Correction to Jonathan Sarfati

Since then, those languages have divided much further. For example, English, French, German, Icelandic, Greek, Russian, Hindi, Persian, and many others can all be traced back to one ancestral language. This language is called “Proto-Indo-European” (PIE). PIE might have been one of the languages God created at Babel. But Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian did not come from PIE. Rather, they came from an ancestral language called Proto-Uralic, maybe another Babel language.

From tomorrow's page on CMI, The Genesis Flood for Kids | Noah’s descendants

French, Spanish, Italian can all be literally traced back to Latin. When in around 800 in Tours Latin started to get a more oldfashioned pronunciation, closer to the letters, the Latin writing was no longer the default spelling of the vernacular language. Within a century, French appeared as very archaic Old French.* Classic Old French is a bit younger.**

In a council in Burgos, the Frankish way of pronouncing Latin was adopted, mid-11th C. and soon enough after that, 1200, you find Old Spanish.*** For Italy I'm not sure of the exact time when Frankish pronunciation trumped the close to Italian one (without nasals at all in -um, pronouncing it like -o), but as Italian is even closer to Latin than Spanish and French are, it is very clear that Italian too stems from Latin. On top of that, there is no record of Latin ever being replaced with an actual foreign language, at any point, so one is very safe to assume that what language Sicilian poets like Giacomo da Lentini or Tuscan poets like Dante wrote was actually a later form of what Horace or Virgil had written.

In this sense, we cannot trace any "branch of Indo-European" or anything at all to "Proto-Indo-European".

One of the reasons that Indo-European languages are supposed to all descend from Proto-Indo-European is verbal endings. You'll be familiar with the Greek ones, no doubt. Now, look at the Finnish endings as well:

μῑσέω		ἐμίσεον		minä vihaan
μῑσέεις		ἐμίσεες		sinä vihaat
μῑσέει		ἐμίσεε		hän vihaa
(μῑσέετον μῑσέετον)		(ἐμῑσέετον ἐμῑσεέτην)
μῑσέομεν		ἐμῑσέομεν		me vihaamme
μῑσέετε		ἐμῑσέετε		te vihaatte
μῑσέουσῐ		ἐμίσεον		he vihaavat

Finnish is not Indo-European, it's Uralic. Was Nostratic, hypothetic ancestor of both Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic, one post-Babel language? Or did some Sprachbund phenomenon influence the common endings between Finnish and Greek? If the latter, could that, on a larger and more intense scale, be the cause of similarities between the several "branches of Indo-European"? Because, if it could, then Greek could be descended from Javanic, the post-Babel language of Javan, son of Japheth. And Hittite with Celtic, Italic (of which Latin and later Romance) and Germanic, could be Gomerite.°

There would have been more than one early and somewhat later occasions for language contact, like when Gomer and Semitic Lud were in Anatolia, Javan was just across the Aegean, or in the 1200's BC, according to archaeologists, the Villanova culture was both influenced by Mycenaean Greeks and in trade contacts all the way up to Denmark from Italy.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Walburgis
25.II.2025

In monasterio Heidenhemii, dioecesis Eystettensis, in Germania, sanctae Walburgae Virginis, quae fuit filia sancti Richardi, Anglorum Regis, et soror sancti Willebaldi, Eystettensis Episcopi.

PS, enumerating the similarities. First person singular is -n in Finnish, -n in Secondary Endings of Greek. Second person singular ends in a dental. Third person singular ends in a long vowel (in present tense in Greek). First person plural ends in -me (-men in Attic and Koiné, -mes in Doric), and in -mme. Second person plural ends in -te / -tte. If I had taken in Latin, I'd have compared "-nt" to Finnish "at", though the preceding -v- is not obviously related to anything in Indo-European, as to third person plural./HGL

* Maybe Strassburg Oaths, certainly the Saint Eulalia Sequence.
** Song of Roland.
*** El Cantar del Mio Cid.
° Church Fathers have traced both Gauls and Cappadocians to Gomer, and it would seem Italic and Germanic are closely related. Old Irish shares grammatic features with Hittite.