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.
[deleted]
The Indo-European Family Tree
41–50 of 103 posts
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#42I miss a control to rotate the circular plot (?)
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#44Earlier 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 I wonder how much of the information is out of date now.
[flagged]
Just out of sympathy cause I think there's a legitimate root to the religious point. Your epistemology comes across as extremely weak, with believing LLMs over scholars, and discriminating which scholars are legitimate based on agreeing with your beliefs. It would pay to at least familiarize yourself with the arguments of the other side, suspending in your mind the whole partisan angle.
Honestly I don't think anyone actually powerful nowadays cares one bit about "PIE" religions. What could be happening is some revisionism relying on conveniently selective standards of rigor to bury other scholars. As this is a field famously relying on unclear and very messily transmitted evidence; and these kinds of problems are a very weak point of the humanities overall. But I don't follow this debate at all, so don't have a formed opinion.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#45Interesting, 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
There is a difference between invasion and migration though, AIT has long been debunked, the current consensus is AMT
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#46Cool. 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.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Indo-European speakers invaded from the north. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations
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.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#50PIE 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.