Glossary

What the words on the map mean. Nothing here needs a linguistics degree.

Reading the map

The marks, colours and labels, in the order you meet them.

stage: One dot on the map: a single form of the word, in one language, at one place and one time. A word’s journey is its stages in order, from the oldest ancestor we can name to the word as it is today.
inheritedblue line: Passed down as its speakers’ language changed: Latin became Old French became French, and the word came along. Nobody decided anything; the pronunciation drifted over centuries and the spelling followed. Most of any journey is this.
borrowedorange arc: Crossed from one language into another, through trade, conquest, religion or fashion. English took beef from the Normans while it already had cow. Linguists call the result a loanword. The arc is raised because something actually travelled.
displacedgreen ring, no path: The new word pushed an older word out of use but did not descend from it. The map draws a ring on the evicted word and refuses to draw a line, because a line would claim a link the evidence denies.
formed in placegrey ring: Built, shortened or invented where it already was: a compound, a clipping, a coinage. Nothing travelled, so there is no path.
reconstructedhollow marker · written *like-this: A form nobody ever wrote down, worked out by comparing the words that descend from it. The asterisk means “reconstructed, not found”, and the map draws these stages hollow for the same reason. See PIE and proto-language.
attestedsolid marker: The opposite of reconstructed: a form that survives in writing somewhere, on an inscription, in a manuscript, in a dictionary. Drawn solid.
confidence: How sure scholars are of a stage or of the link into it. A well-documented Latin word is near certain. A deep root is a strong hypothesis, never a fact on the level of an inscription. The less certain a stage, the fainter its marker.
contestedfaint, with a halo: A stage or link that serious scholars dispute. It is on the map because the case is worth seeing, and marked so you know it is a case.
±kmthe soft circle under a marker: Languages do not have an address. The figure is how far the pin could be off: a few hundred kilometres for a medieval city, seven hundred for the steppe where PIE was spoken. The circle on the map is the same number drawn.
branch ends here×: This form gave us a different word, or nothing. Greek sákkharon led to saccharin, never to sugar, so its branch stops.
cognatesviolet, dashed: Words in different languages that share one ancestor: English cow, Latin bōs, Greek boûs, Sanskrit go. Click a stage, press Cognates, and its relatives are listed; Show on the map draws them, dashed and in violet so they never pass for the word’s own journey. See cognate and doublet.
origin · today: The two ends of the journey: the oldest ancestor the map can place, and the word as it is spoken now. A word with two roots has two origins.
narrative · true scale: How the timeline runs. Narrative gives every stage the same time on screen. True scale uses real years, which means the camera sits on the steppe for most of the run while three and a half thousand years go by, and the last thousand years flash past. Both are honest; they are honest about different things.

The words linguists use

Jargon that turns up in the notes and glosses.

PIE · Proto-Indo-European: The reconstructed common ancestor of most languages of Europe, Iran and northern India: English, Latin and its daughters, Greek, Sanskrit, Russian, Persian and dozens more. Nobody wrote it down. It was spoken roughly 4500 to 2500 BCE, most likely by herders on the steppe north of the Black Sea, which is where the map puts it, with a wide ±km. A PIE word like *gʷṓws is a reconstruction: a well-founded hypothesis about a real word, worked out from cow, bōs, boûs and go, not a word anyone has ever read.
proto-language: Any reconstructed ancestor language: Proto-Germanic, Proto-Slavic, Proto-Indo-European. “Proto-” always means “worked out, never written”. Proto-Germanic is the parent of English, German, Dutch and the Scandinavian languages; it sits between PIE and Old English on most English journeys.
root: The smallest meaningful core a word is built on. PIE roots are written as a skeleton with a star and a hyphen: *leǵ- “to gather, to speak” is behind lecture, legend, logic and lesson. One root can be the origin of a whole family of words.
cognate: A word that shares an ancestor with another, in the same language or a different one. English father, Latin pater and Sanskrit pitṛ are cognates. Looking alike is not the test; descending from the same form by regular sound change is. On the map, see cognates.
doublet: Two words in one language from the same ancestor by different roads, usually one inherited and one borrowed, now meaning different things: cow and beef, shirt and skirt, warden and guardian, fragile and frail. The prize of any cognate set.
loanword: A word taken from another language, the thing the orange arcs draw. English is mostly loanwords by vocabulary and mostly inherited by what people actually say; the hundred commonest words are nearly all native.
calque: A loan translation: the idea is borrowed and the parts are translated. Skyscraper became French gratte-ciel; flea market came from marché aux puces. Nothing crosses that you could point at, so the map draws a calque as a formation in place with a note.
gloss: The short meaning in quotation marks under a form: “cow, head of cattle”. Just enough to follow the thread, not everything the word could mean.
transliteration: A form from another script written in Latin letters so you can read it: Greek βοῦς is shown as boûs, Sanskrit गो as go. The original is kept alongside.
sound change: A shift in pronunciation that runs through a whole language, not one word. Grimm’s law turned PIE *p into Germanic f, which is why Latin pater and pes match English father and foot. These regularities are what make reconstruction possible at all.
folk etymology: Reshaping a strange word to look like words you already know: asparagus into sparrow grass, chaise longue into chaise lounge. Also the stories people tell about where words come from, which are usually better than the truth and usually wrong. The map tries to show what happened.
etymon: The form a word comes from, at any one step. Old French sucre is the etymon of English sugar; Arabic sukkar is the etymon of that.
Old · Middle · Modern: Period labels, not judgements. Old English runs to about 1150, Middle English to about 1500, Modern English after. French and German are cut the same way. Old English is a different language to a modern reader; Middle English is Chaucer and mostly readable.
Vulgar Latin: The Latin ordinary people spoke, as opposed to the Latin of books. It is the parent of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian, and it was rarely written, so some of its forms are reconstructed.
Anglo-Norman: The French spoken in England after the Conquest of 1066, by the court, the law and the kitchen. Where beef, court, parliament and a great deal else entered English.