I'm a professional linguist and have taught the story of William Jones dozens of times to undergraduates. Yet I find the 1686 quote by Andreas Jäger astounding: he perceived the outlines, origins, and migrations of the Indo-European family - as well as, even more impressively, the mechanism of language change and differentiation - far more astutely than William Jones, and did it a full century earlier. His quote could easily be from a linguist working today. I'm shocked that, to my recollection, I have never seen mention of Andreas Jäger or his quote in any introductory linguistics text, even ones focused on historical linguistics. I'll be adding it to my curriculum immediately :) Thank you for sharing this fascinating history!
It seems time has forgotten Andreas Jäger. Wikipedia has an article about him only in Italian Catalan and Galician. Time hasn't been kind with him unfortunately
Looks to me like he was the Tesla of linguistics. No doubt if his work was published, interest in Oriental vernaculars would have soared much more earlier than had happened.
A not-so-fun fact I could find about him is that when his views were rejected by the Scientific Community he resigned and became a pastor instead. He came, gave the world an extremely advanced form of the theory, was sidelined, and then became a pastor.
When I was a kid, I learned a bunch of German words and deduced that German must be descended from the same family as English. I told my Dad my theory and he told me that it was dumb and probably not true 😂
I figured out that My dad just has always gotten frustrated or angry when he looses control and understanding of a conversation, because he doesn't really fully comprehend a lot of words.
Isn't it common knowledge that English and German are related? EDIT: Just to clarify, I only blame the father for not knowing this. The child not knowing this is not only understandable but to be expected.
Growing up as a Serbian kid interested in languages I had two huge eureka moments. The first came about when I met a Slovak kid on vacation and we figured out that if we spoke slowly we could understand each other. That was a trip. But nothing compared to what I felt when I kinda figured out Italian. We listened to a whole lot of Italian music in the car and me and my brother just kinda picked up the words from rote repetition. We figured out we could sorta rearrange them and make sentences that still made sense. Obviously we made a bunch of mistakes but that’s besides the point. Anyway my father noticed and asked us to explain how we figured it out. And we just intuitively began using analogies with Serbian. At some point it just clicked how easy it was to explain it like that. I literally got chills and I knew I had figured something out. When I got a computer and internet the first thing I ever searched on google was the serbian connection to Italian. I fell into the rabbit hole and never looked back.
My own eureka moment was when I heard the word surga in Indonesian - which means heaven and is related to the Slavic god Svarog! And I heard it with my own ears as opposed to reading the info! - Adûnâi
@@Samsung-1.9Cu.Ft.Microwave Metatron (Italian youtuber) posted a video on the similarities between Romanian and Italian and it's interesting there are instances when he can understand the whole sentence and then there are instances where he can't understand a single word
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did much more than that. He was the first person to describe motion in terms of energy. Though it must be noted that he did not call the physical quantity "energy", he called it "living force". He is considered one of the most important philosophers ever. He also had interest in psychology. He wrote volumes on politics, history and other social sciences. He was also an important scholar of Chinese civilisation. He believed time to be relative more than 2 centuries before Einstein. He was a diplomat. Truly, one of the greatest geniuses of all time
There were a number of very interesting polymaths at that time. Kant is best known as a philosopher, but also did some contributions to astronomy. Goethe is the most famous German playwright and novelist, but he was also researching geology, optics, and evolution.
Currently learning persian. I told my parents and my father said it is a dialect of Arabic. I told him flatly no, it is more closely related to English than Arabic. He got annoyed and said "I guess my tour of the persian gulf means nothing then?"😅
The old persian words and structures similarity to European languages are very obvious and easy to notice, but due to Islamization of Persia, and Iranians converting to Islam, so many Arabic found their way into persian, and made these two structurally different languages similar to each other.
@@elsurvivor9153 I'm not disputing that, but it is an Indo-European language, not semitic like arabic. The core structure and vocabulary is non arabic.
What amazes me is that Persian demonstrates cognate similarities both to Germanic and Romance languages such as Infinitive both with the suffixes*an and * ar ( Germanic *en , Latin *ar ) Ke, Ku , Kodam, Ki (= Que , Quo , Quodam, Qui in Latin ), Chera ( Quare in Latin ) , Che , Chi , Chun ( Cum in Latin ), Pour ( Puer in Latin ) but Doxtar cognate to Daughter / Tochter in Germanic , ra / re ( re in Latin ) Dast ( Dexter in Latin), Mard ( = Mar in Latin ), Beh ( Bea in Latin ) but Bad in Persian = Bad / Bose in Germanic, Kar ( Guer in Latin ), Pas ( Pax in Latin ), Prefix * Dosh- ( Dis- in Latin) ... , Abrouw ( Eybrow in English ), Nist ( nicht , niet , ...), Budan ( to be), am ( am in English ), Abar ( Uber in Germanic ), the Prefix Fer-/ Far- ( Ver- in Germanic ) , prefix Be- coincide with that of Germanic languages , Prefix Ge-/ geo - ( Germanic Ge-) , Az ( Aus in Germanic ), *Dan - ( *Den - in Germanik = think , know ) the comparatives with ¡tar (-or in Latin, er in Germanic, Behtar ( Better in English ), the negative " Ich" ( modern Persian Hich ) = ikke / ekke in Scandinavian languages , Ja/ Gah ( Geo in Greek ) ...and many many more .
There is a verse in the Rg Veda that speaks of Dasharajanya (or the war of ten kings) where it's mentioned that one of the tribes that lost the war, "Parashua" (which means, a battle axe in Samskrita) was exiled to the "west". "Parashua" sounds oddly similar to Parsa, as the Persians themselves referred to their land. It is also curious how Avestan or old Persian sounds remarkably similar to Samskrita. There is also a Rg Vedic diety called "Dyush Pitr" which sounds remarkably similar to "Deus Patr" or "Jupiter"
from what I've heard the persian gathas also say that they came from a place called Sapta Sindhu - the rig-vedic motherland. If both of our histories agree why are we waiting for western seal of approval?
@@AKumar-co7oe I have two parsi cousins and when I attended their navjot ceremonies, I was surprised to hear words like "Ayushmaan" and "Rakt" in their chants; the navjot ceremony itself is curiously similiar to the thread ceremony done by young boys in India
Battle of the ten kings is dāśarajna-yuddha or दाशराज्ञयुद्ध or simply dāśarajnam (note दाश rather than दश for "ten" because it is a vriddhi form of ten-kings to mean "of the ten kings") which tells of King Sudās, king of Bharatas, aided by Indra who defeats the coalition of ten Aryan kings. There are two Sanskrit words that could be related to the Old Persian word "pārsa" for Persia or Persians: paraśu (परशु) means tree cutter's axe, parśu (पर्शु) meant "rib-bone" (later also meant sickle, possibly being a variant of परशु). The warrior tribe described in the Rc is always referred using the plural form of parśu which is parśavas (पर्शवः). Note however, the Rigveda does not describe history, it is primarily a philosophical text, and these parśavas are maybe not actually referring to Persians or their ancestors. However, I guess it is possible: Rigveda was composed around 1500 BCE, around the same time that Indo-Aryans split from Iranians, so they'd have memory of each other. Interestingly, hymns from Rc can be interpreted historically to imply that the kingdom of Parsu was a place where people had stopped worshipping Indra and describes an event where where its unpopular king is killed in a rebellion.
@@bestcocbaseswithlink5069 no it's a fake theory. We use more sanskrit words than hindi. Plus language has nothing to do it arya. Arya is who studied hindu scripture not a fat white Christian.
@@jagatsimulation nah bro...for example your original language and culture is fundamentally different...you were conquered by indo Europeans and you were gradually hinduized... for example an average indian is more likely to understand russian,italian,spanish,celtic numerals then tamil,telegu, malayalam numerals...even genetic studies prove it
Great video, and thank you. I love how we can infer technology from Proto-Indo-Europeans, such as they having a word for wheel suggests that they had that technology.
@@tfan2222 Good point. I wonder if any Indo-European "Japhetite" civilization had any contact with Sumerian civilization? They probably were already around at that time.
@@ur_You You just contradicted yourself. The literal existence of an entire family of related languages (Indo-European) by definition implies the existence of an ancestor proto-language. While we can only reconstruct PIE based on the comparative method, it's well known that such a language existed at one point (because then what did the Indo-European languages descend from?), even if we will never know what the language was truly like or what its speakers called it
criminally small channel for such a high production value! excellent and in-depth information, you have a radio voice, you should've been using it from the beginning ;)
This one was very interesting. I had read some of the last ones, but I had never seen a collection of all of them, even the early ones. Great job as always.
Its funny because even today as iranic i see a lot of similarity s between iranic and Germanic languages much more than other European branches of indo - European
@@tfan2222 Germanic is closer to Latin than Indo-Iranian languages. A lot of the differences you see from Germanic compared to modern Romantic language is due to grammatical changes that occurred around the 6th-7th century.
@@minutemansam1214 There's a theory that says that those differences between latin and current romance languages existed before the 6th and 7th centuries because in Europe there was a common language massively spoken before Latin and that those languages were very very very influenced by latin just like english but much more but that the inner structure of the language did not change just like english again.
5:13 This is the opening theme for the Paradox's Europa Universalis II game. It brings me lots of memories of me trying to conquer the world in the Modern period, thank you so much for including the title, I have always looked for it.
Witch burnings literally started in the renaissance. This idea that it was “secular” is sort of a load of nonsense. It’s just an axiomatic conflation of modern secularism with all progress in terms of science etc. Because of the reformation there was more religious fervour, conflict and writing than most of the middle ages.
It may be attributed to the popular scientific writing style at the time, but Hearing and reading how William Wotton's and William Jones' prose sounds, it's like I'm both listening to a mix of a Bible passage and a section of any of Charles Darwin's work. Is it just me? You can really feel in that statement the biblically prophetic and scientific discovery looming over the linguistic horizon.
Imo the idea of all languages being traceable back to Hebrew doesn’t even make sense in the Bible. If after the Tower of Babel, God gave people different languages to make them not understand one another, why would he just make them different descendants of the same language? Wouldn’t it make more sense that he made them completely unrelated?
Also doesn't make sense because the whole Hebrew thing starts with Abraham to begin with. Seems like biblical illiteracy. He would've spoken some unnamed ancestor Semitic language related to Hebrew or possibly some proto-Aramaic.
That theory supposedly led Christopher Columbus to take a scholar who spoke Hebrew and Aramaic on his ship. One of the recent films shows him failing to get through to the Caribs.
So the splitting of languages is a symbol for an interconnected world. Like the phrase “we are speaking the same language” to mean we are on the same page. So the scattering of the languages is the breaking of the connection. So the tower story is speaking of the Bronze Age and its collapse not literal languages.
I've always been super interested in this subject, but I had never seen a video or an article explain the story of the indo-european languages so well. thank you so much, I'm Looking forward to your your future videos
What a fascinating, well edited and well marrated piece of edutainment. I am excited to see more of this linguistic/philological type content and information. Fantasticly done
That works for many languages in which the "higher" vocabulary, dealing with science, law, philosophy and theology comes from some learned language like Latin, Greek or Sanskrit. It falls down for Hindi (Hindustani) in which many of the everyday words come from Arabic, and probably led to William Jones's misapprehension that it was related to Arabic. However, it does not use Arabic grammar. It may also be the reason for some people in the past lumping English with the Romance languages. Although it has kept its Germanic grammar, vast numbers of French words were assimilated after the Norman conquest. Persian disappeared from the written record for about a century after the Arab (i.e. Muslim) conquest, and after that a lot of Arabic was incorporated along with the new script. In contrast, Jones's error about Tibetan being related to Sanskrit may have come from looking mainly at religious texts (probably the only texts available then), in which the higher vocabulary came from Sanskrit (directly or via Pali).
Thanks for making this video about the historic of linguistic science. You've made it that much easier for me to go back and find the original sources for it.
Iran is in a really great place, with mountains in the west and east, sea in the south and Desert in the north. Only a really tough empire or outstanding steppe warlord can conquer such a region. It's not like Russia where it's all open until the Urals.
*_I am a kurd living in Sweden and the amount of similar words is astonishing. There is most certainly an Aryan-Germanic connection, a connection closer to that of the Indo-European connection and I believe that the scythians played a part in this._*
I work at University College Oxford, where William Jones studied. The relief seen at 15:16 is actually inside our college chapel, and his portrait is in our dining hall. Thanks for this video!
Thank you for this wonderfully thorough exploration of the development of the Indo-European hypothesis. I'd heard of Jones, but not of the other linguists who preceded him.
One surprising thing I've come to learn is that Kurdish has quite a few cognates with languages in the PIE family, or at least words which are cognates to the PIE roots of words in languages like English or German or any of the Romance languages, with particularly close ties to Persian. Much of Kurdish feels like a closer median between the Indo-European and Indo-Iranian branches, e.g. proto-Iranian would have sounded most similar to modern day Kurdish. This is just an impression I get from having explored Kurdish vocabulary from my dad. I would search for those words in my knowledge of English vocabulary, and more limited knowledge of German vocabulary, and even more repressed memory of Spanish vocabulary, sometimes trying to intuit potential roots that may have more obviously common origins as the Kurdish words my dad presents. It is difficult, however, as there sadly isn't much accessible or comprehensive information on Kurdish and its etymological relations to the other PIE languages.
I only knew of William Jones' contributions as you had mentioned he is the most popular but glad to have learned of the others before him. Great video and excellently produced, hoping to see many more from this channel!
I was under the impression that he was the first one to discover the connection between European languages and the languages of Persia/India because his famous quote is everywhere
Excellent video, my one piece of feedback is that your music probably needs ducking because your VO is pretty deep! It can be a little hard to hear you at some moments. Once again though it’s very high quality otherwise.
Officially hitite and Mittani Sanskrit are the first two recorded Indo European languages. Both cultures live on in many Kurdish tribes. There are also studies that claim gutian as the first Indo European language and people, and that they are proto Kurds and lack any sort of steppe ancestry. The first self proclaimed aryan empire were the Medes, the king of which was called Kurdanshahi Mahig. It is also noted that the Persians landed on Median culture and took on the aryan customs…
11:58 maybe he was referring to a Finnic language that was spoken on the territory modern day Latvia like Livonian? It's quite obvious that Latvian is similar to Lithuanian and very different from Finnic ones.
Says the expert from India. No wonder, all people are descendants of Indians, Out of India Theory, and all language is nothing but bad copies of Sanskrit. The wheel, btw, is known in India for 20 to 50 thousand years. And, and, and…. No comment.
A really great new channel, subscribed! My own eureka moment was when I heard the word surga in Indonesian - which means heaven and is related to the Slavic god Svarog! And I heard it with my own ears as opposed to reading the info! - Adûnâi
Absolutely amazing. Now make a seires of new channels named after language families and release videos just like this one for all of them. I personally would be excited to see one on how someone pieced together that Sinitc and Tibeto-Burman languages were related.
Really interesting video, but I have a small suggestion to make. Dial back the level of music, it's clashing with the level of your voice. Also, even though you had a good selection of classic, I would suggest choosing music that is not so present and articulate because it gets in the way of your exposition and tries to steal the show. A more subdued and linear soundscape, at a lower volume, would be much easier on the ears of the listener. Great video otherwise!
The audio levels changed a lot depending on the volume settings and the device I used to listen, also I outsource the editing so I don't have direct control over the audio mixing but we both tried to figure it out together to the best of our ability, I will definitely keep this in mind for future videos though, thanks for the feedback.
In simple terms and origin, Yamnaya and Corded Ware - Sintashta. Excellent. Video. It’s to see such a video fully dedicated to linguistics and its discovery. Thank you.
It is interesting how many nations that is considered Turkic got intertwined with PIE languages Hunnic, Tatar, Scythian i feel like this supports my idea on Turkic languages being a mix of eurasiatic and indo european families this first came to me when i noticed old turkic first person was very similar to indo europeans especially possesive form
Interesting video but I found the background music at first distracting and then irritating. Please, tone it down. You don't hear that in a lecture hall. I am a professional musician with interests in linguistics and history. I love Bach and Baroque music in general but, please turn it down!
I've been doing linguistics as a hobby for almost a decade now and some things, like language families, are so obvious to me, so much so that I forget how foreign those concepts are to most people. Because of that I get really irritated when every now and then a new video or reel pops up claiming that "sanskrit is the oldest language", or worse, when someone foregoes the evolutionary descent of languages and then marvels at the connection between sanskrit and some of the modern languages (for example serbian) as if that grants the modern language in question some special status via proxy of the special status of the ancient language. (bruh, what a sentence)
@@fica1137 yes, in fact, his real name is Manojlo Nemanjić. he is a Serb, just like his father, God, is. his mother Mary, excuse me, Marija, is serbian as well. while there's some debate whether all the apostles were serbian, it's an undisputed fact that they all spoke serbian fluently and wrote in cyrilic.
maybe Eureka moment but no scientific proofs nor archeological evidences (nor in europe, nor in India): actually archeologist dismissed at all the idea of a 'Doric (indoeuropean) invasion and Indian scientist refused completely the 'indoeuropean' ypothesis (more and more evidences that Sanscrit could be much older than presumed 'indoeuropean' invasions)
Laungeage are essential in the communication....such as pointing out danger.... during evolution of humans , first few words that formed might be to indicate predators such as lion...but tiger is most Jungle habiatd so the first few words may include 🐅 tiger also....so in the sanskrut it has more then 10+ names for tiger ..such as babru,huli,pulaka,kesari,dwipi,vritra,shardula,...the word haul means to the same in sanskrut... which is by the tiger Roar.....and the word tiger comes from the Parisian word Tigris.... which is connected with the Sanskrit word vya-ghra..or vyaghra which means tiger
@@amaduck2132 Finnish is part of the fenno-ugric family, most of the languages are really small, hungarian being the most prominent. The structure and grammar is quite different from other language groups. Lot of borrowed words from Swedish and Russian, naturally. Our claim to fame is Tolkien taking ideas from Finnish for creating the High Elven language.
@@SpartacusSPQ Ugric languages are a Turkic dialect. And etruscans were also a Turkic language. We span whole europe and asia. Some difference is normal but it does not change the fact that they are all coming from same origin.
I remember using the frase anglo-germanic to describe some languages and this older scholar that was a customer of mine look at me like i was dumb and said " english is latin based and not related to German". Bruh
I’ve always found the links between different languages fascinating. As a Teen studying German and seeing the links between English and German naturally, but then in recent years as I learned some Russian and then Ukrainian, being able to see the notable German influence on Ukrainian vocabulary from what I presume would be the Austrians hold on Poland and western Ukraine. Russian didn’t seem to share much with German, but I was fascinated to see links of Ukrainian to German.
Joseph de Maistre (not a linguist) spent about half a dozen pages in his St Petersburg Dialogues (written in 1810s) comparing the unity of metaphors/idioms across different European languages (mostly French, Greek, and Latin), focusing particularly on nature-based concepts like rivers/trees being applied to describe parts of the body. He was an arch-catholic and bit of an archaist (according to him the Ancient Egyptians had discovered the elliptical orbits of planets) and postulated that the unity of phrases/idioms across European languages pointed to an original divine, antediluvian language. He admits fully to being an amateur in linguistics, but I find that line of thought intriguing
What a pleasure to listen to an elegant and clearly pronounced English, reminding me of the language I learned 60 years ago! In addition all non English names of scholars are pronounced close to their original sounding, and not distorted by typical Anglophone misreading!
Wouldn't the true eureka moment be "Grimm's Law," since that was the beginning of the study of Indo-European sound changes, which allowed proto-Indo-European to be scientifically proven and even mostly reconstructed?
I'm a professional linguist and have taught the story of William Jones dozens of times to undergraduates. Yet I find the 1686 quote by Andreas Jäger astounding: he perceived the outlines, origins, and migrations of the Indo-European family - as well as, even more impressively, the mechanism of language change and differentiation - far more astutely than William Jones, and did it a full century earlier. His quote could easily be from a linguist working today. I'm shocked that, to my recollection, I have never seen mention of Andreas Jäger or his quote in any introductory linguistics text, even ones focused on historical linguistics. I'll be adding it to my curriculum immediately :) Thank you for sharing this fascinating history!
It seems time has forgotten Andreas Jäger. Wikipedia has an article about him only in Italian Catalan and Galician. Time hasn't been kind with him unfortunately
Looks to me like he was the Tesla of linguistics. No doubt if his work was published, interest in Oriental vernaculars would have soared much more earlier than had happened.
A not-so-fun fact I could find about him is that when his views were rejected by the Scientific Community he resigned and became a pastor instead.
He came, gave the world an extremely advanced form of the theory, was sidelined, and then became a pastor.
@@erwinheinrichstromer1156 based af
I thought the same! The quote is almost word for word what I have written in my undergrad dissertation
When I was a kid, I learned a bunch of German words and deduced that German must be descended from the same family as English. I told my Dad my theory and he told me that it was dumb and probably not true 😂
How could your dad disagree with Haus and House, Maus and Mouse ????
Perhaps you were destined to be a linguist and your dad squashed that destiny right then and there.
This field truly gives you eureka moments and curiosity at any age!
I figured out that My dad just has always gotten frustrated or angry when he looses control and understanding of a conversation, because he doesn't really fully comprehend a lot of words.
Isn't it common knowledge that English and German are related?
EDIT: Just to clarify, I only blame the father for not knowing this. The child not knowing this is not only understandable but to be expected.
Growing up as a Serbian kid interested in languages I had two huge eureka moments. The first came about when I met a Slovak kid on vacation and we figured out that if we spoke slowly we could understand each other. That was a trip. But nothing compared to what I felt when I kinda figured out Italian. We listened to a whole lot of Italian music in the car and me and my brother just kinda picked up the words from rote repetition. We figured out we could sorta rearrange them and make sentences that still made sense. Obviously we made a bunch of mistakes but that’s besides the point. Anyway my father noticed and asked us to explain how we figured it out. And we just intuitively began using analogies with Serbian. At some point it just clicked how easy it was to explain it like that. I literally got chills and I knew I had figured something out. When I got a computer and internet the first thing I ever searched on google was the serbian connection to Italian. I fell into the rabbit hole and never looked back.
i hope you become a linguist! haha
My own eureka moment was when I heard the word surga in Indonesian - which means heaven and is related to the Slavic god Svarog! And I heard it with my own ears as opposed to reading the info!
- Adûnâi
@@angamaitesangahyando685 Indo Iranian etymology of the word Svarog was dismissed there's no link between surga/svarga and Svarog
Had the same moment when I heard Italian from a friend of mine, I'm Romanian.
@@Samsung-1.9Cu.Ft.Microwave Metatron (Italian youtuber) posted a video on the similarities between Romanian and Italian and it's interesting there are instances when he can understand the whole sentence and then there are instances where he can't understand a single word
Leibniz is a legend, doing Calculus and Linguistics at the same time.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz did much more than that.
He was the first person to describe motion in terms of energy. Though it must be noted that he did not call the physical quantity "energy", he called it "living force". He is considered one of the most important philosophers ever. He also had interest in psychology. He wrote volumes on politics, history and other social sciences. He was also an important scholar of Chinese civilisation. He believed time to be relative more than 2 centuries before Einstein. He was a diplomat.
Truly, one of the greatest geniuses of all time
There were a number of very interesting polymaths at that time.
Kant is best known as a philosopher, but also did some contributions to astronomy.
Goethe is the most famous German playwright and novelist, but he was also researching geology, optics, and evolution.
@@prasoonjha1816 my mind is blown
@@Yora21 Don’t you think it was easier being at an obscure time and heir to many resources?
all that whilst being covered in chocolate
Currently learning persian. I told my parents and my father said it is a dialect of Arabic. I told him flatly no, it is more closely related to English than Arabic. He got annoyed and said "I guess my tour of the persian gulf means nothing then?"😅
The old persian words and structures similarity to European languages are very obvious and easy to notice, but due to Islamization of Persia, and Iranians converting to Islam, so many Arabic found their way into persian, and made these two structurally different languages similar to each other.
@@elsurvivor9153 I'm not disputing that, but it is an Indo-European language, not semitic like arabic. The core structure and vocabulary is non arabic.
Just tell him it’s Persia’s contemporary culture that is a dialect of Arabic. 😢. Not the language.
@@user-sc7fk5ys6x all I can say is down with the ayatollahs. ایرانی نیستند
@@adlovett9831this might just be me, but I think the problem with the Ayatollah is that he's a dictator and not that he's ethnically Azeri.
5:32 "Nemçe" is actually a Slavic word, but it was used in Turkish during the Ottoman times.
Njemci - Polish
Njemčka -Serbo-Croatian
@@senatuspopulusqueromanum It's "Niemcy" in Polish
@@senatuspopulusqueromanum
Id est njemačka in Serbo-Croat, amice
It is even borrowed into Hungarian (német), which is related to neither
one of the best videos about the history of the discovery of the indo-european language family tree that I have seen
What amazes me is that Persian demonstrates cognate similarities both to Germanic and Romance languages such as Infinitive both with the suffixes*an and * ar ( Germanic *en , Latin *ar ) Ke, Ku , Kodam, Ki (= Que , Quo , Quodam, Qui in Latin ), Chera ( Quare in Latin ) , Che , Chi , Chun ( Cum in Latin ), Pour ( Puer in Latin ) but Doxtar cognate to Daughter / Tochter in Germanic , ra / re ( re in Latin ) Dast ( Dexter in Latin), Mard ( = Mar in Latin ), Beh ( Bea in Latin ) but Bad in Persian = Bad / Bose in Germanic, Kar ( Guer in Latin ), Pas ( Pax in Latin ), Prefix * Dosh- ( Dis- in Latin) ... , Abrouw ( Eybrow in English ), Nist ( nicht , niet , ...), Budan ( to be), am ( am in English ), Abar ( Uber in Germanic ), the Prefix Fer-/ Far- ( Ver- in Germanic ) , prefix Be- coincide with that of Germanic languages , Prefix Ge-/ geo - ( Germanic Ge-) , Az ( Aus in Germanic ), *Dan - ( *Den - in Germanik = think , know ) the comparatives with ¡tar (-or in Latin, er in Germanic, Behtar ( Better in English ), the negative " Ich" ( modern Persian Hich ) = ikke / ekke in Scandinavian languages , Ja/ Gah ( Geo in Greek ) ...and many many more .
-TH-cam will strike through text if you put a dash before and after it-
@@DavidCowie2022 Thank you for the valuable information , I was wondering why it should have happened .
@@majidbineshgar7156so go and edit your original post so it doesn't happen.
@@EricDMMiller Done .
-Huh-
There is a verse in the Rg Veda that speaks of Dasharajanya (or the war of ten kings) where it's mentioned that one of the tribes that lost the war, "Parashua" (which means, a battle axe in Samskrita) was exiled to the "west". "Parashua" sounds oddly similar to Parsa, as the Persians themselves referred to their land. It is also curious how Avestan or old Persian sounds remarkably similar to Samskrita.
There is also a Rg Vedic diety called "Dyush Pitr" which sounds remarkably similar to "Deus Patr" or "Jupiter"
from what I've heard the persian gathas also say that they came from a place called Sapta Sindhu - the rig-vedic motherland.
If both of our histories agree why are we waiting for western seal of approval?
@@AKumar-co7oe I have two parsi cousins and when I attended their navjot ceremonies, I was surprised to hear words like "Ayushmaan" and "Rakt" in their chants; the navjot ceremony itself is curiously similiar to the thread ceremony done by young boys in India
Battle of the ten kings is dāśarajna-yuddha or दाशराज्ञयुद्ध or simply dāśarajnam (note दाश rather than दश for "ten" because it is a vriddhi form of ten-kings to mean "of the ten kings") which tells of King Sudās, king of Bharatas, aided by Indra who defeats the coalition of ten Aryan kings.
There are two Sanskrit words that could be related to the Old Persian word "pārsa" for Persia or Persians: paraśu (परशु) means tree cutter's axe, parśu (पर्शु) meant "rib-bone" (later also meant sickle, possibly being a variant of परशु). The warrior tribe described in the Rc is always referred using the plural form of parśu which is parśavas (पर्शवः). Note however, the Rigveda does not describe history, it is primarily a philosophical text, and these parśavas are maybe not actually referring to Persians or their ancestors. However, I guess it is possible: Rigveda was composed around 1500 BCE, around the same time that Indo-Aryans split from Iranians, so they'd have memory of each other.
Interestingly, hymns from Rc can be interpreted historically to imply that the kingdom of Parsu was a place where people had stopped worshipping Indra and describes an event where where its unpopular king is killed in a rebellion.
Greeting to all fellow indoeuropeans from Nepal!
Greetings from India!
Greetings from south indian aryan
@@jagatsimulation bruh you are Dravidian, yous have a different language evolution
@@bestcocbaseswithlink5069 no it's a fake theory. We use more sanskrit words than hindi. Plus language has nothing to do it arya. Arya is who studied hindu scripture not a fat white Christian.
@@jagatsimulation nah bro...for example your original language and culture is fundamentally different...you were conquered by indo Europeans and you were gradually hinduized... for example an average indian is more likely to understand russian,italian,spanish,celtic numerals then tamil,telegu, malayalam numerals...even genetic studies prove it
Great video, and thank you. I love how we can infer technology from Proto-Indo-Europeans, such as they having a word for wheel suggests that they had that technology.
Right, and we can also see what they didn’t have, such as writing (as no single word can be reconstructed that means such).
There have no language like Proto-indo-european. It is just a hypothetical imaginary term, it's not reality. There is only Indo-European language
@@tfan2222 Good point. I wonder if any Indo-European "Japhetite" civilization had any contact with Sumerian civilization? They probably were already around at that time.
@@ur_You You just contradicted yourself. The literal existence of an entire family of related languages (Indo-European) by definition implies the existence of an ancestor proto-language. While we can only reconstruct PIE based on the comparative method, it's well known that such a language existed at one point (because then what did the Indo-European languages descend from?), even if we will never know what the language was truly like or what its speakers called it
criminally small channel for such a high production value! excellent and in-depth information, you have a radio voice, you should've been using it from the beginning ;)
Hiring the right narrator has definitely contributed to the quality of the videos.
@@Indo-EuropeanOfficialon top of that your music choice is exceptional. Well done
Phenomenal video. I look forward to seeing this channel grow in the future
I love it when the algorithm pushes you a new channel with interesting content! Subbed!
This one was very interesting. I had read some of the last ones, but I had never seen a collection of all of them, even the early ones. Great job as always.
Its funny because even today as iranic i see a lot of similarity s between iranic and Germanic languages much more than other European branches of indo - European
As a Germanic language speaker, I also agree. I wouldn’t be surprised if Germanic and Indo-Iranian broke off at similar times.
@@tfan2222 Germanic is closer to Latin than Indo-Iranian languages. A lot of the differences you see from Germanic compared to modern Romantic language is due to grammatical changes that occurred around the 6th-7th century.
@@minutemansam1214 There's a theory that says that those differences between latin and current romance languages existed before the 6th and 7th centuries because in Europe there was a common language massively spoken before Latin and that those languages were very very very influenced by latin just like english but much more but that the inner structure of the language did not change just like english again.
I dont gets what funny about it.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 i ment funny not like hilarious and laughable but in means of interesting
5:13 This is the opening theme for the Paradox's Europa Universalis II game. It brings me lots of memories of me trying to conquer the world in the Modern period, thank you so much for including the title, I have always looked for it.
Babe, wake up.
The Indo-European Channel just uploaded a new video...
So happy to have been recommended this. Such a niche interest of mine, so happy to see others as entranced with it all
Very fruitfull, knowledgeable and informative channel. Thank you you so much and keep it up, keep going on !
Omg, new video! Ive been waiting for so long
Phenomenal video. The quotes by Jaeger and Wotton are incredible to me
Amazing video, I'm excited to see the rest in the series~! Thank you for adding your research doc in the description.
Witch burnings literally started in the renaissance. This idea that it was “secular” is sort of a load of nonsense. It’s just an axiomatic conflation of modern secularism with all progress in terms of science etc. Because of the reformation there was more religious fervour, conflict and writing than most of the middle ages.
It may be attributed to the popular scientific writing style at the time, but Hearing and reading how William Wotton's and William Jones' prose sounds, it's like I'm both listening to a mix of a Bible passage and a section of any of Charles Darwin's work. Is it just me? You can really feel in that statement the biblically prophetic and scientific discovery looming over the linguistic horizon.
"Is it just me?" Im just laughing at him calling my language a finic one when its baltic.
Imo the idea of all languages being traceable back to Hebrew doesn’t even make sense in the Bible. If after the Tower of Babel, God gave people different languages to make them not understand one another, why would he just make them different descendants of the same language? Wouldn’t it make more sense that he made them completely unrelated?
The bible is not a history book bro
Also doesn't make sense because the whole Hebrew thing starts with Abraham to begin with. Seems like biblical illiteracy. He would've spoken some unnamed ancestor Semitic language related to Hebrew or possibly some proto-Aramaic.
Plus proof of languages are literally older than the Bible claims the earth is
That theory supposedly led Christopher Columbus to take a scholar who spoke Hebrew and Aramaic on his ship. One of the recent films shows him failing to get through to the Caribs.
So the splitting of languages is a symbol for an interconnected world. Like the phrase “we are speaking the same language” to mean we are on the same page. So the scattering of the languages is the breaking of the connection. So the tower story is speaking of the Bronze Age and its collapse not literal languages.
I've always been super interested in this subject, but I had never seen a video or an article explain the story of the indo-european languages so well. thank you so much, I'm Looking forward to your your future videos
Thank you. Great music and voice are added value to fantastic content.
Abrupt and unexpected ending, honestly. Otherwise a great video. Your channel will blow up
I thought the quote was a nice ending point, but totally fair point. I will consider going with more traditional conclusions for future videos.
@@Indo-EuropeanOfficial I thought the quote was a very good way to end the video, I guess just difference in opinions 😅
What a fascinating, well edited and well marrated piece of edutainment. I am excited to see more of this linguistic/philological type content and information. Fantasticly done
Classical scholar: "We should only compare words for things which are in everyday use."
*Mobile phone advert appears*
That works for many languages in which the "higher" vocabulary, dealing with science, law, philosophy and theology comes from some learned language like Latin, Greek or Sanskrit.
It falls down for Hindi (Hindustani) in which many of the everyday words come from Arabic, and probably led to William Jones's misapprehension that it was related to Arabic. However, it does not use Arabic grammar.
It may also be the reason for some people in the past lumping English with the Romance languages. Although it has kept its Germanic grammar, vast numbers of French words were assimilated after the Norman conquest.
Persian disappeared from the written record for about a century after the Arab (i.e. Muslim) conquest, and after that a lot of Arabic was incorporated along with the new script.
In contrast, Jones's error about Tibetan being related to Sanskrit may have come from looking mainly at religious texts (probably the only texts available then), in which the higher vocabulary came from Sanskrit (directly or via Pali).
This channel is amazing. I can't wait to see what else comes from it.
This work is absolutely incredible and so well researched. I just have to see more stuff like this. You've earned yourself a sub.
Thanks for making this video about the historic of linguistic science. You've made it that much easier for me to go back and find the original sources for it.
a new linguistic channel i've never seen before? hell yeah!
I'd like a list of potential cognates beyond the current primary language families.
Thanks early Indo-Europeans from the Eurasian Steppes for your great language.
Nice work, thanks for did this scientific ode to all genius of global linguistics of all eras.
13:08 there are no diacritics on the Polish numbers here; also, there's a mistake, 2 is dwa, dwie is the nominative feminine adjective form
Great channel, don't give up
To be fair the Persians and the Germans are also known for coming back with huge Empires no matter how many times you tell them not to.
Persians had an empire and Alexander took it down easily. Germans never had an empire.
@@pelasgeuspelasgeus4634 British Empire?
@@f34rbeast32 British had an empire. So what?
Iran is in a really great place, with mountains in the west and east, sea in the south and Desert in the north. Only a really tough empire or outstanding steppe warlord can conquer such a region. It's not like Russia where it's all open until the Urals.
ONLY 630 VIEWS?
it was released today😭💀
100x more after 10 days :)
I read it "ONLY 630 WIVES?"
The video I didn't know I needed. Thank you so much!
*_I am a kurd living in Sweden and the amount of similar words is astonishing. There is most certainly an Aryan-Germanic connection, a connection closer to that of the Indo-European connection and I believe that the scythians played a part in this._*
I work at University College Oxford, where William Jones studied. The relief seen at 15:16 is actually inside our college chapel, and his portrait is in our dining hall. Thanks for this video!
Thank you for this wonderfully thorough exploration of the development of the Indo-European hypothesis. I'd heard of Jones, but not of the other linguists who preceded him.
One surprising thing I've come to learn is that Kurdish has quite a few cognates with languages in the PIE family, or at least words which are cognates to the PIE roots of words in languages like English or German or any of the Romance languages, with particularly close ties to Persian. Much of Kurdish feels like a closer median between the Indo-European and Indo-Iranian branches, e.g. proto-Iranian would have sounded most similar to modern day Kurdish.
This is just an impression I get from having explored Kurdish vocabulary from my dad. I would search for those words in my knowledge of English vocabulary, and more limited knowledge of German vocabulary, and even more repressed memory of Spanish vocabulary, sometimes trying to intuit potential roots that may have more obviously common origins as the Kurdish words my dad presents.
It is difficult, however, as there sadly isn't much accessible or comprehensive information on Kurdish and its etymological relations to the other PIE languages.
I only knew of William Jones' contributions as you had mentioned he is the most popular but glad to have learned of the others before him.
Great video and excellently produced, hoping to see many more from this channel!
I was under the impression that he was the first one to discover the connection between European languages and the languages of Persia/India because his famous quote is everywhere
This channel is amazing! Where did y'all come from??
I got a degree in linguistics w/o learning about how much scholarship preceded the iconic quote from Sir William!
Excellent video, my one piece of feedback is that your music probably needs ducking because your VO is pretty deep! It can be a little hard to hear you at some moments. Once again though it’s very high quality otherwise.
Officially hitite and Mittani Sanskrit are the first two recorded Indo European languages. Both cultures live on in many Kurdish tribes. There are also studies that claim gutian as the first Indo European language and people, and that they are proto Kurds and lack any sort of steppe ancestry. The first self proclaimed aryan empire were the Medes, the king of which was called Kurdanshahi Mahig. It is also noted that the Persians landed on Median culture and took on the aryan customs…
Amazing video, thank you for this
1:05 is this a jojo reference? 🤯
11:58 maybe he was referring to a Finnic language that was spoken on the territory modern day Latvia like Livonian?
It's quite obvious that Latvian is similar to Lithuanian and very different from Finnic ones.
I’d like to see you do a video on the indo European language reconstruction
All thanks to the Yamnayas and their *kóryos messing around with the other regions.
It all begins with Sanskrit.
Says the expert from India. No wonder, all people are descendants of Indians, Out of India Theory, and all language is nothing but bad copies of Sanskrit. The wheel, btw, is known in India for 20 to 50 thousand years. And, and, and…. No comment.
Sure. 😅
@@lowersaxon lol seethe and cope, sanskrit originated in india and spread it's way to eurasia
A really great new channel, subscribed! My own eureka moment was when I heard the word surga in Indonesian - which means heaven and is related to the Slavic god Svarog! And I heard it with my own ears as opposed to reading the info!
- Adûnâi
Absolutely amazing.
Now make a seires of new channels named after language families and release videos just like this one for all of them. I personally would be excited to see one on how someone pieced together that Sinitc and Tibeto-Burman languages were related.
I've never heard of your channel but I love it.
Really interesting video, but I have a small suggestion to make. Dial back the level of music, it's clashing with the level of your voice. Also, even though you had a good selection of classic, I would suggest choosing music that is not so present and articulate because it gets in the way of your exposition and tries to steal the show. A more subdued and linear soundscape, at a lower volume, would be much easier on the ears of the listener. Great video otherwise!
The audio levels changed a lot depending on the volume settings and the device I used to listen, also I outsource the editing so I don't have direct control over the audio mixing but we both tried to figure it out together to the best of our ability, I will definitely keep this in mind for future videos though, thanks for the feedback.
Please just don't have music at all. So distracting
Doesnt really sound like a eureka moment, seems like the idea had been brewing for some time, good vid though
I mean it took a long time tho for people to think there was enough similarities to point to a common origin
In simple terms and origin, Yamnaya and Corded Ware - Sintashta.
Excellent. Video. It’s to see such a video fully dedicated to linguistics and its discovery.
Thank you.
great video ❤ please keep making em, i am really curious about the indo-european family both linguistically and genetically
looks like we got a new goated channel to follow.
i even turned notifications on. this is good stuff
What a fascinating video. Thanks for sharing!
Fine work ! A short history of the Linguistics. Bravo ! A Greek friend, Nikephoros.
waiting for some eureka moment of connecting Tamil to Indus and other living languages
10:42 cuts to guy sitting down 😄
Hey man, great video. Would love more on Indo European history.
15:51 "he made errors" his omission of Slavic languages was "work as designed", not an error
It is interesting how many nations that is considered Turkic got intertwined with PIE languages Hunnic, Tatar, Scythian i feel like this supports my idea on Turkic languages being a mix of eurasiatic and indo european families this first came to me when i noticed old turkic first person was very similar to indo europeans especially possesive form
*_Keep up the cope mongol turk lmao_*
Etruscan is literally a Turkic language.
What a wonderful video!
Wonderful content. Expecting more videos soon.😅
i just realized your the same person who made the heritance timeline videos for germanic and slavic. this is great and i like this format.
Not sure who you are referring to, but thanks for the support.
Great work! Keep it up!
Excellent video
Interesting video but I found the background music at first distracting and then irritating. Please, tone it down. You don't hear that in a lecture hall. I am a professional musician with interests in linguistics and history. I love Bach and Baroque music in general but, please turn it down!
I will try to make sure the audio mix is improved for future videos, thanks for the feedback.
I've been doing linguistics as a hobby for almost a decade now and some things, like language families, are so obvious to me, so much so that I forget how foreign those concepts are to most people. Because of that I get really irritated when every now and then a new video or reel pops up claiming that "sanskrit is the oldest language", or worse, when someone foregoes the evolutionary descent of languages and then marvels at the connection between sanskrit and some of the modern languages (for example serbian) as if that grants the modern language in question some special status via proxy of the special status of the ancient language.
(bruh, what a sentence)
Did you know that Jesus spoke in Serbian
@@fica1137 yes, in fact, his real name is Manojlo Nemanjić. he is a Serb, just like his father, God, is. his mother Mary, excuse me, Marija, is serbian as well. while there's some debate whether all the apostles were serbian, it's an undisputed fact that they all spoke serbian fluently and wrote in cyrilic.
6:43 I go by there often! Stood on that bridge not too long ago
maybe Eureka moment but no scientific proofs nor archeological evidences (nor in europe, nor in India): actually archeologist dismissed at all the idea of a 'Doric (indoeuropean) invasion and Indian scientist refused completely the 'indoeuropean' ypothesis (more and more evidences that Sanscrit could be much older than presumed 'indoeuropean' invasions)
‘increased missionary activity’
Underrated!
9:23 - You might as well call this linguistic Darwinism. Memes long before genes. Astounding insight given the time period.
Very interesting topic, well done ❤
Laungeage are essential in the communication....such as pointing out danger.... during evolution of humans , first few words that formed might be to indicate predators such as lion...but tiger is most Jungle habiatd so the first few words may include 🐅 tiger also....so in the sanskrut it has more then 10+ names for tiger ..such as babru,huli,pulaka,kesari,dwipi,vritra,shardula,...the word haul means to the same in sanskrut... which is by the tiger Roar.....and the word tiger comes from the Parisian word Tigris.... which is connected with the Sanskrit word vya-ghra..or vyaghra which means tiger
Tremendous quality
As a Finn, I feel left out. But being a Finn, I quite enjoy that.
Don't you guys use Turkish or sum ?
@@amaduck2132 Finnish is part of the fenno-ugric family, most of the languages are really small, hungarian being the most prominent. The structure and grammar is quite different from other language groups. Lot of borrowed words from Swedish and Russian, naturally. Our claim to fame is Tolkien taking ideas from Finnish for creating the High Elven language.
@@SpartacusSPQ Ugric languages are a Turkic dialect. And etruscans were also a Turkic language. We span whole europe and asia. Some difference is normal but it does not change the fact that they are all coming from same origin.
The grammer difference is so minor between Turkic and Finnish languages.
I remember using the frase anglo-germanic to describe some languages and this older scholar that was a customer of mine look at me like i was dumb and said " english is latin based and not related to German". Bruh
The background music is making it really hard for me to listen to what you're saying
I like your voice, it fit s with the theme and classical music
I love that viola da gamba soundtrack
Subscribed. Great content
Fuck, only two videos in this channel?
Hurry up, we need the next!!
I’ve always found the links between different languages fascinating. As a Teen studying German and seeing the links between English and German naturally, but then in recent years as I learned some Russian and then Ukrainian, being able to see the notable German influence on Ukrainian vocabulary from what I presume would be the Austrians hold on Poland and western Ukraine. Russian didn’t seem to share much with German, but I was fascinated to see links of Ukrainian to German.
Joseph de Maistre (not a linguist) spent about half a dozen pages in his St Petersburg Dialogues (written in 1810s) comparing the unity of metaphors/idioms across different European languages (mostly French, Greek, and Latin), focusing particularly on nature-based concepts like rivers/trees being applied to describe parts of the body.
He was an arch-catholic and bit of an archaist (according to him the Ancient Egyptians had discovered the elliptical orbits of planets) and postulated that the unity of phrases/idioms across European languages pointed to an original divine, antediluvian language.
He admits fully to being an amateur in linguistics, but I find that line of thought intriguing
What a pleasure to listen to an elegant and clearly pronounced English, reminding me of the language I learned 60 years ago! In addition all non English names of scholars are pronounced close to their original sounding, and not distorted by typical Anglophone misreading!
Wouldn't the true eureka moment be "Grimm's Law," since that was the beginning of the study of Indo-European sound changes, which allowed proto-Indo-European to be scientifically proven and even mostly reconstructed?
Maybe you should research a bit on who invented that mumbo jumbo indoeuropean trash. It would help you avoid writing that hilarious comments.
There is a mistake "God" isnt in Czech "buh", but "bůh", same in old Czech
very interesting video, I hope you get many people eating their breakfast watching this