The Indo-European Family Tree

Why are you being down voted... By the time alexander showed up India had spoken an indo European language for thousands of years.

I'm learning Spanish now after studying French and while I'm not fluent at all in Hindi or Marathi which I sometimes heard my family speaking growing up, the cognates are fascinating. The numbers are the most obvious. But even words like 'tu' (you) are the same in all the languages. Same with English and me as the first person.

Not to mention the verbs. Truly wild stuff to think no one noticed.

« earned its own spot »

Linguistically, this chart doesn't have much value. Not sure what criteria were used for inclusion of this or that item, perhaps just presence in some ISO standard. “German” per se doesn't mean much, so-called “high-German” („hochdeutsch“, meaning „oberdeutsch“ in opposition to „niederdeutsch“), the language that you and I speak, is an artificial synthesis and administrative compromise on written variations that is not organically rooted in dialectical evolution and historically has been imposed by schooling (which has led to the eradication of the Northern dialects, „platt“, which are derived from old Saxon and thus are related to English), so it is questionable what its meaning should be in this chart.

Yiddish is a colonial sociolect and somewhat marginal to the evolution, so again, not clear why it was included. IIRC, Koestler wrote in “The Thirteenth Tribe” (where he rejects the mainstream hypothesis of the origin and nature of Eastern Jewry) that Yiddish is based on the South-Eastern variants, not on the South-Western variants.

Looking at the Latin languages, similar inadequacies can be seen. Very superficial and misleading, all in all.

Maybe this chart is meant more to showcase CSS and web graphics than linguistics.

Quick question for you - did the Proto-Indo-European culture spread out further than, or lesser than, the Greek culture?

Because that difference in expansion, distance, and interaction with other cultures might explain the differences you're incredulous about.

Given Punjabi and Irish Gaelic are both descended from PIE, as is _Greek_ I'm going to say that 4K is plenty. The fact that Greek didn't change so much after Mycenean Greek was first attested in 2K BC doesn't say as much about PIE as it does about the Greeks deciding they liked where they were.

Also, _how_ different is Greek to other languages? Given it's a PIE language also.

The "lord's prayer" in Vedic sounds very out of place due to the choices of inflected forms and some stems even reminiscent of classical Sanskrit.

Without going into depth of that, here's something actually more inspiring (actual excerpt from Rig Veda).

    tvā́m ugrám ávase carṣaṇīsáhaṃ rā́jan devéṣu hūmahe

    víśvā sú no vithurā́ pibdanā́ vaso amítrān suṣáhān kr̥dhi

> We call for help, the fierce, ruler of clans of men, king of Gods (Indra)

> All of us that is weak, strengthen it. Make the enemies easy to subdue

(The acute accent is an udatta - high pitch, vedic is a pitch accented language. I would expect IAST with accents, not whatever randomly capitalised things it threw at me).