Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • 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.
    by sajithdilshan
  • The "lord's prayer" in Vedic sounds very out of place due to the choices of inflected forms and some stems even reminiscent of classical Sanskrit.

    Without going into depth of that, here's something actually more inspiring (actual excerpt from Rig Veda).

        tvā́m ugrám ávase carṣaṇīsáhaṃ rā́jan devéṣu hūmahe

    víśvā sú no vithurā́ pibdanā́ vaso amítrān suṣáhān kr̥dhi
    > We call for help, the fierce, ruler of clans of men, king of Gods (Indra)

    > All of us that is weak, strengthen it. Make the enemies easy to subdue

    (The acute accent is an udatta - high pitch, vedic is a pitch accented language. I would expect IAST with accents, not whatever randomly capitalised things it threw at me).

    by _yy01
  • Yeah... But it's not fully true to use a tree shape. Languages have "horizontal gene transfer" as well (some call it "extensive contact" or whatever), and the branches come in and out more easily than what the prescriptive method shows.

    Same for actual speciesation, on every level. On homo species, on any other species, even all the way down to the origin of eurcaryota, it's all a network. The tree was never the correct model, just a "neat" model.

    by lynguist
  • 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.
    by bonoboTP
  • Cool. Looks good. But on Android Chrome the 'about' box covers the entire map, and the timeline slider is in the way too.
    by ahazred8ta
  • 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.
    by erminpour
  • 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.

    by aanet
  • 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.

    by flohofwoe

Explore Birbla archives