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The Indo-European Family Tree

djbinder.com

1–10 of 103 posts

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#3

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.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#6

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.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#7
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.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#9

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

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#10
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.
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