WikiWord

English

Indo-Germanic

name

Meaning

  1. Proto-Indo-European (a hypothetical language)
  2. Pre-Germanic Proto-Indo-European.
  3. Indo-European (a major language family)
  4. Indo-European.

Etymology / origin

Coined by Dano-French geographer Conrad Malte-Brun in 1810 (as langues indo-germaniques) and popularized in German (as indogermanisch/Indogermanisch), especially following J. Klaproth's 1823 Asia polyglotta. At the time the term was coined, the Celtic languages were not yet considered Indo-European, and the Tocharian languages were not yet discovered; even after the inclusion of Celtic, Germanic remains the northwesternmost family (thanks to Icelandic). By surface analysis, Indo- + Germanic.

Sources

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