Vanished Voices

How did people speak thousands of years ago? How did their language sound? This app is as close to time travel as you can get.

HOW TO USE THE APP

- choose a sentence in order to get details on pronunciation and transliteration in a particular language.

- click on previous or later stages of a language to see how the language changed over time.

- click on the family tree to choose another language.

- click on the speaker icon for audio.

- click on a sentence of a particular language to get information on the historical development of the individual words in this language.

- [square brackets] indicate a phonetic transcription, /slashes/ a phonemic transcription.

- an asterisk (*) is used to indicate that no surviving texts are known in a language, so that the language has been reconstructed on the basis of later stages.

‘Vanished Voices: The Indo-European Phrase Book App’ is part of the research project ‘Splitting the Mother Tongue’ (2014-2020, funded by NWO, project number 276-70-026) by Alwin Kloekhorst (Leiden University). The app integrates the Indo-Anatolian model, according to which the Anatolian branch was a sister language of Proto-Indo-European rather than a daughter language, both going back to an even earlier proto-language called Proto-Indo-Anatolian.