Where do your words come from?

 

Where do your words come from? Here’s the tree showing the main roots. When you eventually find the little twig that is English, it’s the sort of twig size that might be chopped off by the gardener to encourage strength in more viable branches. So English is quite a little victor in the fight to receive the most oxygen.

Such a diagram helps enormously to conceptualise the place of one language in comparison with another and the relationship between apparently unlike languages. I found this diagram from bing images. Later, I found ethnologue.com, a site full of rich information.

However, I didn’t just come upon these randomly. This is why I love Stumbleupon. It is a serendipity resources. It is full of such excellent information and illustration (provided you make full use of the thumbs up and thumbs down).  After listing your categories of interest – mine are diverse – you are offered pages fairly randomly within those categories. According to whether you give them thumbs up or not, your preferences are further refined by the site. Warning, don’t do this too much or you may miss items that you had not realised were within your interest.

You see a page that sparks your interest, and off you go on another research journey that might, at some time, come in useful for one of your books.

I originally saw a page from Vox with a wonderful chart by Minna Sundberg (which I can’t legally reproduce here). This led me to research out the further sources.

See Sundberg and her chart:

The origins of English  —–        Minna Sundberg

Where English comes from

English, like more than 400 other languages, is part of the Indo-European language family, sharing common roots not just with German and French but with Russian, Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian. This beautiful chart by Minna Sundberg, a Finnish-Swedish comic artist, shows some of English’s closest cousins, like French and German, but also its more distant relationships with languages originally spoken far from the British Isles such as Farsi and Greek.

When readers ask ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ The answer is often ‘from reading’.  And then that reading leads to more reading . . .

And for the writer, to richer writing!