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sjmaxq Offline OP
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Waddya call groups of languages within families? I have been labouring under the (mis?)apprehension that "family" referred to big groups, like Indo-European. If that is so, what's the name for the groups within that family, such as Indic, Germanic, etc.?

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It has been forty years since I sat in a junior-level class in Linguistic Anthropology but I think the taxonomy we used, updated in terms of the example provided, worked like this:

Kingdom: Human Language
Phylum: Indo-European
Family: Teutonic/Germanic
Subfamily: English
Language: American English
Dialect: Southern Californian
Subdialect: Valley Girl

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sjmaxq Offline OP
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Thanks. The reason for my query was that "family" is often used where you have "kingdom". For example, here. This has ensured that my neuron is all in a tizz.

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I'd say: Indo-European family, Italic or Germanic sub-family, Romance group. That's about as fine-grained as it gets. Not as many languages as species.

[Fixed typo.]

Last edited by zmjezhd; 10/16/05 12:22 AM.

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Only one neuron, Max? It must be too busy to be tizzy.

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Hey, that's an interesting chart Max. Thanks for the link.

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Quote:

... here ...




I love that chart. Looks like some Babylonian solar disk.

But then I've seen Romance divided into, e.g., Ibero-Romance, Gallo-Romance, etc.

Last edited by Faldage; 10/15/05 11:38 PM.

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