Help needed with following RC questions, thanks in advance!
The wealth of morphological, phonetic, and word similarities among certain languages has lead linguists to recognize the unity of the well-defined family of languages called the Aryan or Indo-European family. Yet even this latter term is largely a misnomer. This group of languages spreads over an enormous range virtually without interruption, reaching from Central Asia to the fringes of westernmost Europe. The westernmost terminus of the family is Celtic, while its easternmost representatives were the Tokharian languages, a pair of tongues once spoken by the residents of the Tarim River Basin in Western China and unearthed in documents written more than a thousand years ago.
So remarkable and definite are the similarities among these languages that linguists are convinced they all derived from an earlier language spoken by some community in the prehistoric past. While we know that Latin began as a rustic dialect in the province of Latium, no one knows where proto-Aryan was first spoken. Some speculate that it was first used in Southern Russia, while still others point to the Iranian plateau as a potential cradle. Though some philologists believe that the Old Indic and
Persian of the Avesta contain the most archaic features of Aryan found to date, this does not necessarily fix the habitat of these early Aryan-speaking peoples closer to Asia than to Europe. Consider Icelandic. Though this language has strayed far from its original source, it preserves
many of the characteristics discarded by those who remained behind.
From the existing evidence, only one thing seems certain. By the time of Vedic hymns, the first recorded instance of Aryan, those tribes speaking this early language had already begun their widespread dispersal.
1. The "misnomer" (line 5) refers to
A the fact that not all Indo-Europeans are of Aryan descent
B the family of languages goes beyond the boundaries implied by the name
C the fact that the family of languages actually originated in Western China
D the fact that the languages are no longer spoken
E the fact that proto-Aryan was spoken in the area known as Latium
The wealth of morphological, phonetic, and word similarities among certain languages has lead linguists to recognize the unity of the well-defined family of languages called the Aryan or Indo-European family. Yet even this latter term is largely a misnomer. This group of languages spreads over an enormous range virtually without interruption, reaching from Central Asia to the fringes of westernmost Europe. The westernmost terminus of the family is Celtic, while its easternmost representatives were the Tokharian languages, a pair of tongues once spoken by the residents of the Tarim River Basin in Western China and unearthed in documents written more than a thousand years ago.
So remarkable and definite are the similarities among these languages that linguists are convinced they all derived from an earlier language spoken by some community in the prehistoric past. While we know that Latin began as a rustic dialect in the province of Latium, no one knows where proto-Aryan was first spoken. Some speculate that it was first used in Southern Russia, while still others point to the Iranian plateau as a potential cradle. Though some philologists believe that the Old Indic and
Persian of the Avesta contain the most archaic features of Aryan found to date, this does not necessarily fix the habitat of these early Aryan-speaking peoples closer to Asia than to Europe. Consider Icelandic. Though this language has strayed far from its original source, it preserves
many of the characteristics discarded by those who remained behind.
From the existing evidence, only one thing seems certain. By the time of Vedic hymns, the first recorded instance of Aryan, those tribes speaking this early language had already begun their widespread dispersal.
1. The "misnomer" (line 5) refers to
A the fact that not all Indo-Europeans are of Aryan descent
B the family of languages goes beyond the boundaries implied by the name
C the fact that the family of languages actually originated in Western China
D the fact that the languages are no longer spoken
E the fact that proto-Aryan was spoken in the area known as Latium
