Sunday, March 30, 2008

Indo-European languages

As it has been said before, we will start our language learning and learning about languages with a really peculiar language family, which shaped the existing European culture and many cultures of the world outside Europe as well.

Firstly, I would like to introduce you to which languages belong to this wide and truly rich language family. Some good reading on the subject can be found in this Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

And after you've done with it, we will continue.

Language Learning Purpose

Why do humans learn language? Why do we need language? How do we learn it and how do we use it? Is it possible to gain a near-native fluency in your beloved language? These questions are reasonable ones to ask for a person who came to this web-log for the first time.

The opinion of the creator of this page, me, John Harding, is that any language is primarily a communicational tool. And precisely as the communicational tool we will be reviewing various languages of the human realm

Modern sciences, such as linguistics, seek to understand languages, their structure and how they evolved. Linguists and just language enthusiast of the world tend to stick to the generally accepted division of languages on families (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_families) and by that definition, there are dozens if not hundreds of families, on each continent of Earth. The continent with the highest number of language families present is Central and South America. We however will start our journey of discovery with the family most likely familiar to the reader and the most widespread and influential one - Indo-European languages. English in fact is also a representative of this family, more precisely - it’s Germanic group. So, if you feel that urge for knowledge, feel free to join us in our next language learning blogpost.