English as an Indo-European Language Reflection

I had never noticed the extended variety of language families that exist, until the moment I read this document. Language families can be represented, and I did this in my summary concept map, as a very big tree; a huge one, really. If I may say ‘the biggest tree of them all’. I say it can be represented with a big tree, because the original languages, also known as ‘Proto Languages’ , are like the strong roots of this huge tree, the stock would be the languages that first evolved from those proto languages, while the languages that appeared in the next phase following this ‘proto-evolved’ languages would be the branches. Languages that appeared at the end of this very big chain would be the green foliage of our enormous tree. One of the most relevant language families is the Indo-European family (IE), which was born from what we know as PIE (Proto Indo-European). The Indo-European family language is the family from which English comes from. The summary I made about this text expresses and tries to explain, every important point and step in the analysis of English as an Indo-European Language, from the very beginning until the very end of what, nowadays, we know as one of the most relevant languages in our global community. For example, there is a slideshow in the presentation of the same name that has a colourful cake graph, which shows the percentages of some language families and the amount of speakers they have in relation to each other. This was quite helpful to interpret, because you can compare the magnitudes of the different families and it is shown, in that slideshow, that English comes from the biggest family of languages, which also made me realize about the power that this family language presents these days, like in the case of English, language that comes from one of the most important family of languages and that today is, if not, the most important, globally used language. When it comes to the objectives of the Lexical Analysis course and how this summary I made can help me understand and achieve these objectives, I believe that the summary is particularly related to the first two objectives: 1) Characterise different periods in the history of the English Language and 2)Characterise word formation processes in the English language. These objectives can also be of a lot of help when taking the Culture course, because in this class we study the beginnings of English, where it is from, who spoke it first (peoples) and the impact that this language has in everyday activities, globally speaking. This document and summary, together with the first summary of The Origins of the English Language, can help us to understand the history of this powerful language and it will give us a hand to achieve some of the objectives of the different courses that we take when we study English Pedagogy, because we truly believe in this to be a life career.