Hearthside

       I recently saw this image appear in my feed on Facebook, and although I think it is better than a lot of illustrations of language trees that I have seen, it makes no sense that a primarily English illustration of a language tree fails to include Old English. For those of you wondering, the OE word for mother is “modor.” As such, on this diagram it should be the branch off of Proto-Germanic which is not the branch labeled Old Norse. (I will relabel the diagram below so you can see what I mean.)       There are a lot of perfectly terrible language trees out there, so by comparison this one is fairly good. The actual form of a tree really lends itself to illustrating the evolution of language as it splits into branches of varying lengths. I spend a lot of time looking at different languages for fun in my spare time. My current focus is Norwegian, but I have a background in Old English from my university years and I have studied Old Norse and ...