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The Indo-European Family Tree

djbinder.com

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Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#91
post #88
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

« used the word "colonizer" for Jews living in Germany »

I didn't. Rather, "Germans" (Suebians, Saxons, etc) settled in ("colonized") Eastern Europe, beyond the Empire, typically at the invitation of the local rulers. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochmittelalterliche_Ostsiedlu... That's where the contact with Eastern Jews happened, which, according to Koestler, gave rise to Yiddish.

Yes, the Langobards and the Goths settling in Italy and Spain lost their language, but the medieval Germans settling in Eastern Europe a couple hundred years later did not.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#93
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

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

People don't like getting their dogmas challenged, especially when it comes to their Fathers' sins.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#94
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ap…

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

His first sentence is reasonable. The rest of the comment is unhinged.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#95
post #35

Interesting visualization for sure. At the risk of starting a religious war, interesting to see the "Lord's Prayer" translated in languages that existed before the Lord Himself did :-/ A kinda incongruity dissonance , if you will, reading it in Sanskrit (among other languages). Useful, nonetheless, to see how different languages evolve(d). Not bad for an AI-driven project.

[deleted]

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#96
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

"Kočevsko" is the Slovene word for the Gottschee region, most likely just a slovenified version of the original German name. "Kočevarji" then refers to the people from this region and "kočevarščina" to their language.

Also note that the emphasis in the above terms is on the letter e, not on the o - "kočévsko".

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#97
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…

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.

Aren't most Austrian dialects considered as sub-dialects of Bavarian?

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_language#Geographical...

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#98
post #94
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

His first sentence is reasonable. The rest of the comment is unhinged.

> The theory of an immigration of IA speaking Arya ("Aryan invasion") is simply seen as a means of British policy to justify their own intrusion into India and their subsequent colonial rule: in both cases, a "white race" was seen as subduing the local darker colored population.

Source: Edwin Bryant in https://archive.org/details/EdwinBryantLauriePattonIndoAryan...

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#99

Cool viz. However it’s hilarious to classify living, spoken languages as “proto” - Latvian and Latgalian. It’s like: “despite there being 2M speakers you guys don’t quite qualify as proper Baltic”.

? They are not classified as "proto". The "Proto-Baltic" label is clearly attached to the knot 2 "levels" closer to the center.

Re: The Indo-European Family Tree

#100

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…

I have trouble understanding what a statement like "Basque predates PIE" could possibly mean.

Are you claiming that Basque has been spoken unchanged for 6000 years? Are you claiming that PIE speakers were speaking no language at all until they suddenly invented PIE from whole cloth while Basque speakers were speaking languages? ALL language in Europe were spoken only 6000 years ago, as far as I am aware, including Basque.

Plenty of historians pay attention to cave art but there is not much that can be concluded, whereas it is fascinating that we can reconstruct unattested languages from modern examples of language, include PIE as well as many other proto-languages across the world. For language isolates like Basque, there is simply less to work with, in terms of reconstructing, although there has been work done on "internal reconstruction" to try to extract what historical information can be inferred from variation in a modern language.

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