Turkish Language, Turkic Languages and English Language

Turkish language

 

WRITTEN BY:

The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica

Alternative Titles: Türkçe language, Türkiye Türkçesi language

Turkish language, Turkish Türkçe or Türkiye Türkçesi, the major member of the Turkic language family, which is a subfamily of the Altaic languages. Turkish is spoken in Turkey, Cyprus, and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. With Gagauz, Azerbaijani(sometimes called Azeri), Turkmen, and Khorāsān Turkic, it forms the southwestern, or Oğuz, branch of the Turkic languages.

Modern Turkish is the descendant of Ottoman Turkish and its predecessor, so-called Old Anatolian Turkish, which was introduced into Anatolia by the Seljuq Turks in the late 11th century ad. Old Turkish gradually absorbed a great many Arabic and Persian words and even grammatical forms and was written in Arabic script. After the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923, the Arabic script was replaced by the Latin alphabet (1928). The reform of the language was initiated and supported by the Turkish republican government. In spite of disputes and resistance, the movement contributed greatly to purifying the Turkish vocabulary of foreign elements. An essentially new literary language emerged, and the older one soon became obsolete.

From the point of view of linguistic development, four periods of Turkish may be differentiated: Old (Anatolian and Ottoman) Turkish, 13th–16th century; Middle (Ottoman) Turkish, 17th–18th century; Newer (Ottoman) Turkish, 19th century; and Modern Turkish, 20th century.

Turkish morphology is subject to sound harmony, of which palatal and labial vowel harmony is the most salient feature. Palatal harmony is based on a distinction between front vowels (e, i, ö, ü) and back vowels (a, ı, o, u). As a rule, all the vowels of a word belong to the same class (back or front)—e.g., sargı ‘bandage,’ sergi ‘exhibition’—and the vowels of suffixes vary according to the class of vowels in the primary stem—e.g., ev-de ‘in the house,’ but oda-da ‘in the room.’ In morphology Turkish is marked by its tendency to expand the primary stem with different suffixes, of which many designate grammatical notions. Thus parasızlıklarından ‘because of their poverty’ is composed of para ‘money,’ -sız ‘-less,’ -lık ‘-ness,’ -lar = plural, ı(n) = possessive, -dan = ablative ‘from, due to.’

Syntactically, Turkish, like other Turkic languages, tends to use constructions with verbal nouns, participles, and converbs in cases where English would use constructions with subordinative conjunctions or relative pronouns—e.g., geleceğini biliyorum ‘I know that (s)he will come’ (literally ‘come-[future]-its-[accusative] know-[present]-I’), otelde kalan dostumuz ‘our friend who is staying in the hotel’ (literally ‘hotel-in staying friend-our’), and gülerek girdi ‘(s)he entered laughing’ (literally ‘laughing enter-[past]-(s)he’).

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Turkic languages 

WRITTEN BY:

Lars Johanson

Turkic languages, group of closely related languages that form a subfamily of the Altaic languages. The Turkic languages show close similarities to each other in phonology, morphology, and syntax, though Chuvash, Khalaj, and Sakha differ considerably from the rest. The earliest linguistic records are Old Turkic inscriptions, found near the Orhon River in Mongolia and the Yenisey River valley in south-central Russia, which date from the 8th century ce.

Turkic languages are distributed over a vast area in eastern Europe and Central and North Asia, ranging, with some interruptions, from the Balkans to the Great Wall of China and from central Iran (Persia) to the Arctic Ocean. The core area, between the 35th and 55th parallels, includes a western section comprising Asia Minor, northern Iran, and Transcaucasia, a central West Turkistan (Russian) section to the east of the Caspian Sea, and an East Turkistan (Chinese) section beyond the Tien Shan. The northern area extends from western Russia to northern Siberia. States in which Turkic languages are spoken include Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, northern Cyprus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, China, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Romania, Lithuania, and, because of recent industrial migration, several western European countries.

CLASSIFICATION

The Turkic languages may be classified, using linguistic, historical, and geographic criteria, into a southwestern (SW), a northwestern (NW), a southeastern (SE), and a northeastern (NE) branch. Chuvash and Khalaj form separate branches.

The southwestern, or Oghuz, branch comprises three groups. The West Oghuz group (SWw) consists of Turkish (spoken in Turkey, Cyprus, the Balkans, western Europe, and so on); Azerbaijani (Azerbaijanian; Azerbaijan, Iran); and Gagauz (Moldova, Bulgaria, and so on). The East Oghuz group (SWe) consists of Turkmen (Turkmenistan and adjacent countries) and Khorāsān Turkic (northeastern Iran). A southern group (SWs) is formed by Afshar and related dialects in Iran and Afghanistan.

The northwestern, or Kipchak, branch comprises three groups. The South Kipchak group (NWs) consists of Kazakh (spoken in Kazakhstan, Xinjiang, and so on), its close relative Karakalpak (mainly Karakalpakstan), Nogay (Circassia, Dagestan), and Kyrgyz (Kyrgyzstan, China). The North Kipchak group (NWn) consists of Tatar (Tatarstan, Russia; China; Romania; Bulgaria; and so on), Bashkir (Bashkortostan, Russia), and West Siberian dialects (Tepter, Tobol, Irtysh, and so on). The West Kipchak group (NWw) today consists of small, partly endangered languages, Kumyk (Dagestan), Karachay and Balkar (North Caucasus), Crimean Tatar, and Karaim. The Karachay and Balkars and Crimean Tatars were deported during World War II; the latter were allowed to resettle in Crimea only after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Karaim is preserved in Lithuania and Ukraine. The languages of the Pechenegs and the Kuman are antecedents of modern West Kipchak.

The southeastern, or Uighur-Chagatai, branch comprises two groups. The western group (SEw) consists of Uzbek (spoken in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Xinjiang, Karakalpakstan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan). An eastern group (SEe) comprises Uighur and Eastern Turki dialects (Xinjiang, China; Uzbekistan; Kazakhstan; Kyrgyzstan). Eastern Turki oasis dialects are spoken in the Chinese cities of Kashgar, Yarkand, Ho-T’ien (Khotan), A-k’o-su (Aksu), Turfan, and so on; Taranchi in the Ili valley. Yellow Uighur (spoken in Kansu, China) and Salar (mainly Tsinghai), the latter of Oghuz origin, are small and deviant languages. Old Uighur and Chagatai are antecedents of the modern SE branch.

The northeastern, or Siberian, branch comprises two groups. The North Siberian group (NEn) consists of Sakha and Dolgan (spoken in Sakha republic [Yakutia]), differing considerably from mainstream Turkic owing to long geographic isolation. The heterogeneous South Siberian group (NEs) comprises three types. One is represented by Khakas and Shor (both written) and dialects such as Sagay, Kacha, Koybal, Kyzyl, Küerik, and Chulym (spoken in the Abakan River area). The second type is represented by Tyvan (Tuvan; spoken in Tyva [Tuva] republic of Russia and in western Mongolia) and Tofa (northern Sayan region), both written languages. The third type includes dialects such as Altay (a written language), Kumanda, Lebed, Tuba, Teleut, Teleng, Tölös, and others (northern Altai, Baraba Steppe), some being rather similar to Kyrgyz.

Two strongly deviant branches exhibit both archaic features and innovations: Chuvash, originating in Volga-Bolgar, is spoken in and around Chuvashia (Russia) along the middle course of the Volga; Khalaj, descended from the Old Turkic Arghu dialect, is spoken in central Iran.

LINGUISTIC HISTORY

The Turkic languages are clearly interrelated, showing close similarities in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Historically, they split into two types early on, Common Turkic and Bolgar Turkic. The language of the Proto-Bolgars, reportedly similar to the Khazar language, belonged to the latter type. Its only modern representative is Chuvash, which originated in Volga Bolgarian and exhibits archaic features. Bolgar Turkic and Common Turkic differ in regular phonetic representations such as r versus z and l versus š—e.g., Chuvash śer versus Turkish yüz ‘hundred’; Chuvash śul versus Turkish yaš ‘age.’ Chuvash and Common Turkic are not mutually intelligible. Of the Common Turkic languages, Khalaj displays a greater number of archaic features than any other language.

The linguistic history of the Turkic languages can be followed in written sources from the 8th century on. Attempts at interpreting earlier materials as Turkic (e.g., the identification of Hunnic elements in Chinese sources from the 4th century ce) have failed. The Uighur, Oghuz, Kipchak, and Bolgar branches were already differentiated in the oldest known period. In subsequent centuries, Turkic underwent further divergence corresponding to its gradual diffusion. From the Eurasian steppes, Turkic-speaking groups penetrated other regions: the Uighur migrated toward eastern Turkistan, the Kipchak toward the Pontic steppes, and the Oghuz mainly southeastward, toward Iran, Anatolia, and so on. Some varieties proved amazingly expansive. From the 13th century on, Turkistan and Tatarstan were extensively Turkicized. Of the Iranian languages of Central Asia, practically only Tajik survived. The displacements of linguistic groups also led to mixture and leveling of Turkic varieties. Several areas, notably the Oxus region and Crimea, developed into major contact areas.

LANGUAGE CONTACTS

Turkic has been influenced by a number of different contact languages. Old Turkic exhibits Indo-Iranian and Chinese borrowings, and all subsequent varieties have liberally adopted loanwords. Arabic and Persian elements are numerous in all Islamic languages, especially in those of the early sedentary groups. Mongolian loanwords occur from the 13th century on, notably in varieties of nomadic groups. Interaction with the Mongolian language has been especially strong in such areas as southern Siberia. Turkic and Iranian have interacted closely for many centuries, particularly in Central Asia, leading to a profound Iranian impact on Uzbek and an even stronger Uzbek impact on Tajik dialects. Persian influence on the Turkic dialects of Iran and Afghanistan is still considerable. Several languages deviating from the normal type—Chuvash, Khalaj, and Sakha—have both preserved archaic features and acquired new ones through contact. Part of the divergence is due to Iranian, Slavic, and Uralic influence. Although the adoption of French, Italian, and other Western loanwords began in the early years of the Ottoman Empire, European vocabulary has grown more important in modern times. Many Eastern languages, notably the literary languages that developed in the former Soviet Union, did so under Russian dominance and partly under bilingual conditions, and in this process they acquired numerous Russian loanwords and loan translations. The Turkic languages of China are influenced by Chinese vocabulary.

LITERARY LANGUAGES

Turkic literary languages have emerged in different cultural centres. The older ones can be broadly determined as Uighur, Oghuz, and Kipchak or as mixtures of elements from these branches. Beginning in the 15th century, more distinct literary languages developed, in part as points of departure for modern languages (e.g., Ottoman for Modern Turkish or Chagatai for Uzbek and Modern Uighur). The old Kipchak literary languages, however, ultimately vanished and lack direct modern successors.

The literary languages of the “Old Turkic” period may be divided into Old Turkic proper, Old Uighur, and Qarakhanid. The earliest known records of Old Turkic proper are inscriptions on stone stelae erected in the 8th century in the Orhon River valley (Mongolia) in honour of certain rulers of the Old Turkic empire. This language is also represented in somewhat later inscriptions and manuscripts. The Old Kirghiz inscriptions found in the Yenisey River valley are linguistically similar. Old Uighur developed in the Tarim River basin beginning in the 9th century, and it flourished for several centuries. While similar to Old Turkic proper, it displays a certain dialectal variation and several chronological stages. It is recorded in numerous manuscripts that reflect a rich literature of predominantly religious (Buddhist, Manichaean) nature. Qarakhanid, the first Islamic Turkic literary language, developed in the 11th century in eastern Turkistan under the Qarakhanid dynasty. It is based on pre-Islamic Turkic but influenced by Arabic and Persian.

The “Middle Turkic” period, which began in the 13th century, embraces several regional written languages: Khwārezmian Turkic, Volga Bolgarian, Old Kipchak, Old Ottoman, and Early Chagatai. Khwārezmian, used in the 13th–14th centuries in the empire of the Golden Horde, is based on the old language, but mixed with Oghuz and Kipchak elements. Volga Bolgarian is preserved in inscriptions on tombstones (13th–14th centuries). The main record of Old Kipchak is the Codex Cumanicus, compiled in the 14th century by Christian missionaries. Kipchak dictionaries and grammars were written in Egypt and Syria under the Mamlūk dynasty. In the smaller khanates that emerged at the disintegration of the Golden Horde (15th century), Old Kipchak remained in use. It persisted in Crimea until the 17th century, and essentially the same literary language was used in the khanate of Kazan. Old Anatolian Turkish, the antecedent of Ottoman Turkish, developed in Anatolia beginning in the 13th century, initially under the influence of Central Asian traditions. An Azerbaijani literary language began to develop in the 15th century. A Turkmen equivalent in the 14th century soon came under Chagatai influence. Early Chagatai, used in the 15th–16th centuries in the Timurid realm, was based on Qarakhanid-Khwārezmian traditions but relied more on local elements.

A later period includes Middle and Late Ottoman, Azerbaijani, Late Chagatai, and others. Ottoman is the leading language, with a rich literature comprising a variety of forms and styles. Azerbaijani reached a high level of development in the 16th century. Chagatai continued to play a major role, mixing with local elements in, for example, eastern Turkistan and the khanate of Kazan and among the Turkmen. Local forms later eventually ousted Chagatai in eastern Turkistan, the Volga region, and also, until the Ottoman dominance in the 17th century, on the Crimean Peninsula. There are also south Russian Armeno-Kipchak records (i.e., Kipchak Turkic records written by Armenians) dating from the 16th and 17th centuries.

The modern period comprises 23 written languages: Turkish, Azerbaijani, Gagauz, Turkmen, Karachay-Balkar, Crimean Tatar, Kumyk, Karaim, Tatar, Chuvash, Bashkir, Nogay, Kazakh, Karakalpak, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Uighur, Altay, Khakas, Shor, Tyvan, Tofa, and Sakha. Some of them—Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Kazan Tatar, Crimean Tatar, Uzbek, and Karaim—had a literary form before the 20th century. Modern Turkish replaced Ottoman at the beginning of the century and also influenced Azerbaijani. A rather pure Turkmen literary language had reemerged in the 18th century and remained in use until a new one based on spoken Turkmen was introduced after 1917. Several literary languages had started to develop in the 19th century: Kazan Tatar, also used by the Bashkir and other groups, Chuvash, Crimean Tatar, Kazakh, and Kumyk. After 1917, certain languages thus continued pre-Soviet written traditions. Uzbek- and Taranchi-based “New Uighur” took the place of Chagatai in Turkistan. In the 1920s and ’30s, Kyrgyz, Bashkir, Karakalpak, Karachay-Balkar, Nogay, Tyvan, Altay, Khakas, and Shor were established as literary languages and received a written form.

The first known script is the “runic” one, an original invention based on Semitic patterns. Besides the Brāhmī and Manichaean scripts, the Uighur used a script of their own, developed from the Sogdian cursive script. It was used among Central Asian Turks long after the victory of Islam, in such places as the Golden Horde khanate and Timurid courts. The Syriac Estrangelo script was used by Turkic-speaking Nestorians (13th–14th centuries).

The Arabic script was generally introduced after the adoption of Islam. It was used by all Turkic peoples until the early 1920s and is still used in China and Iran, not to mention the Arab countries. In China, an attempt was made to promote a Pinyin romanization for Uighur and Kazakh, but traditionalists resisted and the effort failed in the 1980s.

The Greek and Armenian alphabets have occasionally been used by minorities. Hebrew script was used for many centuries by the Karaites, believers of the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament). The Sakha and Chuvash languages were written with modified Russian alphabets before the 20th century. Some languages (e.g., Teleut) were occasionally written in scripts created by missionaries. The Mongolian alphabet was to some extent used in the Altai region.

In the 1920s, Roman alphabets were introduced for Soviet Turkic languages, and a “Unified Turkic Latin Alphabet” was created. In 1928, a Roman script was also introduced for Turkish. From the late 1930s until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, however, modified forms of the Cyrillic script were compulsory for all Soviet Turkic languages. The graphic representations differed considerably across languages, and the systems were often changed. Thus, certain languages were first written in Arabic, then in Roman, and then in Cyrillic script. Others were first written in Cyrillic, then in Roman, and finally in Cyrillic script again. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, a return to Roman script has begun or is being considered for several languages, including Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uzbek. Where the “Common Turkic Alphabet”—consisting of the Turkish script plus special letters—has been introduced, it is used alongside the Cyrillic script.

The Ottoman, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, and Tatar languages had had considerable supraregional validity up to the 20th century, but thereafter they were basically restricted to their respective national (or, in the case of Tatar, regional) territories. The new regional languages were based on local dialects and were established without coordination of the various projects. The variety of scripts that were introduced hindered written communication, and language reforms had similar effects. As a result of reforms culminating in the 1920s, the strongly de-Turkicized Ottoman language with its many Arabic-Persian elements finally gave way to a less foreign norm. Despite long disputes and resistance, an essentially new literary language emerged, the older one soon becoming obsolete. Though the aim had been to establish a genuine Turkish language, radical reformers often resorted to artificial means, such as the creation of neologisms that were incomprehensible outside Turkey. Soviet Turkic languages also underwent changes, adopting Russian elements, but mostly maintaining the established Arabic-Persian vocabulary. Lacking common-language planning and close contact situations, the Turkic languages thus continued to develop independently. The social importance of many languages was reduced, for example, by Russian dominance or by (as happened in Iran) a ban on the public use of Turkic. With the rapid political changes of the late 20th century, however, the use of Turkic languages, especially in Central Asia, once again began to increase.

LINGUISTIC STRUCTURE

Turkic word structure is characterized by possessing rich possibilities of expanding stems by means of relatively unchangeable and clear-cut suffixes, of which many designate grammatical notions. Thus, kız-lar-ım-a ‘to my daughters’ is composed of kız ‘daughter’ and plural (-lar), possessive (-ım ‘my’), and dative (-a ‘in’) suffixes. The transparent and regular morphology is subject to sound harmony. Thus, words tend to consist of syllables produced with either a back or a front tongue position. Most suffixes vary according to the preceding syllable, containing either back or front sounds. The Turkish primary stem kül ‘ash’ yields words that contain only front consonants and vowels—e.g., kül-ler ‘ashes,’ kül-ler-i ‘its ashes,’ kül-ler-in-den ‘from its ashes’—whereas kul ‘slave’ yields words that contain back sounds only—e.g., kul-lar ‘slaves,’ kul-lar-ı ‘his slaves,’ kul-lar-ın-dan ‘from his slaves.’ Besides this “palatal harmony,” most languages also adopt a “labial harmony” between syllables with respect to rounded and unrounded vowels—e.g., pul-u ‘his stamp’ versus pil-i ‘his battery.’ Harmony rules, which may also be applied more or less to loanwords, vary across languages, labial harmony being most developed in Sakha and Kyrgyz. In Karaim, Gagauz, and Uzbek dialects and others, Slavic or Iranian influence has caused harmony to be phonetically differently realized, though harmony is far from lost.

Word stress, mostly consisting of high pitch, tends to fall on the last syllable in modern Turkic languages. Several eastern languages still tend toward initial stress, which probably corresponds to an older state.

Morphology

The nominal morphology comprises case, plural, and possessive suffixes. The cases include a genitive (‘of’), dative (‘to’), definite accusative, locative (‘in, at, on’), ablative (‘from’), and sometimes equative (‘like’), terminative (‘until’), comitative (‘with’), and so on. Possessive suffixes (such as ‘my’) exist alongside free possessive pronouns (used for emphasis). There are no definite articles and no grammatical genders—e.g., Turkish o ‘he, she, it.’ Nouns and adjectives are generally not distinguished morphologically. Superlatives are formed with particles meaning ‘most’ (Turkish en iyi ‘best’), comparatives with particles or suffixes meaning ‘more’ (Uzbek yaxširåq, Turkish daha iyi ‘better’) or simply with the ablative added to the standard of comparison (Kumyk qardan suwuq ‘colder than snow’ [literally ‘snow-from cold’]). Intensive adjectives are formed with reduplication—e.g., Turkish kap-kara ‘quite black’ (kara ‘black’). Numerals include cardinals, ordinals, collectives (Kazakh bes-ew ‘a group of 5’), distributives (Turkish on-ar ‘10 each’), and sometimes approximatives (Tatar un-lap ‘about 10’). Nouns following cardinals normally appear in the singular—e.g., Turkish iki uçak ‘two airplane.’

The complex verbal morphology exhibits numerous simple and compound aspect-tense categories. Suffixes express such notions as negation, passive, reciprocal, reflexive, and causative, and they combine to produce long derived stems—e.g., Turkish seviştirilme ‘not to be caused to love each other.’ Personal suffixes indicate subjects—e.g., Kyrgyz kele-biz ‘we come.’ Infinite forms include verbal nouns, verbal adjectives (participles), and verbal adverbs (converbs). Postverbial constructions with auxiliary verbs placed after converbs may specify the manner of action—e.g., Uzbek ålip kel- ‘bring’ (literally ‘taking come’), Kumyk oxup yiber- ‘start reading’ (literally ‘reading send’).

Postpositions, corresponding to English prepositions, are placed after the words they mark functionally—e.g., Turkish benden sonra ‘after me’ (literally ‘I-from after’), ev(in) önünde ‘in front of the house’ (literally ‘house-of front-its-at’). Conjunctions are used less frequently in Turkic languages than in English, and they are often borrowed—e.g., Turkish ve ‘and,’ ama ‘but,’ çünkü ‘for’ (each borrowed from either Arabic or Persian). There are no native subordinative conjunctions or relative pronouns.

Attributes do not agree in number or case with their heads—e.g., Turkish büyük evlerde ‘in the big houses’ (literally ‘big house [-plural]-in,’ without any markers on the adjective). In genitive constructions, a genitive suffix mostly marks the possessor and a possessive suffix the possessed object—e.g., Uzbek ådäm-ning üy-i ‘the man’s house’ (literally ‘man-of house-his’). Instead of ‘have’ verbs, adjectives meaning ‘existent’ and ‘nonexistent’ are used—e.g., Turkish ben-de para var (literally ‘I-at money existent’) ‘I have money,’ para-m yok (literally ‘money-my nonexistent’) ‘I have no money.’

Syntax

In the elaborate sentence construction system of Turkic languages, subordinated clauses are formed with verbal nouns that take plural, case, and possessive suffixes and mostly correspond to that-clauses—e.g., Uzbek båläning kelgänini bilämän ‘I know that the child has come’ (literally ‘child-of having-come-his know-I’). Clauses formed with participles correspond to English relative clauses—e.g., Uzbek kelgän bålä ‘the child that has come’ (literally ‘having-come child’). Converb clauses determine other verbal constructions—e.g., Turkish gülerek girdi ‘[she or he] entered laughing’ (literally ‘laugh-ing enter-ed’ [-erek ‘-ing,’ -di ‘-ed’]). In older and in several modern languages, converb clauses may create long chains of constructions within a single sentence.

Normally, the subject begins a clause and the predicate core ends it, whereas objects and adjuncts precede the elements they determine. These rules may result in sentences such as Turkish Ali, denize yakın evin içinde oturan ailenin gelecek ay buradan ayrılacağını bize bildirdi ‘Ali told us that the family living in the house near the sea will leave this place next month’ (literally ‘Ali sea-to near house-of inside-its living family-of come-future month here-from leaving-future-its-accusative we-to inform-ed-he’).

Lars Johanson

https://global.britannica.com/topic/Turkic-languages

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English language 

WRITTEN BY:

Simeon Potter

David Crystal

LAST UPDATED: 5-20-2016

English language, West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that is closely related to Frisian, German, and Dutch (in Belgium called Flemish) languages. English originated in England and is now widely spoken on six continents. It is the primary language of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, and various small island nations in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. It is also an official language of India, the Philippines, Singapore, and many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa. English is the first choice of foreign language in most other countries of the world, and it is that status that has given it the position of a global lingua franca. It is estimated that a third of the world’s population, some two billion persons, now use English.

Learn about “global English.”

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ORIGINS AND BASIC CHARACTERISTICS

English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish), and West (German, Dutch [and Flemish], Frisian, and English). Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.

Modern English is analytic (i.e., relatively uninflected), whereas Proto-Indo-European, the ancestral tongue of most of the modern European languages (e.g., German, French, Russian, Greek), was synthetic, or inflected. During the course of thousands of years, English words have been slowly simplified from the inflected variable forms found in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Russian, and German, toward invariable forms, as in Chinese and Vietnamese. The German and Chinese words for the noun man are exemplary. German has five forms: Mann, Mannes, Manne, Männer, Männern. Chinese has one form: ren. English stands in between, with four forms: man, man’s, men, men’s. In English, only nouns, pronouns (as in he, him, his), adjectives (as in big, bigger, biggest), and verbs are inflected. English is the only European language to employ uninflected adjectives; e.g., the tall man, the tall woman, compared to Spanish el hombre alto and la mujer alta. As for verbs, if the Modern English word ride is compared with the corresponding words in Old English and Modern German, it will be found that English now has only 5 forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden), whereas Old English ridan had 13, and Modern German reiten has 16.

In addition to the simplicity of inflections, English has two other basic characteristics: flexibility of function and openness of vocabulary.

Flexibility of function has grown over the last five centuries as a consequence of the loss of inflections. Words formerly distinguished as nouns or verbs by differences in their forms are now often used as both nouns and verbs. One can speak, for example, of planning a table or tabling a plan, booking a place or placing a book, lifting a thumb or thumbing a lift. In the other Indo-European languages, apart from rare exceptions in Scandinavian languages, nouns and verbs are never identical because of the necessity of separate noun and verb endings. In English, forms for traditional pronouns, adjectives, and adverbs can also function as nouns; adjectives and adverbs as verbs; and nouns, pronouns, and adverbs as adjectives. One speaks in English of the Frankfurt Book Fair, but in German one must add the suffix -er to the place-name and put attributive and noun together as a compound, Frankfurter Buchmesse. In French one has no choice but to construct a phrase involving the use of two prepositions: Foire du Livre de Francfort. In English it is now possible to employ a plural noun as adjunct (modifier), as in wages board and sports editor; or even a conjunctional group, as in prices and incomes policy and parks and gardens committee. Any word class may alter its function in this way: the ins and outs (prepositions becoming nouns), no buts (conjunction becoming noun).

Openness of vocabulary implies both free admission of words from other languages and the ready creation of compounds and derivatives. English adopts (without change) or adapts (with slight change) any word really needed to name some new object or to denote some new process. Words from more than 350 languages have entered English in this way. Like French, Spanish, and Russian, English frequently forms scientific terms from Classical Greek word elements. Although a Germanic language in its sounds and grammar, the bulk of English vocabulary is in fact Romance or Classical in origin.

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