Vanished Voices

This is an amazing app... if you’re a linguist. It’s still a very good app if you’re not. You can get a wonderful perspective on how Proto-Indo European evolved into many of its child and grandchild languages. You can see the evolution, with excellent audio pronunciation, in individual stages, such as Proto-Germanic between Proto-Indo European and modern English. Almost all of the examples come with audible pronunciation, which is extremely helpful. I did dock the app half a star in my rating, because of all the languages and proto-languages, the only one without audio pronunciations is Lithuanian. This is disappointing because of all contemporary spoken languages Lithuanian is generally considered by linguists to be the closest to Proto-Indo European. Hopefully that audio omission will be rectified soon in an app update. But this app should come with basic pronunciation guides on some of the more obscure sounds, and here is where I critique this app another half star on behalf of anyone who is not a linguist. You need to be very familiar with IPA symbols and their corresponding sounds to fully understand some of the language evolution this app demonstrates - especially for disentangling a sequence of obscure sounds in the audio pronunciation. For example the symbol that resembles a question mark (without the dot) is the IPA symbol for a glottal plosive. Since that sound exists in (I think) none of the contemporary PIE languages it would be VERY helpful if the app had a page simply providing audio samples of the sounds each symbol represents, especially if that sound doesn’t exist in contemporary English. Ditto for, among others, the reverse question mark symbol that represents a pharyngeal fricative. Non-linguists will thank the creator for a symbols sound page, with correct audio pronunciation, in an app update. You can look up the pronunciation for any of these symbols easily online, but for the non-specialist that means regularly toggling back and forth between the app and an external webpage. Also, if you’re not a linguist a lot of specialized linguistic terms will be inaccessible. For example, when the app shows a language shift between two stages of a language, would you understand the cause of the shift if all the app tells you is that the shift is due to analogy? Few people who are not linguists would know what is meant by a language shift due to analogy. It would be VERY helpful if the app creator made a page in the app that provides a brie

It’s a good start. I’d prefer searchable PIE roots, and the ability to choose a word in any language, and trace its etymology to PIE, or Anatolian.

This is such an amazing way to explore the connections between languages! Thank you!

I only wish there was Armenian, Albanian, and maybe Tocharian B! I mean obviously it would be wonderful if every IE language was on here, because this is by far the most elegant layout I’ve ever seen of this. The fact that there is audio for every given proto language and proto-IE is amazing.

It would be nice if this app was able to track a word in a given indo-European language back to it origins.