Language History

Question 1

Jean Francois Champollion

Answer 1

French country boy who played a key role in deciphering the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Demotic script

Question 2

Champollion proved that

Answer 2

hieroglyphs can be read and they included phonetic information

Question 3

Three languages found on the Rosetta Stone

Answer 3

Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, Demotic

Question 4

William Jones

Answer 4

British government official in India that claimed that Sanskrit (ancient language of India) must be related to several European languages

Question 5

Indo-European language family

Answer 5

Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Greek, Celtic, Armenian, Albanian, Iranian

Question 6

Proto-Indo-European

Answer 6

The overarching, ancient family language tree.

Question 7

Romance

Answer 7

Roman subset, derived from Latin - French, Italian, Spanish

Question 8

Germanic

Answer 8

Includes English, German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Yiddish, Gothic, Frisian

Question 9

Celtic

Answer 9

Irish (Gaelic), Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton

Question 10

Indo-Iranian

Answer 10

Farsi, Kurdish, Urdu, Hindi, Nepali, Sanskrit

Question 11

Comparative reconstruction

Answer 11

1) Assemble a cognate set
2) Apply principles of comparative reconstruction

Question 12

Cognate set

Answer 12

words with similar meanings and forms which have a common origin

Question 13

Majority principle

Answer 13

is the majority of the cognates in a data set contain the same phone, then it’s likely that the common ancestor of the cognates had the same phone in the same position

Question 14

Most natural development principle

Answer 14

certain sound changes are much more likely than others

Question 15

Splits

Answer 15

One sound becomes two

Question 16

Mergers

Answer 16

Two sounds become one