Larger Picture at jonathan.beaton
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the common ancestor of hundreds of related languages and dialects spoken in Europe, northern Indian subcontinent, Iranian plateau and most of Central Asia. Though its existence is accepted by most linguists, they couldn't decide on exactly when PIE was spoken (some said in the Early to Middle Bronze Age whereas others placed it as early as the Late Stone Age).
This neat "language tree," illustrates the evolution of modern languages from PIE. What's even neater is that PIE is supposed to be a just one branch in an even larger language tree.
As for the influence of French... Yes, modern languages take influence from each other. English has many words that got in via the Norman invasion (& change of court) 1000 years ago. And, there is a ton of Latin as well that came in mostly during the Elizabethan era. While there are many many words that come from Latin, no one considers English a Romance language....
I think trees like this are trying to show long term slow evolution of a language's roots without sudden changes from large scale immigration. Hence, English is more related to German than French. It often helps if you compare very simple common words, rather than the complex ones which get imported directly.
Discerning what evolved from what is a tough and probably nebulous call to make in a lot of cases, but that's what linguistics gurus do to earn their huge cash and worldwide fame.
English: I, me, my; I am. You, your (thou). You are/Thou art.
Finnish: minä, minun; Minä olen. sinä, sinun; sinä olet.
Most of Indo-European languages show some sort of nasal consonant as 1st person, and some sort of 'dental'/alveolarish consonant for 2nd person, so we have those in the above example, as well as these other 1st person pronouns:
1st Person
French: je, me
Spanish: yo, mi
German: ich, meine (sp?)
Russian: ja, menja (excuse the transliteration)
Swedish: jag, mig/min/mitt
2nd Person:
French: tu
Spanish: tu
German: du
Russian: ty
Swedish: du
Mysterious, right? Anyway, there's probably more evidence for such a relation, but I'm not going to try to list it exhaustively. Basic point: Finnish and Hungarian are not I.E. languages. :)
Finnic first person pronouns look like: minä/mä, mie, ma, mun, mon
Finnic second person pronouns: sinä/sä, šie, sa, don, ton
Also, some cursory googling lead me to: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=indo-uralic&btnG=Search
Hmmmm...
It's a good question. Whilst almost people in Scotland and Ireland are able to speak English, that was only the result of a few hundred years of "gentle persuasion" on the part of the English.
The native languages of Ireland and Scotland are *completely* different from English and generally not very mutually intelligible. Scotland actually has 2 native languages, "Scots" (or "Lowland Scots") and "Scottish Gaelic", which is more highland in origin. Scots is distantly related to English on a very ancient basis and is thus a Germanic language as well. Scottish Gaelic, in contrast, is related to "Irish" (or "Irish Gaelic", often confusingly called just "Gaelic" ) and also Manx, another Gaelic language from the Isle of Man. All are in the Celtic branch, as the diagram shows, and are rather removed from English, German, Dutch, and other Germanic langauges.
If you google around you can find some sound bites (even internet radio stations) of people speaking Irish Gaelic. If you've never heard it, it's probably completely unrecognizable (and very cool). I applaud the efforts for Irish speakers to continue to promote the recovery of their language -- losing it would be a tremendous loss of their history and culture. It's but a minority of the Irish population that speaks Irish daily, but there are pockets of the country where it is the #1 language (although they can speak English also). The situation is a lot worse for Scottish Gaelic and Manx unfortunately...
Sid "9/32 Irish" Morrison
Thanks for the education. It was very informative and fascinating. I think it would be great if someone did some sort of flash animation showing different parts of the world and how languages migrated and mutated as time went on.
English inherits from many of those and even at it's core... it takes a lot from Old and Modern French. France itself was a vast melting pot, took from many sources... and became the original "Lingua franca" and in return influenced those languages back. Much like modern English today.
English's core comes from Germanic roots but much of the vocabulary is from old French, when not directly Latin.
I think, therefore, Portugese will find itself quite happily in one of the many smaller twigs.
Where is one of the old languages???
The A L B A N I A N language?
You must do this.ok