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The Indo-European Family Tree

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Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#61

Post by OutOfHere »

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…

PIE was never a single language. There was significant linguistic diversity. PIE is just what we call their roots in aggregate. It is a conceptual reconstruction.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#63

Post by bonoboTP »

lynguist wrote: post #54

Yeah... 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 corr…

Sprachbund is a key term.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#64

Post by bonoboTP »

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.

Languages, cultures and genetic populations are all separate concepts that have to be distinguished.

There can be and there often is correlation, but it's not the same thing. They don't have to move together.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#66

Post by joshdavham »

kzrdude wrote: post #32
bonoboTP wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I do wonder if language change might start to slow down, however.

Now that we have so much written language from the past, won't that have a sort of fossilizing effect on the language? For example, prior to writing systems, people had no idea how their ancestors communicated. Now with written text and audio recordings, we know in great detail how our language used to be used.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#67

Post by SockThief »

nuxi wrote: post #34
flohofwoe wrote: post #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 Bavar…

This one's also interesting - a non-local (geographically disconnected) Bavarian dialect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottscheerish

It's quite funny for me, because (from the article) in Slovene the dialect is refered to as "kočevarščina".

I don't know Slovene, but I speak one of the Slavic languages and it sounds to me as "cat's growl".

Not very nice maybe, but we're talking about meanings long lost in time.

We call Germans: "Niemcy" and it comes from the word "niemy", which now means "mute", but used to mean "foreigner" in proto-slavic. We don't think of mutes when meeting Germans tho. We never did.

Of course no ill will intended here. Just a bit of history perhaps.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#68

Post by OutOfHere »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #28
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…

Maybe tangential (and I agree with you), but “religion” is also a misleading word for many of the practices that Christianity later grouped together as “paganism.” Where these practices often differed strongly from Christianity was that they were not totalizing, overarching, mandatory systems of belief. They were more about practices embedded in daily and civic life -- sacrifices, festivals, acts of veneration, etc.…

It is paganism that I consider to be the derogatory and misleading word. Calling it paganism was and is a vile attempt to suppress the local religions, whether you consider them derived from PIE or not.

Yes, they were not not overarching, mandatory systems of belief, but is not an excuse to dismiss them as religions. The religions were real. After all, we see the same continuing religious beliefs that you noted (sacrifices, festivals, veneration, etc.) in Hinduism, which traces a direct chain to the PIE religion.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#69

Post by HexDecOctBin »

oofabz wrote: post #49
akshitgaur2005 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But the advent of Indo-European languages in Northern India (let alone Southern Sri Lanka) has nothing to do with Alexander or the Mughals.

The Aryan Invasion Theory was propagated by the British to justify their colonial brutality, and no self-respecting historian will now call the gradual Aryan migration an invasion. The only people who still do are usually trying to achieve some political aims, usually imperial apologia.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#70

Post by ahartmetz »

flohofwoe wrote: post #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 Bavar…

Yiddish is very similar to Palatinate / Hesse dialect simply because many Jews used to live in that region. I grew up in Palatinate - the only strange things about Yiddish for me are the spellings and the occasional words of Hebrew or other non-German origin. Some Hebrew words are actually part of the Palatinate dialect through the Jewish connection, such as Zores (fight / argument / discord / trouble) or machulle (bankrupt).
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