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.
The languages are not static; the languages evolve, new languages appear, and some languages disappear. Besides these changes the speakers might also migrate from one place to another.
This has happened in the history, and this goes on today.
Based on information of people migrations, I compiled a map that shows languages of Europe. This is not a typical map that shows what language is spoken where and today. Instead it’s a ‘heatmap’. The darker color, the more there have been different cultures and languages in the area.
Links:
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers.
Basically there are two ways that a language becomes extinct:
Among the extinct or nearly extinct languages, the users of Verbix can conjugate Latin and Gothic verbs.
In WikiVerb there’s now also a page dedicated to extinct languages.
Links to go:
A bishop called Wulfila (Ulfilas) is the man that translated the Bible to the Gothic language. Although the Gothic tribes were assimilated to other peoples and the language is no more spoken, the work of Wulfila is still very important.
The Gothic bible is the far most important written source of an East-Germanic language that got extinct more than a 1000 years ago.
More info:
The Finnish verb nauttia ‘to enjoy’ doesn’t have any equivalent among the closest language relatives.
The stem of this verb is an old Germanic loan, with a reconstructed word stem *nautijan- ‘to possess, to enjoy’. This stem is represented in today’s Swedish verb nöta ‘to spend’, with an older meaning ‘to enjoy’.
In written language the verb nauttia has been since the XVI century.
More:
I read another day in the newspaper about a Sami person who told that, in order to learn Finnish and Finnish ethnohistory, they should study Sami.
Having read the text, I remembered a map in a book that I read recently. And the map showed how the only people that dwelled in Northern Europe were Sami.
The map to the right shows the linguistic situation in Europe in 600 BC. The Sami people are displayed in light yellow, and the other (Fenno-)Ugric languages in yellow. As seen the ancestors of today’s Finnish speaking population lived in today’s Estonia and in a very limited area of today’s Southern Finland coast area.
Since then both the Finnish and Germanic tribes have pushed the Sami northward.
More to read:
Did you ever wonder where the Teutones lived and when? If you did, then you can see the data at http://ethnohistory.verbix.com/Teutones/.
This new website displays ethnohistory records of 100’s of European people, where they originated and where they dwelled.
One of the best staring points on the Ethnohistory website is the page that groups the peoples by language: http://ethnohistory.verbix.com/languages/
Links to go:
The header picture on this Verb Conjugation Blog was taken last summer (2010) in Öland, Sweden.
We didn’t plan to visit Öland during our summer vacation in Sweden. But, because the weather was hot and our car had air-conditioning we decided to make a round-trip there.
Afterwards I learnt that there are lots of runes carved in stones in Öland. We should have stopped and checked them. Nevertheless, now I’ve studied the runic alphabet and Old Swedish to that degree that I’m looking forward in visiting Öland again.
Before doing that, however, I’ll study these pages:
