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19 comments to "The Language Tree"

phil
February 5th, 2008 at 7:14 am
seems slightly inaccurate to me. for instance, this diagram doesn’t take into account the obvious influence of french on modern english.
silfo
February 5th, 2008 at 7:32 am
Portuguese is forgotten as well, it seems. It should have been put in the Latin branch…
phil
February 5th, 2008 at 8:18 am
fascinating linquistic factoid: of the common modern european languages, Hungarian and Basque are not connected to indo-european at all.
Sid Morrison
February 5th, 2008 at 8:38 am
I noticed Portugeuse was absent — that’s a huge one to forget considering how many people speak it (especially Brazil). I’m guessing it was a (major) oversight.

As for the influence of French… Yes, modern languages take influence from each other. English has many words that got in via the Norman invasion (& change of court) 1000 years ago. And, there is a ton of Latin as well that came in mostly during the Elizabethan era. While there are many many words that come from Latin, no one considers English a Romance language….

I think trees like this are trying to show long term slow evolution of a language’s roots without sudden changes from large scale immigration. Hence, English is more related to German than French. It often helps if you compare very simple common words, rather than the complex ones which get imported directly.

Discerning what evolved from what is a tough and probably nebulous call to make in a lot of cases, but that’s what linguistics gurus do to earn their huge cash and worldwide fame.
Dan Henderson
February 5th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Finnish is missing. I understand it’s related to Hungarian, which was previously noted as absent.
Ryan
February 5th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Dan: Finnish is Finno-Ugric, just like Hungarian; Northern Sámi, Estonian, Karelian. They’re not on this tree since they are not Indo-European, although theories point to Proto-Finno-Ugric as being closely related to Proto-Indo-European. I’ve heard evidence cited being along the lines of 1st and 2nd person pronouns being similar, as well as verb suffixes involving those:

English: I, me, my; I am. You, your (thou). You are/Thou art.
Finnish: minä, minun; Minä olen. sinä, sinun; sinä olet.

Most of Indo-European languages show some sort of nasal consonant as 1st person, and some sort of ‘dental’/alveolarish consonant for 2nd person, so we have those in the above example, as well as these other 1st person pronouns:

1st Person

French: je, me
Spanish: yo, mi
German: ich, meine (sp?)
Russian: ja, menja (excuse the transliteration)
Swedish: jag, mig/min/mitt

2nd Person:

French: tu
Spanish: tu
German: du
Russian: ty
Swedish: du

Mysterious, right? Anyway, there’s probably more evidence for such a relation, but I’m not going to try to list it exhaustively. Basic point: Finnish and Hungarian are not I.E. languages.
Ryan
February 5th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Also, I should probably comment, I don’t really know all that much about Indo-European languages, so much as Uralic/Finno-Ugrian languages. Even then, I’m pretty much Hooked on ‘Finnics’ (lulz, couldn’t resist).

Finnic first person pronouns look like: minä/mä, mie, ma, mun, mon

Finnic second person pronouns: sinä/sä, šie, sa, don, ton

Also, some cursory googling lead me to: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=indo-uralic&btnG=Search

Hmmmm…
su.wei
February 5th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
i dont know how accurate this is…but it’s fascinating nonetheless
Radmila
February 6th, 2008 at 4:12 am
What about Macedonian language? Where is Macedonian language?
witofatwit
February 6th, 2008 at 6:38 pm
I would like to point out that Portuguese is not mentioned most likely because it is so similar to Spanish. To the point where I as a Portuguese speaker can understand Spanish. In fact, I have a harder time understanding some dialects of Brazilian Portuguese. I would compare it is the difference between Afrikaans and Dutch.
Dypok
February 6th, 2008 at 9:24 pm
I’d love to see where Asian, Native American and African languages are in relation to this. Anyone know of a larger tree?
Jeremy
February 6th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
I may come across as a complete linguistics neophyte by asking this question… but I thought English, Scottish, and Irish were all just about the same language. Why are they on completely different branches?
Sid Morrison
February 7th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Jeremy-
It’s a good question. Whilst almost people in Scotland and Ireland are able to speak English, that was only the result of a few hundred years of “gentle persuasion” on the part of the English.

The native languages of Ireland and Scotland are *completely* different from English and generally not very mutually intelligible. Scotland actually has 2 native languages, “Scots” (or “Lowland Scots”) and “Scottish Gaelic”, which is more highland in origin. Scots is distantly related to English on a very ancient basis and is thus a Germanic language as well. Scottish Gaelic, in contrast, is related to “Irish” (or “Irish Gaelic”, often confusingly called just “Gaelic” ) and also Manx, another Gaelic language from the Isle of Man. All are in the Celtic branch, as the diagram shows, and are rather removed from English, German, Dutch, and other Germanic langauges.

If you google around you can find some sound bites (even internet radio stations) of people speaking Irish Gaelic. If you’ve never heard it, it’s probably completely unrecognizable (and very cool). I applaud the efforts for Irish speakers to continue to promote the recovery of their language — losing it would be a tremendous loss of their history and culture. It’s but a minority of the Irish population that speaks Irish daily, but there are pockets of the country where it is the #1 language (although they can speak English also). The situation is a lot worse for Scottish Gaelic and Manx unfortunately…

Sid “9/32 Irish” Morrison
Jeremy
February 7th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
Sid,
Thanks for the education. It was very informative and fascinating. I think it would be great if someone did some sort of flash animation showing different parts of the world and how languages migrated and mutated as time went on.
Jay
February 7th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Yeah like Phil said… the reality is way more complex.
English inherits from many of those and even at it’s core… it takes a lot from Old and Modern French. France itself was a vast melting pot, took from many sources… and became the original “Lingua franca” and in return influenced those languages back. Much like modern English today.
English’s core comes from Germanic roots but much of the vocabulary is from old French, when not directly Latin.
Robert Beard
February 14th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
I would like to know who owns the PIE tree on this page (language.jpg). I would like to use it on my website and would be happy to recognize the artist.
yayo
February 24th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Where’s portuguese? it should be next to Spanish and French as a romanic language…
kaylee
June 26th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I have a paper copy of this diagram and the heading reads “The Indo-European Language Family (449 languages)”

I think, therefore, Portugese will find itself quite happily in one of the many smaller twigs.
Kamili
August 8th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
halllllllloooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!
Where is one of the old languages???
The A L B A N I A N language?

You must do this.ok

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