Sunday 5 September 2010

Black Europe


No this post isn't as risque as the title suggests. While having a conversation with my friend about how different languages are related, it occured to us that the english word "black" doesn't seem to be related to any languages that normally influence English language: Latin, French, German, and Celtic Languages to a lesser extent.

So i set about finding "black" in as many european languages as i could. this is the result. it is quite an interesting map, because if you group together the words that look or sound similar, you end up with a fairly accurate representation of the different language families in Europe: Celtic, Romanic, Germanic, and others I'm not sure on the names of, like the one in the east Baltic area.

1 comment:

  1. Preto exists near Syria and in Portugal? How did it get over there? Probably the Umyaad caliphate's invasion.

    ReplyDelete