After the latest ice age, Europe got free from the ice and the population could move to new areas from the refuges — or the inhabited areas during the ice age.
During this era Europe underwent the neolithic revolution, the time when people switched from hunter gathering to domestication. It is assumed that the Indo-Europeans brought the domestication to Europe and therefore won terrain over the other linguistic groups.
I read in the newspaper about the history of the Ukrainian language, and how it become different from the Russian during the Polish-Lithuanian Union.
That reminded me that I had saved years ago some maps from a site called “Historical Atlas of Europe and the Middle East”. Unfortunately that site no more exists, it existed back in 1997.
Anyway, I post the map that I had in my mind.
… and more maps are found here.
I was cleaning my old PC from files that I downloaded years ago.
Guess what I found? Well, old files from The Indo-European Database website. I kept spending time on this site in the beginning of this millennium. The site that focused on Indo-European languages featured language overviews, linguistic maps, and much more.
Unfortunately this website no more exists.
My son yesterday brought a leaflet about Nordic languages, “Nordens språk”.
When reading this paper I just recalled how close to each other the Nordic languages are. We have been travelling in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. And in all those countries I have had no problem in making myself understood in Swedish variant that is spoken in Finland.
Norwegian, Danish, Swedish (in Sweden) — no problem in communicating with the people in Swedish there.
In the leaflet, I checked the verb ‘to forget’:
Yes, the Finnish and Greenlandic differ from the other Nordic languages. They don’t belong to the Germanic language family.
Almost three years ago I updated the a webpage that tells where a specific language is spoken.
This page ws called “Where on Earth Do They Speak…”. The page itself consists of a list of languages, and clicking the language name would show the location on map.
Now there’s a new page that lets the user zoom and pan the world and see what language(s) are spoken on an area of interest. This new Languages of the World page is available here: http://maps.verbix.com/languages.html
Links:
I noticed that Esperanto verb conjugator for Windows Phone is installed on more than a hundred cell phones. That’s a modest start but I hope that the esperantists allover the World are happy with this free app.
The Swedish verb ‘hvila’ is nowadays not written that way anymore. Instead it is written ‘vila’, with the same meaning ‘to rest’. Regardless these minor changes in otrtography the language is modern Swedish for both.
To study possible changes in modern Swedish language, there is an interesting website called SAOLhist under construction.
Links:
Today I noticed the Verbix server doesn’t work :-(. Fortunately this blog is hosted on another server, as are also Spanish and Portuguese verb conjugators.
Hopefully the main site will be fixed soon, so that you can conjugate verbs of all the other 100+ languages…
Finland is a country with two official languages: Finnish and Swedish. Swedish is spoken mostly on the coastal areas, including the capital Helsinki (Finnish) / Helsingfors (Swedish).
Because Helsinki/Helsingfors is a bilingual town, all the placenames are shown in two languages. Sometimes there are mistakes, however, that can mislead people.
The picture at right was taken in Kronohagen, Helsinfors. Kulosaari as shown on the shield is Brändö in Swedish. So either Finnish or Swedish speaking cyclists will find themselves in wrong place 😉
More links:
I bough the other day Kielikello, a magazine of language use in Finnish. There was an interesting news about a new portal with Swedish placenames that was opened recently.
That reminded me of the fact that National Land Survey of Finland has released their geoinformation as open source. Not much later I downloaded the placename data of all Finnish topographic (1:25,000) maps.
From the dataset with 2 Million names, I extracted the Swedish names and put them on map. Not surprisingly the Swedish placenames are located in the same area where Swedish is spoken in Finland; the coastal areas in south and west. These are marked in red on the map.
My plan is to later add the possibility to drill down in the map and let users check different kinds of names; house names, lake names, to name a few.
References:
