Magnificent Linguistic Family Tree Shows How all Languages are Related.

[elleng]

Linguists often use the tree metaphor to show the historical relationships between languages and how they relate to one another. In a language history course, these trees would most of the time look very simple and informative, but they lack imagination. Minna Sundberg, creator of the webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent, thinks that there is no reason why linguistics should be so visually uninspiring and unimaginative. So, she remapped the languages into one beautiful and magnificent tree that is quite a sight to feast your eyes on.

https://thelanguagenerds.com/2019/feast-your-eyes-on-magnificent-linguistic-family-tree/?

[niyad]

1. KNR and bookmarking. For later. Thank you for sharing this fascinating find.

Thevads, however, were very annoying.

[fierywoman]

2. AHHH!!! So Venetian DOES have Spanish roots!

Every time I'd ask a Venetian about Spanish (linguistic) influence, they'd heatedly deny it.

[DFW]

3. This was very impressive, though with one glaring error

In the sub-diagram where the Scandinavian languages and Finnish are dually listed with their names in their own languages, Norwegian is correctly listed as Norsk, Danish is correctly listed as Dansk, and Swedish is correctly listed as Svenska. However, Finnish is incorrectly listed as Suomi. Suomi is the country (Finland). The language, Finnish, is called Suomea by native speakers. In Finnish, as with Hungarian, the stress is always on the first syllable, and all letters are pronounced, so a Finn would call his/her language "SOO-oh-may-ah." The country is pronounced "SOO-oh-mee."

I noticed also that it translated Icelandic as "Islenska." When I was there, the locals told me it was pronounced "Islensk," although I never learned enough to get well-informed. I was 19 and only there for 3 days with my brother, and we were there to see the sights, not get fluent in the language. Next time!

[elleng]

6. YES, NEXT time, let us know!

[DFW]

7. Next time I'm in Rinkydink, I promise!

[elleng]

8. LOLOL!

Never been there!

[DFW]

11. It has been a while for me, too

Not only Rinkydink. Gulfoss, Geysir and Þingvellir. VERY cool place. Of course, that was 50 years ago. My brother and I stayed at a Salvation Army hostel for $2 a night. High class accommodations!

[ProfessorPlum]

4. cool graphic

but I don't see Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, etc. on the tree. Very cool for this one trunk of languages though!

[elleng]

9. Right, a few extended branches missing, but things to study.

[sl8]

5. 1. Great post and illustration, thanks.

2. It's a few continents shy of illustrating "all" languages.

[DFW]

10. It was pretty close, though

I didn't notice Assyrian listed. Either I missed it, or they don't have their own language any more. They have been around for 4000 years or so, and the Assyrian language that is recognized as such is closest to Aramaic and Hebrew.

I used to hang out with some Assyrians while I was in college in Philadelphia. When I first met them, and asked where they were from, they said, Iran, but they weren't Persians. I asked what then? When they said Assyrians, I thought I hadn't heard right, and said, you mean Syrians? They said no, Assyrians. I couldn't believe it. I asked, "As in Ashurbanipal and ziggurats?" BIG smiles. "So, you HAVE heard of us?" I said of course, I've heard of you. I took ancient history just like everybody else. I just didn't know that you guys had still been around for the last 2000 years!

[elleng]

12. I just didn't know that you guys had still been around for the last 2000 years!

[sl8]

14. Well, close except for the African, (many) Asian, American, & Australian languages.

Good story about the Assyrians, thanks. I haven't met any that I'm aware of.

[DFW]

15. It didn't appear to me that languages not spoken in Europe were intended to be included

That would have required a whole forest, not just one tree

[sl8]

16. Probably so.

In the article, the author makes it clear that this is just a portion of the world's 7000+ languages.

[DFW]

17. Non-European languages that are spoken in Europe were included except for the oldest one

I saw that Finnish and its offshoots as well as Hungarian were listed. They are geographically European, but not linguistically.

Basque was not, and probably correctly so. It is is no way related to the Indo-Iranian languages, or, as far as any linguistics scholar has been able to determine, to anything else. Neuk piskat Euskera aitxutendot (I understand a little Basque). It is so removed from anything else, it is practically its own language group. There are distinctive dialects (Bilbao Euskera is different from what is spoken in Donostia), but they are all equally impossible. I have been in small Guipúzcoa villages where it is still the main spoken language, and it might as well be Martian. Unless you know it, there is no possible way to figure it out.

[wnylib]

18. India is on the tree. There is

a heavy emphasis on Info European language groups, so that could explain the inclusion of India, although some of the listed Indian languages are probably not descendants of Sanskrit.

The OP does say that the tree includes all of the world's languages, yet omits languages from Africa, North and South America, Australia, and Pacific islands.

[Mr.Mystery]

13. All languages probably are NOT related.

That’s the consensus view among most linguists who research these things. It’s possible that all existing languages had one common root language, but the origins of language are too old to know one way or another.

What we do know is that wherever there are humans, they use language. So if humans developed independently of one another, they no doubt had unrelated languages.

Spanish and Italian are related because they both emerged from Latin, Latin and Greek are related because they’re both part of western Indo-European etc.

But that doesn’t mean Chinese is related to English. If they sprang from a common root language, it’s too ancient to tell.

[wnylib]

19. Thanks for pointing that out and saving me the

trouble of trying to explain it.

Every now and then someone claims to have found evidence of a unified source of all language families. None of them hold up when examined by other linguists. The last one that I heard of before this one came from some researchers in Russia, back in the 1980s.