INDO EUROPEAN LANGUAGE FAMILY

LANGUAGE FAMILY

• A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor called the proto-language.

• Estimates suggest there are 5,000 to 8,000 living languages today.

• A living language is one that is used as the primary means of communication by a group of people.

Eight Major Language Families in the World:

1. Sino-Tibetan

2. Indo-European

3. Dravidian

4. Afro-Asiatic

5. Niger-Congo

6. Malayo-Polynesian

7. Nishadha Languages

8. Khoisan Dialects

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INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES

• A large language family consisting of several hundred related languages and dialects (about 445 total).

• Spoken widely in South Asia, Europe, and parts of Western and Central Asia.

• It has the second-longest recorded history, after the Afro-Asiatic family.

• The term "Indo-European" was coined by Thomas Young in 1813, derived from its geographical spread—from Western Europe to Northeast India.

Probable Original Homelands:

• Scandinavia and Northern Germany

• Hungarian Plains

• Southern Ukraine and the northern Black Sea region

Eleven Principal Branches of Indo-European:

1. Indian

2. Iranian

3. Armenian

4. Albanian

5. Balto-Slavic

6. Italic

7. Germanic

8. Celtic

9. Hellenic

10. Hittite (dead)

11. Tocharian (dead)

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SATEM AND CENTUM LANGUAGES

• Division proposed by Peter von Bradke in 1890.

• Based on phonetic changes, especially the pronunciation of the original /k/ sound.

Centum Languages (e.g., /k/ stays velar):

• Italic

• Celtic

• Germanic

• Hellenic

• Tocharian

Satem Languages (e.g., /k/ becomes palatal):

• Baltic

• Slavic

• Armenian

• Indo-Iranian

Examples:

• Canis (Latin) → Sunaka (Sanskrit)

• Deka (Greek) → Dasa (Sanskrit)

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BRANCHES OF INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY

1. Indian

• Sanskrit and Prakrit are key languages.

• Vedas, the earliest texts, were written in Sanskrit.

• Rig Veda, the oldest, dates to 1500 BCE.

2. Iranian

• Spoken in the Iranian plateau.

• Major ancient languages: Avestan (Zend) and Old Persian.

  • Avestan – language of the Zoroastrian sacred text Avesta.

  • Old Persian – used by King Darius.

• Evolved into languages like Afghan, Baluchi, Kurdish, etc.

3. Armenian

• Spoken south of the Caucasus Mountains and at the eastern end of the Black Sea.

• Earliest record: Bible translation (5th century CE).

4. Hellenic

• Language of the Greeks.

• Classical works: Iliad, Odyssey.

• Five dialects; Attic was the dominant one.

  • Spoken in Athens (5th century BCE).

  • Used by Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle.

  • Alexander the Great’s conquests helped spread Attic.

5. Italic

• Gave rise to Latin, which came from Latium dialect.

• Latin was dominant due to Roman political power.

• Vulgar Latin evolved into Romance languages:

  • French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian

6. Balto-Slavic

• Two groups: Baltic and Slavic.

Baltic Languages:

• Prussian, Latvian, Lithuanian

Slavic Languages:

• Russian, Czech, Polish, etc.

7. Germanic

• Includes English, German, etc.

Three branches:

• East Germanic: Gothic (now extinct)

• West Germanic:

  • High German

  • Low German: Old Saxon, Old Low Franconian, Old Frisian, Old English

• North Germanic: Scandinavian languages

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GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

1. Complex grammatical system

2. Common wordstock

3. Highly inflected

4. Eight grammatical cases

5. Three persons (first, second, third)

6. Affixation for word formation

7. Compounding as another method of word formation

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Middle & Modern English Period

Middle English Period

1. Norman Conquest and Its Aftermath

• Norman Conquest took place in 1066

• Normandy was located on the northern coast of France, across the English Channel.

• English King Ethelred the Unready married a Norman woman. Driven away by the Danes, he sought refuge with his brother-in-law, the Duke of Normandy.

• His son, Edward the Confessor, returned to the English throne in 1042.

  • He brought Norman friends and granted them key positions in the government.

• In 1066, Edward died without heirs. Harold, a powerful English earl, claimed the throne.

• William, Duke of Normandy, disputed Harold’s claim and also declared his right to the throne.

• Battle of Hastings (1066): William defeated Harold.

• William became King of England on 25th December 1066.

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2. French vs English: Political and Linguistic Conflict

• The Normans occupied key government positions — French became the language of the ruling class.

• In 1204, King John lost Normandy due to conflict with the King of France.

• Tensions led to open hostility, culminating in the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453).

  • Immediate cause: French interference in England’s control of Scotland.

  • Notable English victories:

    • Battle of Crecy (1346)

    • Battle of Poitiers

    • Battle of Agincourt (1415)

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3. Social Shifts and Language Development

• Black Death (1348) and Peasants’ Revolt (1381):

  • These events weakened feudalism and led to the rise of the Middle Class, which predominantly spoke English.

• English gained popularity:

  • 1349 – Began to be used in schools.

  • 1362 – Became the language of legal proceedings.

  • 1397 – The first will written in English.

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4. Linguistic Features of Middle English

• Known as the Period of Levelled Inflections:

  • Most noun inflections disappeared.

  • Only -es and -en plurals remained.

• Strong verbs declined in favor of weak verbs.

• Shift from synthetic to analytic grammar:

  • Natural gender replaced grammatical gender.

  • Word order became fixed.

  • Use of prepositions increased.

• Alphabetic changes:

  • Letters ‘K’ and ‘Q’ introduced around 1240, replacing some uses of ‘C’.

• Vocabulary Expansion:

  • Influx of French words.

  • Latin words entered through academics and the Church.

  • Coexistence of English, French, and Latin synonyms (with subtle differences).

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5. Dialectal Diversity

• Main dialects: Northern, Southern, East Midland

  • Northern Dialect: Used in areas south to the Humber River.

  • East Midland Dialect: Between Humber and Thames Rivers.

  • Southern Dialect: South of the Thames.

• East Midland Dialect emerged as Standard English:

  • A compromise between northern and southern dialects.

  • Most populous and prosperous region.

  • Home to Oxford and Cambridge Universities.

  • Used in public schools.

  • With Caxton’s introduction of printing in 1476, East Midland dialect was solidified as the standard.

    • London, the political and commercial hub, became the publishing center.

    • Caxton used London English in his translations.

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Modern English Period

1. Printing and Literacy

• Printing Press introduced by Caxton in 1476.

• Led to:

  • Rapid spread of education

  • Increased communication

• Resulted in:

  • Unphonetic spelling

  • Introduction of silent syllables

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2. The Great Vowel Shift (15th–17th Century)

• Major sound change affecting long vowels.

  • Vowels were raised (tongue moved higher).

  • Some vowels became diphthongs:

    • /i:/ → /ai/

    • /u:/ → /au/

  • /a:/ shifted forward (frontalization).

• No significant effect on spelling, as spelling conventions changed earlier.

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3. English Dictionaries

• 1604 – Table Alphabetical by Robert Cawdrey: First English dictionary.

• 1755 – Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary:

  • Became the standard for spelling and usage.

• 1806 – Noah Webster’s Compendious English Dictionary.

• 1828 – Webster’s American Dictionary.

• 1890 – Webster’s International Dictionary.

• Daniel Johns published the English Pronouncing Dictionary.

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CLASSICISM

1. Definition and Historical Context

• Refers to Greek and Roman art and literature in the Western or European tradition.

• Encompasses:

  • Homeric epics: The Iliad and The Odyssey

  • Works of Hesiod and Sappho

• The "Classical Period":

  • Begins ~500 BC

  • Known for:

    • Tragedies of Euripides, Aeschylus, Sophocles

    • Comedies of Aristophanes

    • Foundational philosophy by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle

  • Ends in 323 BC with the death of Alexander the Great

• Followed by the Hellenistic Period:

  • Greek culture spreads across the Mediterranean and Middle East

  • Expansion aided by Alexander’s conquests and dynasties of his generals

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2. Major Figures and Works

Homer

• Legendary author of The Iliad and The Odyssey (folk epics)

• The Iliad: Set during the Trojan War; focuses on the quarrel between Agamemnon and Achilles

• The Odyssey: Follows Odysseus' 10-year journey home after the fall of Troy

• Opens with invocation to the muses, showing that poetry was viewed as divinely inspired

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Aesop (6th or 7th Century)

• Fabulist; credited with Aesop's Fables

• Stories feature anthropomorphized animals and objects

• Herodotus calls him a “writer of fables”

• Later tradition (via Planudes, 13th c.) suggests he was Ethiopian

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Lyric Poets: Sappho and Pindar

Sappho

• Known for lyric poetry accompanied by the lyre

• Called the “Tenth Muse”, “The Poetess”

• Most works are lost; one complete poem: Ode to Aphrodite

• Modern symbol of female homosexuality (origin of the term lesbian, from Lesbos)

Pindar

• Lyric poet from Thebes

• Known for Pindaric odes with a triadic structure:

  • Strophe (movement right to left)

  • Antistrophe (left to right)

  • Epode (center stage, final stanza, different meter)

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Tragedians

Sophocles

• Wrote over 123 plays; major works: Ajax, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes

• Contemporary of Aeschylus and Euripides

• The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney and Neutral Ground by Tom Stoppard are adaptations of Philoctetes

• Theban Plays: Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone

Aeschylus

• Referred to as the Father of Tragedy

• Introduced dialogue into drama

• Wrote over 70 plays; only 7 extant

  • The Oresteia trilogy: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides

  • Prometheus Bound (Prometheus gives fire to mankind and is punished)

• Inspiration from dream of Dionysus (similar to Caedmon in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History)

Euripides

• Challenged societal norms; sympathetic to marginalized

• Associated with Socrates

  • Socrates: tried and executed

  • Euripides: exiled, died in Macedonia

• Known for strong female characters: Hippolytus, Andromache, Hecuba, The Trojan Women

• Wrote 95+ plays, 18 extant

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Comedians

Aristophanes

• Called "Father of Comedy", "Prince of Ancient Comedy"

• Master of Old Comedy (vs. Menander - New Comedy)

• Known for political and philosophical satire

  • The Clouds: satirizes Socrates (linked to Socrates' trial by Plato)

  • Plato depicts Aristophanes favorably in The Symposium

• Major works: The Knights, The Clouds, The Wasps, The Birds, The Frogs

  • The Frogs: early document of literary criticism, debates Aeschylus vs Euripides

Menander

• Master of New Comedy

• Only surviving work: Dyskolos

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3. Roman Classicism

Virgil

• Augustan-era Roman poet

• Major works:

  • The Eclogues (pastoral)

  • The Georgics (didactic, farming instructions; inspired by Hesiod)

  • The Aeneid (national epic of Rome; modeled after Homer)

• Influenced Dante’s Divine Comedy (Virgil as guide)

• Aeneid: story of Aeneas, a Trojan refugee

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Terence

• Adapted late Attic Greek comedies

• Wrote in simple, conversational Latin

• Inspired English comedies like:

  • Ralph Roister Doister (Nicholas Udall)

  • Gammer Gurton's Needle

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Ovid

• Roman poet of Augustus’ reign

• Contemporary of Virgil and Horace

• Best known for:

  • Metamorphoses: 15-book mythological narrative in epic meter

  • First English translation by William Caxton, 1480

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Seneca

• Roman philosopher, statesman, tragedian

• Key works: Medea, Phaedra, Thyestes, Hercules Furens, Troades, Phoenissae, Oedipus, Agamemnon

• Influential in the revenge tradition of English drama

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4. Classical Critical Tradition

Critic	Culture
Plato	Greek
Aristotle	Greek
Longinus	Greek
Horace	Roman
Quintilian	Roman

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THE STUDY OF POETRY bY MATHEW ARNOLD

 MATTHEW ARNOLD: LIFE AND BACKGROUND

• One of the foremost poets and critics of the 19th century.

• Regarded as the father of modern literary criticism.

• Part of the Victorian poetry trio with Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.

• Son of Sir Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School; commemorated in Arnold’s poem Rugby Chapel.

• Arnold studied at Rugby School and later became an Inspector of Schools.

• In 1857, became Professor of Poetry at Oxford — the first to deliver lectures in English instead of Latin.

MATTHEW ARNOLD: MAJOR WORKS

As a Poet

• The Strayed Reveller (First poetry collection)

• Empedocles on Etna (Second collection)

• New Poems (1867)

• Sohrab and Rustum (Narrative poem in blank verse)

• The Scholar Gypsy

• Thyrsis (Elegy for Arthur Hugh Clough)

• Rugby Chapel (Elegy for his father)

• Dover Beach

As a Critic

• Preface to the Poems of 1853

• On Translating Homer

• Essays in Criticism (First Series – 1865, Second Series – 1888)

• Culture and Anarchy

• Literature and Dogma

• The Study of Poetry

• The Function of Criticism at the Present Time

• THE STUDY OF POETRY

  Originally published as the introduction to T.H. Ward's anthology, The English Poets (1880), and later in Essays in Criticism: Second Series (1888).

  Opening Quote

  • From The Hundred Greatest Men:

    
    

     "The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay"

  Central Argument

  • Poetry will replace religion as the chief source of guidance and spiritual sustenance.

  • Poetry must be of a high order to interpret life, console, and sustain humanity.

  •  The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry

  
  

  👉 What does Matthew Arnold propose do in the essay?

  
  

  ➤ To trace the stream of English poetry

  
  

  ➤ The recurrent metaphor used to refer to the poetic tradition is the metaphor of stream/river of poetry

  
  

  ➤ We should conceive of it as capable of higher uses, and called to higher destinies

  
  

  👉 What is the higher destiny of poetry according to Matthew Arnold?

  ➤To interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us

  
  

  ➤ Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete

  IMPORTANT QUOTES & IDEAS

• Wordsworth:

  “Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”
  “The impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science.”

• Napoleon: “Charlatanism exists everywhere.”

• Sainte-Beuve: “In art, charlatanism must find no entrance.”

👉What are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge?

➤ Arnold describes religion and philosophy as shadows, dreams and false shows of knowledge

➤ Only poetry of a high order of excellence will be capable of fulfilling such high destinies

➤ "Charlatan as much as you please; but where is there not charlatanism?"

➤ It is true in politics, in the art of governing mankind.

➤ But in the order of thought, in art, the glory, the eternal honour is that charlatanism shall find no entrance

➤Poetry is thought and art in one

➤ In poetry the distinction between excellent and inferior, sound and unsound or only half-sound, true and untrue or only half- true, is of paramount importance

➤ Poetry is a criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty

➤ The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, sustaining, and delighting us, as nothing else can.

➤ To understand the best poetry we should subject poetry to a real

Dangerous Fallacies in Criticism

👉Arnold identifies two fallacious estimates of poetry

➤ The historic estimate and the personal estimate

➤ A poet or a poem may count to us historically

➤ We may consider a poet's work as important in the course of development of a nation's language or culture

➤ A poet or poem may count to us on grounds personal to ourselves

➤ Personal affinities, likings and circumstances, have great power to sway our estimate of this or that poet's work

➤The historic estimate is likely in especial to affect our judgment and our language when we are dealing with ancient poets

➤the personal estimate when we are dealing with poets our contemporaries, or at any rate modern

➤ The historic estimate leads to dangerous abuse of language

➤ Caedmon compared to Milton is an example for the historic estimate

➤ The eminent French critic, M. Vitet in his reading of the French poem Chanson de Roland commits the fallacy of historical estimate

➤ The poem has vigour and freshness; it is not without pathos.

👉 About which poem does Arnold make the following observations

➤According to Arnold M. Vitet, however, overrated the work

➤ M. Vitet sees in it a grand and beautiful work, a monument of epic genius.

➤ In its general design he finds the grandiose conception, in its details he finds the constant union of simplicity with greatness, which are the marks, he truly says, of the genuine epic, and distinguish it from the artificial epic of literary ages

➤ M. Vitet's praise of Chanson de Roland reminds one of Homer

➤ According to Arnold, Homer is the highest of all epic poets

➤ Arnold then compares a passage from Chanson de Roland with a Passage from Homer's IIliad

👉Arnold introduces the comparative method of criticism

➤ Arnold then states that Chanson de Roland is much inferior to Homer's work

➤The French have become diligent students of their own early poetry, which they long neglected

➤ the study makes many of them dissatisfied with their so-called classical poetry

➤ M. Charles d'Héricault, the editor of Clément Marot, goes too far when he says that "the cloud of glory playing round a classic is a mist as dangerous to the future of a literature as it is intolerable for the purposes of history."

➤ So the classics should be subjected to strict analysis

➤ If he is a dubious classic, let us s sift him; if he is a false classic, let us explode him.

➤ But if he is a real classic, if his work belongs to the class of the very best, then the great thing for us is to feel and enjoy his work as deeply as ever we can

➤we must read our classic with open eyes, and not with eyes blinded with superstition

➤ What does superstition here refer to?

➤ While talking about the benefit of enjoying the real classic Arnold quotes the words of Thomas Kempis work The Imitation of Christ

➤ Cum multa legeris et cognoveris, ad unum semper oportet redire principium

➤ The line is in Latin

➤ It means "When you have read and learned many things, you should always return to the one principle"

➤ The classic stands as a model for our reading of other works

Touchstone Method (Comparative Criticism)

Use lines and expressions of great masters as “touchstones” to judge other poetry.

Source	Examples
Homer	Iliad, xvii.443–45; xxiv.543
Dante	Inferno xxxiii.39–40; ii.91–93; Paradiso iii.85
Shakespeare	Hamlet
Milton	Paradise Lost

➤There can be no more useful help for discovering what poetry belongs to the class of the truly excellent, and can therefore do us most good, than to have always in one's mind lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply them as a touchstone to other poetry

➤ we are not to require this other poetry to resemble them; it may be very dissimilar

➤ The classics will work as Infallible touchstone for detecting the presence or absence of high poetic quality, and also the degree of this quality, in all other poetry which we may place beside them

➤Touch stones are short passages, even single lines drawn from real classics

➤ Touch stones are thus specimens of poetry of the high, the very highest quality