820 canonical forms + 578 route stages.
THE TIMELINE ATLAS
JOURNEY ATLAS ↗FORM / ROUTE / BOUND
1398 REVIEWED EVENTSLANGUAGE
IN TIME.
One cross-word chronology for every defensibly bounded form and journey stage—without converting a vague historical label into a fake year.
A reviewed graph bound, not a claim of an earliest human word.
Only stages with directly cited numeric bounds enter this atlas.
Labels remain visible in Journey Atlas, but not parsed into false years.
006 MATCHING EVENTS
FILTER THE CHRONOLOGY
WHEN DID THE EVIDENCE LAND?
TWO CLOCKS.
NO FALSE PRECISION.
FORM CHRONOLOGY dates a canonical linguistic form or reconstruction in the lexical graph.
ROUTE CHRONOLOGY dates a geographic or transmission stage in a word’s journey.
They can share an era band, but they are never silently treated as the same kind of claim.
CROSS-WORD CHRONOLOGY / EARLIEST BOUND FIRST
THE EVIDENCE IN TIME
Prehistory1 ON THIS PAGE
4500 BCE–2500 BCErange
ROUTE STAGEProposed Indo-European comparative horizon
frēond
*prī-
American Heritage places the shared Germanic friend and free family under a proposed Indo-European root. This is not a written token, recoverable institution, or single archaeological point.
Antiquity4 ON THIS PAGE
500 BCE–200 CErange
ROUTE STAGEProto-Germanic linguistic horizon
frēond
*frī-
The like, love, or friendly base is reconstructed from daughter-language evidence. No Proto-Germanic speaker, homeland point, or written occurrence is claimed.
500 BCE–200 CErange
ROUTE STAGEGermanic participial-formation horizon
frēond
*frijōnd-
The loving-agent formation predates the daughter-language records, but its exact lexicalization moment and full paradigm remain reconstructed.
450 CE–1150 CErange
ROUTE STAGEOld English textual record
friend
frēond, frīond, friand, and inflected forms
OED and Bosworth–Toller document dialectal and inflectional variation across Old English texts without reducing the language to one birthplace.
2 EVIDENCE LINKS
Conventional Old English bounds; individual source records are separately qualified.
AUDIT RECORD ↗450 CE–1150 CErange
ROUTE STAGEOld English textual record
frēond
frēond, frīond, frīand, frend, and inflected forms
OED and Bosworth–Toller document dialect, mutation, inflection, companion, ally, relation, patron, and friend-versus-foe evidence across Old English sources.
2 EVIDENCE LINKS
Conventional Old English bounds; individual witnesses remain separately qualified.
AUDIT RECORD ↗Medieval1 ON THIS PAGE
975 CE–1025 CErange
ROUTE STAGEEngland, copying place unresolved
frēond
Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, folio 152r
The directly inspected Beowulf folio visibly preserves freondum at verse 1018. The manuscript locates textual survival, not the origin of the word or a single birthplace for its senses.
2 EVIDENCE LINKS
A conservative production horizon for the manuscript; it is not the poem’s composition date or the word’s first-use date.
AUDIT RECORD ↗UNBOUNDED IS
A REAL RESULT.
Stages without source-backed numeric bounds stay in their complete Journey Atlas route, carry an explicit temporal note, and remain absent here until the evidence supports normalization. The missing point is visible work—not permission to guess.