My newest image using this template, here’s the word for “tongue” in 64 living Indo-European languages, and a bunch of dead ones.
If it doesn’t look HD, try clicking on it to open the image in a new window:
This is my second image in this style. For the previous one, in which I go into some details about the limitations of an image like this, check out Indo-European Words for Name.
To give a quick summary: there are around 450 living Indo-European languages and many more dead ones, so my image can’t include all of them. So sorry if your native languages/favourite language is missing, but if I tried to include every language this image would take 10 times longer and only be readable with a microscope.
Words for tongue
Why ‘tongue’ is interesting
Core vocabulary, such as body parts, tend to be well conserved across languages. Tongue is an interesting example because it commonly carries the secondary meaning of “language”. In fact the English words “tongue” and “language” are related, with “language coming from Latin “lingua”.
The ‘lick’ influence
Three separate branches of this family have undergone in interesting shift: their initial sound for this word changed into an /l/. Lithuanian, Armenian, and Latin all share this evolution. The suspected cause is the influence of the word “lick”, a very which is obviously very connected to “tongue”.
So very early Latin “dingua” was possibly influenced by “lingō” (to lick) to give us “lingua”
The Proto-Armenian word for tongue shifted to լեզու/lezu under influence of լիզեմ/lizem (to lick).
Proto-Balti-Slavic *inźūˀ became “insuwis” in Old Prussian, but “liežuvis” in Lithuanian, under the influence of “liẽžti” (to lick).
Lingō, լիզեմ/lizem, and liẽžti are all related to the English “lick”, from PIE *leyǵʰ- (to lick).
Unrelated words for ‘tongue’ in this family
A number of languages on my image have their words for tongue written in red, to show that they have words for tongue which are unrelated to the rest of the image. Some examples:
Greek: γλώσσα / glóssa. This is the origin of English “glossary”. The ultimate etymology of this is unknown.
Albanian: gjuhë. Ultimately thought to be from PIE *golso, which is also the origin of many Slavic and Germanic words related to speech, such as Russian nго́лос/gólos (voice) and English “call”.
Latvian: mēle. This is from Proto-Baltic *mel-, which is from Proto-Indo-European *melh₂- (to crush or grind). This is the origin of English “mild”, “meal”, “mould’, as well as the name of Thor’s hammer, “Mjǫllnir”.
There is also some debate over if the words in the Indo-Aryan languages on the left of this image are actually related.
The idea is that the words went something like:
dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s → dn̥ȷ́ʰwáHs → diȷ́ʰwáHs → ȷ́iȷ́ʰwáHs → *ȷ́iȷ́ʰwáH.
But these aren’t typical sound changes from PIE to Proto-Indo-Aryan, it’s been suggested that an origin in PIE *ǵʰewH- (to invoke) is more consistent.
Conclusion
So there you go, my second image in this series showing the shared origin of Indo-European words. Next I’m thinking about doing some images showing the shared origins of words for numbers.
Don’t forget to look at Indo-European Words for Name, a very similar image about another fascinating family of related words.
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