Who were the Indo-Europeans and where did they come from?
4.2.1. Sound changes in Germanic languages Germanic languages (including English) have undergone a special set of sound changes. Take a look at the consonants in each cognate set in the chart below. ‘foot’ ‘three’ ‘heart’ Latin ped tres cord (c = [k]) Greek pod tris kard Sanskrit pad trayas syertse English foot three (th=[]) heart As you can see, English has an [f] where other Indo-European languages usually have a [p]. Similarly, English has an [] instead of a [t] and an [h] instead of a [k]. (Sanskrit has an [s] instead of the usual [k], but we won’t worry about that here.) One way to visualize these sound changes is to imagine the phonetics chart for consonants that we studied in Unit 2. The Indo-European voiceless stops seem to have moved down the chart into the position of the voiceless fricatives without changing their place of articulation very much. Of course, this forced the old Indo-European voiceless fricatives had to shift their manner of articulation, otherwise, too many w
