A new type of dictionary. An indispensable reference for
language learners within the Indo-European language family, as well as for any
who love words and want to deepen their understanding of English, or any of
these other languages.
Vocabulary is a sticking point for many language learners. That's because
words have a certain arbitrary quality that makes them hard to memorize. One of
the main factors determining the ease or difficulty of mastering another
language is the degree to which it shares vocabulary with the language(s) you
know.
If you've done any study of a language related to your own, you'll know about
cognates. They're the words that are easiest to learn because they're similar to
the words you already know, because they're descended from the same root word.
But similarities aren't always easy to spot. For example, wichtig means
important in German. The connection between wichtig and important is not direct,
because they are not cognates. But English does have a word that is cognate with
wichtig, and this is a word with related meaning: weighty. If you were learning German, and simply tried to memorize 'wichtig =
important', there's nothing to hook onto for your memory. However, if instead
you were to think of it as 'wichtig = weighty, important', the new word becomes
much easier to remember.
Recognizing the relatedness of words in different languages can give you
a boost in memorizing them. Proto-Indo-European is the ultimate ancestor of
many European and Indian languages, and the Indo-European Cognate Dictionary gathers words from 32 languages into
cognate clusters that show related words that descend from a specifec
Proto-Indo-European root word.
This dictionary records words from 32 languages, covering
eight of the nine living branches of the Indo-European language 'tree'. These
languages are English, Old English, Frisian, Dutch, German, Swedish, Danish,
Norwegian, Icelandic, Norse, Welsh, Irish, Latin, French, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, Ancient Greek, Modern Greek, Lithuanian, Latvian, Russian,
Polish, Czech, Slovak, Macedonian, Albanian, Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, Pashto. Of these, the
Germanic and Romance languages are covered far more completely and deeply, with
nearly 32,000 of the 40,000 words in the dictionary belonging to these groups.
The dictionary consists of two parts. The first part contains the
pages for each Proto-Indo-European word (the root word), showing cognates in the
chosen languages plus various descendants and derivatives. These pages are
arranged thematically, allowing you to browse or study. Search is enabled by the
second part to the dictionary, which contains a separate index for each
language, telling you where to find each word.
