Have fun figuring out how to pronounce them though.
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What Morris Swadesh did was at the same time simpler and greater than that: he created a list of concepts likely to pop up across many different languages, regardless of their time period and area. This is extremely useful to track the relationship between multiple languages, even if you don’t speak them.
I’m not sure if he created one for Proto-Indo-European; “Swadesh list” became a generic name for this sort of list, regardless of who compiles it. Plus Morris Swadesh main interest was Amerindian languages.
It is INCREDIBLE how many of these are basically still in use today.
I (1sg) *éǵh₂ == german “ich”
you (2sg) *túh, *te == french “tu” russian ты
we (1pl) *wéy == english
you (2pl) *yū, *yú
who *kʷis (pron.), *kʷod (adj.) == latin “quis, quod”
one *(H)óynos, *(H)óykos, *(H)óywos, *sḗm == spanish “uno”
two *dwóh₁; *dwó == french “deux”
three *tréyes == spanish “tres”
four *kʷetwóres == french “quatorze”… 🤔
Im no lingust, just uninformed observation.
We finns aren’t even a PIE language, and we still use some clearly from those.
The word for sea is basically exactly the same, depending on the pronunciation. We say “meri”, it’s marked down as “móri”. In Finnish yellow is “keltainen” and PIE says “ǵʰelh₃-”.
In every language, most words that most people use are still used from a very long time ago, we just pronounce them a bit differently.
*(H)óynos, *dwó, *treyes for example aren’t just uno, deux and tres, they are 1, 2 and 3 in English, French, German, Italian, Greek, Russian, Hindi, Farsi, Kurdish, Tajik etc. Literally the same word, just spoken by different groups of descendent speakers.
Some languages have undergone sound changes that make certain words sound more or less similar to how we think they sounded in PIE.
So even though though four, vier, quattuor and tessera sound quite different to us, they are all basically just how we say *kʷetwóres.
1 in russian is один, I think it’s quite different from one/uno/un (especially since the о is pronounced а). 2 and 3 are instead extremely similar (два три). Does it actually still come from the same root?
While not being competent in this subject, I found it very fascinatinf that ugro-finnic languages (which are not indoeuropean AFAIK) like Finnish or Estonian are so wildly different, so that 1 2 and 3 are üks, kaks, kolm (in Estonian), for example.
That example does sound quite different, but Wiktionary has it as from the Proto-Slavic *(j)edinъ, which is “ultimately from *h₁óy(H)nos.”
Finnish or Estonian are so wildly different
I know right?! I strongly remember the first Uralic language example I heard was the Finnish for merry christmas: hyvää joulua - it just sounded so different.
