Indo-European Words for ‘Name’

I’ve created a huge tree to show the relationship between 64 living Indo-European languages, and many dead or extinct ones. With this template I’m planning on making a series of images to show how various words in these languages have shared etymologies. This is the first image in that series: words for “name”.

Moving into the image from the outside we travel back in time, until we reach the core of the image, wherein lies Proto-Indo-European. PIE was spoken somewhere around the border of Europe and Asia, and diverged into the 10 inner Proto languages shown here 4500+ years ago. How far into the image a language is doesn’t necessarily correspond to an exact age of the language.

There are about 380 Indo-European languages missing from this image, although I’ve tried to pick representatives from as many branches as possible. The Indo-Iranian branch is by far the largest, accounting for around two thirds of Indo-European languages.

Apologies to all the languages I’ve missed. Maybe one day I’ll make some vast and intricate image with several hundred languages, but this is plenty big enough for now.

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