Where did this come from and is there a bigger picture? The small print is hard to read.
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Huh. What does it mean in practical terms for the “Uralic” section of the tree to be away from the “Indo-European” one?
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Finno-Ugric are not Indo-European
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“not Indo-European”
Though they just may both be Nostratic…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostratic_languages
Though I’ve never heard of Semitic languages like Arabic or Hebrew belonging to Nostratic and have heard of one version that includes Eskimo-Aleut(!)
There also used to be a theory connecting Finno-Ugric and Dravidian which I liked.
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There is still a huge debate going on about this that has acquired strangely ideological overtones.
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So are the words at the end supposed to be languages or language families? I can tell you that “Deccan” is not a language.
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Well, strictly speaking, neither are many of the other families mentioned in the chart, German contains 7 mutually incomprehensible dialects, modern Italian as we know it is an invented language from the dialects of the Italian peninsula. So
I vote for families.
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Emphasis on North-Germanic and Finno-Ugric languages convincingly proves this was done by a Finnish person. 🙂 I’ve seen these scheme before, and at that time it was clearly attributed to a Finnish person. Whose name I of course not remember…
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It’s by Minna Sundberg, who writes the webcomic Stand Still, Stay Silent – try there for larger versions etc., I think (and to appreciate the reason for the kitties, not that all explanatory charts wouldn’t be improved by the addition of kitties)
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And from the web-comic point of view, the inter-understandability of speakers of Finnish, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic is very important, as it means that several of the main characters can only speak to each other via an intermediary (or mime/guessing/interpretation of actions), which leads to both comedic and dangerous situations…
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Following fluffymog’s post, here’s a link to the original: http://sssscomic.com/comic.php?page=196
It’s a much larger version, and the first paragraph of artist’s comments below it has some explanation on where the information comes from.
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Hebrew was not included, right?
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It’s not an Indo-European language. Yiddish, though, definitely is.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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