Friday offtopic. Magnificent linguistic family tree

[airiefairie]

This tree beautifully captures the connections between groups of languages in Eurasia, and it shows that all those languages descend from a common ancestral proto-language. The size of the leaves on top of each branch approximates how many people speak each language. (click on image for large version)

Comments

[edelsont]

Disclaimer: I am no linguistics expert: have read a modest bit, mostly on (English) Wikipedia. Based on that "knowledge", I shall pick two nits.

Nit 1: Indo-European vs. Uralic. That diagram does kind of make them look like one big tree, but the linguists' consensus, I believe, is that they are two entirely separate language families. In other words, yes, the (many) Indo-European languages are believed to have one common proto-language, but the (fewer) Uralic languages have a different common proto-language.

Nit 2: I don't know if you meant to say this, but the wording of the post *appears* to imply that the two families shown, between them, comprise all of the languages of "Eurasia". Counterexample from Europe: Basque. Counterexample from Asia: Chinese.

Source for most of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_families

End of nits.

[airiefairie]

I said groups of languages in Eurasia, not all the groups of languages of Eurasia.

[luzribeiro]

Would've been great to see the whole world tree.

[mahnmut]

It'd be more like a forest.