Introduction to Indo-European

Comparative Linguistics

In this course, Professor Geoff Horrocks (University of Cambridge) provides an introduction to Comparative Linguistics, the study of how languages are related, and how and why languages can change over time. This course makes use of Greek, Latin and Sanskrit for its demonstrations, though absolutely no knowledge is required of any of these languages.

As we move through the course, we introduce the Indo-European language, the notional ancestor language for almost every language in Europe, before thinking about how we can tell the difference between languages that are superficially similar (e.g. Modern English and French) and those that are genetically related.

In the final part of the course, we explore some of the methods that philologists use to test for genetic relatedness, and how knowledge of how languages change can be used to reverse engineer what an original Indo-European language may have looked like.

Introduction to Indo-European

In this module, we introduce the concept of language-families and (in particular) the family known as Indo-European, which contains most major current languages of Europe, South Asia and parts of Western and Central Asia. In particular, we introduce the notional common ancestor for all these languages, known as Proto-Indo-European, and the idea of ‘genetic relatedness’ between languages.