- 1印歐語系（也指印歐語系的祖語，即原始印歐語）。英語、德語、法語、俄語、希臘語、波斯語、印地語都屬於這一系；中文、日文、韓文、阿拉伯文都不屬於。
Indo-European is the name of a very large family of languages, and also the name of the ancient language they all grew out of. English belongs to it. So do German, Dutch, and the Nordic languages; French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian; Russian, Polish, and Czech; Greek; Persian; and Hindi, Bengali, , and many other languages of northern India. Chinese does not belong to it, and neither do Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Hungarian, Finnish, or Turkish. The idea is this: several thousand years ago, one group of people spoke one language. As they moved apart, their speech slowly drifted, and after enough centuries the branches could no longer understand each other — the way Latin quietly turned into French, Spanish, and Italian, but over a much longer time. Nobody wrote that first language down; scholars worked backwards from the modern languages to reconstruct it, and its words are written with a * to mark 'this is our best reconstruction, not something anyone found'. This is why English mother, German , Latin mater, and matar look so alike — they are not borrowings, they are cousins. The word is used as an adjective ('the Indo-European languages') and as a name for the family or the parent language ('this word goes back to Indo-European'). You may also see PIE, short for Proto-Indo-European, which means specifically the reconstructed parent language rather than the whole family. Write it with a capital I, a capital E, and the .
組成Indo- (India, the eastern edge of the family) + European (Europe, the western edge). The English scholar Thomas Young put the name together in 1813, naming the family after the two ends of the map where its languages were then known. It was a fair name at the time; in the early 1900s scholars found Tocharian, spoken further east in what is now western China, so the name is now a little narrower than the truth.
原始詞典資料10 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
Indo-Europeanname/ˌɪndəʊˌjʊəɹəˈpiːən/
- 1
A major language family which includes many of the native languages of Europe, Western Asia and India, with notable Indic, Iranian and European sub-branches.
- 2
Proto-Indo-European: the hypothetical parent language of the Indo-European language family.
Indo-Europeannoun/ˌɪndəʊˌjʊəɹəˈpiːən/
- 1
anthropologyarchaeologyhistoryA member of the original ethnolinguistic group hypothesized to have spoken Proto-Indo-European and thus to have been the ancestor for most of India and Western Eurasia.
- Two theories of the origins of the Indo-Europeans currently compete. M. Gimbutas believes that early Indo-Europeans entered southeastern Europe from the Pontic Steppes starting ca. 4500 B.C. and spread from there. C. Renfrew equates early Indo-Europeans with early farmers who entered southeastern Europe from Asia Minor ca. 7000 BC and spread through the continent.
- Thus, although at least one term for ‘alder’ can be reconstructed to PIE, the wide distribution of this tree prevents it from being diagnostic of the earlier location of the Indo-Europeans.
- 2
A speaker of any Indo-European language (though especially an ancient one), or a member of an Indo-European culture, who is regarded as a continuation of the Proto-Indo-Europeans in terms of language, ancestry, or cultural affinity.
- To the same direction points a recent revelation made by Professor Henning who identifies the Gutians or Kutians and Tukres of the ancient Near East that occur in the cuneiform inscriptions of the end of the 3rd millennium B.C. with historical Kuchi-Tocharians, this being the earliest appearance of the Indo-Europeans in history (cf. W. Henning, the first Indo-Europeans in history, "Society and History." […]).
- We Indo-Europeans are crazy about three! We see the world as earth, sky, water. We see things as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. Do you want a third example? Sure you do—you're Indo-European!
- 3
rareA European living in India or the Indies.
- The sale of looted items persisted for a month, and quick profits were made by burghers and Indo-Europeans.
- 4
A person of mixed European and Indian or Indonesian ancestry.
Indo-Europeanadj/ˌɪndəʊˌjʊəɹəˈpiːən/
- 1
Of or relating to the family of languages originally spoken in Europe and Western Asia.
- Of the great Indo-European family of languages the general principal was also that of one name for each individual[…]
- 2
Of or relating to the hypothetical parent language of the Indo-European language family.
- 3
Of or relating to the hypothetical group of peoples that spread early Indo-European languages.
- As there is no evidence for Indo-European apiculture, we have to reckon with foreign origin for κηρός […].
- 4
Of or relating to persons of mixed European and Indian or Indonesian ancestry.
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。