User:Esotericbubbba/sandbox

Article Evaluation

 * 1) Check the latest number of Indo-European languages
 * 2) Check if (Proto-)Indo-European languages reached west of China(Article only mentions influence to India)
 * 3) possibly need to add Grimm's law on consonants shift
 * 4) possibly need to mention the Great Vowel Shift in English
 * 5) in the consonant change section, need to label the language where the changes happen (e.g. French, English)
 * 6) very likely need to add details on syntax and grammar

Potential Sources

 * 1) Detachments for Cohension by M. M. Jocelyne Fernandez-Vest
 * 2) Language Change at the Syntax-Semantics Interface
 * 3) Words, the evolution of Western languages by Victor Stevenson.(1983)
 * 4) In Search of the Indo-Europeans:language, archaeology, and myth by J.P. Mallory(1989)
 * 5) Indo-European language and culture : an introduction by Benjamin W. Fortson(2004)
 * 6) Archaeology and langauge:the puzzle of Indo-European origins by Colin Renfrew

Morphology
Introduction: Morphology is the study of word formation. The Greek root ‘morph’ means shape or form; thus morphology is interested in how words form. Languages in the Indo-European family have many similarities in the morphology of their words. For example, all Indo-European languages share a remarkably similar formation of words and a striking similarity in their root structure. In terms of affixes, all Indo-European languages mark their nouns and verbs with various affixes to indicate a wide range of information such as number and case.

Ablaut
Ablaut is the process of vowel changes within a morpheme to indicate changes in grammatical functions. For example, in English the verb infinitive sing changes its vowel i to a and becomes sang to indicate past tense, and becomes sung (change to u) to indicate participle, and finally it becomes song (change to o) to indicate a noun. Linguists do not yet completely agree whether or not ablaut is a phonetic or morphological process.

Each variant of the vowel is called a grade. The vowel e is called e-grade. It is the most common vowel and is also called the full grade. Other grades are o-grade, long e-grade, and empty grade when the vowel is missing. The first table below contains some examples of ablaut within a language and the second table examples of ablaut across languages.

Word Structure
Words in all Indo-European languages consist of a root morpheme and optionally affixes. Different languages have different affixes to mark a variety of grammatical information such as tense, number, and case. In English for example, the word walked consists of the root morpheme walk and the past tense suffix –ed.

In terms of placement, affixes can be divided into prefix, suffix, and infix. Prefixes come before the root, such as the negation marker (also called privative prefix) un- in English. Suffixes come after the root such as the adverb marker –ly in English. Infixes come in the middle of the word, such as in Sanskrit yunakti where –na- is a nasal infix.

Moreover, these affixes fall into two main types: derivational affixes, and inflectional affixes. Derivational affixes are those that serve to alter the part of speech of a word. For example, in English, the suffix –tion added to a verb such as “implement” changes it to a noun, “implementation.” In the same way, also in English, adding the suffix –al to a word such as “function” changes it to an adjective, in this case, “functional”. The second group of affixes, inflectional affixes, are those that change the aspects of a word, such as tense, voice and number. For example, in French, adding the suffix –ions to the root of a verb such as “parler” forms the verb conjugation for the first-person plural in the past progressive, “parlions.” Similarly,  in French, adding the suffix –ez to the infinitive of a verb like “dormir” creates “dormirez”, the conjugation for the second-person plural in the future.

Root Structure
The root of a word is the most important and the smallest meaning-carrying unit. Therefore, much research has been devoted to its study. One aim of root study is to find a unifying theory of its structure. The most prevalent and widely-accepted theory is put forward by Émile Benveniste. In the simplest form, all Indo-European roots take on the form of CeC where C stands for a consonant and e stands for a vowel. The choice of e to stand for a vowel is because it is the most frequent vowel in all Indo-European languages. There are some variants of the root structure, most notably CReC, CeRC, and CCeC where R stands for a resonant. Examples of each variation is shown in the following table.

Verb Structure
Indo-European verbs express actions in at least three dimensions: tense, voice, and mood. And many of these dimensions are expressed as suffixes to the verb stem. For example, in English, most of the past tense is expressed by adding the ending –ed to the verb; hence, the past tense of walk is walked. Proto-Indo-European languages had much more markings than their modern descendants. For example, PIE verbs were thought to have hundreds of forms.

Noun Structure
The most salient similarity among all Indo-European nouns is the number marker. All modern Indo-European languages have a plural marker. PIE and some modern daughter languages have three – singular, dual, and plural. Many Indo-European languages also have case markers on the noun to indicate their grammatical function, usually subjects and objects.

Syntax
Syntax is the study of sentence structures. Although commonly thought of as grammar especially by people outside linguistics, linguists study syntax with the goal of finding deep, unifying structures that underlie a sentence’s surface form. Syntax poses a particular challenge for historical languages because surviving texts are very rare and moreover, surviving texts of general genre and good quality are even more rare, making syntactic analysis particular difficult and uncertain. However, careful, persistent, and ingenious research has led to fruitful results.

Phrase Structure
Phrases that have been researched extensively are noun phrases, pre- and post-positional phrases, and verb phrases. Noun phrases in Indo-European languages are modified by adjectival phrases and in many languages in the family, the adjectives and the nouns must agree in number, gender, and/or case. Although modern English only has prepositional phrases (such as on the table), many Indo-European languages also have post-positional phrases in which the preposition occurs after the noun phrase. In some languages, the preposition or the postposition becomes an affix instead of a separate word. Verb phrases are modified by adverbs, sometimes called preverbs. Adverbs or preverbs can be realized in word form (such as in English) or attached as prefix such as most prevalent Sanskrit, Celtic, [Slavic languages|Slavic]], and Old Irish. In terms of their patterns, their numbers, their order, their sematic compositions, preverbs differ widely in languages in which they are present. Some examples of preverbs are presented in the following table.

Word Order
Word order of IE languages is a topic in historical linguistics that is less agreed upon among linguists. Some view holds that historically, IE languages are mostly verb final and its word order is SOV (subject object verb). The most striking example is in Hittie which is almost exclusively verb final. But other than Hittie, none of the other IE languages are consistently verb-final in their clauses. Another school of thought is that the IE languages are largely SVO, championed by Friedrich. Recently, Friedrich’s SVO was discovered as a result of right-shift movement. Although many linguists think IE languages cannot be neatly categorized into a strict word order, others propose that the different word orders are patterned and regular and differ only in degree, still others propose that IE languages are free word order. Research is still looking for a model to explain the diverse yet structured way IE languages order their words.

No matter whether or not a general basic word order exists across the IE languages, each language provides various mechanisms for constructing sentences different from the ‘basic word order.’ In English, examples of these mechanisms include topicalization, PP-fronting, Negative-initial, and WH-movement. The table below provides an example of each of these mechanisms in English. The existence of these mechanisms for changing word order gives rise to the idea that word order may also be prosodic as well as syntactic.

Clause Structure
In Indo-European languages, both historical and present, subjects need to agree with their predicates in either number, gender, or case, or all. Secondly, relative clauses in many IE languages occur before the main clause and moreover, the relative pronouns and any pronouns in the main clause are almost always in agreement. Thirdly, Jacob Wackernagel discovered the remarkable placement of clitics (unstressed function words, such as and, too, but). Simply put, Wackernagel’s law tells that the clitics almost always occurs second to the first stressed word in a clause. The following table gives examples of a typical Wackernagel clitics placement in many IE languages where the clitics are underlined. Wackernagel’s law is not without exception, most notably in WH constructions where the clictics is moved after the WH- word and in pronominalized sentences.

Peer Review
posted to ashleypace's draft

I think that you have done a great job adding new content to this page, particularly regarding the verbs. While they might be momentarily incomplete, the verb conjugation tables are an extremely helpful addition that helps create a far better understanding of French for the readers. I also really liked how you phrased your paragraph about nouns and how it was very clear in concise in its explanation of French nouns. Aside from a few stylistic elements, I believe that you have done an excellent job editing. I have some suggestions for possible additions/clarifications.

Firstly, in the second sentence of the noun paragraph, you said that French nouns are not inflected based on their gender, but after that you describe in detail how nouns are indeed inflected based on gender, in this case the word "enseignent" becoming "enseignente."

Secondly, as a possible addition to the current content, you could talk about how French adjectives are largely supposed to agree in gender and number with the nouns they describe.

Thirdly, another suggestion for adding content, in your paragraph about verbs, you can go even deeper into the topic and talk about how the moods and conjugations within French stem largely from Latin and its respective verbal rules.

Finally, you might want to add a transition between the two sentences about syntax in order to better connect their ideas.

Overall, I think that you've done a great job and I'm very excited to see the final product.

posted to Fantiniji's draft

From your draft, it is very evident that this is a very well researched composition. You've made considerable changes to a wanting section in the original article.

I believe that one area in which you can improve is to better explain all of the terms you use in explaining the classifications, because the paragraph is very difficult to understand without sufficient background knowledge on the reader's part. In that regard, I think that you can keep the same level of intellectual writing while, at the same time, making the paragraph more understandable to someone without any background pertaining to German.

Also, I think that the classification section can be better organized by talking grouping together different types of German. For example, East Germanic and Gothic, West Germanic with English, Old Saxon, Dutch, and Frisian, and lastly, North Germanic with Old Norse and Scandinavian.

Moreover, in the history section, it might be advisable to talk about the runic alphabet because it was the first writing system used by Germanic peoples.

You've done a great job and I hope you succeed.

Move to wikipedia proper
I do not feel ready to add my edits to the proper page because not only do I still need to add content and polish the language and style, but I also need fix the formatting on my current draft. I will begin copying over my edits once I feel confident enough in their quality.