Language Families—Diversity of Structures

This topic shows how language change in different directions can produce two language families extremely different from Indo-European and from one another. Semitic includes Arabic and Hebrew and assigns basic meanings to three-consonant sequences and creates words by altering the vowels around them: in Hebrew, katav is “he wrote,” kotev is “he writes,” and ktiv is “spelling.” In Sino-Tibetan languages, such as Chinese, a sentence tends to leave more to context than we often imagine possible, and a series of particles at the end of a sentence conveys shades of attitude that we barely think of as “grammar” at all.

This topic introduces two language families that demonstrate how different the product of language change over time can be.