The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent.Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish, have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo …

In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or partially attested at best. ... It is also sometimes called the common or primitive form of a language (e.g. Common Germanic, …

The Proto-Slavic language, the hypothetical ancestor of the modern-day Slavic languages, developed from the ancestral Proto-Balto-Slavic language (c. 1500 BC), which is the parent language of the Balto-Slavic languages (both the Slavic and Baltic languages, e.g. Latvian and Lithuanian).The first 2,000 years or so consist of the pre-Slavic era, a long period during which …

Months. The Germanic calendars were lunisolar, the months corresponding to lunations. Tacitus writes in his Germania (Chapter 11) that the Germanic peoples observed the lunar months.. The lunisolar calendar is reflected in the Proto-Germanic term *mēnōþs "month" (Old English mōnaþ, Old Saxon mānuth, Old Norse mánaðr, and Old High German mānod, Gothic mēnōþs), being …

The much-anticipated Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is the premier resource about words for people who seek to know more and find fresh perspectives. Exhaustively researched and thoroughly revised, the Fifth Edition contains 10,000 new words and senses, over 4,000 dazzling new full-color images, and authoritative, up-to …

Ēostre (Proto-Germanic: *Austrō(n)) is a West Germanic spring goddess. The name is reflected in Old English: *Ēastre ([ˈæːɑstre]; Northumbrian dialect: Ēastro, Mercian and West Saxon dialects: Ēostre), Old High German: *Ôstara, and Old Saxon: *Āsteron. By way of the Germanic month bearing her name (Northumbrian: Ēosturmōnaþ, West Saxon: Ēastermōnaþ; Old High …

Sister families to West Germanic are North Germanic, with Old Norse (a.k.a. Old Icelandic) as its chief dialect, and East Germanic, with Gothic as its chief (and only attested) dialect. The Germanic parent language of these three families, referred to as Proto-Germanic, is not attested but may be reconstructed from evidence within the families, such as provided by Old English …

Indo-European languages, family of languages spoken in most of Europe and areas of European settlement and in much of Southwest and South Asia. The term Indo-Hittite is used by scholars who believe that Hittite and the other Anatolian languages are not just one branch of Indo-European but rather a branch coordinate with all the rest put together; thus, Indo-Hittite …

Odin (/ ˈ oʊ d ɪ n /; from Old Norse: Óðinn, IPA: [ˈoːðenː]) is a widely revered god in Germanic paganism. Norse mythology, the source of most surviving information about him, associates him with wisdom, healing, death, royalty, the gallows, knowledge, war, battle, victory, sorcery, poetry, frenzy, and the runic alphabet, and depicts him as the husband of the goddess Frigg.In wider …

Proto-Germanic. All Germanic languages derive from the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), which is generally thought to have been spoken between 4500 and 2500 BCE. The ancestor of Germanic languages is referred to as Proto- or Common Germanic, and likely represented a group of mutually intelligible dialects. They share distinctive characteristics which set them …