User:Soap/Europe

Europe is a continent in the northwestern part of the Eastern Hemisphere of planet Earth. Though small and mostly cold, it is the birthplace of many of the most powerful civilizations of the world, including the English.

Languages

Most present-day European languages belong to the Indo-European family, which, as its name implies, extends also to India. The Indo-European family is usually postulated to have arisen in the most seemingly improbable of places: deep in the interior of Russia, among a people who used horses to escape their cold homeland and conquer other peoples.

Indo-Europeans smothered the native peoples of Europe to such an extent that we can only guess at what families of languages were spoken there in the past. But some exceptions do remain: Basque, now a language isolate, is spoken by people who by all estimates have lived in the same place for at least 4000 years; and a few Finno-Ugric languages, mainly accounted for by Finnish and Hungarian, which are arms of a previously more widespread Uralic language family. Uralic is itself believed to be related to Indo-European on the basis of minor but improbable coincidences such as the three-person verb systems of the proto-languages being very similar. Surprisingly, though, there are very few cognates among common nouns, the two most frequently cited being (in Finnish) nimi "name" and vesi "water".

Native European languages, regardless of origin, share certain phonological and grammatical characteristics in common. Some of these also apply to IE languages spoken in Asia. An incomplete list of these features is given below.

Phonological characteristics

• Heterorganic consonant clusters (e.g. "ps", "kt", "mn") are permitted in all European languages. This contrasts with languages such as Japanese, where consonant clusters must be of the type exemplified by -tt-, -nn-, etc.
• At least some types of final consonants are permitted, although some languages, such as Italian, have them only in function words and loans.
• All European languages have at least /l/ and one or more "rhotic" consonants, though the category of rhotic consonants is quite loose.
• Most European languages have some palatal or postalveolar consonants; interestingly, though, this was not true 2000 years ago.
• Robust tonal systems are absent; a few languages have a marginal tonal contrast, such as Swedish, but this is usually analyzed either as pitch-accent or a word-level tone system in which tones are tied to whole words rather than individual syllables.
• Most European languages contrast voiced and voiceless stops, although in some languages the contrast is marginal, and in others it has changed to a voiceless:voiceless aspirate contrast (though this is not represented in the orthography in any of them). Estonian has neither a voicing contrast nor a series of voiceless aspirates, but the letters of voiced stops are present to indicate differences in consonant length.

• The only language that has both a phonemic aspiration contrast and a voicing contrast for stops is Armenian, which is somewhat curious as its stop system is arguably the one closest to the original Indo-European system that still survives, yet it is unusual because every other branch of the family has changed the system drastically, with European languages tending to reduce the stop inventory and Asian Indo-European languages tending to increase it.

• All European languages have at least one sibilant and one non-sibilant fricative, though in some languages the non-sibilant fricatives are quite rare. Note that it is generally believed that early IE languages had only one fricative consonant, /s/, aside from the laryngeals which disappeared early on. Thus this seemingly trivial characteristic shows that in fact new fricatives were independently created in all eight branches of the family. (Or at least the European branches, since there seem to be some Indo-Iranian languages that still just have sibilants, though even they tend to have more than one of them.)
• Postvelar stops are generally absent, although the glottal stop /ʔ/ could be argued to be phonemic in a few languages. Postvelar fricatives and approximants are fairly common, however (whereas in the rest of the world, generally if a language has any uvular sounds it has /q/). No language contrasts velar and postvelar versions of the same sound (e.g. no language has both /x/ and /X/), although this crtierion does not consider glottals to be postvelar.
• Vowel length as the sole distinction between two vowels is known only in the Finno-Ugric family, everywhere else there is always some other feature that goes along with vowel length. (Though "double" vowels may occur in compounds and occasionally in monomoprhemic words, they are not usually analyzed as long vowels because they are so rare.)
• Phonemic labialization, presumed to have existed in Proto-Indo-European and many of its early descendants, seems to have disappeared with a few marginal exceptions such as the contrast in some English dialects of /h/ versus /ʍ/, though even this is not a true labialization contrast. By contrast, phonemic palatalization is still present in many languages.
• /s/ is a common consonant in all European languages, and many languages allow it to occur in places where no other consonant can be found, such as before a cluster at the beginning of a word, or at the end.
• It is common to find languages in Europe that will allow only a particular few consonants to occur at the end of a word. European languages can be divided into two types: those that allow any (or nearly any) consonant at the end of a word, and those that allow only a few consonants, often a subset of the coronals. But what is never found is a situation like that of Cantonese where the final consonants are /m n ŋ p t k/ ... in other words, final consonants in European languages are often restricted by place of articulation, or by place and manner, but never by manner alone.
• True vowel sequences are not very common. (The written vowel sequences of languages such as Finnish are primarily diphthongs, though some languages do have pure vowel sequwences.)

Thus, phonologically speaking, European languages most closely resemble the Austronesian languages of southeast Asia, but not their close relatives in the Pacific Ocean, which have undergone dramatic phonological changes. Few adults would hear a text like

"Rumah di desa daerah Pantai Utara merupakan suatu bangunan persegi panjang, di atas tiang dengan tinggi seluruhnya kira-kira 4,30 meter. 20 Rumah itu biasanya berukuran empat meter lebar, lima meter panjang, dan tiga meter tinggi. Di dalamnya terdapat satu dua ruangan atau lebih, suatu ruangan untuk tempat duduk keluarga merangkap dapur, dan satu dua 25 ruangan lain untuk ruang tidur. Walaupun demikian, cukup banyak juga rumah yang hanya terdiri dari suatu ruangan tempat semua penghuninya tinggal bersama."

and think "Wow, that sounds like French", even though the text (it's Indonesian) satisfies all the characteristics given above, but this just goes to show that there are other characteristics that are too difficult to qualify that distinguish one language from another. One might be tempted to add items to the list referring to the frequency of common sounds. For example, in Europe it is generally true that coronal consonants are more common than dorsal ones. But then this is also true of most other languages in the world.

Grammatical characteristics

It is more difficult to find a stereotype of the common European language with respect to the grammar, perhaps because languages in general are more internally diverse grammatically than they are in phonology. For example, if a language has /p/, it cannot not have /p/, but if a language has SOV word order, it may also have SVO word order, VSO word order, and so on. But below is a list of characteristics that describe European languages at least in general, though many exceptions do abound.

• Most European languages have non-lexical gender for all nouns. Although the most widely spoken European language, English, is an exception to the rule, if you weight each language equally regardless of its population it is still a relatively firm pattern.

For more information on grammar, see Standard Average European.