It's hangman, but with Proto-Indo-European vocabulary! After seeing that the original was taken down, I decided to recreate it. There are over 80 roots to guess, so it will probably be a while before you see a lot of repeats. To play, just click on the phoneme that you want to guess. For a hint, press the green button with a question mark. First it will give you the meaning of the root, then it will give you a word in English that derives from the root, either a native Germanic word or a borrowing from Latin or Greek. Note that the cognate does not always match exactly in meaning! For example, the English cognate for the PIE root meaning "to hear", *ḱlew-, is "loud". Nouns are put in the nominative, not written as a root. For example, the root for salt is in the game as *seh₂ls, not *seh₂l-. Adjectives are similarly given in the masculine nominative. Verbs, meanwhile are simply given in root form: to eat is *h₁ed, rather than anything else. In this project, I decided to ignore pitch accent and syllabic consonants. It would add too many extra dimensions to the chart. Also, I decided to treat /u/ and /i/ as separate phonemes, rather than syllabic versions of the glides. Hint: Common sounds in PIE include e, o, s, t, r, w, n, and h₂. Sounds that are rarer include gʷ, gʷʰ, and b.
For those who don't who what PIE is, here's an except from Wikipedia: "Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the linguistic reconstruction of the ancient common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, the most widely spoken language family in the world." Widely-spoken languages that descend from PIE include English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and even Hindi. TAGS #linguistics #PIE #Proto-Indo-European
