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Comments (49)

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  flohofwoe
  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.
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  ahazred8ta
  Cool. Looks good. But on Android Chrome the 'about' box covers the entire map, and the timeline slider is in the way too.
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  bonoboTP
  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.
• aanet
  Interesting 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.
• stickerpack350
  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?
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  erminpour
  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.
• euroderf
  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.
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  sajithdilshan
  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.
• lloda
  I miss a control to rotate the circular plot (?)
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  joshdavham
  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!
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  skor
  Any ideas where Basque may fit in?
• reader9274
  Very well organized.
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  sbassi
  what is the size of the circle?
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  OutOfHere
  PIE was not just a commonality for language, but also for religion across these regions. And then came along the Semitic wave of religions.
• tealmoonx
  [dead]
• amriksohata
  [flagged]