Diachronic analysis

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Latin pater

Spanish: padre

Italian: padre

French: père

Catalan: pare

Portuguese: pai

Family of languages

The first scientific attempts to discover the history of the world’s languages were made at the end of the 18th century.

The late eighteenth century discovery that Sanskrit (the ancient language of India) was related to Latin, Greek, Germanic, and Celtic revolutionized European linguistic studies. Sir William Jones, a British judge and scholar working in India, summed up the nature and implication of the findings in his 1786 address to the Royal Asiatic Society, a part of which follows:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious (having more cases) than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident.

The main metaphor that is used to explain the historical relationships is that of the language family or family tree. Within the Romance family, Latin is the parent language and French, Spanish, Italian, etc. are daughter languages; French would then be called sister language to Spanish and the others. The same approach is used with larger groups. Within the Indo-European family, Proto Indo-European is the parent language and Latin, Greek, Old Persian, Old Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Proto German, Celtic and others are daughter languages. In a large family it will be necessary to distinguish various branches, each of which may contain several languages or sub-families of languages.

Indoeuropean pater

Sanskrit: pitar

Greek: patér

Latin: páter

German: fadar

Old Irish: athir