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Languages of the Indo-European family are classified as either centum languages or satem languages, according to the type of development of the dorsal consonants (sounds of "K" and "G" type) of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). These different developments gave rise to alternations of the kind found in the early attested IE languages in, for example, the words for "hundred": in centum languages these began with a sound (Latin ''centum'' was pronounced with initial /k/), while in satem languages they often began with (the example ''satem'' comes from the Avestan language of Zoroastrian scripture). The table below show the traditional reconstruction of the PIE dorsal consonants, with three series (according to some more recent theories there may actually have been only two series). In the centum languages the palatovelars – which include the initial consonant of the "hundred" root – merged with the plain velars, whereas in the satem languages they remained distinct, while the labiovelars merged with the plain velars.〔J.P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams (eds.), ''The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture'' (1997), p. 461.〕 The centum–satem division forms an isogloss in synchronic descriptions of historical Indo-European languages. However, it has rarely been proposed as a genuine phylogenetic division of the diachronic development of the Indo-European phylum. That is, it is not thought that PIE split into a centum branch and a satem branch, from which all the centum and all the satem languages respectively would have derived. Such a division is made particularly unlikely by the discovery that, while the satem group lies generally to the east and the centum group to the west, the most eastward of the known IE language branches, Tocharian, is in fact centum. ==Terminology== The terms ''centum'' and ''satem'' are derived from the words for the number "one hundred" in a traditional representative language of each group: Latin ラテン語:''centum'' and Avestan '. The centum–satem division refers to the development of the dorsal series at the time of the earliest separation of Proto-Indo-European into the proto-languages of its individual daughter branches. It does not apply to any later analogous developments within any individual branch. For example, the palatalization of Latin to in some Romance languages (which means that modern French ''cent'' is pronounced with initial /s/) is satem-like, as is the merger of with in the Gaelic languages; such later changes do not affect the classification of these languages as centum. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Centum–satem isogloss」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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