Did you know?
In the 16th century Europeans noticed similarities between the Indo-Aryan, Iranian, and European languages.
Indo-European Families:The Origins.
The most widely studied language family in the world is the Indo-European.
1583 Konkani Thomas Stephens (the English Jesuit missionary and scholar): noted similarities between the Indian, Greek and Latin languages.
In 1647, the Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn. He noted the similarity between certain Asian and European languages and theorized that they were derived from a common primitive language he called Scythian. It included in its hypothesis Dutch, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Persian and German, and then Slavic, Celtic and Baltic languages were added.
The Ottoman Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi visited Vienna in 1665-1666. He noticed some similarities between the words in German and in Persian.
Coeurdoux made an exhaustive comparison of the Sanskrit, Latin and Greek conjugations at the end of the 1760s to suggest a relationship between them.
In 1786 Sir William Jones gave a lecture on the striking similarities between three of the oldest languages known in his day: Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.
Thomas Young first used the Indo-European term in 1813, derived from the geographical extremes of the linguistic family: from Western Europe to northern India.
Franz Bopp wrote in 1816 about the conjugated system of the Sanskrit language in comparison with the Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic.
The division of the Indo-European languages into satem and centum groups was proposed by Peter von Bradke in 1890.
Anatolian (Asia Minor), the earliest attested branch. Emerged around 4200 BC Isolated terms in Luwian/Hittite texts from the 20th and 19th from about 1650.
Germanic (from Proto-Germanic), emerged around 3300 BC,earliest testimonies in runic inscriptions from around the 2nd century AD, earliest coherent texts in Gothic, 4th century AD. Old English manuscript tradition from about the 8th century AD.
Celtic, descended from Proto-Celtic, emerged around 3000 BC.Lepontic inscriptions date as early as the 6th century BC; Celtiberian from the 2nd century BC; Primitive Irish Ogham inscriptions from the 5th century AD, earliest inscriptions in Old Welsh from the 8th century AD.
Italic, including Latin and its descendants (the Romance languages), emerged around 3000 BC,attested from the 7th century BC.
Balto-Slavic, emerged around 2800 BC,believed by most Indo-Europeanists to form a phylogenetic unit, while a minority ascribes similarities to prolonged language contact. . Slavic (from Proto-Slavic), attested from the 9th century AD (possibly earlier; see Slavic runes), earliest texts in Old Church Slavonic. Baltic, attested from the 14th century AD; for languages attested that late, they retain unusually many archaic features attributed to Proto-Indo-European (PIE).
Armenian, emerged around 2800 BC.Alphabet writings known from the beginning of the 5th century AD
Hellenic, emerged around 2500 BC.Fragmentary records in Mycenaean Greek from between 1450 and 1350 BC have been found. Homeric texts date to the 8th century BC.
Indo-Iranian, emerged around 2200 BC,attested circa 1400 BC, descended from Proto-Indo-Iranian (dated to the late 3rd millennium BC).
Albanian, attested from the 14th century AD; Proto- Albanian language likely evolved from Paleo-Balkan predecessors.