I’ve created a huge tree to show the relationship between 64 living Indo-European languages, and many dead or extinct ones.
With this template I’m planning on making a series of images to show how various words in these languages have shared etymologies. This is the first image in that series: words for “name”.
If it doesn’t look HD, try clicking on it to open the image in a new window.
Understanding this image
Moving into the image from the outside we travel back in time, until we reach the core of the image, wherein lies Proto-Indo-European. PIE was spoken somewhere around the border of Europe and Asia, and diverged into the 10 inner Proto languages shown here 4500+ years ago. How far into the image a language is doesn’t necessarily correspond to an exact age of the language.
Limitations of an image like this
All the missing languages
There are about 380 Indo-European languages missing from this image, although I’ve tried to pick representatives from as many branches as possible. The Indo-Iranian branch is by far the largest, accounting for around two thirds of Indo-European languages.
Apologies to all the languages I’ve missed. Maybe one day I’ll make some vast and intricate image with several hundred languages, but this is plenty big enough for now.
I’ve also had to miss many intermediate steps, such Middle English, Old French etc., to avoid cluttering the image too much.
Reconstructions
Earlier languages show asterisks * next to words, to show that these words are not recorded in any historical text, but rather reconstructed based on the later languages. While for the most part the evidence for these reconstructions is often pretty strong, historical linguistics is an evolving discipline, and with new discoveries and ideas these may change slightly.
Connections between branches
There are proposed groupings of some of the earliest languages in the tree, such as a Italo-Celtic or Graeco-Phrygian, but these are not widely accepted by linguists, and there is a lot of debate about the wider relationships between Indo-European branches.
What even is a language
There is no set definition of the word “language”, and I’ve had to make some choices about what I show as an independent language, and what I decide are dialects of one language. Since how languages and dialects are defined often has a political nature, some of these decisions will probably be unpopular with some people. For the most part I’ve tried my best to stick to the groupings used by the majority of the linguistic community. So while it might have been more diplomatic to keep closely related varieties like Hindi/Urdu or Serbian/Croatian as distinct, I’ve grouped them and freed up some space for more clearly district languages.
Old Church Slavonic
One slightly misleading thing about my image is the placement of Old Church Slavonic, the oldest attested Slavic language. I’ve shown it as the ancestor of the South Slavic languages, but the truth is a bit more complex. OCS is really a standardised, formalised version of the eastern dialect of the ancestor of the South Slavic languages. It’s kind of tricky to show something like that in an image like this, so I’ll settle for explaining it here. I wanted to include OCS, and this seemed like the best way to do it.
Words for name
Why I picked ‘name’
I’ve thought about making this image, specifically about the words for “name”, for a long time.
There are a few reasons “name” works really well in an image like this:
- The /n/ and /m/ sounds are some of the most stable and well conserved across many languages. They mostly just evolve into each other, if at all. This means the words in this image are often very similar: despite many thousands of years and miles between them, English “name” and Gujarati “nām” remain startlingly close.
- The word for “name” is such a core word in any given language that it is less likely to be borrowed or to mutate into some other meaning.
- Because the word is so fundamental, it is often attested even in languages for which we have fairly limited records, like Gaulish or Archaic Irish.
Why Baltic is different.
There is only one group of languages a on my tree that haven’t retained this word, and those are the Baltic languages. This is shown by that family being greyed out, and their words being in red. Somewhere along the way, the East Baltic languages (Lithuanian and Latvian) replaced their word for “name” with a word derived from the Baltic word for “word”, *wardas. *wardas is ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *werdʰh₁om, which is the of English “word”. Meanwhile an extinct West Baltic language not on my image, Old Prussian, retained a word for “name” related to the other languages: “emnes”.
Non-IE borrowings
In the bottom left of my image I’ve also shown some non-Indo-European languages that have borrowed a word for “name” from Sanskrit. In some cases this is not the main word for “name”, but a formal or secondary word, sometimes also with the meaning “noun”. The English word “noun” happens to also be related to “name”, coming from Latin “nōmen”.
A Uralic connection?
One of the most intriguing parts of my image is hidden away in the bottom left corner.
The Uralic language family includes Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian, 3 of the few European languages that are not Indo-European. But although Uralic is widely regarded as its own separate language family, these language have really similar words for “name” as the IE laguages, reconstructed in Proto-Uralic as *nime.
The reason for this similarity is a mystery.
There are a few possibilities. It could be a coincidence; it could be a very early borrowing from an Indo-European language into Proto-Uralic; or it could be evidence that the Uralic and Indo-European languages are themselves just branches of a larger family. The Indo-Uralic hypothesis is disputed amongst linguists, as there isn’t enough evidence to make any conclusive claims about it. But when a claim is made, *h₁nómn̥/*nime is often sited as evidence.
It should perhaps be noted that several other Northern Eurasian languages have kind of similar words for “name”: Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan *nənnə, Proto-Yukaghir *ńu:, and Proto-Japonic *na (whence Japanese 名前 “namae”). With /n/ and /m/ being such well preserved sounds, is it possible that this word contains a subtle clue to a greater grouping of languages, all but buried by vast eons of time? We may never know.
Supporting Starkey Comics
So there you go, my first image in what will hopefully end up as a fascinating series showing the relationship between Indo-European words. Next I think I’d do words for “tongue/language”, then maybe words for numbers, family members etc.
So make sure to give my facebook page a follow for future images.
I share everything I make on my facebook page, often before I get round to sharing it here on my site.
If you enjoy content like this and would like to help fund and motivate my work, I’d massively appreciate a donation to my Patreon account. As a solo creator with a deep hatred of ads, my Patrons are the only income I receive for my Starkey Comics stuff, and without them I’d find it harder to justify just how much of my time and effort I put into images like this one.