Travel the World of Indo-European Languages Quiz

Answer: Eurasian steppes

For a while, it seemed that maybe archaeology had found the Indo-Europeans! The culture of the Kurgan peoples of the Russian steppes seemed to bear some striking resemblances to what we reconstruct as Indo-European. Calvert Watkins describes it as, "small tribal units (teuta-) ruled by powerful chieftains (reg-), a predominantly pastoral (pa-) economy including horse (ekwo-) breeding (deme- [last letter really a shwa]) and plant cultivation (yewo-)..." Thus spake the great Calvert Watkins. We shall be hearing more about him later on!

Well, anyway, for a while, things looked great, but it turns out that the timing is wrong. Bummer. But it does seem, from the roots that show up in all Indo-European languages, that it was the Eurasian steppes somewhere around the Black Sea. So, uh, have you seen any yet?

Answer: No

Don't we wish! Everything we know comes from comparing roots and grammar across different languages. It seems there were actually different stages of Proto Indo-European. Everybody used to think that the original Proto Indo-European was something with lots and lots of cases and tenses and word endings, like Greek or Sanskrit.

Then somebody deciphered Hittite, and it only had, say, two tenses. Oops!

Answer: Laryngeals

Laryngeals were pronounced in the back of the throat. I would have to make some grunting and choking sounds to get it across. There were three of these, conveniently named h1, h2, and h3. In Greek, h1 > e (> stands for "turned into"), h2 > a, and h3 > o.

Indo-European also had two types of "k"s. Ever notice that you pronounce "ki" more on your palate, while you pronounce "ko" more in the back of your throat? Give it a try. Those were the two types of Indo-European "k"s, except each one could occur with any vowel. What happened to each of the two "k"s in different languages is an exciting story...

Answer: Hittite

We LOVE the Hittites. Not only did they pass down to us ample records, pre-fired (AHEM, all you Linear B scribes), they also passed down written records in other languages spoken in the region. Why? You don't just have to placate YOUR gods-- you have to placate everyone else's, and in their own language! And even in adapting cuneiform they adopted the logograms of several other languages, including Akkadian and Sumerian. James Joyce should have written in Hittite!

Hittite is also a very interesting language linguistically. It doesn't have all the complicated case inflections of, say, Sanskrit and Greek. Nope, it has two verb tenses (present and not-quite-present), two voices (active and middle), first, second, and third persons in singular and plural, and a nice compliment of noun cases. Hittite is actually easier to learn than Latin or Greek. Less complicated grammar. The only catch? You have to learn German first!

Answer: Sanskrit

Sanskrit is the uber-inflected language. Eight cases, three genders, three numbers (singular, plural, and dual!), five declensions, and that's just for nouns! Good grief! Verbs, I don't even want to think about verbs. Vedic is the language of the Vedas. Trying to read Vedic if you know Sanskrit is like trying to read Chaucer if you know modern English. Yes, you can puzzle it out, but it reads really strange.

Sanskrit is to India what Latin was to western Europe. It is the language of a lot of important literature and religious scriptures, but also the language used by intellectuals, and the ancestor of the Indo-European languages spoken in India, like Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Sindhi, Punjabi...

By the way, the best grammar of any language is generally agreed to be Panini's grammar of Sanskrit. He lived sometime between the second and fourth centuries BC. On the other hand, the best Sanskrit grammar in English was written by William Dwight Whitney. Happy reading!

Answer: Greek

Greek is the oldest continuously spoken language. The earliest records we have come from the 14th century BC, and are written in Linear B, a writing system totally different from Egyptian Hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and the alphabet. Modern Greek, a direct descendant of ancient Greek, is still spoken today.

It is interesting to note how the language has changed over time. Mycenaean Greek from the 14th century had the sounds q, w, and y, which had dropped out by the time of Classical Greek. In Modern Greek, what were "b" and "u" in ancient Greek became "v" and "i."

Answer: Etruscan

Etruscan, actually, isn't related to anything we know of - it is referred to as a language isolate. Oscan, Umbrian, and South Picene are closely related to Latin, although you probably won't be able to read them even if you know Latin. On the other hand, it's fun to try. See C. D. Buck's "A Grammar of Oscan and Umbrian" for a little bit of light reading. You know, Umbrian is only known from a few tablets, the Iguvian tablets!

There has been some debate as to whether Etruscan is part of the Satem (Eastern) group of the Indo-European languages, but most scholars do not consider it to be so.

Answer: Latin

The development of Latin is really quite interesting. In any text you would read in school, the language is quite standardized. On the other hand, if you go to read any of the early Latin, like Ennius, you start to note slight differences in spelling, and the language becomes grammatically interesting again.

A lot of Latin graffiti is really, really funny, but sadly, I couldn't find any in time to include it in this quiz.

Answer: China

I thought Tocharian was pretty cool. One of my friends went to Germany to study Indo-European linguistics, and they actually let him look at some Tocharian inscriptions. What did he tell me? "Yeah, Tocharian doesn't really do it for me, man." I was indignant. Now, I have taken Tocharian, and... OK, the interesting info. Tocharian A was only used as a written language, but Tocharian B was widely spoken as the lingua franca of eastern Turkistan and the Xinjiang province of China. Hmph.

Answer: No

It's a Germanic language. Sorry. It's pretty closely related to Icelandic and Old English, and was the ancestor of the Scandinavian languages. The Celtic languages used to be spoken over most of Western Europe, but most are now preserved only as fragmentary inscriptions. As far as Celtic languages go, you've probably heard of Welsh. Other Celtic languages did not have so happy a fate. The last Cornish speaker was a certain Dolly Pentreath, who died in 1777, a very lonely lady. After all, she had no-one to talk to!

[Author's note: Yes, there are some people who still speak Cornish today. But Cornish is considered dead because there are no speakers who have acquired competency as native speakers, as children.]

Answer: The American Declaration of Independence

Sir William Jones began his work in the 1780s. His book, "The Sanskrit Language," suggested that Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit shared a common root, and might be related to Gothic, the Celtic languages, and Persian as well. In a later book, he wrote: "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists ..."

Answer: Finno-Ugric

Finno-Ugric consists of Finnish and Estonian (which are mutually intelligible), Hungarian, and a host of other languages on the verge of dying out. They are totally unrelated to all the Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Croatian, Bulgarian, etc.) Romance (Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, etc.) and Germanic (German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, etc.) languages. I do expect you to memorize that whole list, by the way. I'm sorry; this is possibly the most boring and predictable question in the entire quiz!

Answer: Tibetan

Farsi and Tajik are both Iranian languages, and are related to Avestan (the language of the Avestas, the sacred texts of Zoroastrianism), and Old Persian (what Darius and Xerxes would have been speaking while trying to demolish Greece). One linguist remarked that reading Old Persian is very boring and repetitive; it's all about the Great Deeds of the Great King Muck-A-Muck.

They'd rather be reading Mycenaean accounting records or Hittite legal disputes, I gather. These linguists constitute a flock of rather odd birds, indeed. Anyway, Armenian seems to be a branch of its own. Have you ever looked at the Armenian alphabet? Quite lovely, and very different looking from the Roman Alphabet, the Greek Alphabet, or Cyrillic.

Answer: Lithuanian

Um, "as nekalbu lietuviskai"! Actually, Old Prussian was even more conservative, but it died out in the 16th century AD. Lithuanian (and to a much lesser extent, Latvian) preserve a lot of features of Indo-European, although, as someone (I can't figure out who, sorry) once said, "In the verb, Baltic abandons its usual conservatism and has a wild fling."

Answer: English

Let's see, we have Calvert Watkins, currently THE eminent Indo-Europeanist, so be sure not to miss his talk, and, um, lots of other people I don't recognize. Jose Luis Garcia Ramon is really awesome (and what a snazzy name, too!). Actually, I've never been to any of these conferences before, but it sure *sounded* fun! Well, in any case, I hope you enjoyed my Indo-European world tour!