what is the size of the circle?
The Indo-European Family Tree
31–40 of 103 posts
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#32Before 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.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 I wonder how much of the information is out of date now.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.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#34Kinda 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 Bavar…
This one's also interesting - a non-local (geographically disconnected) Bavarian dialect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottscheerish
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#35Interesting 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.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#38I 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
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#39what is the size of the circle?
I think for the living languages it's speakers (on a log scale, presumably).
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#40Interesting, 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)