The Indo-European Family Tree
djbinder.com
djbinder.com
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.
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.
Also note that the emphasis in the above terms is on the letter e, not on the o - "kočévsko".
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.
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.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bavarian_language#Geographical...
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
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.
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.
Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos.
Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.
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
There are reconstructed languages loosely based on proto Indo European. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambahsa ## https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantean_language ## https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uropi
Not to mention the verbs. Truly wild stuff to think no one noticed.
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.
(Yes, I did make an apples and oranges joke.)
[Removed my Anatolian criticism: I just hadn't zoomed in enough!]
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.
These PIE charts do suggest a message that humanity was kinda more unified, or humans (or these regions) were still one big family at that time, all spoke PIE (again, except for faraway places), and it later fragmented.
I'm not saying that this website is bad or should be changed. I'm adding extra info, that sure it's useful, and it should be enjoyed with the knowledge that PIE was one normal language among many, existed in flux, did normal exchange of vocabulary etc with other neighboring languages, most of which are much less knowable compared to PIE. Europe used to be populated by non-Indo-European languages. In Greece, a lot of the -nthos words are likely borrowings from such a non-Indo-European language that was spoken there before Proto-Greek.
Maybe it's the curse of knowledge if you know all this. But I think the average person doesn't really have a reasonable mental map about any of this.
And crucially it's not just other IE-adjacent languages but the Pre-IE substrate. So many Greek words are inherited from the mysterious languages that were there before, of which we only know through the marks they left on ours.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derive...
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.
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
> 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).
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)
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 apologia.
Source: Edwin Bryant in https://archive.org/details/EdwinBryantLauriePattonIndoAryan...
The northern folks, the tamils are there because sri lanka used to be physically connected to Tamil nadu in recent history, like just a few centuries ago
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Where these practices often differed strongly from Christianity was that they were not totalizing, overarching, mandatory systems of belief. They were more about practices embedded in daily and civic life -- sacrifices, festivals, acts of veneration, etc. -- than about belief or internal mental state (“Whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”). They were also generally quite willing to incorporate gods, heroes, and practices from other peoples encountered along the way.
IMHO, exclusive, universal, doctrinally policed religion developed partly through the interaction of monotheistic traditions with imperial states, which had strong reasons to standardize institutions and identities; although neither Rome nor the caliphates ever achieved simple religious homogeneity.
(And yeah, clearly there's a lot of commonality between many of the cultures derived from early Indo-European migration etc but also incredible diversity and very clear adaptations to wherever they ended up and who they ended up co-existing with)
Yes, they were not not overarching, mandatory systems of belief, but is not an excuse to dismiss them as religions. The religions were real. After all, we see the same continuing religious beliefs that you noted (sacrifices, festivals, veneration, etc.) in Hinduism, which traces a direct chain to the 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.
There can be and there often is correlation, but it's not the same thing. They don't have to move together.
It is mathematically true that they don't have to move together, but there are lines of evidence that for PIE they did. For example, there are lots of divinity related words and root words found in the PIE language that then carried forward in various derived languages in distinct geographical regions of Indo-Europe. This is not nothing.
There are even be stories that similarly exist in common. There is the story of slaying the serpent. There is another story of the divine twins. These stories are found everywhere that the PIE culture went.
The third line of evidence is PIE poetic formulas and poetic traditions. These again show up in multiple post-PIE cultures. The local writings show the same mythic structure across cultures. These things are too difficult to explain without a common ancestor culture/religion.
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.
With that said, most historical linguists would probably kill for more data on extinct pre-PIE languages.
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.