Indo European words for "two"

[Pythagorean]

https://starkeycomics.com/2019/11/01/indo-european-words-for-two/

 

[Pythagorean]

also:

 

[Hornbein]

View attachment 313096
https://starkeycomics.com/2019/11/01/indo-european-words-for-two/

The Indonesian word is "dua."

 

[pinball1970]

View attachment 313096
https://starkeycomics.com/2019/11/01/indo-european-words-for-two/

This is very interesting. The meme plays a part here? As well as some anatomical and environmental differences.

 

[Pythagorean]

This is very interesting. The meme plays a part here? As well as some anatomical and environmental differences.

I think as an analogy to gene, phoneme evolution combined with etymology (evolution of meaning) would be the most fundamental unit of linguistically transmissible ideas. I don't know if that's how the word meme is actually used though. Even Dawkins seemed to be talking about a higher level concept.

 

[Pythagorean]

The Indonesian word is "dua."

I believe in the case of Indonesian it's a coincidence, as Indonesian is a descendent of the Polynesian family which is on the Oceanic branch of Austronesian languages.

 

[Hornbein]

I believe in the case of Indonesian it's a coincidence, as Indonesian is a descendent of the Polynesian family which is on the Oceanic branch of Austronesian languages.

View attachment 314148

View attachment 314147

I live in Indonesia, speak Indonesian, and can tell you it is a polyglot language with many borrowed words from Arabic, Chinese, English, and Dutch. But with a very old word like two I suppose it is indeed a coincidence.

 

[Hall]

@Pythagorean It would be better if in centre they put Sanskrit "Dvi". I guess one of the earliest use of number two is in Sanskrit Vedas when Aryans gave the concept of "Dvij" (twice born).

 

[Swamp Thing]

https://starkeycomics.com/2019/11/01/indo-european-words-for-two/

The links at the top of the page (e.g. Home, About, Maps etc) at StarkeyComics don't work... they go to a page that says "Error establishing a database connection". Or is it just me?

 

[Pythagorean]

I live in Indonesia, speak Indonesian, and can tell you it is a polyglot language with many borrowed words from Arabic, Chinese, English, and Dutch. But with a very old word like two I suppose it is indeed a coincidence.

Yeah, most modern languages are full of borrowed words and we have developed lots of modern concepts and technologies that weren't ever encoded in the ancient languages.

To trace linguistic evolution, linguists use words that would have been fairly useful and universal in ancient times. Typically numbers, body parts, and bodily functions. But also technology that was around when the Proto Indo Europeans were.

For example, we know the Proto Indo Europeans must have had agriculture, cart and wheel since we can trace those word through its descendent languages. However we know their descendent cultures developed the spoked wheel sometime after some descendent groups split off because they came up with their own phonemology.

In general, it's a whole system of transformations that make languages related. With a three letter word like two you would expect lots of coincidences, but if you look at systematic changes you begin to see patterns that couldn't be random. For example, Grimm's Law. If we take words that represent concepts the ancients would have had, you can see that where most Indo European languages use p, the Germanic Descendents mutated that to a f and t became a th and d became a t. So pisc (fish) becomes fisk, pater becomes father, ped becomes foot, tres becomes three, dent becomes tooth (using Latin languages to represent p usage in Indo European since it conserved that).

*edit: switched p and f to their proper place and removed extra word

 

[Pythagorean]

@Pythagorean It would be better if in centre they put Sanskrit "Dvi". I guess one of the earliest use of number two is in Sanskrit Vedas when Aryans gave the concept of "Dvij" (twice born).

Proto Indo European is not "attested" anywhere (not written down) it's reconstructed from a model that assumes cultural descendants based on their similarities (whenever you see the * on a word, that's essentially what it means - that the word is reconstructed through laws like Grimm's law). So Sanskrit could be the oldest language attested while still not being the ancestral language. I don't know the details of how the Aryan-Iranian branch might have formed from the proposed ancestral culture, but I do see questions and challenges come up a lot around Sanskrit so I'm curious.

Much of the evidence used to analyze the context of the Proto Indo Europeans is based on archeology and genetics. The prevalent hypothesis is currently the Kurgan hypothesis, which assumes the ancestral culture to be the Kurgan Culture. But also keep in mind that the descendent cultures of the Proto Indo Europeans are not clean genetic lines. The PIEs themselves are likely an admixture and in most cases, the Proto Indo Europeans spread and moved in on present cultures and mixed their language and cultures together; their language was just one thing that came with it. E.g. the Old Norse are not merely a descendent tribe of the Germanic tribes, the Old Norse are the result of a Proto Indo European descendent tribe and the native reindeer herders (the Sami) colliding. So you see a "northern version" of Germanic culture arise. Just to the South, the Anglo Saxons were already being dominated by the contemporary Italic culture (Roman Christianity, itself an influence from Afro-Asiatic cultures) and, within a few centuries, be the ones to influence conversion to Christianity on the Old Norse (their own Germanic sibling tribe) through war, trade, and missionary work. So cultural transmission is nonlinear and language propagation is not 1-to-1 with genetic propagation and neither are always linear with material culture (archeology evidence) either.