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.
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.
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.
It 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.
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.
Yiddish 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).
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's not a clean inheritance but lots of linguistic contact and negotiation.
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.
PIE was never a single language. There was significant linguistic diversity. PIE is just what we call their roots in aggregate. It is a conceptual reconstruction.
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 going on intellectually.
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.
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.
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.
the story of how the sinhalese got there is told in the Mahavamsa a Buddhist pali take that recounts the story of prince Vijaya fleeing his kingdom in mainland India and arriving in sri lanka.
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
There'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.
Anyone 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.
There 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?
Yeah... 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.
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”.
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
The "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).
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 24.9 ms ] threadThere 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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).
> 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).