INDOEUROPEAN:

 

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau (Southwest Asia), Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent (South Asia). It is composed of 449 languages and dialects, according to the 2005 SIL estimate, about half (219) belonging to the Indo-Aryan sub-branch. "Indo" refers to the Indian subcontinent, as the language group geographically extends from Europe in the west to India in the east. The languages of the Indo-European group are spoken by approximately three billion native speakers, the largest number of the recognised families of languages. (The Sino-Tibetan family has the second-largest number of speakers.)

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

 

BROWN CORPUS:

The Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English (or just Brown Corpus) was compiled by Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis at Brown University, Providence, RI as a general corpus (text collection) in the field of corpus linguistics.In 1967, Kucera and Francis published their classic work Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English (1967), which provided basic statistics on what is known today simply as the Brown Corpus. The Brown Corpus was a carefully compiled selection of current American English, totaling about a million words drawn from a wide variety of sources. Kucera and Francis subjected it to a variety of computational analyses, from which they compiled a rich and variegated opus, combining elements of linguistics, psychology, statistics, and sociology. It has been very widely used in computational linguistics, and was for many years among the most-cited resources in the field.One interesting result is that even for quite large samples, graphing words in order of decreasing frequency of occurrence shows a hyperbola: the frequency of the n-th most frequent word is roughly proportional to 1/n. Thus "the" constitutes nearly 7% of the Brown Corpus, "to" and "of" more than another 3% each; while about half the total vocabulary of about 50,000 words are hapax legomena: words that occur only once in the corpus. This simple rank-vs.-frequency relationship was noted for an extraordinary variety of phenomena by George Kingsley Zipf (for example, see his "The Psychobiology of Language"), and is known as Zipf's law.Shortly after publication of the first lexicostatistical analysis, Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kucera to supply a million word, three-line citation base for its new American Heritage Dictionary. This ground-breaking new dictionary, which first appeared in 1969, was the first dictionary to be compiled using corpus linguistics for word frequency and other information.The initial Brown Corpus had only the words themselves, plus a location identifier for each. Over the following several years part-of-speech tags were applied. The Greene and Rubin tagging program (see under part of speech tagging) helped considerably in this, but the high error rate meant that extensive manual proofreading was required.The tagged Brown Corpus used a selection of about 80 parts of speech, as well as special indicators for compound forms, contractions, foreign words and a few other phenomena, and formed the basis for many later corpora such as the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus. The tagged corpus enabled far more sophisticated statistical analysis, much of it carried out by graduate student Andrew Mackie. Some of the analysis appears in Frequency Analysis of English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar, by Winthrop Nelson Francis and Henry Kucera, Houghton Mifflin (January, 1983) ISBN 0-395-32250-2.Although the Brown Corpus pioneered the field of corpus linguistics, by now typical corpora (such as the Corpus of American English, the British National Corpus or the International Corpus of English) tend to be much larger, in the order of 100 million words.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Corpus

ANGLO-SAXONS:

Anglo-Saxons is the term usually used to describe the invading tribes in the south and east of Great Britain starting from the early 5th century AD, and their creation of the English nation, lasting until the Norman conquest of 1066.[1] The Benedictine monk, Bede, identified them as the descendants of three Germanic tribes: [2]

They spoke closely related Germanic dialects and may have traced a common heritage to the Ingvaeones as described by the Roman historian Tacitus.

In contemporary usage, Anglo-Saxon is sometimes used to denote modern peoples or groups considered largely descended from the English, as in White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, and is sometimes used by non-English speakers, especially the French, to denote the Anglosphere.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-saxon

PROTOLANGUAGE:

A proto-language is the common ancestor of the languages that form a language family. Occasionally, the German term Ursprache (from Ur- "primordial" and Sprache "language") is used instead.

Often the proto-language is not known directly. In such cases, it may be reconstructed by comparing different members of the language family through the comparative method. The level of completeness of the reconstruction achieved varies, depending on how complete the evidence is from the descendant languages and on the quality of the effort of the linguists working on it. Some of the many unattested proto-languages for which reconstructions have been devised are Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Dravidian.

In other cases, the proto-language is attested in surviving texts. For example, Latin is the proto-language of the Romance language family, which includes such modern languages as French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian. Likewise, Old Norse, the ancestor of the modern Scandinavian languages, is attested, albeit in fragmentary form, in ancient runic inscriptions. Although there are no very early Indo-Aryan inscriptions, the Indo-Aryan languages of modern India all go back to Vedic Sanskrit (or dialects very closely related to it), which has been preserved in texts accurately handed down by parallel oral and written traditions for many centuries.

The first person to offer systematic reconstructions of an unattested proto-language was August Schleicher for Proto-Indo-European in 1861 (Lehmann 1993:26).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protolanguage

ANGLO-SAXON HEPTARCHY:

Heptarchy (Greek: ἑπτά + ἀρχή seven + realm) is a collective name applied to the supposed seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of south, east, and central Great Britain during late antiquity and the early Middle Ages which eventually unified into Angle-land (England) (at this time the areas now known as Scotland and Wales were also divided into several smaller political units). The term has been in use since the 16th century but the initial idea that there were seven Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is attributed to the English historian Henry of Huntingdon in the 12th century and was first used in his Historia Anglorum.[1]

Use of the term

By convention the label is considered to cover the period from AD 500 to AD 850, often referred to as the Dark Ages, which approximately represents the period following the departure of Roman legions from Britain until the unification of the kingdoms under Egbert of Wessex.

The word heptarchy refers to the existence (as was thought) of seven kingdoms, which eventually merged to become the basis for the Kingdom of England; these were Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. The period supposedly lasted until the seven kingdoms began to consolidate into larger units, but the actual events marking this transition are debatable. At various times within the conventional period, certain rulers of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex (such as Penda of Mercia) claimed hegemony over larger areas of England; yet as late as Edwy and Edgar, it was still possible to speak of separate kingdoms within the English population.

In reality the end of the Heptarchy was a gradual process. The 9th century Viking raids that led to the establishment of a Danish-controlled enclave at York, and ultimately to the Danelaw, gained considerable advantage from the petty rivalries between the old kingdoms. The need to unite against the common enemy was recognised, so that by the time Alfred of Wessex resisted the Danes in the late 9th century, he did so essentially as the leader of an Anglo-Saxon nation. Successive kings of Wessex (and especially Athelstan) progressively reinforced the English unitary state, until the old constituent kingdoms in effect became irrelevant.

Recent research has revealed that some of the Heptarchy kingdoms (notably Essex and Sussex) did not achieve the same status as the others. Conversely, there also existed alongside the seven kingdoms a number of other political divisions which played a more significant role than previously thought. Such were the kingdoms (or sub-kingdoms) of: Bernicia and Deira within Northumbria; Lindsey in present-day Lincolnshire; the Hwicce in the southwest Midlands; the Magonsæte or Magonset, a sub-kingdom of Mercia in what is now Herefordshire; the Wihtwara, a Jutish kingdom on the Isle of Wight, originally as important as the Cantwara of Kent; the Middle Angles, a group of tribes based around modern Leicestershire, later conquered by the Mercians; the Hæstingas (around the town of Hastings in Sussex); and the Gewissæ, a Saxon tribe in what is now southern Hampshire later developing into the kingdom of Wessex.

Certainly the term Heptarchy has been considered unsatisfactory since the early 20th century, and many professional historians no longer use it, feeling that it does not accurately describe the period to which it refers. However, it is still sometimes used as a label of convenience for a phase in the development of England.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_Heptarchy

DANELAW:

The Danelaw, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (also known as the Danelagh; Old English: Dena lagu; Danish: Danelov), is a historical name given to the part of Great Britain in which the laws of the "Danes"[1] dominated those of the Anglo-Saxons. The part of Great Britain that was part of the Danelaw is now northern and eastern England. The origins of the Danelaw arose from the Viking expansion of the 9th century, although the term was not used to describe a geographic area until the 11th century. With the increase in population and productivity in Scandinavia, Viking warriors sought treasure and glory in nearby Britain.

Danelaw is also used to describe the set of legal terms and definitions created in the treaties between the English king, Alfred the Great, and the Danish warlord, Guthrum the Old, written following Guthrum's defeat at the Battle of Ethandun in 878. In 886, the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum was formalised, defining the boundaries of their kingdoms, with provisions for peaceful relations between the English and the Vikings.

The Danish laws held sway in the Kingdom of Northumbria and Kingdom of East Anglia, and the lands of the Five Boroughs of Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford and Lincoln.

The prosperity of the Danelaw, especially Jórvík (York), led to its becoming a target for later Viking raiders. Conflict with Wessex and Mercia sapped the strength of the Danelaw. The waning of its military power together with the Viking onslaughts led to its submission to Edward the Elder in return for protection. It was to be part of his Kingdom of England, and a province of Denmark no longer, as the English laid final claim to it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danelaw