Astro Hacker News - The Indo-European Family Tree

flohofwoe |next [-]

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 Bavarian earned its own spot because it has the most speakers.

sajithdilshan |next |previous [-]

Interesting, 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.

bonoboTP |next |previous [-]

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 earlier versions etc. etc.

talideon |root |parent [-]

Well, 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 |root |parent [-]

The 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.

ahazred8ta |next |previous [-]

Cool. Looks good. But on Android Chrome the 'about' box covers the entire map, and the timeline slider is in the way too.

erminpour |next |previous [-]

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.

benbreen |root |parent |next [-]

My 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.

ahazred8ta |root |parent |previous [-]

English: God gave us teeth; God will give us bread.

Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos.

Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.

talideon |root |parent [-]

And a fun extra one is that Lithuanian "gobti" is cognate with English "give"!

joshdavham |next |previous [-]

Before 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 |root |parent [-]

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.

reader9274 |next |previous [-]

Very well organized.

OutOfHere |next |previous [-]

PIE was not just a commonality for language, but also for religion across these regions. And then came along the Semitic wave of religions.

TFNA |root |parent |next [-]

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 a scholarly introduction to the field (not a pop-sci one that is likely to be unreliable by definition) from recent years.

OutOfHere |root |parent [-]

Each descendant subregion of PIE of course imposed its own religious beliefs and local gods. There is no surprise there. The key thread of derivative localized polytheism, often rooted in the same nature-based phenomenon, however persisted across the regions.

Refer to the sibling comment by drivers99. Sky god is not a vague lexeme; it is a critical rooting evidence. You're fooling no one by attempting to cover it up. A shallow dismissal of valid evidence is an attribute of a conman.

The Indo-Iranian branch of religion connects directly to the PIE religion via the commonality in their religious poetry, rituals, myths, rituals, and words. The Greek branch connects similarly.

TFNA |root |parent [-]

I am an actual Indo-Europeanist and currently employed in the field. Please stop trying to oversell this. The sibling comment is referring to the aforementioned vague lexemes, too vague for much reconstruction of anything meriting being called a common IE religion. Earlier work by scholars like Dumézil, which are common to pop-sci shit and still hang on here and there on Wikipedia, are generally discussed within the field now as cautionary tales.

No one has any problem with reconstructing some branch-level stuff like Italic or Indo-Iranian. But projecting it back to even Nuclear/Core Indo-European, let alone Proto-Indo-European, is too fraught with problems.

muststopmyths |root |parent [-]

would you recommend a more recent book comparable to "Empires of the Word" by Nicholas Ostler on the subject of languages ? I am really enjoying the book, but it's over 20 years old at this point. I wonder how much of the information is out of date now.

drivers99 |root |parent |previous [-]

pretty interesting etymology connecting Dios, Jupiter, Zeus, etc. (Sky Father)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us

tealmoonx |next |previous [-]

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amriksohata |previous [-]

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