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Locative Case

Locative case

Locative is a case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by". The locative case belongs to the general local cases together with the lative and separative case.

The locative case in various languages

The locative case exists in many languages, e.g. the Altaic, Indo-European, and Uralic languages.

Indo-European languages

The locative case is found in:
- in modern Balto-Slavic languages (see however prepositional case)
- some classical Indo-European languages, particularly Sanskrit and Latin
- in uncommon, archaic or literary use in certain modern Indian languages (such as Marathi in which a separate ablative case has however disappeared)

Turkish

The locative case exists in Turkish. For instance, in Turkish, elim means: my hand, and elimde means in my hand, so using de and da suffixes, the locative case is marked.

Finnish

In Finnish, there are two sets of local cases. Instead of the locative, the Finnish language has the inessive, which indicates a location inside of a place, and the adessive, which indicates a location outside of a place. The ancient Uralic locative is still used in some expressions in modern Finnish, e.g.
- ulkona 'outside'
- kotona 'at home'. In the Finnish grammar, the locative is included in the essive case. Its ending is -na/-nä.

Inari Sami

In Inari Sami, the locative suffix is -st.
- kyeleest 'in the language'
- kieđast 'in the hand'.

Hungarian

In the Hungarian language, nine such cases exist, yet the name locative case refers to a form (-t/-tt) used only in a few city/town names along with the Inessive case or Superessive case. It can also be observed in a few local adverbs and postpositions. It is no longer productive. Examples:
- Győrött (also Győrben), Pécsett (also Pécsen), Vácott (also Vácon), Kaposvárt and Kaposvárott (also Kaposváron), Vásárhelyt (also Vásárhelyen)
- itt (here), ott (there), imitt, amott (there yonder), alatt (under), fölött (over), között (between/among), mögött (behind) etc. The town/city name suffixes -ban/-ben are the inessive ones, and the -on/-en/-ön are the superessive ones. ja:処格

Lative case

Lative is a case which indicates motion to a location. It corresponds to the English prepositions to and into. The lative case belongs to the group of the general local cases together with the locative and separative case.

The lative case in various languages

The lative case is typical of the Uralic languages and it was one of the Proto-Uralic cases. It still exists in many Uralic languages, e.g. Finnish, Erzya, Moksha, and Meadow Mari.

Finnish

In Finnish, the lative case is not productive anymore. It occurs in various adverbs, e.g. alas 'down', kauemmas 'farther off', pois 'away', and rannemmas 'closer to the shore'. The lative suffix is usually -s.

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects, including most of the major language families of Europe, as well as many languages of Southwest and South Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. Contemporary languages in this superfamily include Bengali, English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish (each with more than 100 million native speakers), as well as numerous smaller national or minority languages. The Indo-European is the largest widely accepted family of languages in the world today, spoken by approximately 3 billion native speakers. (The second most common family of tongues being Sino-Tibetan)

Classification

The various subgroups of the Indo-European family include (in historical order of their first attestation):
- Anatolian languages — earliest attested branch, from the 18th century BC; extinct, most notable was the language of the Hittites.
- Indo-Iranian languages, descending from a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-Iranian
- Indo-Aryan, including Sanskrit, attested from the 2nd millennium BC
- Iranian languages, attested from roughly 1000 BC, including Avestan and Persian.
- Greek language — fragmentary records in Mycenaean from the 14th century BC; Homer dates to the 8th century BC. See History of the Greek language.
- Italic languages — including Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages, attested from the 1st millennium BC.
- Celtic languages — Gaulish inscriptions date as early as the 6th century BC; Old Irish texts from the 6th century AD.
- Germanic languages (including English) — earliest testimonies in runic inscriptions from around the 2nd century, earliest coherent texts in Gothic, 4th century.
- Armenian language — attested from the 5th century.
- Tocharian languages — extinct tongues of the Tocharians, extant in two dialects, attested from roughly the 6th century.
- Balto-Slavic languages, believed by many Indo-Europeanists to derive from a common proto-language later than Proto-Indo-European, while others are skeptical and think that Baltic and Slavic are no more closely related than any other two branches of Indo-European.
- Slavic languages — attested from the 9th century, earliest texts in Old Church Slavonic.
- Baltic languages — attested from the 14th century, and, for languages attested that late, they retain unusually many archaic features attributed to Proto-Indo-European.
- Albanian language — attested from the 15th century (1462); relations with Illyrian, Dacian, or Thracian proposed. In addition to the classical ten branches listed above, there are several extinct languages, about which very little is known:
- Illyrian languages — possibly related to Messapian or Venetic; relation to Albanian also proposed.
- Venetic language — close to Italic.
- Liburnian language — apparently grouped with Venetic.
- Messapian language — not conclusively deciphered.
- Phrygian language — language of ancient Phrygia, possibly close to Greek, Thracian, or Armenian.
- Paionian language — extinct language once spoken north of Macedon.
- Thracian language — possibly close to Dacian.
- Dacian language — possibly close to Thracian and Albanian.
- Ancient Macedonian language — probably related to Greek, others propose relation to Ilyrian, Thracian or Phrygian.
- Ligurian language — possibly not Indo-European; possibly close to or part of Celtic There were no doubt other Indo-European languages which are now lost without a trace. The fragmentary Raetian language cannot be classified with any certainty. Further subfamilies have been suggested, among them Italo-Celtic and Graeco-Aryan. Neither of these is widely accepted. Indo-Hittite refers to the hypothesis that there is a significant separation between Anatolian and all the remaining groups.

Satem and Centum languages

Indo-Hittite/Srubna cultures).]] The Indo-European sub-branches are often classified in a Satem and a Centum group. This is based on the varying treatments of the three original velar rows. Satem languages lost the distinction between labiovelar and pure velar sounds, and at the same time assibilated the palatal velars. The centum languages, on the other hand, lost the distinction between palatal velars and pure velars. Thus, geographically, the "eastern" languages are Satem (Indo-Iranian, Balto-Slavic, but not including Tocharian and Anatolian), and the "western" languages are Centum (Germanic, Italic, Celtic). The Satem-Centum isogloss runs right between the Greek (Centum) and Armenian (Satem) languages (thought to be related by a number of scholars), with Greek exhibiting some marginal Satem features. Some scholars think that there may be some languages that classify neither as Satem nor as Centum (Anatolian, Tocharian, and possibly Albanian). It should be noted that the grouping does not imply a claim of monophyly: there never was a "proto-Centum" or a "proto-Satem", but the sound changes spread by areal contact among already distinct post-PIE languages (say, during the 3rd millennium BC).

Suggested superfamilies

Some linguists propose that Indo-European languages are part of a hypothetical Nostratic language superfamily, and attempt to relate Indo-European to other language families, such as South Caucasian languages, Altaic languages, Uralic languages, Dravidian languages, Afro-Asiatic languages. This theory is controversial, as is the similar Eurasiatic theory of Joseph Greenberg, and the Proto-Pontic of John Colarusso.

History

See also: Proto-Indo-European, Historical linguistics, Glottochronology. The possibility of common origin for some of these languages was first proposed by Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn in 1647, proposing their derivation from "Scythian". However, the suggestions of van Boxhorn did not become widely known and were not pursued. The hypothesis was again proposed by Sir William Jones, who noticed similarities between four of the oldest languages known in his time, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian. Systematic comparison of these and other old languages conducted by Franz Bopp supported this theory, and Bopp's Comparative Grammar, appearing between 1833 and 1852 is considered the starting point of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline. The common ancestral (reconstructed) language is called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). There is disagreement as to the original geographic location (the so-called "Urheimat" or "original homeland") from where it originated. There are two main candidates today: # the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea (see Kurgan) # Anatolia (see Colin Renfrew). Proponents of the Kurgan hypothesis tend to date the proto-language to ca. 4000 BC, while proponents of Anatolian origin usually date it several millennia earlier, associating the spread of Indo-European languages with the Neolithic spread of farming (see Indo-Hittite).

Kurgan hypothesis

The Kurgan hypothesis was originally suggested by Marija Gimbutas in the 1950s. According to the Kurgan hypothesis, early PIE was spoken in the chalcolithic steppe cultures of the 5th millennium BC between the Black Sea and the Volga. Timeline
- 4500–4000: Early PIE. Sredny Stog, Dnieper-Donets and Sarama cultures, domestication of the horse.
- 4000–3500: The Yamna culture, the prototypical kurgan builders, emerges in the steppe, and the Maykop culture in the northern Caucasus. Indo-Hittite models postulate the separation of Proto-Anatolian before this time.
- 3500–3000: Middle PIE. The Yamna culture is at its peak, representing the classical reconstructed Proto-Indo-European society, with stone idols, early two-wheeled proto-chariots, predominantly practicing animal husbandry, but also with permanent settlements and hillforts, subsisting on agriculture and fishing, along rivers. Contact of the Yamna culture with late Neolithic Europe cultures results in the "kurganized" Globular Amphora and Baden cultures. The Maykop culture shows the earliest evidence of the beginning Bronze Age, and bronze weapons and artefacts are introduced to Yamna territory. Probable early Satemization.
- 3000–2500: Late PIE. The Yamna culture extends over the entire Pontic steppe. The Corded Ware culture extends from the Rhine to the Volga, corresponding to the latest phase of Indo-European unity, the vast "kurganized" area disintegrating into various independent languages and cultures, still in loose contact enabling the spread of technology and early loans between the groups, except for the Anatolian and Tocharian branches, which are already isolated from these processes. The Centum-Satem break is probably complete, but the phonetic trends of Satemization remain active.
- 2500–2000: The breakup into the proto-languages of the attested dialects is complete. Proto-Greek is spoken in the Balkans, Proto-Indo-Iranian north of the Caspian in the Sintashta-Petrovka culture. The Bronze Age reaches Central Europe with the Beaker culture, likely composed of various Centum dialects. Proto-Balto-Slavic (or alternatively, Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic communities in close contact) develops in north-eastern Europe. The Tarim mummies possibly correspond to proto-Tocharians.
- 2000–1500: The chariot is invented, leading to the split and rapid spread of Iranian and Indo-Aryan from the Andronovo culture and the Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex over much of Central Asia, Northern India, Iran and Eastern Anatolia. Proto-Anatolian is split into Hittite and Luwian. The pre-Proto-Celtic Unetice culture has an active metal industry (Nebra skydisk).
- 1500–1000: The Nordic Bronze Age develops (pre-)Proto-Germanic, and the (pre-)Proto-Celtic Urnfield and Hallstatt cultures emerge in Central Europe, introducing the Iron Age. Proto-Italic migration into the Italian peninsula. Redaction of the Rigveda and rise of the Vedic civilization in the Punjab. Flourishing and decline of the Hittite Empire. The Mycenaean civilization gives way to the Greek Dark Ages.
- 1000 BC–500 BC: The Celtic languages spread over Central and Western Europe. Northern Europe enters the Pre-Roman Iron Age, the formative phase of Proto Germanic. Homer initiates Greek literature and early Classical Antiquity. The Vedic Civilization gives way to the Mahajanapadas. Zoroaster composes the Gathas, rise of the Achaemenid Empire, replacing the Elamites and Babylonia. The Cimmerians (Srubna culture) are replaced by Scythians in the Pontic steppe. Armenians succeed the Urartu culture. Separation of Proto-Italic into Osco-Umbrian and Latin-Faliscan, and foundation of Rome. Genesis of the Greek and Old Italic alphabets. A variety of Paleo-Balkan languages are spoken in Southern Europe. The Anatolian languages are extinct.

Competing hypotheses

Colin Renfrew in 1987 suggested that the spread of Indo-European was associated with the Neolithic revolution, spreading peacefully into Europe from Asia Minor from around 7000 BC with the advance of farming (wave of advance). Accordingly, all of Neolithic Europe would have been Indo-European speaking, and the Kurgan migrations would at best have replaced Indo-European dialects with other Indo-European dialects. Thomas Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav V. Ivanov in 1984 placed the Indo-European homeland on Lake Urmia. They suggested that Armenian was the language which stayed in the Indo-European cradle while other Indo-European languages left the homeland. They are also the originators of the Glottalic theory. Some people have pointed to the Black Sea deluge theory, dating the genesis of the Sea of Azov to ca. 5600 BC, as a direct cause of the Indo-European expansion. This event occurred in still clearly Neolithic times and is rather too early to fit with Kurgan archaeology. It may still be imagined as an event in the remote past of the Sredny Stog culture, and the people living on the land now beneath the Sea of Azov as possible pre-Proto-Indo-Europeans. Other theories exist, often with a nationalistic flavour, sometimes bordering on national mysticism, typically positing the development in situ of the proponents' respective homes. One prominent example of such are the Indian theories that derive Vedic Sanskrit from the Indus valley civilization, postulating that Vedic Sanskrit is essentially identical to Proto-Indo-European, and that all other dialects must ultimately trace back to the early Indus valley civilization of ca. 3000 BC. This theory is not widely accepted by scholars. See Indo-Aryan migration for a discussion. Another example may be the Paleolithic Continuity Theory proposed by Italian theorists that derives Indo-European from the European Paleolithic cultures.

References

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- August Schleicher, A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages (1861/62).
- Leszek Bednarczuk (red.), Języki indoeuropejskie. PWN. Warszawa. 1986 (in Polish).

External links

- [http://www.HJHolm.de Slide-show of subgrouping roughly agreeing with the figures of the article.]
- [http://www.ship.edu/%7Ecgboeree/indoeuropean.html The Evolution of the Indo-European Languages, by Dr. C. George Boeree].
- [http://www.bartleby.com/61/IEroots.html Indo-European Roots, from the American Heritage Dictionary].
- [http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/iedocctr/ie.html Indo-European Documentation Center] at the University of Texas
- [http://www.grsampson.net/Q_PIE.html Say something in Proto-Indo-European] (by Geoffrey Sampson)
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90017 IE language family overview (SIL)]
- [http://www.psych.auckland.ac.nz/psych/research/Evolution/Gray&Atkinson2003.pdf Gray & Atkinson, article on PIE Phylogeny]
- [http://www.geocities.com/protoillyrian Indo-European Root/lemmas] (by Andi Zeneli)
- [http://www.indoeuropean.nl The Indo-European Database]
- [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/17084 Discussion on proto-Satem]
- [http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/6507/chronicle120.html The Early History of Indo-European Languages]
- ja:インド・ヨーロッパ語族 ko:인도유럽어족 th:ภาษากลุ่มอินโด-ยูโรเปียน

Declension

In linguistics, declension is a feature of inflected languages. In the general sense it is the alteration of a noun to indicate its grammatical role. An example in English is the way "he" changes to "him" when it follows a verb or preposition, and to "his" when it is possessive. In the specific sense, such as declension I of Latin or the a-declension of , it is a type of grammatical gender: A set of nouns which inflect the same way. In inflected languages, nouns are said to decline into different forms, or morphological cases. Morphological cases are one way of indicating grammatical case; other ways are listed below. Declension is seen, for example, in many Indo-European languages like Latin, German and Sanskrit; in Dravidian languages like Tamil; in Finnish; in Swahili and many others. Old English had an extensive case system. In modern English grammar, the same information is now mostly conveyed with word order and prepositions, though a few remnants of the older declined form of English still exist (for example, in pronouns, such as "he" vs. "him"; see Declension in English). Languages are categorized into several case systems, based on how they group verb agents and patients into cases:
- Nominative-accusative: The agent of both transitive and intransitive verbs is always in the nominative case. The patient of a (transitive) verb is in the accusative case. The dative case may also be present.
- Ergative-absolutive (or simply ergative): The patient of a verb is always in the absolutive case, along with the agent of intransitive verbs. If both agent and patient are present, the agent is in the ergative case.
- Active-stative (also called active): The agent of a verb is always in the subject case, and the patient is always in the object case. The case does not depend on whether a verb is used in a transitive or intransitive form.
- Trigger: One noun in a sentence is the topic or focus. This noun is in the trigger case, and information elsewhere in the sentence (for example a verb affix in Tagalog) specifies the role of the trigger. The trigger may be identified as the agent, patient, etc. Other nouns may be inflected for case, but the inflections are overloaded; for example, in Tagalog, the subject and object of a verb are both expressed in the genitive case when they are not in the trigger case. The following are systems that some languages use to mark case instead of, or in addition to, declension:
- Positional: Nouns are not inflected for case; the position of a noun in the sentence expresses its case.
- Prepositional/postpositional: Nouns are accompanied by words that mark case, but the noun itself is not modified. Some languages have more than 20 cases. For an example of a language that uses a large number of cases, see Finnish language noun cases. The lemma forms of words, which is the form chosen by convention as the canonical form of a word, is usually the most unmarked or basic case, which is typically the nominative, trigger, or absolutive case, whichever a language may have.

External links

- [http://www.hi.is/~eirikur/cases.pdf The Status of Morphological Case in the Icelandic Lexicon] by Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson. Discussion of whether cases convey any inherent syntactic or semantic meaning.
- [http://web.phil-fak.uni-duesseldorf.de/~wdl/OptCase.pdf Optimal Case: The Distribution of Case in German and Icelandic] by Dieter Wunderlich
- [http://phrontistery.info/cases.html A long list of names for cases] found in one language or another
- [http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/brian/brian-08.htm Scene 8, Monty Python's the Life of Brian] explains Latin declension. Best if viewed in the context of the movie before reading. Category:Grammar als:Deklination ja:ディクレンション

Balto-Slavic languages

The Balto-Slavic language group is a hypothetical language group consisting of the Baltic and Slavic language subgroups of the Indo-European family.

General argument

Baltic and Slavic share more close similarities, both lexical and morphosyntactic, than any other language group within the Indo-European language family. Many linguists, following the lead of such notable Indo-Europeanists as Oswald Szemerényi, take these to indicate that the two groups separated from a common ancestor, Proto-Balto-Slavic, only well after the breakup of Indo-European. Other linguists — themselves following such notable Indo-Europeanists as Antoine Meillet — regard these similarities as arising entirely from intensive contact between the two branches well after they had separately split directly from proto-Indo-European (the satem group). The former view is traditionally the more widely held of the two: Beekes (1995: 22), for example, states: "The Baltic and Slavic languages were originally one language and so form one group". Collinge (1985) includes an appendix (pp. 271–77) on "Laws of accentuation in Balto-Slavic", apparently implying a belief in a single Balto-Slavic proto-language, but does concede, "everything in this section is controversial, including this sentence."

Evidence and interpretation

More than 100 words are common in their form and meaning to Baltic and Slavic alone, among them:
- Lithuanian begu "I run," Latvian bēgu, Russian begu;
- Lithuanian liepa "linden tree," Latvian liepa, Old Prussian lipe, Russian lipa. The amount of shared words may be explained either by existence of common Balto-Slavic language in the past or by the following circumstances:
- Baltic and Slavic speakers are in close geographical, political and cultural contact, which naturally leads to lexical similarities; that is, each has borrowed words and meanings from the other. Differentiating between borrowings and common inheritance requires a careful study of sound shifts, and in some cases the information can be insufficient to resolve the question.
- Slavic and Baltic languages were not written down until 9th and 16th centuries A.D., respectively. Thus, the historical record tracing the development of the languages is limited.
- Baltic and Slavic languages both belong to the Satem sub-group of the Indo-European languages.

Meillet vs. Szemerényi

Until Meillet's Dialects indo-européens of 1908, Balto-Slavic unity was undisputed among linguists, as he notes himself at the beginning of the Le Balto-Slave chapter (L'unité linguistique balto-slave est l'une de celles que personne ne conteste). Meillet's critique of Balto-Slavic confined itself to the seven characteristics listed by Karl Brugmann in 1903, attempting to show that no single one of these is sufficient to prove genetic unity. Szemerényi in his 1957 re-examination of Meillet's results concludes that the Balts and Slavs did, in fact, share a "period of common language and life", and were probably separated due to the incursion of Germanic tribes along the Vistula and the Dnepr roughly at the beginning of the Common Era. Szemerényi notes fourteen points that he judges cannot be ascribed to chance or parallel innovation, and thus considers proof of Balto-Slavic unity: #phonological palatalization (described by Kurylowicz, 1956) #the development of i and u before PIE resonants #ruki #accentual innovations #the definite adjective #participle inflection in -yo- #the genitive singular of thematic stems in -ā(t)- #the comparative formation #the oblique 1st singular men-, 1st plural nōsom #tos/tā for PIE so/sā pronoun #the agreement of the irregular athematic verb (Lithuanian dúomi, Slavic damь #the preterite in ē/ā #verbs in Baltic -áuju. slav. -ujǫ #the strong correspondence of vocabulary not observed between any other pair of branches of the Indo-European languages. Another common innovation proposed for Balto-Slavic is Winter's law (Werner Winter, 1978), the lengthening of a short vowel before a voiced plosive. The validity of the law is disputed, and Holst (HS 116, 2003) suggests a modification to the effect that the change only takes place under the accent.

References

-
-
- Provides a review of the points of debate, and a listing of the scholars and their positions.
- Answers the question in the negative.
-
-
- Pashka, Joseph.
- Pashka, Joseph.
-

External links

- The University of Texas at Austin [http://www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/lrc/iedocctr/ie-lg/ie-lg.html The Indo-European Language Family]
- [http://jilaniwarsi.tripod.com/geno.pdf#search='BaltoSlavic%2Cgroup%2Clanguages' Balto-Slavic within the Indo-European language group]
- [http://www.worldhistory.com/wiki/B/Balto-Slavic-languages.htm Balto-Slavic language group]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90207 Ethnologue – Baltic languages]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=90673 Ethnologue – Slavic languages]
- [http://www.staff.hum.ku.dk/olander/project/ The Balto-Slavic accentual mobility]
- [http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art218e.pdf Balto-Slavic Accentuation], by Kortlandt
- [http://postilla.mch.mii.lt/Kalba/baltai.en.htm We the Balts] (by Algirdas Sabaliauskas)
- [http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi51.htm Lexical comparison of Sanskrit and Latvian] Category:Indo-European languages

Indo-European

Indo-European was originally a purely linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. By extension, it became a collective name for cultures and religions associated with these languages. Hypothetically, these cultures arose from the expansion of an ancient people, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, from a homeland that has remained obscured, although opinion is generally divided between southern Russia and eastern Anatolia.

Language Family

See main article Indo-European languages. The Indo-European language family is attested in twelve branches, some of them extinct, with a historical distribution over most of Europe, North India, Pakistan, Anatolia, Armenia, Iran, and parts of Central Asia (East Turkistan). The word Indo specifically refers to India alone. India has the largest single Indo-European speaking population on the planet where 75% of the non-Dravidian population (some 700 million people) speak many different Indo-European languages and dialects, which are descendents of a language called Proto-Indo-Aryan by linguists. During the age of colonialism, Indo-European languages spread from Europe to all continents, and today there are over three billion speakers of Indo-European languages, distributed all over the world. The languages are traditionally separated into a Satem group in the east (Baltic, Slavic, Indo-Iranian, Armenian) and a Centum group in the west (Greek, Italic, Celtic, Germanic), according to their different treatment of PIE velar sounds. The two groups are considered paraphyletic, i.e. there are no separate proto-languages for each group and their common characteristics are likely due to prolonged contact because of their geographical proximity. Also, there is evidence that the Anatolian, Tocharian and Albanian branches belong to neither of the two groups.

Comparative Linguistics

See main article Indo-European studies. The existence of the Proto-Indo-Europeans has been inferred by comparative linguistics. The discovery of the genetic relationship of the various Indo-European languages goes back to William Jones, a British judge in India, who in 1782 observed the strong affinity of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin. The language group was briefly referred to as "Indo-Germanic", until it became apparent that the group included most of the other languages of Europe, as well. "Indo-European", the term now current in English, was coined in 1813 by the British scholar Sir Thomas Young. Franz Bopp performed extensive comparative work. At first, the related languages were simply compared, with no attempt at reconstruction. August Schleicher was the first scholar to compose a tentative text in the extinct "common source" Jones had predicted. The reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) represents, by definition, a hypothetical model of the common language of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, great progress was made due to the discovery of more language material belonging to the Indo-European family, and by advances in comparative linguistics, by scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure.

Proto-Indo-Europeans

See main article Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Origins

The scholars of the 19th century that originally tackled the question of the original homeland of the Indo-Europeans (also called Urheimat after the German term), were essentially confined to linguistic evidence. A rough localization was attempted by reconstructing the names of plants and animals as well as the culture and technology. The scholarly opinions became basically divided between a European hypothesis, positing migration from Europe to Asia, and an Asian hypothesis, holding that the migration took place in the opposite direction. However, from its early days, the controversy was tainted by romantic, nationalistic notions of heroic invaders at best and by imperialist and racist agendas at worst. The question is still the source of much contention. racist according to the Kurgan hypothesis. The purple area corresponds to the assumed Urheimat (Samara culture, Sredny Stog culture). The red area corresponds to the area which may have been settled by Indo-European-speaking peoples up to ca. 1000 BC.]] In the twentieth century, Marija Gimbutas (1956) created a modern variation on the traditional invasion theory (the Kurgan hypothesis) which regards the Indo-Europeans as nomadic horsemen in what is today South Russia and Eastern Ukraine, expanding in several waves during the 3rd millennium BC. However, others have associalted the Kurgans with the Indo-Iranians. Colin Renfrew (1987) is the main propagator for another theory according to which the Indo-Europeans were farmers in Anatolia who introduced agriculture into southeast Europe around 7000 BC and assimilated the Preindoeuropeans. This is also problematic, however, as the Indo-European language had words for things such as yoke and plough which were not present at the introduction of agriculture to Europe. The rise of Archaeogenetics, which uses genetic analysis to trace migration patterns, added new elements to the puzzle. Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza recently used genetic evidence to in some ways combine Gimbutas' and Renfrew's theory.

Religion

Main article: Proto-Indo-European religion The hypothetical PIE religion was centered on sacrificial rituals where animals were slaughtered to establish good relations with the gods. The chief god of the Proto-Indo-European pantheon, probably mirroring the position of the king in human society, was the sky-god Dyeus.

Latin

Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. It gained great importance as the formal language of the Roman Empire. All Romance languages, those being most notably Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian, are descended from Latin, and many words based on Latin are found in other modern languages such as English. The Latin alphabet, derived from the Greek, remains the most widely-used alphabet in the world. It is said that 80 percent of scholarly English words are derived from Latin (in a large number of cases by way of French). Moreover, in the Western world, Latin was a lingua franca, the learned language for scientific and political affairs, for more than a thousand years, being eventually replaced by French in the 18th century and English in the late 19th. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the formal language of the Roman Catholic Church to this day, and thus the official national language of the Vatican. The Church used Latin as its primary liturgical language until the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. Latin is also still used (drawing heavily on Greek roots) to furnish the names used in the scientific classification of living things. The modern study of Latin, along with Greek, is known as Classics.

Main features

Latin is a synthetic inflectional language: affixes (which usually encode more than one grammatical category) are attached to fixed stems to express gender, number, and case in adjectives, nouns, and pronouns, which is called declension; and person, number, tense, voice, mood, and aspect in verbs, which is called conjugation. There are five declensions (declinationes) of nouns and four conjugations of verbs. There are six noun cases: #nominative (used as the subject of the verb or the predicate nominative), #genitive (used to indicate relation or possession, often represented by the English of or the addition of s to a noun), #dative (used of the indirect object of the verb, often represented by the English to or for), #accusative (used of the direct object of the verb, or object of the preposition in some cases), #ablative (separation, source, cause, or instrument, often represented by the English by, with, from), #vocative (used of the person or thing being addressed). In addition, some nouns have a locative case used to express location (otherwise expressed by the ablative with a preposition such as in), but this survival from Proto-Indo-European is found only in the names of lakes, cities, towns, small islands, and a few other words related to locations, such as "house", "ground", and "countryside". Latin itself, being a very old language, is far closer to Proto-Indo-European than are most modern Western European languages; it has, in fact, about the same relationship with PIE as modern Italian or French has to Latin. There are six general tenses in Latin (technically they are tense/aspect/mood complexes). The indicative mood can be used with all of them. The subjunctive mood, however, has only present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect tenses. These tenses in the subjunctive mood do not completely correlate in meaning to the tenses in the indicative. The following examples are of the first conjugation verb "laudare" ("to praise") in the indicative mood and the active voice:
Primary sequence tenses
# present (laudo, "I praise") # imperfect (laudabam, "I was praising") # future (laudabo, "I shall praise," "I will praise")
Secondary sequence tenses
# perfect (laudavi, "I praised", "I have praised") # pluperfect (laudaveram, "I had praised") # future perfect (laudavero, "I shall have praised," "I will have praised") The future perfect tense can also imply a normal future idea (like in "When I will have run...") and so may also sometimes be included in the primary sequence.
Latin and Romance
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, Latin evolved into the various Romance languages. These were for many centuries only spoken languages, Latin still being used for writing. For example, Latin was the official language of Portugal until 1296 when it was replaced by Portuguese. The Romance languages evolved from Vulgar Latin, the spoken language of common usage, which in turn evolved from an older speech which also produced the formal classical standard. Latin and Romance differ (for example) in that Romance had distinctive stress, whereas Latin had distinctive length of vowels. In Italian and Sardo logudorese, there is distinctive length of consonants and stress, in Spanish only distinctive stress, and in French even stress is no longer distinctive. Another major distinction between Romance and Latin is that all Romance languages, excluding Romanian, have lost their case endings in most words except for some pronouns. Romanian retains a direct case (nominative/accusative), an indirect case (dative/genitive), and vocative. In Italy, Latin is still compulsory in secondary schools as Liceo Classico and Liceo Scientifico which are usually attended by people who aim to the highest level of education. In Liceo Classico Ancient Greek is a compulsory subject.
Latin and English
See Latin influence in English for a more complete exposition. English grammar is independent of Latin grammar, though prescriptive grammarians in English have been heavily influenced by Latin. Attempts to make English grammar follow Latin rules — such as the prohibition against the split infinitive — have not worked successfully in regular usage. However, as many as half the words in English were derived from Latin, including many words of Greek origin first adopted by the Romans, not to mention the thousands of French, hundreds of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian words of Latin origin that have also enriched English. During the 16th and on through the 18th century English writers created huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek roots. These words were dubbed "inkhorn" or "inkpot" words (as if they had spilled from a pot of ink). Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, but some remain. Imbibe, extrapolate, dormant and inebriation are all inkhorn terms carved from Latin words. In fact, the word etymology is derived from the Greek word etymologia, meaning "true sense of the word." Latin was once taught in many of the schools in Britain with academic leanings - perhaps 25% of the total [http://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/T/teachem2/thennow/]. However, the requirement for it was gradually abandoned in the professions such as the law and medicine, and then, from around the late 1960s, for admission to university. After the introduction of the Modern Language GCSE in the 1980s, it was gradually replaced by other languages, although it is now being taught by more schools along with other classical languages.
Latin education
The linguistic element of Latin courses offered in high schools or secondary schools, and in universities, is primarily geared toward an ability to translate Latin texts into modern languages, rather than using it in oral communication. As such, the skill of reading is heavily emphasized, whereas speaking and listening skills are barely touched upon. However, there is a growing movement, sometimes known as the Living Latin movement, whose supporters believe that Latin can, or should, be taught in the same way that modern "living" languages are taught, that is, as a means of both spoken and written communication. One of the most interesting aspects of such an approach is that it assists speculative insight into how many of the ancient authors spoke and incorporated sounds of the language stylistically; without understanding how the language is meant to be heard it is very difficult to identify patterns in Latin poetry. Institutions offering Living Latin instruction include the Vatican and the University of Kentucky. In Britain the Classical Association encourages this approach, and there has been something of a vogue for books describing the adventures of a mouse called Minimus. In the United States there is a thriving competitive organization for high school Latin students, the National Junior Classical League (the second-largest youth organization in the world after the Boy Scouts), backed up by the Senior Classical League for college students. Many would-be international auxiliary languages have been heavily influenced by Latin, and the moderately successful Interlingua considers itself to be the modernized and simplified version of the language (le latino moderne international e simplificate). Latin translations of modern literature such as Paddington Bear, Winnie the Pooh, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Le Petit Prince, Max und Moritz, and The Cat in the Hat have also helped boost interest in the language.
See also

About the Latin language

- Latin grammar
- Latin spelling and pronunciation
- Latin declension
- Latin conjugation
- Latin alphabet
- List of Latin words with English derivatives
- Latin verbs with English derivatives
- Latin nouns with English derivatives
- ablative absolute
- Word order in Latin
About the Latin literary heritage

- Latin literature
- Romance languages
- Loeb Classical Library
- List of Latin phrases
- List of Latin proverbs
- Brocard
- List of Latin and Greek words commonly used in systematic names
- List of Latin place names in Europe
- Carmen Possum
Other related topics

- Roman Empire
- Internationalism
References

- Bennett, Charles E. Latin Grammar (Allyn and Bacon, Chicago, 1908)
- N. Vincent: "Latin", in The Romance Languages, M. Harris and N. Vincent, eds., (Oxford Univ. Press. 1990), ISBN 0195208293
- Waquet, Françoise, Latin, or the Empire of a Sign: From the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Centuries (Verso, 2003) ISBN 1859844022; translated from the French by John Howe.
- Wheelock, Frederic. Latin: An Introduction (Collins, 6th ed., 2005) ISBN 0060784237
External links

- [http://www.jambell.com/latin.html Latin Phrases for after dinner conversation (Thanks to Elaine Poole)]
- [http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=lat Ethnologue report for Latin]
- [http://forumromanum.org/literature/index.html Corpus Scriptorum Latinorum] is a comprehensive webography of Latin texts and their translations.
- [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ The Perseus Project] has many useful pages for the study of classical languages and literatures, including [http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/resolveform?lang=Latin an interactive Latin dictionary].
- [http://lysy2.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/words.exe words by William whitaker] is a dictionary program online capable of looking up various word forms.
- [http://retiarius.org/ Retiarius.Org] includes a Latin text search engine.
- [http://www.nd.edu/~archives/latgramm.htm Latin-English dictionary and Latin grammar from U of Notre Dame]
- [http://latin-language.co.uk/ Latin language] History of Latin language, Latin texts with English translation and a collection of dictionaries.
- [http://augustinus.eresmas.net/scl/ Societas Circulorum Latinorum] gathers together Latin Circles all over the world.
- [http://www.learnlatin.tk LearnLatin.tk] - Free online course in Latin
- [http://www.latintests.net/ LatinTests.net] - Lets Latin learners test their grammar and vocabulary with self-checking quizzes.
- [http://thelatinlibrary.com/ The Latin Library] contains many Latin etexts
- [http://www.textkit.com/ Textkit] has Latin textbooks and etexts.
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Latin-english/ Latin–English Dictionary]: from Webster's Rosetta Edition.
- [http://www.language-reference.com/ Language reference] Cross-foreign-language lexicon powered by its own search engine. All cross combinations between Latin and French, German, Italian, Spanish.
- [http://comp.uark.edu/~mreynold/rhetor.html Rhetor by Gabriel Harvey] was originally published in 1577 and never again reprinted.
- [http://freewebs.com/omniamundamundis omniamundamundis] Latin hypertexts from fourteen ancient Roman authors.
- [http://www.saltspring.com/capewest/pron.htm Pronunciation of Biological Latin, Including Taxonomic Names of Plants and Animals]
- [http://www.yleradio1.fi/nuntii Nuntii Latini (News in Latin)], written and spoken (RealAudio) news in latin. Weekly review of world news in Classical Latin, the only international broadcast of its kind in the world, produced by YLE, the Finnish Broadcasting Company.
- [http://www.tranexp.com:2000/InterTran?url=http%3A%2F%2F&type=text&text=Replace%20Me&from=eng&to=ltt InterTran Latin], Translate from Latin to ENGLISH or vice versa.
- [http://www.latinvulgate.com Latin Vulgate] The Latin and English of the Old & New Testaments in parallel, along with the Complete Sayings of Jesus in parallel Latin and English. Category:Classical languages Category:Ancient languages Category:Fusional languages Category:Languages of Italy Category:Languages of Vatican City als:Latein zh-min-nan:Latin-gí ko:라틴어 ja:ラテン語 simple:Latin language th:ภาษาละติน

Ablative case

For the physical process, see ablation. In linguistics, the ablative case is a noun case found in several languages, including Armenian, Latin, Sanskrit and the Finno-Ugric languages. The Latin ablative combines the functions of the Indo-European ablative (indicating "from"), instrumental (indicating "with" or "by"), and locative (indicating "in") cases, which merged together in the development of Latin. From these original meanings several others developed, including the ablative of cause (indicating "caused by"), the ablative of time and means (indicating "at the time of", deriving from the locative), and the ablative absolute. In Finnish, the ablative case is the sixth of the locative cases with the meaning "from off of", e.g. pöytä — pöydältä "table — off from the table". It is an outer locative case, used just as the adessive and allative cases to denote both being on top of something and "being around the place" (as opposed to the inner locative case, the elative, which means "from out of" or "from the inside of"). The other locative cases in Finnish are:
- Inessive case ("in")
- Elative case ("out of")
- Illative case ("into")
- Adessive case ("on")
- Allative case ("onto")

Latin usage

The case also exists in 3 kinds besides its direct purpose and Ablativus absolutus:
- Ablativus separationis with meaning of separation, e.g. movere loco - "to put aside", educere castris - "to bring out from camp" or domo - "from home", Roma - "from Rome";
- Ablativus causae means the reason, e.g. ira clamare - "to shout because of anger", morbo abesse - "to absent because of disease";
- Ablativus comparativus which is used in comparisons, e.g. vilius argentum auro - "the silver is cheaper than gold"; Category:Grammatical cases ja:奪格

Turkish language

Turkish (Türkçe) is a Turkic language spoken natively in Turkey, Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Bulgaria, as well as by several million immigrants in the European Union. The number of native speakers is uncertain, primarily due to a lack of minority language data from Turkey. The figure of 60 million used here assumes that Turkish is the mother tongue of 80% of the Turkish population, with making up most of the remainder. (Linguistic minorities in Turkey are, however, bilingual in Turkish.) There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between Turkish and other Oghuz languages such as Azeri, , and . If these are counted together as "Turkish", the number of native speakers is 100 million, and the total number including second-language speakers is around 125 million.

Classification

Turkish is a member of the Turkish family of languages, which includes Balkan Gagauz Turkish, Gagauz, and Khorasani Turkish in addition to Osmanli Turkish. The Turkish family is a subgroup of the Oghuz languages, themselves a subgroup of the Turkic languages, which most linguists believe to be member of an Altaic language family. Like Finnish and Hungarian, Turkish has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually Subject Object Verb. Turkish has a T-V distinction: second-person plural forms can be used for individuals as a sign of respect.

Geographic distribution

Turkish is spoken in Turkey and by minorities in 35 other countries. In particular, Turkish is used in countries that formerly (in whole or part) belonged to the Ottoman Empire, such as Bulgaria, Romania, the former Yugoslavia (specifically in the Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija on a local level), and the Republic of Macedonia.

Official status

Turkish is the official language of Turkey, and is one-although today it is less spoken- of the official languages of Cyprus. It is also an official or national language in Bulgaria. In Turkey, the Turkish Language Society (Türk Dil Kurumu) was founded by Kemal Atatürk in 1932 as the Türk Dili Tetkik Cemiyeti ("Society for the Investigation of the Turkish Language"), an independent body. In August, 1983, when Turkey was under martial law as a result of the military coup of 1980, the Turkish Language Society was brought under the control of the prime ministry.

Dialects

Dialects of Turkish include Danubian, Eskişehir (spoken in Eskişehir Province), Razgrad, Dinler, Rumelian, Karamanlı (spoken in Karaman Province), Edirne (spoken in Edirne), Gaziantep (spoken in Gaziantep Province), Urfa (spoken in Şanlıurfa Province), and Goynuk (a village in Bolu).

Sounds

One characteristic feature of Turkish is vowel harmony. For example, if the first vowel of a Turkish word is a front vowel, the second and other vowels of the same word are usually the same vowel or another front vowel: vişne "sour cherry": i is close unround front, e is open unround front. Stress is usually on the last syllable, with the exception of some suffix combinations and words like masa ['masa].

Consonants

The phoneme usually refered to as "soft g", "ğ" in Turkish orthography, actually represents a rather weak front-velar or palatal approximant between front vowels. When it is word-final or preceding another consonant it lengthens the preceding vowel. In all other positions, it is not pronounced at all.

Vowels

Grammar

Turkish has an abundance of suffixes, but no prefixes (apart from the reduplicating intensifier prefix as in beyaz="white", bembeyaz="very white", sıcak="hot", sımsıcak="very hot"). (Some Arabic loan words have their own prefixes, but those are the common prefixes of Arabic.) One word can have many suffixes. Suffixes can be used to create new words (see #Vocabulary) or to indicate the grammatical function of a word. Turkish nouns can take endings indicating the person of a possessor. They can take case-endings, as in Latin. (The series of case-endings is the same for every noun, except for spelling changes owing to vowel harmony, and variation between voiced and unvoiced consonants.) Finally, they can take endings that give them a person and make them into sentences: ev "house", eviniz "your house", evinizde "at your house", Evinizdeyiz "We are at your house." Turkish adjectives as such are not declined (though they can generally be used as nouns, in which case they are declined). Used attributively, they precede the nouns they modify. Turkish verbs exhibit person. They can be made negative or impotential; they can also be made potential. Finally, Turkish verbs exhibit various distinctions of tense, mood, and aspect: a verb can be progressive, necessitative, aorist, future, inferential, present, past, conditional, imperative, or optative. gel- "(to) come", gelme- "not (to) come", geleme- "not (to) be able to come", gelebil- "(to) be able to come", Gelememiş "She [or he] was apparently unable to come." Gelememişti "She had not been able to come." Gelememiştiniz "You (pl) had not been able to come." Gelememiş miydiniz? "Was it the case that you (pl) were not able to come?" All Turkish verbs are conjugated the same way, except for the irregular and defective verb i- (see Turkish copula), which can be used in compound forms: Gelememişti = Gelememiş idi = Gelememiş + i- + -di Word order in Turkish is generally Subject Object Verb, as in Japanese and Latin, but not English. This can be seen in the following sentence from a newspaper (Cumhuriyet, 16 August 2005, p. 1). The sentence uses all noun cases except the genitive: Türkiye'de modayı gazete sayfalarına taşıyan, gazetemiz yazarlarından N. S. yaşamını yitirdi: Türkiye'de "in Turkey" (locative) modayı "fashion" (accusative of moda) gazete "newspaper" (nominative) sayfalarına "to its pages" (dative; sayfa "page", sayfalar "pages", sayfaları "its pages") taşıyan, "carrying" (present participle of taşı-) gazetemiz "our newspaper" (nominative) yazarlarından "from its writers" (ablative; yazar "writer") N. S. [person's name] (nominative) yaşamını "her life" (accusative; yaşam "life") yitirdi. "lost" (past tense of yitir- "lose" from yit- "be lost") "One of the writers of our newspaper, N. S., who brought fashion to newspaper pages in Turkey, lost her life."

Vocabulary

Turkish has the resources for building up many new words from old: from nouns: göz "eye", gözlük "eyeglasses" gözlükçü "someone who sells glasses" gözlükçülük "the business of selling glasses" and from verbs: yat- "lie down" yatır- "lay down [that is, cause to lie down]" yatırım "instance of laying down: deposit, investment" yatırımcı "depositor, investor". Turkish vocabulary has gone through drastic changes in the history of the language. In the last sixty years, Turkish vocabulary has gone through changes that might take three centuries in another language.

Replaced old words

When the Turks came from middle Asia to Anatolia about a thousand years ago, they came in contact with Islam and the Arabic societies. Since the Turks accepted Islam, Arabic words (and fewer, Persian words) started infiltrating the language. During the course of over six hundred years of the Ottoman Empire, Turkish kept borrowing loan words from these two languages. Towards the end of the 19th century, this got to a point where the language was rather called the Ottoman language. This is because Turkish had been inundated with so many loan words that the language became a mix of Turkish, Arabic and Persian. In contemporary Turkey, the Ottoman language is almost incomprehensible. After Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey, he established the "Turkish Language Foundation" (Türk Dil Kurumu, TDK), whose task was to replace Arabic and Persian origin words with their new Turkish counterparts. The foundation succeeded in removing several hundred Arabic words from the language. While most of the words introduced to the language by TDK are new, TDK also suggested using old Turkish words which had not been used in the language for centuries. Older and younger people in Turkey tend to express themselves with different vocabulary. While the generations born up to the 1940s tend to use the old Arabic origin words (even the obsolete ones), the younger generations favor using the new expressions. Some new words are not used as often as their old counterparts or have failed to convey the intrinsic meanings of their old equivalents. Among some of the old words that were replaced are terms in geometry, directions (north, south, east, west), some of the months and many nouns and adjectives. Many new words have also been derived from verbs. Some examples of new and their old counterparts are: Please see List of replaced loan words in Turkish for an extensive list of replaced old words and current loan words

Writing system

Turkish is written using a modified version of the Latin alphabet, which was introduced in 1928 by Kemal Atatürk as part of his efforts to modernize Turkey. Until 1928, Turkish was written using a modified version of the Arabic alphabet (see Ottoman Turkish language), but use of the Arabic alphabet was outlawed after the Latin alphabet was introduced. See Turkish alphabet.

The language in daily life

Turkish has many formulaic expressions for various social situations. Several of them feature Arabic verbal nouns together with the Turkish verb et- ("make, do"). A famous quotation and motto of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk:
- Yurtta sulh, cihanda sulh "Peace at home, peace in the world." In the current language, this is
- Yurtta barış, dünyada barış.

References

- International Phonetic Association (1999) Handbook of the International Phonetic Association ISBN 0-521-63751-1
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External links

- [http://groups.yahoo.com/group/turkishlearner/ A discussion list for the learners of Turkish]
- [http://www.langtolang.com/ Langtolang Turkish, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian, Swedish, Danish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Finnish, Esperanto, Swahili, Serbo_Croat Multilingual Dictionary]
- [http://www.turkce-ingilizce.com/ Turkish-English and English-Turkish Online Dictionary]
- [http://www.123lasvegas.info Free turkish dictionary.]
- [http://www.tdk.org.tr/TDKSOZLUK/SOZBUL.ASP Turkish to Turkish Dictionary.]
- [http://turkisaretdili.ku.edu.tr Turkish to Turkish Sign Language (TID) Visual Dictionary]
- [http://www.turkishclass.com Learn Turkish language online.]
- [http://www.fdicts.com/dictlist1.php?k1=97 All free Turkish dictionaries]
- [http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=TRK Ethnologue report for Turkish]
- [http://www.onlineturkish.com onlineturkish.com]
- [http://www.weberberg.de/infoport/tuerkisch Free online Turkish course written in German ]
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/translation/Turkish/ Dictionary] with Turkish - English Translations from [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org Webster's Online Dictionary] - the Rosetta Edition
- [http://www.zargan.com.tr/ Online Turkish-English/English-Turkish dictionary]
- [http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org/definition/Turkish-english/ Turkish - English Dictionary]
- [http://www.langtolang.com/ A comprehensive and accurate Turkish-(English/French/Italian/and various other languages) dictionary]
- [http://aton.ttu.edu Texas Tech University, Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative]
- [http://www.turkcebilgi.com/T%FCrk%E7e An Information site in Turkish Language]
- [http://www.ipb.nu/winmekmak/ WinMekMak - Turkish Verb Conjugator]
- [http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/pf.htm The best site for learning Turkish with detailed explanations]
- [http://www.turkishdictionary.net/ Turkish dictionary available for use in various forms]
- [http://miejipang.homestead.com/untitled18.html Let's try to learn Hungarian(Magyar) and Turkish!] Category:Languages of Turkey Category:Languages of Cyprus Category:Languages of the Republic of Macedonia Category:Agglutinative languages Category:Vowel harmony languages category:Turkic languages ja:トルコ語 th:ภาษาตุรกี

Inessive case

Inessive case is a locative grammatical case. This case carries the basic meaning of "in": for example, "in the house" is "talo·ssa" in Finnish, "maja·s" in Estonian, "etxea·n" in Basque, and "ház·ban" in Hungarian. In Finnish the inessive case is typically formed by adding "ssa/ssä". Estonian adds "s" to the genitive stem. In Hungarian, the suffix "ban/ben" is most commonly used for inessive case, although many others, such as -on, -en, -ön and others are also used, especially with cities. In the Finnish language, the inessive case is considered the first of the six locative cases, which correspond to [http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Locational locational] prepositions in English. The remaining five cases are:
- Elative case ("out of")
- Illative case ("into")
- Adessive case ("on")
- Ablative case ("from off of")
- Allative case ("onto") Category:Grammatical cases

Essive case

The essive or similaris case carries the meaning of a temporary state of being, often equivalent to the English "as a...". In the Finnish language, this case is marked by adding "-na/-nä" to the stem of the noun. Example: "lapsi" -> "child", "lapsena" -> "as a child", "when (I) was a child". In Finnish, it is also used for specifying times, days and dates when something happens. For example: "maanantaina" -> "on Monday", "kuudentena joulukuuta" -> "on the 6th of December". Some expressions use the essive in the ancient locative meaning, e.g. "at home" is "kotona". Observe the similarity to English "at home/in my home":
- Luen lehtiä kotona. "I read newspapers at home." If you use the inessive, kodissani, you contrast to reading them in the garage (a physical location) instead.
- Kodissani tehdään remonttia. "In my home, a renovation is underway." Category:Grammatical cases

Hungarian language

The Hungarian language is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in Hungary and in the adjacent states of Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, Austria, and Slovenia (to all of which Hungary lost territory after World War I). The Hungarian name for the language is magyar . There are about 14.5 million speakers, of whom 10 million live in Hungary. The largest minority concentration is in the now Romanian counties of Transylvania, including Harghita (Hargita), Mureş (Maros), and Covasna (Kovászna), with approximately one and a half million Magyars.

Classification

Hungarian is a member of the Ugric languages, a sub-group of the Finno-Ugric language family, which in turn is a branch of the Uralic languages. Connections between the Ugric and Finnic languages were noticed in the 1670s and established, along with the entire Uralic family, in 1717, although the classification of Hungarian continued to be a matter of political controversy into the 18th and even 19th centuries. Today the Uralic family is considered one of the best demonstrated large language families, along with Indo-European and Austronesian.

Sound correspondences

There are numerous regular sound correspondances between Hungarian and the other Ugric languages. For example, Hungarian á corresponds to in certain positions, and Hungarian h corresponds to Khanty , while Hungarian final z corresponds to Khanty final . For example, Hungarian ház "house" vs. Khanty "house", and Hungarian száz "hundred" vs. Khanty "hundred". The distance between the Ugric and Finnic languages is greater, but the correspondances are also regular. The relationship is most obvious when comparing all the Ugric languages with all the Finnic languages, for then individual idiosyncracies are averaged out, but here we will just compare Hungarian with Finnish.
- Finnish [p] corresponds to Hungarian [f] (just like Latin [p] in pater corresponds to English [f] in father):
- Finnish [k] corresponds to Hungarian [k] before front vowels
- Finnish [k] corresponds to Hungarian [h] before back vowels (just like Latin [k] in canine corresponds to English [h] in hound)
- Finnish [t] corresponds to Hungarian [t] at the beginning of a word
- Finnish [l] corresponds to Hungarian [l] This is just a sample. Even in the small number of words above, other regular sound correspondances are evident, such as Finnish [nt] and Hungarian [d] in "to know" and "bird/goose".

Geographic distribution

Hungarian is spoken in the following countries: :Source: National census, Ethnologue Hungarian speakers are also found in Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, United States, and in other parts of the world, adding an additional million speakers.

Official status

Hungarian is the official language of Hungary, and thus an official language of the European Union. Besides, Hungarian is one of official languages of Vojvodina and an official language of three municipalities in Slovenia (Hodos, Dobranak and Lendva), along with Slovene. Hungarian is officially recognized as a minority or regional language in Austria, Croatia and Slovakia.

Dialects

The dialects of Hungarian identified by Ethnologue are: Alföld, West Danube, Danube-Tisza, King's Pass Hungarian, Northeast Hungarian, Northwest Hungarian, Székely and West Hungarian; they are all mutually intelligible.

Phonology

Hungarian has 14 vowel phonemes and 25 consonant phonemes. The vowel phonemes are pairs of long and short vowels. Most of these pairs have similar vowel qualities, but the pairs written with and do not. Consonant length is also distinctive in Hungarian. Most of the consonant phonemes can occur geminate. The sound voiced palatal plosive , written , is unlike any in English. It occurs in the name of the country, "Magyarország" (Hungary), pronounced . Primary stress is always on the first syllable of a word. There is sometimes secondary stress on other syllables, especially in compounds, e.g. "viszontlátásra" (see you later) pronounced . Front-back vowel harmony is an important feature of Hungarian phonology.

Grammar

Hungarian is an agglutinative language. Most grammatical information is given through suffixes. For example: at the table = az asztalnál (space relation), at 5 o'clock = öt órakor (time relation). There is also one grammatical prefix (leg- for superlatives). An unusual feature of Hungarian are the 2 verb conjugations. The "definite" conjugation is used for a transitive verb with a definite object. The "indefinite" conjugation is used for an intransitive verb or for a transitive verb with an indefinite object.

Lexicon

Giving an exact estimate for the total word count is difficult, since it is hard to define what to call "a word" in agglutinating languages, due to the existence of compound words. To have a meaningful definition of compound words, we have to exclude such compounds whose meaning is the mere sum of its elements. The largest dictionaries from Hungarian to another language contain 120,000 words and phrases (but this may include redundant phrases as well, because of translation issues). Hungarian lexicon is usually estimated to comprise 60,000 to 100,000 words. (Independently of specific languages, speakers actively use at most 10,000 to 30,000 words.) Hungarian words are built around so called word-bushes, for example kör-köröz-körös-kering-kerge-kurta (originally related to "circle", "round"). Due to this feature words with similar meaning often arise from the same root. The lexicon of Hungarian contains words borrowed from various Turkic languages, including Turkish, as well as several loan words from German and Slavic. The basic vocabulary shares 1000-1200 words from Uralic languages like Finnish and Estonian (e.g., the numbers egy ~ yksi ~ üks (1), kettő ~ kaksi ~ kaks (2), három ~ kolme ~ kolm (3), négy ~ neljä ~ neli (4); víz ~ vesi ~ vesi (water); kéz ~ käsi ~ käsi (hand); vér ~ veri ~ veri (blood); fej ~ pää ~ pea (head) which have regular sound correspondences, so most linguists classify them as Finno-Ugric languages, a subgroup of the Uralic language family. These 1000-1200 original word roots, however, account for about 80-90% of the words in an average present-day text, due to their wide-ranging compounds, derivations and formations, several dozens of words from a single root. The proportion of the word roots in Hungarian lexicon is as follows: Finno-Ugric 21 %, Slavic 20 %, German 11 %, Turkic 9.5 %, Latin and Greek 6 %, Romance 2.5 %, Other of known origin 1 %, Other of uncertain origin 30%. Except for a few Latin and Greek loan-words, these are undiscernible for native speakers; they were entirely adapted into Hungarian lexicon.

Word formation

Words can be compound (as in German) and derived (with suffixes). There are also compound words using verbs which have their individual meanings, for example egyedülálló single (eg. person), whereas egyedül álló means something which stands alone.

Noteworthy lexical items

Two words for "red"

There are two basic words for "red" in Hungarian. (They are basic in the sense that you can't say one is a sub-type of the other, like "scarlet" is a kind of "red".) Piros is used for lighter or vivid red, and often for inanimate, artificial things, as well as for things seen as cheerful or neutral. Vörös is used for darker red, and often for animate things, as well as for serious or emotionally involved/affected things. Since these attributes don't overlap in every case, their usage is not entirely regular or predictable. – According to Berlin, B and Kay, P (1969) Basic Color Terms, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, Hungarian is unique in having two basic colour words for red.

Kinship terms

In Hungarian there exist separate words for brothers and sisters depending on relative age: (The original word for "elder sister" has become obsolete, and has been replaced by the generic word for "sister".) Besides, separate prefixes exist for up to the 5th ancestors and descendants: On the other hand, no lexical items exist for "son" and "daughter", but the words for "boy" and "girl" are applied with possessive suffixes. Nevertheless, the terms are differentiated with different declension or lexemes:

Writing system

For more information see also Hungarian alphabet. Hungarian is written using a variant of the Latin alphabet, and has a phonemic orthography, i.e. pronunciation can generally be predicted from the written language. In addition to the standard letters of the Latin alphabet, Hungarian uses several additional letters. These include letters with acute accents (á,é,í,ó,ú) which represent long vowels, with umlauts (ö and ü) and their long counterparts ő and ű. Sometimes ô or õ is used for ő and û for ű, due to the limitations of the Latin-1 / ISO-8859-1 codepage, though these are not part of the Hungarian language. Hungarian can be properly represented with the Latin-2 / ISO-8859-2 codepage, but this codepage is not always available. (Hungarian is the only language using both ő and ű.) Of course, Unicode includes them, and they therefore can be used on the Internet. For a complete table of the pronunciation of the Hungarian alphabet, see the X-SAMPA description in the Hungarian Wikipedia (in Hungarian, but the table is obvious), which transliterates Hungarian letters into IPA and X-SAMPA characters. Additionally, the letter pairs <ny>, <ty>, and <gy> represent the palatal consonants , , and (a little like the "dy" sound in British "duke" or American "would you"). Hungarian uses <s> for and <sz> for /s/, which is the reverse of Polish. is and <cs> is . All these digraphs are considered single letters. is also a "single letter digraph", but is pronounced like /j/ (English <y>), and mostly appears in old words. More exotic letters are <dz> and <dzs> . They are hard to find even in a longer text. Two examples are madzag; edzeni (rope; to train) and dzsungel (jungle). Single R's are tapped, like the Spanish "pero"; Double R's and initial R's are trilled, like the Spanish "perro". Hungarian distinguishes between long and short vowels, where the long vowels are written with acutes, and between long consonants and short consonants, where the long consonants are written double. The digraphs, when doubled, become trigraphs: +=, but changing line: :... busz- :szal... Usually a trigraph is a double digraph, but there are a few exceptions: tizennyolc "eighteen" is tizen + nyolc. There are doubling minimal pairs: tol (push) vs. toll (feather). While it seems unusual to English speakers at first, once one learns the new orthography and pronunciations, written Hungarian is nearly totally phonemic.

Name order

The Hungarian language uses the so-called eastern name order, in which the family name comes first and the given name comes last. However, as a rule, names are represented in the western name order when used in foreign languages. Thus for example Edward Teller, the Hungarian-born physicist, is known in Hungary as Teller Ede. On the other hand, western names retain their order when used in Hungarian. Therefore:
- Kiss János, amikor Los Angelesben járt, látta John Travoltát. translates to
- When János Kiss was in Los Angeles, he saw John Travolta. Note: or John Kiss. While common prior to the 20^th century, given names are usually not translated into English. See also: Hungarian name.

Examples

When a word has its own stress (rather than clinging on the previous ones), it is practically always placed on the first syllable in Hungarian.
- Hungarian (person, language): magyar
- hello: szia (informal) (sounds almost exactly like American "see ya") But you only say this to people that you know well. When you address a stranger you use the more formal "good day": jó napot (kívánok)
- good-bye: viszontlátásra (formal) (see above), viszlát (semi informal)
- please: kérem (szépen) (This literally means "I ask (it) well". See next for a more common form of the polite request)
- I would like ____, please: Szeretnék ____ (This example illustrates the use of the conditional tense, as a common form of a polite request)
- sorry: bocsánat
- thank you: köszönöm
- that/this: az ez
- how much?: mennyi?
- how much does it cost?: mennyibe kerül?
- yes: igen
- no: nem
- I don't understand: nem értem
- I don't know: nem tudom
- Where's the toilet?: Hol van a vécé? , more polite (and word-for-word) version Hol van a mosdó?
- generic toast: egészségedre!
- juice: gyümölcslé
- water: víz
- wine: bor
- beer: sör
- tea: tea
- milk: tej
- Do you speak English?: Beszél angolul?
- I love you: szeretlek
- Help!: Segítség!

Reactions

Sir John Bowring

Sir John Bowring was a Hungarian-speaking English diplomat. This is what he said about the Hungarian language in 1830:
- The Hungarian language goes far back. It developed in a very particular manner and its structure reaches back to times, when most of the now spoken European languages did not even exist. It is a language which developed steadily and firmly in itself, and in which there is logic and mathematics with the adaptability and malleability of strength and chords. The Englishmen should be proud that his language indicates an epic of human history. One can show forth its origin; and alien layers can be distinguished in it, which gathered together during the contacts with different nations. Whereas the Hungarian language is like a rubble-stone; consisting of only one piece, on which the storms of time left not a scratch. It's not a calendar that adjusts to the changes of the ages. It needs no one, it doesn't borrow, does no buckstering, and doesn't give or take from anyone. This language is the oldest and most glorious monument of a national sovereignty and a mental independence. What scholars cannot solve, they ignore. In philosophy it's the same way as archeology. The floors of the old Egyptian temples, which were made out of only one rock, can't be explained. No one knows where they came from, or from which mountain the wonderous mass was taken. How they were transported and lifted to the top of the temples. The genuineness of the Hungarian language is a phenomenon much more wonderous than this. He who solves it shall be analyzing the Divine secret; in fact the first thesis of this secret: “In the beginning there was Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” But by this time, of course, the modern understanding of Hungarian origins was already well understood.

Marc Martin

The book Járt utat kétszer járj ("Tread twice the trodden path", ISBN 9633675820) was published in 2004, a sultry declaration of love for the Hungarian language, written by a native Frenchman, a translator, Marc Martin. (His name is given on the cover in the Hungarianized form, Martin Márk.) He first met the language through a record of Bluebeard's Castle by Bartók. The back cover dedication was written by Péter Nádas (whose novel A Book of Memories he had translated into French). The "trodden path" refers to his original life, family, neighbourhood, which he wanted to break away from, by being re-born into a new life and a new language.

Controversy over origins

There are various alternative speculations about the origins of the Hungarian language, even fanciful ideas about Hungarian being derived from the Sumerian language, but these are dismissed by linguists owing to a lack of evidence:
- Hungarian has often been claimed to be related to Hunnish, since Hungarian legends and histories show close ties between the two peoples. Some people believe that the Székely, a part of the Hungarians living in Romania, are descended from the Huns. However, the link with Hunnish is uncertain, and it is not even known which languages the Huns spoke.
- For many years (from 1869), it was matter of dispute whether Hungarian was a Finno-Ugric language, or was more closely related to the Turkic languages, a controversy known as the "Ugric-Turkish war". It is only i