Kinda funny that Bavarian is more distant from 'High German' than Yiddish :D (not exactly wrong though, Yiddish is easier to understand for any non-Bavarian than hardcore Bavarian).
There's at least a dozen local German dialects missing which are just as 'weird' as Bavarian though (PS: ok, all the main dialects spoken in the northern parts of Germany seem to be there, just in their own 'heritage node'), I guess Bavarian earned its own spot because it has the most speakers.
It's quite funny for me, because (from the article) in Slovene the dialect is refered to as "kočevarščina".
I don't know Slovene, but I speak one of the Slavic languages and it sounds to me as "cat's growl".
Not very nice maybe, but we're talking about meanings long lost in time.
We call Germans: "Niemcy" and it comes from the word "niemy", which now means "mute", but used to mean "foreigner" in proto-slavic. We don't think of mutes when meeting Germans tho. We never did.
Of course no ill will intended here. Just a bit of history perhaps.
"Kočevsko" is the Slovene word for the Gottschee region, most likely just a slovenified version of the original German name. "Kočevarji" then refers to the people from this region and "kočevarščina" to their language.
Also note that the emphasis in the above terms is on the letter e, not on the o - "kočévsko".
Yiddish is very similar to Palatinate / Hesse dialect simply because many Jews used to live in that region. I grew up in Palatinate - the only strange things about Yiddish for me are the spellings and the occasional words of Hebrew or other non-German origin. Some Hebrew words are actually part of the Palatinate dialect through the Jewish connection, such as Zores (fight / argument / discord / trouble) or machulle (bankrupt).
Linguistically, this chart doesn't have much value. Not sure what criteria were used for inclusion of this or that item, perhaps just presence in some ISO standard. “German” per se doesn't mean much, so-called “high-German” („hochdeutsch“, meaning „oberdeutsch“ in opposition to „niederdeutsch“), the language that you and I speak, is an artificial synthesis and administrative compromise on written variations that is not organically rooted in dialectical evolution and historically has been imposed by schooling (which has led to the eradication of the Northern dialects, „platt“, which are derived from old Saxon and thus are related to English), so it is questionable what its meaning should be in this chart.
Yiddish is a colonial sociolect and somewhat marginal to the evolution, so again, not clear why it was included. IIRC, Koestler wrote in “The Thirteenth Tribe” (where he rejects the mainstream hypothesis of the origin and nature of Eastern Jewry) that Yiddish is based on the South-Eastern variants, not on the South-Western variants.
Looking at the Latin languages, similar inadequacies can be seen. Very superficial and misleading, all in all.
Maybe this chart is meant more to showcase CSS and web graphics than linguistics.
No. How did you arrive at that conclusion? The equivalent for Italian would be colonization of some area (say, somewhere around the Mediterranean or Black Sea) by Venetians and other Adriatic or Northern Italic peoples, founding new urban centers, developing a mish-mash of their original Romance dialects, and exerting cultural influence via their more advanced culture/technology ; and then some local non-Italic people adapting to that via economic/cultural exchange, losing their native language in the process, as they had already lost their original religion by converting to Judaism. Read Koestler's book to understand (or get an AI summary).
Germanic tribes did colonize northern Italy and eventually used the local latin language with heavy borrowings from their original language.
Not sure why you used the word "colonizer" for Jews living in Germany. Perhaps I misunderstood, but given the book you referenced I made an educated guess
« used the word "colonizer" for Jews living in Germany »
I didn't. Rather, "Germans" (Suebians, Saxons, etc) settled in ("colonized") Eastern Europe, beyond the Empire, typically at the invitation of the local rulers.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochmittelalterliche_Ostsiedlu...
That's where the contact with Eastern Jews happened, which, according to Koestler, gave rise to Yiddish.
Yes, the Langobards and the Goths settling in Italy and Spain lost their language, but the medieval Germans settling in Eastern Europe a couple hundred years later did not.
I can image the moment Sir William Jones realized Sanskrit and Latin had a common origin. "Wait a minute...these can't all be coincidences." It's pretty mid-blowing.
My daughters are growing up bilingual in Persian and English. Totally fascinating to find the cognates; many are surprisingly close still (daughter/dokhtar, star/setare, cow/gav). It’s fun feeling like I could communicate basic ideas to a proto Indo European speaker based on those really distant cognates.
It gets complicated by the preponderance of French loan words, although they tend to be for newer concepts such as car, elevator, etc.
There do also seem to be some genuine coincidences, such as sock it/saket, both being a somewhat forceful way to tell someone to be quiet.
But yes, Persian people and culture in particular has fascinated me due to the ancient, but not prehistoric, traces of a shared identity with Europeans, in contrast with its neighbors. It’s not something that gets a lot of attention in popular culture
I'm learning Spanish now after studying French and while I'm not fluent at all in Hindi or Marathi which I sometimes heard my family speaking growing up, the cognates are fascinating. The numbers are the most obvious. But even words like 'tu' (you) are the same in all the languages. Same with English and me as the first person.
Not to mention the verbs. Truly wild stuff to think no one noticed.
People noticed. They just didn’t come up with a theory of a common ancestor language. Or, in some cases, they assumed other European languages were originally heavily debased forms of Latin/Greek.
It is very common for vibecoded UI to have significant usability problems on mobile platforms and I find it annoying.
I'm pretty sure that it can be fixed by either manual testing and giving the agent feedback or by giving the engine tools to do the testing. Vibecoders just tend to be very careless about such things.
Great project. One thing that is masked by the tree view though is that there were indeed countless other languages being spoken besides Proto-Indo-European. It's just the one that gave rise to today's Indo-European languages. But back then it wasn't alone, but just one of many, some related to it and some more distant from it. Kinda similar to how it works today. It had dialects, it was in motion and change, it had earlier versions etc. etc.
The tree appearance just makes it too inviting to imagine PIE as some pristine ur-language, the kind of original language of Babel. I'm not saying that people explicitly think these thoughts, just that it's easy to get this impression, even if it's not conscious. The fascination about the original human tongue in Eden used to be a common intellectual preoccupation. My point here is that PIE is quite a different story.
Is it though? It's not as if it can pull in hypothetical superfamilies like Nostratic. It's not saying it's a family tree of all languages, just I-E. Your assumption is that somebody would look at it and forget that Mandarin exists, or Arabic, or Finnish, &c. I don't buy that. Hence my fruit joke. I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do to avoid an egregious misreading by somebody spectacularly smoothbrained, because anyone with that mentality isn't going to be paying attention anyway.
[Removed my Anatolian criticism: I just hadn't zoomed in enough!]
No, I understand that people would know that Chinese existed far away. My point is that locally, PIE had neighbors, had variants, dialects, it had earlier forms, it was like a living language in a normal human context.
Maybe your brain works differently. I had this kind of misconception, imagining languages to be Pangea-like. That there used to be less linguistic diversity, there was a big uniform language (and perhaps a handful of others far away on the Earth) that later on fractured. But reality is more dynamic. PIE was just an ordinary language. And there was likely more linguistic diversity than today, due to less communication and travel opportunities and geographical features being more isolating.
The tree is used to show species, too, but I can't see anyone looking at one and imagining that some weird reptile-looking thing is the pure essence of mammal. Some people are prone to getting bad ideas about ancestry (the Nazis' search for an Aryan homeland is an example) but you can hardly blame illustrations like this.
I think it's very hard to imagine what others imagine because these things aren't verbalized. It's assumptions about fundamental "how the world works" things. You can see a figure and form an assumption that you never verbalize and don't even notice that you formed an assumption.
These PIE charts do suggest a message that humanity was kinda more unified, or humans (or these regions) were still one big family at that time, all spoke PIE (again, except for faraway places), and it later fragmented.
I'm not saying that this website is bad or should be changed. I'm adding extra info, that sure it's useful, and it should be enjoyed with the knowledge that PIE was one normal language among many, existed in flux, did normal exchange of vocabulary etc with other neighboring languages, most of which are much less knowable compared to PIE. Europe used to be populated by non-Indo-European languages. In Greece, a lot of the -nthos words are likely borrowings from such a non-Indo-European language that was spoken there before Proto-Greek.
Maybe it's the curse of knowledge if you know all this. But I think the average person doesn't really have a reasonable mental map about any of this.
Yeah, it's not a clean inheritance but lots of linguistic contact and negotiation.
And crucially it's not just other IE-adjacent languages but the Pre-IE substrate. So many Greek words are inherited from the mysterious languages that were there before, of which we only know through the marks they left on ours.
PIE was never a single language. There was significant linguistic diversity. PIE is just what we call their roots in aggregate. It is a conceptual reconstruction.
The "lord's prayer" in Vedic sounds very out of place due to the choices of inflected forms and some stems even reminiscent of classical Sanskrit.
Without going into depth of that, here's something actually more inspiring (actual excerpt from Rig Veda).
tvā́m ugrám ávase carṣaṇīsáhaṃ rā́jan devéṣu hūmahe
víśvā sú no vithurā́ pibdanā́ vaso amítrān suṣáhān kr̥dhi
> We call for help, the fierce, ruler of clans of men, king of Gods (Indra)
> All of us that is weak, strengthen it. Make the enemies easy to subdue
(The acute accent is an udatta - high pitch, vedic is a pitch accented language. I would expect IAST with accents, not whatever randomly capitalised things it threw at me).
Yeah... But it's not fully true to use a tree shape. Languages have "horizontal gene transfer" as well (some call it "extensive contact" or whatever), and the branches come in and out more easily than what the prescriptive method shows.
Same for actual speciesation, on every level. On homo species, on any other species, even all the way down to the origin of eurcaryota, it's all a network. The tree was never the correct model, just a "neat" model.
Interesting, northern India and southern Sri Lanka ended up with Indo-European languages. However, southern Indian and northern Sri Lanka ended up speaking a completely different language family. I wonder how that happened.
That doesn't explain Sri Lanka which is past South India...
Edit: The actual answer is North/Eastern Indians speaking an IE variant immigrated to Sri Lanka in the 5th/6th centuries and became the dominant language there since (Sinhala)
Sri Lanka only became an island like 500 years ago. It was a storm in 1480 that disconnected the passable land bridge that once connected it to mainland India.
There are many historical events of Indo-European speakers invading India from the north, like Darius the Great, Alexander the Great, the Mughals. AIT refers to a theory from an earlier time period but rejecting it does not rule out subsequent Indo-European conquests of the region which surely contributed to the spread of Indo-European culture and language southward.
But the advent of Indo-European languages in Northern India (let alone Southern Sri Lanka) has nothing to do with Alexander or the Mughals.
The Aryan Invasion Theory was propagated by the British to justify their colonial brutality, and no self-respecting historian will now call the gradual Aryan migration an invasion. The only people who still do are usually trying to achieve some political aims, usually imperial apologia.
> The theory of an immigration of IA speaking Arya ("Aryan invasion") is simply seen as a means of British policy to justify their own intrusion into India and their subsequent colonial rule: in both cases, a "white race" was seen as subduing the local darker colored population.
the story of how the sinhalese got there is told in the Mahavamsa a Buddhist pali take that recounts the story of prince Vijaya fleeing his kingdom in mainland India and arriving in sri lanka.
The northern folks, the tamils are there because sri lanka used to be physically connected to Tamil nadu in recent history, like just a few centuries ago
4000 BC? I don't buy it: if you look at how little Greek changed over the last 3500 years and compared to how different it is to other languages this doesn't sit right
Quick question for you - did the Proto-Indo-European culture spread out further than, or lesser than, the Greek culture?
Because that difference in expansion, distance, and interaction with other cultures might explain the differences you're incredulous about.
Given Punjabi and Irish Gaelic are both descended from PIE, as is _Greek_ I'm going to say that 4K is plenty. The fact that Greek didn't change so much after Mycenean Greek was first attested in 2K BC doesn't say as much about PIE as it does about the Greeks deciding they liked where they were.
Also, _how_ different is Greek to other languages? Given it's a PIE language also.
Greek has several things in favor of it being conservative: 1. It’s been a written language for longer than most other languages 2. It’s been the language of empires 3. It’s been a liturgical language
With that said, I find Modern Greek speakers tend to overstate the similarities between Modern and Ancient Greek. The spelling is conservative but pronunciation is very different and conjugation/declension patterns have been significantly simplified.
Still there’s a lot more intelligibility than between English and Old English for example, which is a good example of how much can change in about 1000 years. Similar with French or Romanian and Latin.
Cool viz. However it’s hilarious to classify living, spoken languages as “proto” - Latvian and Latgalian. It’s like: “despite there being 2M speakers you guys don’t quite qualify as proper Baltic”.
Anyone new to this stuff and fascinated by it could check out "Proto" by Laura Spinney. A new book about PIE and the Yamnaya and such and also incorporating tie-ins to DNA archeology.
There is definitely a correlation between the connectedness of the world and the amount/speed of language development. People in the past probably diverged from the language they started with because of physical isolation/distance between towns/settlements.
I wonder, if skipped forward a few thousands of years into the future, how the data changes - would we end up with only a few languages or maybe even one after a while?
I do wonder if language change might start to slow down, however.
Now that we have so much written language from the past, won't that have a sort of fossilizing effect on the language? For example, prior to writing systems, people had no idea how their ancestors communicated. Now with written text and audio recordings, we know in great detail how our language used to be used.
Also it seems to me that modern borrowings and loan words are more faithful to the original version, while before widespread writing it was more butchered and twisted into the target language's phonology and only approximately imitated how it sounded. Because the loaners often didn't speak that language well and went by the ear, and third hand accounts.
There's a weird number of shared words between Basque and old Armenian, also names of places. But I've only seen random articles trying to link the two, not real scientific papers.
Many of the days of the week are named after ancient nature gods, many of which trace to PIE:
PIE sóh₂wl̥ (“sun”)
→ Proto-Germanic sunnǭ (“sun”)
→ Old English sunne (“sun”)
→ Old English Sunnandæg (“Sun's day”)
→ Middle English Sonday / Sunday
→ Sunday
PIE mḗh₁n̥s (“moon; month”)
→ Proto-Germanic mēnô (“moon”)
→ Old English mōna (“moon”)
→ Old English Mōnandæg (“Moon's day”)
→ Middle English Monenday / Monday
→ Monday
PIE deywós
→ Sanskrit deva, “god”
→ Latin deus, “god”
→ Old Norse Týr, the god
→ Old English Tīw
→ Tīwesdæg (“Tiw's day”)
→ Tuesday
PIE dyew- (“bright sky; daylight”)
→ deywós (“celestial one; god”)
→ Proto-Germanic Tīwaz
→ Old English Tīw
→ Tīwesdæg
→ Tuesday
The reconstruction exists for the remaining days too, but is more uncertain when tracing it to PIE:
PIE weh₂t- / related roots concerning excitement or inspiration
→ Proto-Germanic *Wōðanaz
→ Old English Wōden
→ Wōdnesdæg (“Woden's day”)
→ Wednesday
PIE (s)tenh₂- (“thunder”) (reconstruction/derivation has some uncertainty)
→ Proto-Germanic þunraz (“thunder”; the god Thunder/Thor)
→ Old English Þunor
→ Þunresdæg (“Þunor's day”)
→ Thursday
PIE prih₁- / preyH- (“to love; be dear”)
→ Proto-Germanic Frijjō (the goddess Frigg, approximately “beloved/dear one”)
→ Old English Frīg
→ Old English Frīgedæg (“Frīg's day”)
→ Middle English Fridai / Friday
→ Friday
Saturday is not known to trace to PIE:
Latin Saturnus
→ Old English Sætern(es)dæg (“Saturn's day”)
→ Saturday
Reconstructing a PIE religion (as opposed to a few rather vague lexemes like "sky god") is regarded as less tenable today than in the past. The well-described features of Indo-Iranian religion are largely innovations and not found among speakers of IE branches that split off before. Some of Greek and Roman religion is actually the result of areal contact, not inheritance from earlier IE times.
You might want to read a scholarly introduction to the field (not a pop-sci one that is likely to be unreliable by definition) from recent years.
The "PIE religion" is the name scholars give to the religious pool that is partially reconstructed from the overlapping evidence (poetry+rituals+myth+gods+vocabulary) of its descendants.
Each descendant subregion of PIE of course imposed its own religious beliefs and local gods. There is no surprise there. The key thread of derivative localized polytheism, often rooted in the same nature-based phenomenon, however persisted across the regions.
Refer to the sibling comment by drivers99. Sky god is not a vague lexeme; it is a critical rooting evidence. You're fooling no one by attempting to cover it up. A shallow dismissal of valid evidence is an attribute of a conman.
I am an actual Indo-Europeanist and currently employed in the field. Please stop trying to oversell this. The sibling comment is referring to the aforementioned vague lexemes, too vague for much reconstruction of anything meriting being called a common IE religion. Earlier work by scholars like Dumézil, which are common to pop-sci shit and still hang on here and there on Wikipedia, are generally discussed within the field now as cautionary tales.
No one has any problem with reconstructing some branch-level stuff like Italic or Indo-Iranian. But projecting it back to even Nuclear/Core Indo-European, let alone Proto-Indo-European, is too fraught with problems.
would you recommend a more recent book comparable to "Empires of the Word" by Nicholas Ostler on the subject of languages ? I am really enjoying the book, but it's over 20 years old at this point. I wonder how much of the information is out of date now.
I don't recommend any books written for the general public. Too full of compromises, oversimplifications, and obsolete ideas. I can only recommend learning the field through the same course materials used in training the next generation of researchers. Of course, this is a very large time commitment.
Maybe tangential (and I agree with you), but “religion” is also a misleading word for many of the practices that Christianity later grouped together as “paganism.”
Where these practices often differed strongly from Christianity was that they were not totalizing, overarching, mandatory systems of belief. They were more about practices embedded in daily and civic life -- sacrifices, festivals, acts of veneration, etc. -- than about belief or internal mental state (“Whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”). They were also generally quite willing to incorporate gods, heroes, and practices from other peoples encountered along the way.
IMHO, exclusive, universal, doctrinally policed religion developed partly through the interaction of monotheistic traditions with imperial states, which had strong reasons to standardize institutions and identities; although neither Rome nor the caliphates ever achieved simple religious homogeneity.
(And yeah, clearly there's a lot of commonality between many of the cultures derived from early Indo-European migration etc but also incredible diversity and very clear adaptations to wherever they ended up and who they ended up co-existing with)
It is paganism that I consider to be the derogatory and misleading word. Calling it paganism was and is a vile attempt to suppress the local religions, whether you consider them derived from PIE or not.
Yes, they were not not overarching, mandatory systems of belief, but is not an excuse to dismiss them as religions. The religions were real. After all, we see the same continuing religious beliefs that you noted (sacrifices, festivals, veneration, etc.) in Hinduism, which traces a direct chain to the PIE religion.
Watkins wrote his magnum opus on The serpent-slaying myth. You might also like ML West's Indo European Myth and Poetry. So the heroic poetry, mannerbund, the specific characteristics of the King of the Gods who is often associated with both wisdom and war, guest hospitality norms, shared characteristics of epic mythology, the myth of stealing mead / ambrosia. There certainly existed a PIE religion.
I don't question your credentials but I also think many things deemed to be IIr innovations may not even be. IIr came through CW -> Sintashta after all and BMAC influences are overstated. For instance, Soma may have a root in this region, but the myth associated with theft of divine intoxicating drink and it's function as the mead of poetry must predate the specific IIr Soma cult.
Many European languages predate PIE (Basque, Etruscan) and PIE were only a spoken, not written.
I’ve always wondered why it gets so much attention as an early European concept when people had been speaking other languages for thousands of years, doing cave art dating back tens of thousands of years - it’s like history ignores it.
It kind of reminds me of how they treat “dark ages” when there was actually quite a lot going on intellectually.
Possibly because there’s such scant linguistic evidence for the (undoubtedly many) pre-PIE languages in Europe? It’s hard to study something that didn’t leave behind much writing, if any. Basque being a notable exception to that, of course.
With that said, most historical linguists would probably kill for more data on extinct pre-PIE languages.
I have trouble understanding what a statement like "Basque predates PIE" could possibly mean.
Are you claiming that Basque has been spoken unchanged for 6000 years?
Are you claiming that PIE speakers were speaking no language at all until they suddenly invented PIE from whole cloth while Basque speakers were speaking languages?
ALL language in Europe were spoken only 6000 years ago, as far as I am aware, including Basque.
Plenty of historians pay attention to cave art but there is not much that can be concluded, whereas it is fascinating that we can reconstruct unattested languages from modern examples of language, include PIE as well as many other proto-languages across the world. For language isolates like Basque, there is simply less to work with, in terms of reconstructing, although there has been work done on "internal reconstruction" to try to extract what historical information can be inferred from variation in a modern language.
Kinda funny that Bavarian is more distant from 'High German' than Yiddish :D (not exactly wrong though, Yiddish is easier to understand for any non-Bavarian than hardcore Bavarian).
There's at least a dozen local German dialects missing which are just as 'weird' as Bavarian though (PS: ok, all the main dialects spoken in the northern parts of Germany seem to be there, just in their own 'heritage node'), I guess Bavarian earned its own spot because it has the most speakers.
This one's also interesting - a non-local (geographically disconnected) Bavarian dialect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottscheerish
It's quite funny for me, because (from the article) in Slovene the dialect is refered to as "kočevarščina".
I don't know Slovene, but I speak one of the Slavic languages and it sounds to me as "cat's growl".
Not very nice maybe, but we're talking about meanings long lost in time.
We call Germans: "Niemcy" and it comes from the word "niemy", which now means "mute", but used to mean "foreigner" in proto-slavic. We don't think of mutes when meeting Germans tho. We never did.
Of course no ill will intended here. Just a bit of history perhaps.
"Kočevsko" is the Slovene word for the Gottschee region, most likely just a slovenified version of the original German name. "Kočevarji" then refers to the people from this region and "kočevarščina" to their language.
Also note that the emphasis in the above terms is on the letter e, not on the o - "kočévsko".
Yiddish is very similar to Palatinate / Hesse dialect simply because many Jews used to live in that region. I grew up in Palatinate - the only strange things about Yiddish for me are the spellings and the occasional words of Hebrew or other non-German origin. Some Hebrew words are actually part of the Palatinate dialect through the Jewish connection, such as Zores (fight / argument / discord / trouble) or machulle (bankrupt).
« earned its own spot »
Linguistically, this chart doesn't have much value. Not sure what criteria were used for inclusion of this or that item, perhaps just presence in some ISO standard. “German” per se doesn't mean much, so-called “high-German” („hochdeutsch“, meaning „oberdeutsch“ in opposition to „niederdeutsch“), the language that you and I speak, is an artificial synthesis and administrative compromise on written variations that is not organically rooted in dialectical evolution and historically has been imposed by schooling (which has led to the eradication of the Northern dialects, „platt“, which are derived from old Saxon and thus are related to English), so it is questionable what its meaning should be in this chart.
Yiddish is a colonial sociolect and somewhat marginal to the evolution, so again, not clear why it was included. IIRC, Koestler wrote in “The Thirteenth Tribe” (where he rejects the mainstream hypothesis of the origin and nature of Eastern Jewry) that Yiddish is based on the South-Eastern variants, not on the South-Western variants.
Looking at the Latin languages, similar inadequacies can be seen. Very superficial and misleading, all in all.
Maybe this chart is meant more to showcase CSS and web graphics than linguistics.
Yes, why include Bavarian explicitly?
You could have included Tyrolean, Viennese, or whatever which are all local dialects on par with "Bavarian".
These all belong to the Upper German dialects, as seen here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_dialects
Looks like this is just some Vibecoded app, with no real science behind it.
Aren't most Austrian dialects considered as sub-dialects of Bavarian?
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_language#Geographical...
Does it mean the Lombard dialect of northern Italy is colonial sociolect too?
No. How did you arrive at that conclusion? The equivalent for Italian would be colonization of some area (say, somewhere around the Mediterranean or Black Sea) by Venetians and other Adriatic or Northern Italic peoples, founding new urban centers, developing a mish-mash of their original Romance dialects, and exerting cultural influence via their more advanced culture/technology ; and then some local non-Italic people adapting to that via economic/cultural exchange, losing their native language in the process, as they had already lost their original religion by converting to Judaism. Read Koestler's book to understand (or get an AI summary).
Germanic tribes did colonize northern Italy and eventually used the local latin language with heavy borrowings from their original language.
Not sure why you used the word "colonizer" for Jews living in Germany. Perhaps I misunderstood, but given the book you referenced I made an educated guess
« used the word "colonizer" for Jews living in Germany »
I didn't. Rather, "Germans" (Suebians, Saxons, etc) settled in ("colonized") Eastern Europe, beyond the Empire, typically at the invitation of the local rulers. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochmittelalterliche_Ostsiedlu... That's where the contact with Eastern Jews happened, which, according to Koestler, gave rise to Yiddish.
Yes, the Langobards and the Goths settling in Italy and Spain lost their language, but the medieval Germans settling in Eastern Europe a couple hundred years later did not.
Interesting visualization for sure.
At the risk of starting a religious war, interesting to see the "Lord's Prayer" translated in languages that existed before the Lord Himself did :-/
A kinda incongruity dissonance, if you will, reading it in Sanskrit (among other languages).
Useful, nonetheless, to see how different languages evolve(d).
Not bad for an AI-driven project.
I can image the moment Sir William Jones realized Sanskrit and Latin had a common origin. "Wait a minute...these can't all be coincidences." It's pretty mid-blowing.
English: God gave us teeth; God will give us bread.
Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos.
Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.
And a fun extra one is that Lithuanian "gobti" is cognate with English "give"!
Another cool one, Svet in Russian and Schwet in Hindi, both meaning white/light and both being in names (Svetlana, Shweta)
My daughters are growing up bilingual in Persian and English. Totally fascinating to find the cognates; many are surprisingly close still (daughter/dokhtar, star/setare, cow/gav). It’s fun feeling like I could communicate basic ideas to a proto Indo European speaker based on those really distant cognates.
It gets complicated by the preponderance of French loan words, although they tend to be for newer concepts such as car, elevator, etc.
There do also seem to be some genuine coincidences, such as sock it/saket, both being a somewhat forceful way to tell someone to be quiet.
But yes, Persian people and culture in particular has fascinated me due to the ancient, but not prehistoric, traces of a shared identity with Europeans, in contrast with its neighbors. It’s not something that gets a lot of attention in popular culture
The romance languages are closer to the indo Iranian ones than the Germanic languages from what I understand.
I'm learning Spanish now after studying French and while I'm not fluent at all in Hindi or Marathi which I sometimes heard my family speaking growing up, the cognates are fascinating. The numbers are the most obvious. But even words like 'tu' (you) are the same in all the languages. Same with English and me as the first person.
Not to mention the verbs. Truly wild stuff to think no one noticed.
People noticed. They just didn’t come up with a theory of a common ancestor language. Or, in some cases, they assumed other European languages were originally heavily debased forms of Latin/Greek.
For a French, Spanish is not a particularly easy language. Italian is much closer to French, and easier to learn.
Cool. Looks good. But on Android Chrome the 'about' box covers the entire map, and the timeline slider is in the way too.
It is very common for vibecoded UI to have significant usability problems on mobile platforms and I find it annoying.
I'm pretty sure that it can be fixed by either manual testing and giving the agent feedback or by giving the engine tools to do the testing. Vibecoders just tend to be very careless about such things.
Same in Fennek. Did they not check their presentation in mobile?
Great project. One thing that is masked by the tree view though is that there were indeed countless other languages being spoken besides Proto-Indo-European. It's just the one that gave rise to today's Indo-European languages. But back then it wasn't alone, but just one of many, some related to it and some more distant from it. Kinda similar to how it works today. It had dialects, it was in motion and change, it had earlier versions etc. etc.
Well, yeah, but that's like saying that producing a tree of pomaceous fruit hides the fact that citrus fruits exist.
(Yes, I did make an apples and oranges joke.)
The tree appearance just makes it too inviting to imagine PIE as some pristine ur-language, the kind of original language of Babel. I'm not saying that people explicitly think these thoughts, just that it's easy to get this impression, even if it's not conscious. The fascination about the original human tongue in Eden used to be a common intellectual preoccupation. My point here is that PIE is quite a different story.
Is it though? It's not as if it can pull in hypothetical superfamilies like Nostratic. It's not saying it's a family tree of all languages, just I-E. Your assumption is that somebody would look at it and forget that Mandarin exists, or Arabic, or Finnish, &c. I don't buy that. Hence my fruit joke. I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do to avoid an egregious misreading by somebody spectacularly smoothbrained, because anyone with that mentality isn't going to be paying attention anyway.
[Removed my Anatolian criticism: I just hadn't zoomed in enough!]
No, I understand that people would know that Chinese existed far away. My point is that locally, PIE had neighbors, had variants, dialects, it had earlier forms, it was like a living language in a normal human context.
Maybe your brain works differently. I had this kind of misconception, imagining languages to be Pangea-like. That there used to be less linguistic diversity, there was a big uniform language (and perhaps a handful of others far away on the Earth) that later on fractured. But reality is more dynamic. PIE was just an ordinary language. And there was likely more linguistic diversity than today, due to less communication and travel opportunities and geographical features being more isolating.
The tree is used to show species, too, but I can't see anyone looking at one and imagining that some weird reptile-looking thing is the pure essence of mammal. Some people are prone to getting bad ideas about ancestry (the Nazis' search for an Aryan homeland is an example) but you can hardly blame illustrations like this.
I think it's very hard to imagine what others imagine because these things aren't verbalized. It's assumptions about fundamental "how the world works" things. You can see a figure and form an assumption that you never verbalize and don't even notice that you formed an assumption.
These PIE charts do suggest a message that humanity was kinda more unified, or humans (or these regions) were still one big family at that time, all spoke PIE (again, except for faraway places), and it later fragmented.
I'm not saying that this website is bad or should be changed. I'm adding extra info, that sure it's useful, and it should be enjoyed with the knowledge that PIE was one normal language among many, existed in flux, did normal exchange of vocabulary etc with other neighboring languages, most of which are much less knowable compared to PIE. Europe used to be populated by non-Indo-European languages. In Greece, a lot of the -nthos words are likely borrowings from such a non-Indo-European language that was spoken there before Proto-Greek.
Maybe it's the curse of knowledge if you know all this. But I think the average person doesn't really have a reasonable mental map about any of this.
We know now the tracing of the ancestry, from Iran/Greece to the Caucusus, originally to Yamnaya in Russia.
Yeah, it's not a clean inheritance but lots of linguistic contact and negotiation.
And crucially it's not just other IE-adjacent languages but the Pre-IE substrate. So many Greek words are inherited from the mysterious languages that were there before, of which we only know through the marks they left on ours.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derive...
PIE was never a single language. There was significant linguistic diversity. PIE is just what we call their roots in aggregate. It is a conceptual reconstruction.
The "lord's prayer" in Vedic sounds very out of place due to the choices of inflected forms and some stems even reminiscent of classical Sanskrit.
Without going into depth of that, here's something actually more inspiring (actual excerpt from Rig Veda).
> We call for help, the fierce, ruler of clans of men, king of Gods (Indra)
> All of us that is weak, strengthen it. Make the enemies easy to subdue
(The acute accent is an udatta - high pitch, vedic is a pitch accented language. I would expect IAST with accents, not whatever randomly capitalised things it threw at me).
Yeah... But it's not fully true to use a tree shape. Languages have "horizontal gene transfer" as well (some call it "extensive contact" or whatever), and the branches come in and out more easily than what the prescriptive method shows.
Same for actual speciesation, on every level. On homo species, on any other species, even all the way down to the origin of eurcaryota, it's all a network. The tree was never the correct model, just a "neat" model.
Sprachbund is a key term.
Interesting, northern India and southern Sri Lanka ended up with Indo-European languages. However, southern Indian and northern Sri Lanka ended up speaking a completely different language family. I wonder how that happened.
The Indo-European speakers invaded from the north.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations
That doesn't explain Sri Lanka which is past South India...
Edit: The actual answer is North/Eastern Indians speaking an IE variant immigrated to Sri Lanka in the 5th/6th centuries and became the dominant language there since (Sinhala)
Could it be that Sri lanka is an island
Sri Lanka's been inhabited for over 100k years.
Sri Lanka only became an island like 500 years ago. It was a storm in 1480 that disconnected the passable land bridge that once connected it to mainland India.
There is a difference between invasion and migration though, AIT has long been debunked, the current consensus is AMT
There are many historical events of Indo-European speakers invading India from the north, like Darius the Great, Alexander the Great, the Mughals. AIT refers to a theory from an earlier time period but rejecting it does not rule out subsequent Indo-European conquests of the region which surely contributed to the spread of Indo-European culture and language southward.
But the advent of Indo-European languages in Northern India (let alone Southern Sri Lanka) has nothing to do with Alexander or the Mughals.
The Aryan Invasion Theory was propagated by the British to justify their colonial brutality, and no self-respecting historian will now call the gradual Aryan migration an invasion. The only people who still do are usually trying to achieve some political aims, usually imperial apologia.
Why are you being down voted... By the time alexander showed up India had spoken an indo European language for thousands of years.
People don't like getting their dogmas challenged, especially when it comes to their Fathers' sins.
His first sentence is reasonable. The rest of the comment is unhinged.
> The theory of an immigration of IA speaking Arya ("Aryan invasion") is simply seen as a means of British policy to justify their own intrusion into India and their subsequent colonial rule: in both cases, a "white race" was seen as subduing the local darker colored population.
Source: Edwin Bryant in https://archive.org/details/EdwinBryantLauriePattonIndoAryan...
the story of how the sinhalese got there is told in the Mahavamsa a Buddhist pali take that recounts the story of prince Vijaya fleeing his kingdom in mainland India and arriving in sri lanka.
The northern folks, the tamils are there because sri lanka used to be physically connected to Tamil nadu in recent history, like just a few centuries ago
4000 BC? I don't buy it: if you look at how little Greek changed over the last 3500 years and compared to how different it is to other languages this doesn't sit right
Quick question for you - did the Proto-Indo-European culture spread out further than, or lesser than, the Greek culture?
Because that difference in expansion, distance, and interaction with other cultures might explain the differences you're incredulous about.
Given Punjabi and Irish Gaelic are both descended from PIE, as is _Greek_ I'm going to say that 4K is plenty. The fact that Greek didn't change so much after Mycenean Greek was first attested in 2K BC doesn't say as much about PIE as it does about the Greeks deciding they liked where they were.
Also, _how_ different is Greek to other languages? Given it's a PIE language also.
Massive controversy in historical linguistics, singularity2001 on hacker News doesn't buy the age of proto-Indo-European
Greek has several things in favor of it being conservative: 1. It’s been a written language for longer than most other languages 2. It’s been the language of empires 3. It’s been a liturgical language With that said, I find Modern Greek speakers tend to overstate the similarities between Modern and Ancient Greek. The spelling is conservative but pronunciation is very different and conjugation/declension patterns have been significantly simplified.
Still there’s a lot more intelligibility than between English and Old English for example, which is a good example of how much can change in about 1000 years. Similar with French or Romanian and Latin.
I miss a control to rotate the circular plot (?)
Cool viz. However it’s hilarious to classify living, spoken languages as “proto” - Latvian and Latgalian. It’s like: “despite there being 2M speakers you guys don’t quite qualify as proper Baltic”.
? They are not classified as "proto". The "Proto-Baltic" label is clearly attached to the knot 2 "levels" closer to the center.
Anyone new to this stuff and fascinated by it could check out "Proto" by Laura Spinney. A new book about PIE and the Yamnaya and such and also incorporating tie-ins to DNA archeology.
There is definitely a correlation between the connectedness of the world and the amount/speed of language development. People in the past probably diverged from the language they started with because of physical isolation/distance between towns/settlements. I wonder, if skipped forward a few thousands of years into the future, how the data changes - would we end up with only a few languages or maybe even one after a while?
Before seeing this page, I had always assumed that PIE was a lot older. It’s amazing how much linguistic development has occurred in ~6,500 years!
I mean, it's enough to look at French vs Spanish or other Romance language which separated just 1500 years ago. Or just look at Old English.
I just think, look at how much happens in a generation or two right now. No wonder languages can change quickly.
I do wonder if language change might start to slow down, however.
Now that we have so much written language from the past, won't that have a sort of fossilizing effect on the language? For example, prior to writing systems, people had no idea how their ancestors communicated. Now with written text and audio recordings, we know in great detail how our language used to be used.
Also it seems to me that modern borrowings and loan words are more faithful to the original version, while before widespread writing it was more butchered and twisted into the target language's phonology and only approximately imitated how it sounded. Because the loaners often didn't speak that language well and went by the ear, and third hand accounts.
Any ideas where Basque may fit in?
Basque is not an Indo-European language:)
It's believed that basque is a remnant of earlier people before agriculture and indo europeans arrived.
There's a weird number of shared words between Basque and old Armenian, also names of places. But I've only seen random articles trying to link the two, not real scientific papers.
Very well organized.
what is the size of the circle?
I think for the living languages it's speakers (on a log scale, presumably).
PIE was not just a commonality for language, but also for religion across these regions. And then came along the Semitic wave of religions.
pretty interesting etymology connecting Dios, Jupiter, Zeus, etc. (Sky Father)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us
And then there is Tuesday, for the forgotten god.
Many of the days of the week are named after ancient nature gods, many of which trace to PIE:
PIE sóh₂wl̥ (“sun”) → Proto-Germanic sunnǭ (“sun”) → Old English sunne (“sun”) → Old English Sunnandæg (“Sun's day”) → Middle English Sonday / Sunday → Sunday
PIE mḗh₁n̥s (“moon; month”) → Proto-Germanic mēnô (“moon”) → Old English mōna (“moon”) → Old English Mōnandæg (“Moon's day”) → Middle English Monenday / Monday → Monday
PIE deywós → Sanskrit deva, “god” → Latin deus, “god” → Old Norse Týr, the god → Old English Tīw → Tīwesdæg (“Tiw's day”) → Tuesday
PIE dyew- (“bright sky; daylight”) → deywós (“celestial one; god”) → Proto-Germanic Tīwaz → Old English Tīw → Tīwesdæg → Tuesday
The reconstruction exists for the remaining days too, but is more uncertain when tracing it to PIE:
PIE weh₂t- / related roots concerning excitement or inspiration → Proto-Germanic *Wōðanaz → Old English Wōden → Wōdnesdæg (“Woden's day”) → Wednesday
PIE (s)tenh₂- (“thunder”) (reconstruction/derivation has some uncertainty) → Proto-Germanic þunraz (“thunder”; the god Thunder/Thor) → Old English Þunor → Þunresdæg (“Þunor's day”) → Thursday
PIE prih₁- / preyH- (“to love; be dear”) → Proto-Germanic Frijjō (the goddess Frigg, approximately “beloved/dear one”) → Old English Frīg → Old English Frīgedæg (“Frīg's day”) → Middle English Fridai / Friday → Friday
Saturday is not known to trace to PIE:
Latin Saturnus → Old English Sætern(es)dæg (“Saturn's day”) → Saturday
Reconstructing a PIE religion (as opposed to a few rather vague lexemes like "sky god") is regarded as less tenable today than in the past. The well-described features of Indo-Iranian religion are largely innovations and not found among speakers of IE branches that split off before. Some of Greek and Roman religion is actually the result of areal contact, not inheritance from earlier IE times.
You might want to read a scholarly introduction to the field (not a pop-sci one that is likely to be unreliable by definition) from recent years.
The "PIE religion" is the name scholars give to the religious pool that is partially reconstructed from the overlapping evidence (poetry+rituals+myth+gods+vocabulary) of its descendants.
Each descendant subregion of PIE of course imposed its own religious beliefs and local gods. There is no surprise there. The key thread of derivative localized polytheism, often rooted in the same nature-based phenomenon, however persisted across the regions.
Refer to the sibling comment by drivers99. Sky god is not a vague lexeme; it is a critical rooting evidence. You're fooling no one by attempting to cover it up. A shallow dismissal of valid evidence is an attribute of a conman.
I am an actual Indo-Europeanist and currently employed in the field. Please stop trying to oversell this. The sibling comment is referring to the aforementioned vague lexemes, too vague for much reconstruction of anything meriting being called a common IE religion. Earlier work by scholars like Dumézil, which are common to pop-sci shit and still hang on here and there on Wikipedia, are generally discussed within the field now as cautionary tales.
No one has any problem with reconstructing some branch-level stuff like Italic or Indo-Iranian. But projecting it back to even Nuclear/Core Indo-European, let alone Proto-Indo-European, is too fraught with problems.
would you recommend a more recent book comparable to "Empires of the Word" by Nicholas Ostler on the subject of languages ? I am really enjoying the book, but it's over 20 years old at this point. I wonder how much of the information is out of date now.
I don't recommend any books written for the general public. Too full of compromises, oversimplifications, and obsolete ideas. I can only recommend learning the field through the same course materials used in training the next generation of researchers. Of course, this is a very large time commitment.
Honestly David Anthony's book ("Horse Wheel Language") is pretty good, no? Maybe a bit dry for "general public"? Also a bit old at this point?
Maybe tangential (and I agree with you), but “religion” is also a misleading word for many of the practices that Christianity later grouped together as “paganism.”
Where these practices often differed strongly from Christianity was that they were not totalizing, overarching, mandatory systems of belief. They were more about practices embedded in daily and civic life -- sacrifices, festivals, acts of veneration, etc. -- than about belief or internal mental state (“Whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”). They were also generally quite willing to incorporate gods, heroes, and practices from other peoples encountered along the way.
IMHO, exclusive, universal, doctrinally policed religion developed partly through the interaction of monotheistic traditions with imperial states, which had strong reasons to standardize institutions and identities; although neither Rome nor the caliphates ever achieved simple religious homogeneity.
(And yeah, clearly there's a lot of commonality between many of the cultures derived from early Indo-European migration etc but also incredible diversity and very clear adaptations to wherever they ended up and who they ended up co-existing with)
It is paganism that I consider to be the derogatory and misleading word. Calling it paganism was and is a vile attempt to suppress the local religions, whether you consider them derived from PIE or not.
Yes, they were not not overarching, mandatory systems of belief, but is not an excuse to dismiss them as religions. The religions were real. After all, we see the same continuing religious beliefs that you noted (sacrifices, festivals, veneration, etc.) in Hinduism, which traces a direct chain to the PIE religion.
Watkins wrote his magnum opus on The serpent-slaying myth. You might also like ML West's Indo European Myth and Poetry. So the heroic poetry, mannerbund, the specific characteristics of the King of the Gods who is often associated with both wisdom and war, guest hospitality norms, shared characteristics of epic mythology, the myth of stealing mead / ambrosia. There certainly existed a PIE religion.
I don't question your credentials but I also think many things deemed to be IIr innovations may not even be. IIr came through CW -> Sintashta after all and BMAC influences are overstated. For instance, Soma may have a root in this region, but the myth associated with theft of divine intoxicating drink and it's function as the mead of poetry must predate the specific IIr Soma cult.
Languages, cultures and genetic populations are all separate concepts that have to be distinguished.
There can be and there often is correlation, but it's not the same thing. They don't have to move together.
Many European languages predate PIE (Basque, Etruscan) and PIE were only a spoken, not written.
I’ve always wondered why it gets so much attention as an early European concept when people had been speaking other languages for thousands of years, doing cave art dating back tens of thousands of years - it’s like history ignores it.
It kind of reminds me of how they treat “dark ages” when there was actually quite a lot going on intellectually.
Possibly because there’s such scant linguistic evidence for the (undoubtedly many) pre-PIE languages in Europe? It’s hard to study something that didn’t leave behind much writing, if any. Basque being a notable exception to that, of course.
With that said, most historical linguists would probably kill for more data on extinct pre-PIE languages.
I have trouble understanding what a statement like "Basque predates PIE" could possibly mean.
Are you claiming that Basque has been spoken unchanged for 6000 years? Are you claiming that PIE speakers were speaking no language at all until they suddenly invented PIE from whole cloth while Basque speakers were speaking languages? ALL language in Europe were spoken only 6000 years ago, as far as I am aware, including Basque.
Plenty of historians pay attention to cave art but there is not much that can be concluded, whereas it is fascinating that we can reconstruct unattested languages from modern examples of language, include PIE as well as many other proto-languages across the world. For language isolates like Basque, there is simply less to work with, in terms of reconstructing, although there has been work done on "internal reconstruction" to try to extract what historical information can be inferred from variation in a modern language.