🌳 Comparative Linguistics
The Indo-European Language Tree
Why do Spanish and Italian share 82% lexical similarity? How did English inherit both Germanic roots and Norman French verbs?
Proto-Indo-European (PIE)
🏛️ Italic ➔ Vulgar Latin (Romance)
Characterized by rich inflectional endings (-ar, -er, -ir) and synthetic future tenses.
🇪🇸 Spanish (82% lexical overlap with Italian)
🇮🇹 Italian (closest living relative to classical Latin)
🇵🇹 Portuguese (89% mutual intelligibility in writing)
🇫🇷 French (heavy Celtic & Frankish phonetic shifts)
🌲 Proto-Germanic Branch
Characterized by strong verbs (vowel shift ablaut: sing/sang/sung) and weak verbs with dental suffixes (-ed).
🇩🇪 German (rigid SOV verb-last word order in sub-clauses)
🇬🇧 English (West Germanic core + 60% Latin/French vocabulary)