THE GENEALOGY OF HUMAN LANGUAGE
Words carry worlds.
Go to the root. Follow the sound, the meaning, and the evidence—until the trail ends.
ROOT OF THE ROOT / LIVE DOSSIER
A word. Its entire trail.
Select any stage to inspect its sound change, meaning change, scholar, confidence, and source.
hatizōn
A Gothic weak verb meaning be angry with or at someone, represented by exactly one verified corpus token: present active second-person plural hatizoþ in John 7:23. Project Wulfila and Streitberg align the form with Greek χολᾶτε in the question “are you angry at me?” and analyze the verb with a dative object. The University of Texas derivational grammar builds class-II hatizōn on the consonantal stem hatiz- of hatis “hatred” or “wrath”; Wright independently lists it as a class-II weak verb. The macronized infinitive is a scholarly citation form, while the manuscript writes only the inflected token without a vowel-length mark. The route continues through the reviewed Germanic noun family and a qualified Indo-European comparison, then stops. One corpus token cannot establish spoken rarity, first use, a complete semantic range, exact pronunciation, or one prehistoric essence.
“One Gothic anger verb survives in one question: hatizoþ, “are you angry at me?” The manuscript writes neither the normalized infinitive hatizōn nor its editorial macron, and the current corpus finds no second token.”
No securely reconstructed ancestor is currently known.
02 / THE CONNECTION LAB
FIND THE LINE
BETWEEN WORDS.
Not an AI-generated resemblance. The lab first searches cited lexical ancestry, bounded at twelve edges. When history connects two words without shared descent, it switches to a separately sourced context link and says so.
TRY:
CONNECT 2–8 WORDS IN ONE EVIDENCE VIEW ↗03 / THE CONTRARIAN LEDGER
MOST UNVEILING
ROOT TRUTHS
The old meaning, the route to the present, and why the connection changes what you see. Rankings are editorial; evidence is inspectable.
stranger, guest, host; a person inside reciprocal duties
* RECONSTRUCTED*ghos-ti- → hostis ‘stranger; enemy’ → hostīlis → hostile
A stranger became both guest and enemy.
Hospitality and hostility preserve a semantic fork in how the outsider is received.
be firm, solid, steadfast; wood or tree
* RECONSTRUCTED*deru- ‘firm’ → *treuwaz ‘faithful’ → trēowþ ‘fidelity’ → truth
Truth began with firmness and fidelity.
The older metaphor beneath truth is something that holds firm.
compulsory labor, corvée, drudgery
● ATTESTEDrobota ‘forced labor’ → artificial worker → robot
Robot named forced labor before machinery.
The word inherits a social role—labor under compulsion—before it acquires a technical body.
earth, soil, ground
● ATTESTEDhumus ‘ground’ → humilis ‘low’ → humilitās ‘lowness’ → humility
Humility is an earth-and-lowness metaphor.
A physical position became a social condition and then a moral virtue.
small pebble; counting-board stone
● ATTESTEDcalculus ‘pebble’ → calculāre ‘reckon’ → calculate
Calculation began with a pebble in the hand.
The root turns abstraction back into the physical counting technology it fossilized.
ball, sphere, or ball of thread
● ATTESTEDcliewen → clew ‘thread ball’ → guiding thread → clue ‘evidence’
Evidence became a thread you could follow.
The word encodes a method: keep hold of the thread and follow it through confusion.
ignorant; not knowing
● ATTESTEDnescius ‘ignorant’ → ‘foolish’ → ‘fastidious / precise’ → ‘pleasant’
Nice crossed from ignorance to approval.
The modern compliment is the end of a long social reversal, not the word’s original nature.
true, real, in true order
* RECONSTRUCTED*set-u- → ἔτυμος ‘true’ → ἐτυμολογία ‘true account’ → etymology
Etymology calls itself the ‘true account.’
The field names its truth-seeking ambition while the asterisk forces it to admit uncertainty.
THE WORD UNIVERSE / COMPLETE REVIEWED INDEX
214 DOORS.
NO HIDDEN DEMO LIST.
Browse before you know what to ask. Each card is a compressed root fingerprint: present word, deepest revealing form, semantic path, depth, and evidence.
04 / THE MARK OF HONESTY
THE ASTERISK
CHANGES EVERYTHING.
In historical linguistics, * means reconstructed: inferred from patterns across languages, not directly preserved in a manuscript or inscription.
*SET-U wears the uncertainty in its own name. The proposed ancestral family behind Greek ἔτυμος—“true, real, genuine”—becomes a promise: show the reconstruction, show the source, show the doubt.
05 / THE EVIDENCE CONTRACT
EVERY EDGE
EARNS ITS PLACE.
Comprehensive does not mean confidently filling every blank. It means preserving every useful distinction.
THE FIVE-GRADE SCALE
NO SINGLE CLEAN ANSWER
WHEN NONE EXISTS.
establishedDirectly attested or overwhelming agreement
probableStrong comparative case; details may vary
proposedPublished hypothesis with live alternatives
speculativePossible, but evidence is thin
boundaryThe honest stopping point
THE LONG WORK