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The Indo-European Family Tree
- reader9274 2mo agoVery well organized.
- erminpour 2mo agoI 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.
- ahazred8ta 2mo agoEnglish: God gave us teeth; God will give us bread. Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos. Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.
- benbreen 2mo agoMy daughters are growing up bilingual in Persian and English. Totally fascinating to find the cognates; many are surprisingly close still (daughter/dokhtar, star/setare, cow/gav). It’s fun feeling like I could communicate basic ideas to a proto Indo European speaker based on those really distant cognates.
- georgeburdell 2mo agoIt gets complicated by the preponderance of French loan words, although they tend to be for newer concepts such as car, elevator, etc. There do also seem to be some genuine coincidences, such as sock it/saket, both being a somewhat forceful way to tell someone to be quiet. But yes, Persian people and culture in particular has fascinated me due to the ancient, but not prehistoric, traces of a shared identity with Europeans, in contrast with its neighbors. It’s not something that gets a lot of attention in popular culture
- anon291 2mo agoThe romance languages are closer to the indo Iranian ones than the Germanic languages from what I understand.
- ahazred8ta 2mo agoApparently -tamo is a superlative, and 'gautama' means 'the one who has the most cows'. There are reconstructed languages loosely based on proto Indo European. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambahsa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambahsa ## https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantean_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantean_language ## https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uropi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uropi
- anon291 2mo agoI'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.
- stevula 2mo agoPeople 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.
- BrandoElFollito 2mo agoFor a French, Spanish is not a particularly easy language. Italian is much closer to French, and easier to learn.
- ahazred8ta 2mo agoCool. Looks good. But on Android Chrome the 'about' box covers the entire map, and the timeline slider is in the way too.
- vova_hn2 2mo agoIt is very common for vibecoded UI to have significant usability problems on mobile platforms and I find it annoying. I'm pretty sure that it can be fixed by either manual testing and giving the agent feedback or by giving the engine tools to do the testing. Vibecoders just tend to be very careless about such things.
- tsoukase 2mo agoSame in Fennek. Did they not check their presentation in mobile?
- flohofwoe 2mo agoKinda 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 Bavarian earned its own spot because it has the most speakers.
- nuxi 2mo agoThis one's also interesting - a non-local (geographically disconnected) Bavarian dialect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottscheerish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottscheerish
- SockThief 2mo agoIt'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.
- nuxi 2mo ago"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".
- ahartmetz 2mo agoYiddish 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).
- OutOfHere 2mo agoPIE was not just a commonality for language, but also for religion across these regions. And then came along the Semitic wave of religions.
- drivers99 2mo agopretty interesting etymology connecting Dios, Jupiter, Zeus, etc. (Sky Father) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us
- euroderf 2mo agoAnd then there is Tuesday, for the forgotten god.
- OutOfHere 2mo agoMany 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
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- bonoboTP 2mo agoGreat 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 earlier versions etc. etc.
- talideon 2mo agoWell, yeah, but that's like saying that producing a tree of pomaceous fruit hides the fact that citrus fruits exist. (Yes, I did make an apples and oranges joke.)
- bonoboTP 2mo agoThe 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.
- talideon 2mo agoIs it though? It's not as if it can pull in hypothetical superfamilies like Nostratic. It's not saying it's a family tree of all languages, just I-E. Your assumption is that somebody would look at it and forget that Mandarin exists, or Arabic, or Finnish, &c. I don't buy that. Hence my fruit joke. I'm not sure exactly what you expect them to do to avoid an egregious misreading by somebody spectacularly smoothbrained, because anyone with that mentality isn't going to be paying attention anyway. [Removed my Anatolian criticism: I just hadn't zoomed in enough!]
- bonoboTP 2mo agoNo, I understand that people would know that Chinese existed far away. My point is that locally, PIE had neighbors, had variants, dialects, it had earlier forms, it was like a living language in a normal human context. Maybe your brain works differently. I had this kind of misconception, imagining languages to be Pangea-like. That there used to be less linguistic diversity, there was a big uniform language (and perhaps a handful of others far away on the Earth) that later on fractured. But reality is more dynamic. PIE was just an ordinary language. And there was likely more linguistic diversity than today, due to less communication and travel opportunities and geographical features being more isolating.
- joshdavham 2mo agoBefore seeing this page, I had always assumed that PIE was a lot older. It’s amazing how much linguistic development has occurred in ~6,500 years!
- bonoboTP 2mo agoI 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.
- kzrdude 2mo agoI just think, look at how much happens in a generation or two right now. No wonder languages can change quickly.
- joshdavham 2mo agoI 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.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoAlso 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.
- tealmoonx 2mo agoMany 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 going on intellectually.
- stevula 2mo agoPossibly 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.
- SetTheorist 2mo agoI 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.
- amriksohata 2mo ago[flagged]
- sajithdilshan 2mo agoInteresting, northern India and southern Sri Lanka ended up with Indo-European languages. However, southern Indian and northern Sri Lanka ended up speaking a completely different language family. I wonder how that happened.
- oofabz 2mo agoThe Indo-European speakers invaded from the north. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations
- rirze 2mo agoThat 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)
- edgyquant 2mo agoCould it be that Sri lanka is an island
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo agoSri Lanka's been inhabited for over 100k years.
- anon291 2mo agoSri Lanka only became an island like 500 years ago. It was a storm in 1480 that disconnected the passable land bridge that once connected it to mainland India.
- akshitgaur2005 2mo agoThere is a difference between invasion and migration though, AIT has long been debunked, the current consensus is AMT
- skor 2mo agoAny ideas where Basque may fit in?
- kzrdude 2mo agoIt's believed that basque is a remnant of earlier people before agriculture and indo europeans arrived.
- KK7NIL 2mo agoBasque is not an Indo-European language:)
- mahboi 2mo agoThere's a weird number of shared words between Basque and old Armenian, also names of places. But I've only seen random articles trying to link the two, not real scientific papers.
- sbassi 2mo agowhat is the size of the circle?
- LawnGnome 2mo agoI think for the living languages it's speakers (on a log scale, presumably).
- aanet 2mo agoInteresting 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 2mo ago[deleted]
- lloda 2mo agoI miss a control to rotate the circular plot (?)
- euroderf 2mo agoAnyone 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.
- stickerpack350 2mo agoThere 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?
- lynguist 2mo agoYeah... 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.
- bonoboTP 2mo agoSprachbund is a key term.
- truekonrads 2mo agoCool 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”.
- SetTheorist 2mo ago? They are not classified as "proto". The "Proto-Baltic" label is clearly attached to the knot 2 "levels" closer to the center.
- singularity2001 2mo ago4000 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
- EdwardDiego 2mo agoQuick 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.
- mrbukkake 2mo agoMassive controversy in historical linguistics, singularity2001 on hacker News doesn't buy the age of proto-Indo-European
- stevula 2mo agoGreek 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.
- _yy01 2mo agoThe "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).