语言学复习要点.docVIP

语言学复习要点 样题一： Indo-European Language family: It is assumed that the world has approximately 3,000 (some put it 5,000) languages, which can be grouped into roughly 300 language families on the basis of similarities in their basic word stock and grammar. The Indo-European is one of them. It is made up of most of the languages of Europe, the Near East, and India. The prehistoric Indo-European parent language is thought to be a highly inflected language . It was a language in which the various forms of a given word showed its relationship to other words in a sentence. When groups of this language moved away from the original homeland, believed to be somewhere in the eastern most part of Europe, the language of each group grew and developed along different lines in much the same way that American and Australian English now show differences from the language of England. Over very long periods of complete isolation from each other, these dialects of a single language changed so much that they became separate languages. Speakers of one were not understood by speakers of another. 　　 The surviving languages show various degrees of similarity to one another. The similarity bear a more or less direct relationship to their geographical distribution. They accordingly fall into eight principal groups, which can be grouped into an Eastern set: Balto-Slavic , Indo-Iranian, Armenian and Albanian; a Western set: Celtic, Italic, Hellenic, Germanic. In the Eastern set, Armenian and Albanian are each the only modern language respectively. The Balto-Slavic comprises such modern languages as Prussian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Slovenian and Russian. In the Indo-Iranian we have Persian, Bengali, Hindi, Romany , the last three of which are derived from the dead language Sanskrit.　　 In the Western set, Greek is the modern language derived from Hellenic. In the Celtic, we find Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Breton, etc. The five Romance languages, namely, Portuguese, Spanish, French, It