How did people speak thousands of years ago? How did their language sound? This app is as close to time travel as you can get.
HOW TO USE THE APP
- choose a sentence in order to get details on pronunciation and transliteration in a particular language.
- click on previous or later stages of a language to see how the language changed over time.
- click on the family tree to choose another language.
- click on the speaker icon for audio.
- click on a sentence of a particular language to get information on the historical development of the individual words in this language.
- [square brackets] indicate a phonetic transcription, /slashes/ a phonemic transcription.
- an asterisk (*) is used to indicate that no surviving texts are known in a language, so that the language has been reconstructed on the basis of later stages.
‘Vanished Voices: The Indo-European Phrase Book App’ is part of the research project ‘Splitting the Mother Tongue’ (2014-2020, funded by NWO, project number 276-70-026) by Alwin Kloekhorst (Leiden University). The app integrates the Indo-Anatolian model, according to which the Anatolian branch was a sister language of Proto-Indo-European rather than a daughter language, both going back to an even earlier proto-language called Proto-Indo-Anatolian.