Issues in Study of Languages

Mario Pei notes that the languages of the world have only been imperfectly studied and classified and that too little is known about the structure and affiliations of certain languages, notably the American Indians, African Negroes, the natives of Australia and New Guinea, and many of the languages spoken in Asia. The languages of Europe, the Mediterranean basin, and the Near East have been assigned properly to groups and families because they have also been the most studied and the languages with the longest unbroken records. Linguists have long dreamed of being able to trace all languages back to a common source, but this has been an elusive goal.

The language spoken by any person is an accident of geography, but human beings do

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oups found today only in one isolated language each, Armenian and Albanian; and with the western group including the Hellenic group, whose only modern representative is Greek, and the Italic languages, the Germanic languages, and the Celtic language: An extinct language called Tocharian once spoken in central Asia, belonged--strangely enough--to the western group. The Hittites, a people mentioned in the Bible, once ruled an empire centered in what is now eastern Turkey. The inscriptions they left give us only an imperfect picture of their language but it was obviously related to Indo-European. The Romance languages are those that can trace their origin to Latin. Latin developed from a form of Italic spoken originally in a region in central Italy, probably settled by Proto-Latin speakers around 1000 B.C. Latin flourished as the Roman military, political, and economic influence spread during the expansion of the Roman Empire. Dialects became more differentiated as the empire collapsed and as different political entities formed and ere separated from one another. Even during the time of the Empire, there were regional variations and local influences that were creating differentiations among the different regional dialects.
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Near East, Siberia Basque, , Greek Italic, Low German, Hungarian Turkish, Empire Dialects, Sanskrit Italian, Estonian Altaic, United Stats, languages world, immigrant dialects, definition language, indo-european family, language spoken, romance languages, dialect french, greek albanian armenian, common origin, languages europe, hamitic languages, dialect french french,
Approximate Word count = 2258
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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