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The Indo-European Family Tree

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Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#81

Post by tacker2000 »

Lumich wrote: post #76
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…

« 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 writ…

Yes, why include Bavarian explicitly?

You could have included Tyrolean, Viennese, or whatever which are all local dialects on par with "Bavarian".

These all belong to the Upper German dialects, as seen here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_dialects

Looks like this is just some Vibecoded app, with no real science behind it.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#82

Post by _yy01 »

TFNA wrote: post #11
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.

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…

Watkins wrote his magnum opus on The serpent-slaying myth. You might also like ML West's Indo European Myth and Poetry. So the heroic poetry, mannerbund, the specific characteristics of the King of the Gods who is often associated with both wisdom and war, guest hospitality norms, shared characteristics of epic mythology, the myth of stealing mead / ambrosia. There certainly existed a PIE religion.

I don't question your credentials but I also think many things deemed to be IIr innovations may not even be. IIr came through CW -> Sintashta after all and BMAC influences are overstated. For instance, Soma may have a root in this region, but the myth associated with theft of divine intoxicating drink and it's function as the mead of poetry must predate the specific IIr Soma cult.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#83

Post by stevula »

anon291 wrote: post #74
erminpour wrote: post #2

I 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.

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.

People noticed. They just didn’t come up with a theory of a common ancestor language. Or, in some cases, they assumed other European languages were originally heavily debased forms of Latin/Greek.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#84

Post by stevula »

singularity2001 wrote: post #77

4000 BC? I don't buy it: if you look at how little Greek changed over the last 3500 years and compared to how different it is to other languages this doesn't sit right

Greek has several things in favor of it being conservative: 1. It’s been a written language for longer than most other languages 2. It’s been the language of empires 3. It’s been a liturgical language With that said, I find Modern Greek speakers tend to overstate the similarities between Modern and Ancient Greek. The spelling is conservative but pronunciation is very different and conjugation/declension patterns have been significantly simplified.

Still there’s a lot more intelligibility than between English and Old English for example, which is a good example of how much can change in about 1000 years. Similar with French or Romanian and Latin.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#85

Post by stevula »

tealmoonx wrote: post #16

Many European languages predate PIE (Basque, Etruscan) and PIE were only a spoken, not written. I’ve always wondered why it gets so much attention as an early European concept when people had been speaking other languages for thousands of years, doing cave art dating back tens of thousands of years - it’s like history ignores it. It kind of reminds me of how they treat “dark ages” when there was actually quite a lot…

Possibly because there’s such scant linguistic evidence for the (undoubtedly many) pre-PIE languages in Europe? It’s hard to study something that didn’t leave behind much writing, if any. Basque being a notable exception to that, of course.

With that said, most historical linguists would probably kill for more data on extinct pre-PIE languages.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#86

Post by ithkuil »

Lumich wrote: post #76
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…

« 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 writ…

Does it mean the Lombard dialect of northern Italy is colonial sociolect too?

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#87

Post by Lumich »

ithkuil wrote: post #86
Lumich wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

« 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 writ…

Does it mean the Lombard dialect of northern Italy is colonial sociolect too?

No. How did you arrive at that conclusion? The equivalent for Italian would be colonization of some area (say, somewhere around the Mediterranean or Black Sea) by Venetians and other Adriatic or Northern Italic peoples, founding new urban centers, developing a mish-mash of their original Romance dialects, and exerting cultural influence via their more advanced culture/technology ; and then some local non-Italic people adapting to that via economic/cultural exchange, losing their native language in the process, as they had already lost their original religion by converting to Judaism. Read Koestler's book to understand (or get an AI summary).

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#88

Post by ithkuil »

Lumich wrote: post #87
ithkuil wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it mean the Lombard dialect of northern Italy is colonial sociolect too?

No. How did you arrive at that conclusion? The equivalent for Italian would be colonization of some area (say, somewhere around the Mediterranean or Black Sea) by Venetians and other Adriatic or Northern Italic peoples, founding new urban centers, developing a mish-mash of their original Romance dialects, and exerting cultural influence via their more advanced culture/technology ; and then some local non-Italic peopl…

Germanic tribes did colonize northern Italy and eventually used the local latin language with heavy borrowings from their original language.

Not sure why you used the word "colonizer" for Jews living in Germany. Perhaps I misunderstood, but given the book you referenced I made an educated guess

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#89

Post by bonoboTP »

joshdavham wrote: post #66
kzrdude wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also it seems to me that modern borrowings and loan words are more faithful to the original version, while before widespread writing it was more butchered and twisted into the target language's phonology and only approximately imitated how it sounded. Because the loaners often didn't speak that language well and went by the ear, and third hand accounts.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#90

Post by BrandoElFollito »

anon291 wrote: post #74
erminpour wrote: post #2

I 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.

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.

For a French, Spanish is not a particularly easy language. Italian is much closer to French, and easier to learn.
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