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.
The Indo-European Family Tree
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Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#52There 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?
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#54Yeah... 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.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#55Earlier 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 I wonder how much of the information is out of date now.
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The book I mentioned is about languages and their spread through history, not religion.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#56Great 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…
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...
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The book I mentioned is about languages and their spread through history, not religion.
Even wrt languages, for the first time in history, we have an intelligence that knows all notable modern and historical languages. It knows their words and antecedents. This is more significant than any scholar.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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…
> Honestly I don't think anyone actually powerful nowadays cares one bit about "PIE" religions.
You obviously don't care about it, and I can see why any scholar of a Semite-based religion would want to suppress the connection, just as a Nazi would want to suppress the holocaust. To me it's a very big deal that the entirety of the PIE derivative religions were destroyed in Europe by the Semitic religious wave. I consider it nothing less than a major cultural massacre. What is weak to you is a big deal to someone else.
There is no "other side" here. The word derivations and the cultural commonalities speak for themselves. For the first time in history, we have an intelligence that knows all notable modern and historical languages. It knows their words and antecedents. This is more significant than any scholar.
Re: The Indo-European Family Tree
#60Earlier 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.
We know now the tracing of the ancestry, from Iran/Greece to the Caucusus, originally to Yamnaya in Russia.