Language Family
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree or in a subsequent modification to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. All the apparently biological terms are used only in the metaphoric sense: No actual biology relationship is implied by the metaphor.
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Some articles on language family:
... Outside of China, members of the Miao linguistic/cultural family sub-group or nations of the Hmong live in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Burma due to migrations starting in the 18th century ... Altogether there are approximately 8 million speakers in the Miao language family ... This language family, which consists of 6 languages and around 35 dialects (some of which are mutually intelligible) belongs to the Hmong/Miao branch of the Hmong–Mien ...
... A larger Aegean family including Eteocretan (Minoan language) and Eteocypriot has been proposed by G.M ... to some alleged similarities between the Etruscan language and ancient Lemnian (an Aegean language widely thought to be related to Etruscan), and some ... If these languages could be shown to be related to Etruscan and Rhaetic, they would constitute a pre-Indo-European phylum stretching from (at the very least) the Aegean islands and Crete across mainland Greece and ...
... Eskimo–Aleut or Eskaleut is a language family native to Alaska, the Canadian Arctic, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut, Greenland, and the Chukchi Peninsula on the eastern tip of Siberia ... The Eskimo–Aleut language family is divided into two branches, the Eskimo languages and the Aleut language ... The Aleut language family consists of a single language, Aleut, spoken in the Aleutian Islands and the Pribilof Islands ...
... The concept of language families is based on the historical observation that languages develop dialects, which over time may diverge into distinct languages ... evolution of microbes, with extensive lateral gene transfer Quite distantly related languages may affect each other through language contact, which in extreme cases may lead to languages ... In addition, a number of sign languages have developed in isolation and appear to have no relatives at all ...
... known as runes), used for writing mostly Turkic languages ... noted for the exceptional uniformity of its language and paleography ... the 8th century to record the Old Turkic language ...
Famous quotes containing the words family and/or language:
“The East is the hearthside of America. Like any home, therefore, it has the defects of its virtues. Because it is a long-lived-in house, it bursts its seams, is inconvenient, needs constant refurbishing. And some of the family resources have been spent. To attain the privacy that grown-up people find so desirable, Easterners live a harder life than people elsewhere. Today it is we and not the frontiersman who must be rugged to survive.”
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–1978)
“Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)