On this general topic, I recently learned that the words undulate and water have the same origin in Proto-Indo-European:

wódr̥ (PIE) → udōr (Proto-Italic) → unda (Latin) → undulātus (Late Latin) → undulate (English)

wódr̥ (PIE) → watōr (Proto-Germanic) → *watar (Proto-West Germanic) → wæter (Old English) → water (Middle English) → water (English)

In fact, I'm now noticing that the t in the Proto-Germanic line corresponds to the d in the Proto-Italic line, just as you said.

It's so interesting because now that I am looking for it, so many of these sounds that I did not realize were related now seem like just minor variations of tongue/mouth parts positioning.

Interesting about udor, as water in ancient Greek is ύδωρ.

In IE languages, the words for water basically follow either "aqua" or "water". Finnish (it's Ugric, not IE) follows the latter, with "vesi" (combining form "vete-").

To be pedantic, Finnish is not Ugric. Hungarian is Ugric, Finnish is Finnic. They both are Finno-Ugric, a.k.a Uralic. Many non-linguist Finns mix up Finno-Ugric and Ugric.

The Proto-Uralic *weti "water" looks like it could come from IE *u̯ódr̥, *udén- "water", but that etymology is problematic because of irregular sound substitutions[0]:

- why would Uralic have *e when it's not present in the IE original?

- why would Uralic drop *r or *n at the end?

[0] Simon, Z. (2020). Urindogermanische Lehnwörter in den uralischen und finno-ugrischen Grundsprachen. Indogermanische Forschungen, 125(1), 239–266. https://doi.org/10.1515/if-2020-011

A-ha, good to know. And sori on the "Ugric".

As for irregular sound substitutions, well, water IS a very common concept & word, so I would think that anything goes.

And a search for the roots of said "shared" terms creates trees of relations which are crucial and incommensurately important to recognize clusters of meanings that link disparate "terminal" terms, and arrive to "patterns" in this compositional structure that are the "heart and soul" of those clusters.

(For example, I recently mentioned in these pages the terms for the "sky" as spawning from ideas of "covering", which also spawn terms for "colour" and "concealing".)

> The languages that turned out to be related this way included

...I see you have left out no less than Italian, the post-Latin at the epicenter!

OT: BTW, Seth, thank you for Let's Encrypt! (Maybe this is also something that OP did not know?)

The book "The Unfolding of Language: the evolution of mankind's greatest invention" by Guy Deutscher explains this very well and has numerous examples. As a language noob, I found it fascinating!

Appreciate the book recommendation, I have read “Through the language glass: why the world looks different in other languages” by the same author and similarly found it fascinating.

Another cool one is this:

https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Encyclopedia-Language-David...

I second this recommendation.

This language tree infographic seems to illustrate your points about the various branches well:

https://www.openculture.com/2015/06/the-tree-of-languages-il...

As a Hungarian, I love and hate this infographic at the same time.

I've always found it interesting that some words are constructed the same across many languages. For example, response: responsibility in

- English (well)

- Russian (ответ : ответственность)

- German (Antwort : Verantwortung)

- Scandinavian (svar : ansvar)

There's likely more! Even though the modern words have diverged completely, the concept behind the construct is the same.

Note that a large number of these examples in European languages are calques

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calque

In these cases, people who knew both languages consciously adopted the structure of a foreign word by translating its components (morphemes). For example, German has a lot of calques from Latin compounds.

That is to say that it's not always a coincidence or an indication that people inherently think of the concept in the same way; sometimes it's an indication that people thought a foreign word for a concept was awesome, and wanted to borrow it by translating it literally.

Interesting! Same in Estonian (vastus: vastutus)

Polish: odpowiedź : odpowiedzialność

The history of english podcast is a wonderful resource for this topic. Heck of a lot of episodes though.

https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

I laughed thinking about British empire teaching english to indians who they inherited most the language from.

etymonline.com is a nice way to rabbithole time away with fun

Well, English and most indian languages share a common ancestor, but indic languages have drifted just as far as any other from proto Indo-European that you can't really say one branch inherited anything from the other . Indic languages are our cousins, not our grandparents.

Perhaps not just as far though? I don't know how true it is, but I've heard that Lithuanian is considered the living language that is closest to proto-Indo-European.

English is interesting in that it has been mixed up with so many different branches of the tree, Saxon, Scandinavian, Latin, French, etc during different periods. Sometimes it has synonyms coming from eg Norse and French, where the PIE root is the same but the words are quite different, and carrying different connotations.

> to rabbithole time away with fun

I absolutely love how you use rabbit hole as a verb here :D.

I think it was used in the "yak system design" article on the FP

Have any modern constructed languages made use of this knowledge?

A very quick Google suggest Esperanto doesn't:

https://indo-european.eu/2008/05/esperanto-other-invented-la...

Loglan and Lojban give entirely too much weight to Chinese and other large languages (in terms of numbers of speakers) that have zero relationship to IE (unless you're heavily into Nostratic). I'd like to see someone combine an exemplary form of Romance languages (like, Latin or early French) with an exemplary form of Germanic languages (like modern Icelandic or reconstructed proto-Germanic) to form a new lingua franca [insert corresponding Germanic term here] for use among language enthusiasts in Europe. Call it Frankenlingua ?

[Allsprech / Grundsprache / Ursprache / Simplespeak / Allspeak ?]

Interlingua maybe?

The swedish/scandinavian word for human "människa" has three syllables (norwegian "menneske" sounds more like two syllables) as opposed to german "mensch". It sounds suspiciously similar to the sanskrit word "manusha" which apparently also means human.

I suspect, without having researched it, that människa and mensch are direct cognates where vowels have been inserted for various reasons.

It's not unusual that an affix can have a form with a vowel that gets lost or added, or that cognates can have different morphemes in addition to their shared morphemes. (For the latter case, when writing about Grimm's Law above, I re-learned that although "hundred" is cognate with "centum", the "red" part is a separate Germanic morpheme meaning 'count'. For that matter, the "um" part is a separate Latin morpheme that is a neuter noun ending.)

Mensch, människa, menneske, ..., and (most likely) manusha are cognates. But it's still curious how "manusha" sounds like "människa" while the vowels have been dropped in "mensch".

For some reason German sometimes drops the i in "-isch" (cognate with English "-ish"). But the only reasonably common examples I can think of are Deutsch (etymologically definitely with -isch/-isk) and Kölsch ('pertaining to Cologne'). I don't know if this is somehow an example of a more widespread phonological process in German.

In Swedish, "isk" endings are sometimes contracted to "sk" such as "polsk"="polish" and the only way to say "pertaining to Köln" would be "kölsk" (unless specifically the beer.)

But "människa" is a noun. It's pronounced "menisha" but it doesn't mean "manish". In Norwegian, the word for humane is spelled "menneskelig" literally "menneske-like". (In Norwegian the 'k' is hard.)

As I can gather, the literal meaning in sanskrit of "manusha" = "born of Manu" = human. Manu is a god.

Wiktionary claims that "människa" does mean "manish" (and that it's a direct cognate with "mensch"):

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...

It's just that that etymology has become opaque to modern-day Germanic language speakers.