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The Indo-European Family Tree

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Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#11

Post by TFNA »

OutOfHere wrote: post #8

PIE was not just a commonality for language, but also for religion across these regions. And then came along the Semitic wave of religions.

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.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#13

Post by OutOfHere »

TFNA wrote: post #11
OutOfHere wrote: post #8

PIE was not just a commonality for language, but also for religion across these regions. And then came along the Semitic wave of religions.

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…

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.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#14

Post by bonoboTP »

joshdavham wrote: post #12

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.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#15

Post by TFNA »

OutOfHere wrote: post #13
TFNA wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 per…

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.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#16

Post by tealmoonx »

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.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#17

Post by talideon »

bonoboTP wrote: post #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…

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.)

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#18

Post by bonoboTP »

talideon wrote: post #17
bonoboTP wrote: post #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…

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.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#20

Post by talideon »

ahazred8ta wrote: post #3
erminpour wrote: post #2

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"!
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