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No artigo da semana passada, a resposta à pergunta QUAL É A PRIMEIRA VANTAGEM QUE UMA PESSOA ADQUIRE QUANDO APRENDE UM SEGUNDO IDIOMA não chegou a ser respondida devido ao fato de que as informações preliminares tomaram muito mais espaço do que eu pretendia utilizar. O assunto IDIOMA PROTO-INDO- EUROPEU é, por demais, apaixonante. E ainda não será no artigo de hoje que vamos responder à pergunta que deu origem a este artigo. De qualquer maneira, a pergunta continua em aberto e é bom, para quem está aprendendo algo, pensar sobre os itens em discussão.

Todo o mundo gosta de saber sobre suas origens e sobre as origens dos idiomas que falamos ou estamos aprendendo a falar. Escrever sobre esse assunto é tão apaixonante para mim que recomecei a estudar a língua dos meus antepassados, a saber, alemão. Vamos ler mais um pouco sobre o PIE:

The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and its reconstruction is far advanced and quite detailed.

Scholars estimate that PIE may have been spoken as a single language (before divergence began) around 3700 BC, though estimates by different authorities can vary by more than a millennium. The most popular hypothesis for the origin and spread of the language is the Kurgan hypothesis, which postulates an origin in the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. In modern times the existence of the language was first postulated in the 18th century by Sir William Jones, who observed the similarities between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Latin. By the early 1900s, well-defined descriptions of PIE had been developed that are still accepted today (with some refinements).

PIE is known to have had a complex system of morphology that included inflections (suffixing of roots, as in who, whom, whose), and ablaut (vowel alterations, as in sing, sang, sung). Nouns used a sophisticated system of declension (declinação, como temos no latim e no alemão, por exemplo) and verbs used a similarly sophisticated system of conjugation.

As there is no direct evidence of Proto-Indo-European language, all knowledge of the language is derived by reconstruction from later languages using linguistic techniques such as the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction. Relationships to other language families, including the Uralic languages, have been proposed though all such suggestions remain controversial.

Obs.: devido aos esforços do nosso editor, os links estão funcionando, de modo que os meus estimados leitores podem aumentar a abrangência deste artigo, clicando nos mesmos, what I strongly recomend.

Indo-European studies began with Sir William Jones making and propagating the observation that Sanskrit bore a certain resemblance to classical Greek and Latin. In The Sanskrit Language (in 1786) he suggested that all three languages had a common root, and that indeed they may all be further related, in turn, to Gothic and the Celtic languages, as well as to Persian.

His third annual discourse before the Asiatic Society on the history and culture of the Hindus (delivered on 2 February 1786 and published in 1788) with the famed "philologer", passage is often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies. This is Jones' most quoted passage, establishing his tremendous find in the history of linguistics:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with Sanskrit; and old Persian might be added to the same family.

This common source came to be known as Proto-Indo-European.

The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar (1833) to August Schleicher's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann's Grundriss first published in the 1880s. Brugmann's junggrammatische re-evaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure's development of the laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of "contemporary" Indo-European studies.

PIE as described in the early 1900s is still generally accepted today; subsequent work is largely refinement and systematization, as well as the incorporation of new information, notably the Anatolian and Tocharian branches unknown in the 19th century.

Notably, the laryngeal theory, in its early forms discussed since the 1880s, became the mainstream after Jerzy Kurylowicz's 1927 discovery of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phonemes in Anatolian.

Julius Pokorny's landmark Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ("Indo-European Etymological Dictionary", 1959) gave a detailed overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated up until that time, but neglected contemporary trends of morphology and phonology (including the laryngeal theory), and largely ignored Anatolian.

The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins, Jochem Schindler and Helmut Rix) developed a better understanding of morphology and, in the wake of Kury?owicz's 1956 Apophonie, understanding of the ablaut. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to establish its relationship to PIE; see also Indo-Hittite.

Como podem facilmente deduzir, PIE não é uma lenda, apesar de não existir nenhum documento escrito em tal língua.

Para encerrar a nossa aula de hoje, lembro que o nome da língua atualmente falada no reino dos aiatolás (a antiga Pérsia) é FARSI (Farsi is widely spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and, to some extent, in Armenia, Turkmanistan, Azerbaijan and Bahrain.

Encerro com minhas saudações à Presidente Rousseff no que diz respeito ao relacionamento do Brasil com a teocracia iraniana. Confesso que cresce cada vez mais a minha admiração pelas mulheres (exceção, é claro, feita à Viúva Christina).

Dixi

Roberto Henry Ebelt é professor, escritor, produz uma coluna semanal para o Jornal do Comércio de Porto Alegre deste 2001 e é diretor do curso HENRY'S BUSINESS ENGLISH desde 1971.

Seu mais recente livro, O QUE VOCÊ DEVE SABER ANTES DE ESTUDAR INGLÊS, pode ser encontrado nas livrarias Disal, Cultura e SBS ou à rua Hoffmann, 728 em Porto Alegre.

E-mail: roberto@henrys.com.br
Fone (51) 3222-3144
www.henrys.com.br