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flohofwoe 3 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
bonoboTP 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
talideon 2 hours ago [-]
Is 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 2 hours ago [-]
No, 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.
xhevahir 34 minutes ago [-]
The tree is used to show species, too, but I can't see anyone looking at one and imagining that some weird reptile-looking thing is the pure essence of mammal. Some people are prone to getting bad ideas about ancestry (the Nazis' search for an Aryan homeland is an example) but you can hardly blame illustrations like this.
bonoboTP 10 minutes ago [-]
I think it's very hard to imagine what others imagine because these things aren't verbalized. It's assumptions about fundamental "how the world works" things. You can see a figure and form an assumption that you never verbalize and don't even notice that you formed an assumption.
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.
ahazred8ta 19 hours ago [-]
Cool. Looks good. But on Android Chrome the 'about' box covers the entire map, and the timeline slider is in the way too.
vova_hn2 31 minutes ago [-]
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.
erminpour 21 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
georgeburdell 55 minutes ago [-]
It 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
ahazred8ta 19 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
And a fun extra one is that Lithuanian "gobti" is cognate with English "give"!
redhed 57 minutes ago [-]
Another cool one, Svet in Russian and Schwet in Hindi, both meaning white/light and both being in names (Svetlana, Shweta)
sajithdilshan 2 hours ago [-]
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.
44 minutes ago [-]
oofabz 2 hours ago [-]
The Indo-European speakers invaded from the north.
There is a difference between invasion and migration though, AIT has long been debunked, the current consensus is AMT
rirze 45 minutes ago [-]
That 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 30 minutes ago [-]
Could it be that Sri lanka is an island
lloda 36 minutes ago [-]
I miss a control to rotate the circular plot (?)
joshdavham 3 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
kzrdude 1 hours ago [-]
I just think, look at how much happens in a generation or two right now. No wonder languages can change quickly.
skor 2 hours ago [-]
Any ideas where Basque may fit in?
kzrdude 1 hours ago [-]
It's believed that basque is a remnant of earlier people before agriculture and indo europeans arrived.
KK7NIL 1 hours ago [-]
Basque is not an Indo-European language:)
sbassi 1 hours ago [-]
what is the size of the circle?
LawnGnome 47 minutes ago [-]
I think for the living languages it's speakers (on a log scale, presumably).
reader9274 3 hours ago [-]
Very well organized.
OutOfHere 3 hours ago [-]
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 3 hours ago [-]
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.
cmrdporcupine 1 hours ago [-]
Maybe tangential (and I agree with you), but “religion” is also a misleading word for many of the practices that Christianity later grouped together as “paganism.”
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)
OutOfHere 2 hours ago [-]
The "PIE religion" is the name scholars give to the religious pool that is partially reconstructed from the overlapping evidence (poetry+rituals+myth+gods+vocabulary) of its descendants.
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.
TFNA 2 hours ago [-]
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 2 hours ago [-]
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.
TFNA 1 hours ago [-]
I don't recommend any books written for the general public. Too full of compromises, oversimplifications, and obsolete ideas. I can only recommend learning the field through the same course materials used in training the next generation of researchers. Of course, this is a very large time commitment.
cmrdporcupine 56 minutes ago [-]
Honestly David Anthony's book ("Horse Wheel Language") is pretty good, no? Maybe a bit dry for "general public"? Also a bit old at this point?
OutOfHere 2 hours ago [-]
The problem with "scholars" when it comes to religion, unlike just for languages, is that scholars often are ideologically biased by the pro-Semitic chain of religion which would have a vested interest in suppressing PIE religious history. For thousands of years, even the local PIE-derived religions were unfairly dismissed as paganism. You'd have more luck talking to an LLM about it, as it's more likely to independently know the full picture, and hasn't yet been brainwashed by "scholars" into asserting otherwise. An LLM can trivially pull together bits of evidence across all of world history. At the very least, consider the shared cgpt chat with ID 6a7e0d45-0478-83ea-8142-8172433fad21.
stereolambda 32 minutes ago [-]
Just out of sympathy cause I think there's a legitimate root to the religious point. Your epistemology comes across as extremely weak, with believing LLMs over scholars, and discriminating which scholars are legitimate based on agreeing with your beliefs. It would pay to at least familiarize yourself with the arguments of the other side, suspending in your mind the whole partisan angle.
Honestly I don't think anyone actually powerful nowadays cares one bit about "PIE" religions. What could be happening is some revisionism relying on conveniently selective standards of rigor to bury other scholars. As this is a field famously relying on unclear and very messily transmitted evidence; and these kinds of problems are a very weak point of the humanities overall. But I don't follow this debate at all, so don't have a formed opinion.
drivers99 3 hours ago [-]
pretty interesting etymology connecting Dios, Jupiter, Zeus, etc. (Sky Father)
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.
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.
(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.
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 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
Lithuanian: Dievas davė dantis; Dievas duos duonos.
Sanskrit: Devas adadat datas; Devas dat dhanas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migrations
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)
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.
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)
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.
Honestly I don't think anyone actually powerful nowadays cares one bit about "PIE" religions. What could be happening is some revisionism relying on conveniently selective standards of rigor to bury other scholars. As this is a field famously relying on unclear and very messily transmitted evidence; and these kinds of problems are a very weak point of the humanities overall. But I don't follow this debate at all, so don't have a formed opinion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/*Dy%C4%93us