But things go sour quickly as two wrongs make an even wronger wrong. Check out Aurie's channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbwMMS-92JKOKxi8GAhayRA...
ABAlphaBeta has so much cool historical lingusitics content
I suppose the question is why is it a sub group, or why did that particular sub group happen, or I guess what’s the reason for there being seemingly an Indo half and a European half?
To add on to what u/jack said, I think that in modern research the idea that the indo-european languages can be split into “indo” and “european” branches is no longer accepted. The Indo-Iranian (persian and indian) languages are still well supported as a branch, but the other languages are no longer considered to fit cleanly into a single branch. I think the (now-extinct) Tocharian languages in particular have features of both “indo” and “european” languages.
Also, in regards to some of your other questions, I think it’s worth mentioning that there have been tons of proposed language families that have since been abandoned due to lack of evidence, even ones, like the Altaic languages, that group together very similar languages spoken by culturally similar peoples, but Indo-European is not one of them. It’s not just “a similar sound to mean a similar thing” and as u/jack pointed out, they often aren’t similar and often don’t mean the same thing. Instead it’s more about “reverse engineering” and working backwards from attested languages to find evidence of a common ancestor language how it changed into the other languages.
So it’s more just a few common threads between otherwise possibly very different cultures or languages or peoples?
Yes and no. The languages themselves may be quite divergent, like english vs bengali or mandarin vs burmese, but the key thing is that they used to be the same; just like how latin diverged and evolved into the modern romance languages, the idea is that PIE (and the proto languages of other language families like sino-tibetan and afro-asiatic) diverged and evolved into other languages, which themselves diverged and evolved into further languages, in a process that is still continuing today. Sometimes with quite different results!
To add on to what u/jack said, I think that in modern research the idea that the indo-european languages can be split into “indo” and “european” branches is no longer accepted. The Indo-Iranian (persian and indian) languages are still well supported as a branch, but the other languages are no longer considered to fit cleanly into a single branch. I think the (now-extinct) Tocharian languages in particular have features of both “indo” and “european” languages.
Also, in regards to some of your other questions, I think it’s worth mentioning that there have been tons of proposed language families that have since been abandoned due to lack of evidence, even ones, like the Altaic languages, that group together very similar languages spoken by culturally similar peoples, but Indo-European is not one of them. It’s not just “a similar sound to mean a similar thing” and as u/jack pointed out, they often aren’t similar and often don’t mean the same thing. Instead it’s more about “reverse engineering” and working backwards from attested languages to find evidence of a common ancestor language how it changed into the other languages.
Ah ok thanks, it makes sense that it's an uncertain field with lots of revision, I suppose we've still got a lot to dig up.
So it's more just a few common threads between otherwise possibly very different cultures or languages or peoples?
Yes and no. The languages themselves may be quite divergent, like english vs bengali or mandarin vs burmese, but the key thing is that they used to be the same; just like how latin diverged and evolved into the modern romance languages, the idea is that PIE (and the proto languages of other language families like sino-tibetan and afro-asiatic) diverged and evolved into other languages, which themselves diverged and evolved into further languages, in a process that is still continuing today. Sometimes with quite different results!