LANGUAGES - SPEAKING - COMMUNICATING

What was there before French ? Latin ! And what was there before Latin ? Greek ! and before Greek...?

What was there before ENGLISH ? er... er... Germanic ? YES !! but what was there before Germanic ...?

The adventure of languages

Indo-European = proto language
No written trace - the name given to the people that moved from areas where India is nowadays when the last ice age came to an end in Eastern and Western Europe. They moved first to the North Eastern Russian steps and from there, in around -8'000 B.C. they swept towards the West, where they brought their patriarchal and warlike social organization and their language

Sanskrit = dead language from India
The oldest written language (- 2'500 B.C.) belonging to the Indo-European family (religious texts from India). Sanskrit is considered as the ancestor of all the European languages, as well as the large Indo-Iranian branch.

Celtic
Probably the oldest among ancient Western languages. The most widely-spread as well : spoken all over the European continent as from -2'500 B.C.; first written traces +500 A.D. (Old Irish).

Asterix was a Celt and spoke Britonic

Celtic languages are all nearly extinct :
Welsh is still spoken and learned at school in Wales. Gaelic survives in some areas of Scotland and Ireland.

Greek
The First written European language - 1'500 B.C. (Mycenean)
All ancient variants, such Mycenean, Dorian, Bizantin, are extinct

They invented the phonetic alphabet
...............From the Greek language : Alpha-Beta

 

Modern Greek

Modern languages derived : Italian, Spanish, French, Romanian

Germanic
First written traces + 300 A.D. (Scandinavian, Old Norse);
+ 400 A.D. Gothic and + 800 A.D. Old Germanic

Modern languages : Scandinavian, Danish, Modern German, ENGLISH !!!

Slavonic
First written traces + 900 A.D. (Cyrillic alphabet), translation of the Gospels

Modern languages : Eastern European branch - Russian, Polish, etc.

Indo-Iranian branch
Hindi, Bengali, Kurdish, Armenian, Old Persian, local languages of Afghanistan, Caucasus, etc.

As well as Romani : the language spoken by the Gipsies

Some of these languages are extinct, some have survived in a modern form