But this reconstruction also had its drawbacks. The first drawback was that the reconstruction of the voiced aspirate series in the absence of the voiceless aspirate series is typologically unreliable. The second drawback was that there were only three rather unreliable examples for Proto-Indo-European b. This reconstruction could not explain this fact.

A new stage was the advancement in 1972 by T. V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov of the glottal theory (and, independently of them, by P. Hopper in 1973). This scheme was based on the shortcomings of the previous one. This theory made it possible to interpret Grassmann's and Bartholome's laws in a different way, as well as to comprehend Grimm's law in a new way. However, this scheme seemed to many scientists imperfect. In particular, it assumes for the late Proto-Indo-European period the transition of glottalized consonants into voiced ones, while glottalized ones are rather dull sounds.

The last reinterpretation was made by V.V. Shevoroshkin, who suggested that in Proto-Indo-European there were not glottalized, but “strong” stops, which are found in some Caucasian languages. This type of stops can indeed be voiced.

Old Slavonic language

OLD SLAVONIC LANGUAGE, otherwise - the Old Church Slavonic language - the most ancient of the written Slavic languages, which spread among the southern, eastern and partly western Slavs in the 9th - 10th centuries. n. e. as the language of the Christian church and literature. By its origin, it is a written processing of one of the dialects of the Bulgarian language of the second half of the 9th century, namely, the dialect of the mountains. Thessalonica in western Macedonia (now Thessaloniki). However, the Slavic language received its initial distribution in the West Slavic environment, in the Great Moravian Principality (within present-day Czechoslovakia).

History of occurrence.

The Old Church Slavonic language arose as a language for translating Christian liturgical books from Greek for the needs of Christian missionary activity in Moravia. In 863, the Great Moravian prince Rostislav, striving for independence in relation to the German clergy, who represented the Roman Church in Moravia, sent an embassy to the Byzantine emperor Michael III with a request to send him persons who could preach Christianity to the Moravians in a language they understood. This preaching mission was entrusted to the brothers Constantine (monastic Cyril) and Methodius, the sons of a prominent Byzantine nobleman, natives of Thessalonica, who knew the language of the local Bulgarian settlers. Before leaving for Moravia, Constantine compiled the Slavic alphabet, according to most scholars, the so-called Glagolitic alphabet, and also managed to start translation work, which was already ongoing in Moravia. Constantine and Methodius also extended their missionary activity to the Slavic principality of Kotsela on Lake Blaten, in Pannonia (now within Hungary), where the Slovenes lived - one of the South Slavic peoples. After the death of Constantine and Methodius, their students moved their activities to Bulgaria, which at the end of the 9th and beginning of the 10th century. experienced an era of great literary upsurge. The appearance of the second Slavic alphabet, probably the so-called Cyrillic alphabet, as well as some differences in the language compared with the Old Slavonic language of the older period, is apparently connected with the activities of the students of Constantine and Methodius in Bulgaria. From the Bulgarians, he passed to the Serbs, and then to Kievan Rus. Over time, the Old Church Slavonic language, which served as the church-literary language for various Slavic peoples, was assimilated to a certain extent by the corresponding living Slavic language among each of these peoples, so that in relation to the XI-XII centuries. we have to talk about local varieties or so-called. izvodah S. yaz. Of these, the most important are the Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian editions.

The term "Old Church Slavonic" is the most accepted in modern Russian-speaking science; similarly formed terms fr. le vieux slave, lat. palaeoslavica. In different linguistic traditions, the Old Church Slavonic language is called: Old Church Slavonic (in the Russian tradition of the 19th - early 20th centuries), Old Slavonic, Old or Old Bulgarian (in the Bulgarian tradition, sometimes in German: Altbulgarisch). Until the middle of the 19th century, in the Russian tradition it was called (together with Church Slavonic) simply “Slovenian”, “Slavonic” or “Slavic”. The term Slavism can also be applied to borrowings from the Old or Church Slavonic language.

Historical monuments.

Many monuments of the Old Slavonic language have been preserved, as the oldest (X-XI centuries) in the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets. There are also numerous monuments of the 11th century, reflecting the influence of local dialects on the Old Slavonic language. Among them are monuments of the Russian edition (Cyrillic), monuments of the Czech edition, of a later origin (XII-XIII centuries) - monuments of the Serbian and Middle Bulgarian edition.

The number of known monuments of Old Church Slavonic proper is small. All of them are not dated, but for various internal reasons they should be attributed to the time not later than the 11th century. and not earlier than the end of the X century. Of these, the most important:

a) written in the Glagolitic alphabet - the Zograf Gospel (Public Library named after Saltykov-Shchedrin in Leningrad), the Mariinsky Gospel, the so-called Collection of Klots, the Sinai Trebnik, the Sinai Psalter, the Kyiv Missal;

b) written in Cyrillic - the so-called. Savvin's book (Moscow Historical Museum), the Suprasl manuscript, the Hilandar leaflets, etc. The oldest monument of the Russian version of S. yaz. is the so-called Ostromirovo Ev. (1056--1057, stored in the Public Library in Leningrad), the oldest monuments of the Bulgarian version - Dobromirovo Ev. and the Bologna Psalter of the 12th century, Serbian edition - Miroslavovo Ev. XII.

Being the oldest written expression of Slavic speech, the Old Church Slavonic language retains in its structure many features that have been lost by modern Slavic languages (for example, the so-called "deaf" vowels ъ and ь, nasal vowels, which are now preserved only in Polish and in some Macedonian dialects, a complex system of past tenses in a verb, etc.). But at the same time, in comparison with other Indo-European languages, the Old Church Slavonic language reveals many new formations (especially in phonetics), which generally characterize the Slavic languages.

Meaning Old Slavonic language for the science of language is due not only to its antiquity, but also to the great role that it plays in the fate of younger Slavic literary languages, in particular, Russian. On the basis of the Russian version of the S. language, over time, the Church Slavonic language developed, which was the main language of writing in Russia until the end of the 17th century (see "Russian language"). The Russian variety of the Church Slavonic language left deep traces in the Russian national literary language, which are still noticeable, the so-called Slavicisms.

Old Church Slavonic is not the spoken language of the 9th century Slavs, but a language specially created for translating Christian literature and creating their own Slavic religious works. It follows from this that the Old Slavonic language simply could not coincide with the living language of the same time. However, it was understandable to speakers of Slavic languages both in its phonetics, and in morphology, and in syntax, and the vocabulary not used in the colloquial language turned out to be associated with the new religion, was memorized, came into use along with the new faith. The Old Church Slavonic language was created on the basis of the dialects of the southern group of Slavic languages, to which of the modern Slavic languages belong, for example, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian languages. At the same time, it began to spread to the territory now occupied by Czech, Slovak, Polish languages belonging to the western group, and by the end of the 10th century it also falls into the East Slavic territory inhabited by the ancestors of the current Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians. The language spoken at that time by our ancestors is usually called Old Russian, so after the baptism of Russia on its territory there is a living spoken language of the Eastern Slavs - Old Russian - and a literary written language - Old Slavonic, which takes on some features of the living and in this form exists until the 17th century as the main written literary language. Scientists call this language "Church Slavonic", leaving the term "Old Church Slavonic" for the language of the 9th century, the one that Constantine and his students created. In the Old Russian language, writing is carried out, but this is business and everyday correspondence, while works of art, annals, lives of saints, teachings are written with an orientation towards the bookish Church Slavonic language.

Naturally, the Russian and Church Slavonic languages interact throughout their centuries-old history. The words and turns of the Church Slavonic language penetrate into business writing, and then into the living language, remain there and are not perceived as something alien. This is the direct difference between borrowings from the Church Slavonic language ("Old Church Slavonicisms") and all other borrowings. Borrowings from other languages at the first stage are perceived as alien, foreign, and only then, having passed the levels of phonetic, graphic, grammatical development, they become an element of the Russian language. Old Slavonicisms at all stages of entry into the Russian language do not carry foreign language features. This is due, as already mentioned above, with a small difference in the 9th century Slavic languages, therefore, words of Old Slavonic origin and words of Russian origin differ very slightly.

Old Church Slavonic, the language of the most ancient Slavic monuments of the 10th-11th centuries that have come down to us, continuing the tradition of those translated from Greek by Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century. liturgical and canonical books. The basis of it, the oldest Slavic literary language, was the Slavic South Macedonian (Thessalonica) dialect. From the very beginning, the Old Church Slavonic language had the character of a Slavic international language, which was used among the Western Slavs (Czech, Moravian, Slovak and partly Polish lands), then the Southern Slavs, and somewhat later (from the 10th century) the Eastern Slavs. Monuments of S. Ya. written in two alphabets: Glagolitic and Cyrillic. Most scientists assume that the Glagolitic alphabet is older than the Cyrillic alphabet and that it was it that was invented by one of the creators of the glory. written by Konstantin-Kirill. The peculiarity of the Glagolitic writing, which does not allow it to be confidently associated with any of the alphabets known at that time, confirms this assumption. The Cyrillic alphabet quite often reproduces the manner of the Greek statutory writing of the 9th century. The Old Slavonic monuments that have come down to us reflect the local types of the most ancient Slavic literary language of the 10th-11th centuries. The total number of Old Slavonic book monuments is small - 16 (including small ones). A valuable addition to the parchment corpus of monuments are the inscriptions on the stone (the oldest one is the Dobruja inscription, 943).

The continuation of the Old Slavonic language as a literary language was the Church Slavonic language, which at an early stage of development (11th-14th centuries) had a number of versions: Russian Middle Bulgarian-Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian Glagolitic.

Dead language

There are several definitions of this concept, but they are all connected by a similar meaning and idea.

1. A language that has ceased to be the main means of communication of a certain ethnic community, has lost speakers who passed this language from generation to generation in a natural way.

2.dead tongues m to - a language that does not exist in living use and, as a rule, is known only from written monuments, or is in artificial regulated use.

3. A dead language is a language that does not have living speakers for whom it is native. This usually happens when one language is completely replaced by another, such as the Coptic language was replaced by Arabic, and many native American languages were replaced by English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

We can identify the main reasons for the appearance of dead languages:

1) the disappearance of the people who spoke this language (Tasmanian languages);

2) the transition of the people to a new language (Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Gothic, Prussian).

The Classical Dead Language may continue to be used in some limited areas of usage (eg Latin, Classical Mongolian), however it has no native speakers and is always a learned language. Some linguists (V.K. Zhuravlev) question the application of the concept of "dead language" in relation to a language that received a written form of existence in its time. They believe that this language does not die, but continues to live on the bookshelf, often remaining an inexhaustible source of development of living literary languages, such as Book Slavonic for Russian, Grabar for modern Armenian, Latin and Ancient Greek for European languages, Sanskrit for the South Asian cultural and historical area. . Such a “dead” language, under certain conditions, can theoretically be “revived”, but in practice this happens in exceptional cases: for example, Hebrew “revived”, having also received oral communication in Israel.

A dead language can continue to evolve in other languages based on it. An example of such a language is Latin, a dead language that is the ancestor of modern Romance languages. Similarly, Sanskrit is the progenitor of the modern Indo-Aryan languages, and Old Church Slavonic is the progenitor of the modern South Slavic languages.

In some cases, the extinct language continues to be used for scientific and religious purposes. Among the many dead languages used in this way are Sanskrit, Latin, Church Slavonic, Coptic, and others.

The degrees of preservation of languages are scale of six categories proposed inRed BookUNESCO languages for a clearer definition of the danger threatening a particular language.

1. extinct languages(extinct) -- languages for which there is no living native speaker; for example, Polabsky, Southern Mansi, Ubykh, Slovinsky, Prussian, Gothic, Dalmatian, Kerek.

Ancient dead languages should be distinguished from them (ancient; languages either died out before 1500 (the date is conditional) or developed into modern languages (like Latin)); bookish languages (dead languages, the texts of which are still used today); in addition, there are several "resurrected" extinct (Cornish, Manx) and dead (Hebrew) languages that are a special case.

1a. Possibly extinct languages(possibly extinct) - languages that definitely existed in the recent past, but there is no reliable information about whether someone speaks the language now. For example, Western Mansi, Cappadocian Greek,

2. On the brink of extinction(almost extinct, nearly extinct) - several dozen carriers (although there may be up to several hundred), all of which are elderly. With their death, the language will definitely die out. For example, Liv, Vod, Orok, South Yukaghir, Ainu.

3. Disappearing(endangered) languages (seriously endangered) - there are more speakers (from two hundred to tens of thousands), but there are practically no speakers among children. This situation can persist for a long period if the language is "second" and is used in everyday life only by some adults. For example, Izhora, Veps, Northern Yukagir, Selkup, Yiddish, Nivkh, Ket, Breton, Kashubian.

4. Disadvantaged Languages(endangered) -- some children (at least at some age) speak the language, but their numbers are declining. The total number of carriers can range from one thousand to millions. For example, Nenets, Karelian, Komi, Irish.5. Unstable languages(potentially endangered) -- the language is used by people of all ages, but it has no official or other status and does not enjoy much prestige, or the ethnic territory is so small (1-2 villages) that it can easily disappear as a result of a cataclysm (an avalanche with mountains, flood, war). Examples: Dolgan, Chukchi, minor languages of Dagestan, Belarusian, Galician, Frisian, Basque.

6. Prosperous languages(not endangered) -- Russian, English, Estonian.

There is a fine line between dead languages and the ancient states of the living: for example, the Old Russian language, whose speakers also do not exist, is not considered dead. The difference is whether the old form of the language flowed into the new ones entirely, or whether they split and existed in parallel for some time. Most often, the literary language breaks away from the spoken language and freezes in some of its classical form, then almost unchanged; when the spoken language develops a new literary form, the old one can be considered to have become a dead language.

Most often, the literary language breaks away from the spoken language and freezes in some of its classical form, then almost unchanged; when the spoken language develops a new literary form, the old one can be considered to have turned into a dead language (an example of such a situation can be the Turkish language, which replaced the Ottoman language as the language of education and office work in Turkey in the 1920s).

Used Books

Encyclopedia of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. M .: "Kanon +", ROOI "Rehabilitation". I.T. Kasavin. 2009.

Lit .: Kulbakin S. M., Old Church Slavonic, 3rd ed., Har., 1917; Lavrov P. A., Materials on the history of the emergence of ancient Slavic writing, L., 1930; Selishchev A. M., Old Slavonic language, part 1-2, M., 1951-1952; Wayan A., Guide to the Old Church Slavonic language, trans. from French, M. 1952; Trubetzkoy N., Altkirchenslavische Grammatik, W., 1954.

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Ancient proto-language. An alternative view of a linguist: the Old Russian language is the parent language of all other languages! What is hell and heaven

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