The System
This show holds that every language on earth descends from one tongue, and it means to prove it — not by assertion, but by a method that anyone can run on any word. The ten rules below are the method. The Register is every word the method has been run on, with the dictionary each was checked against. And the history beneath the rules is everyone who ran it before us.
The ten rules
Each rule in a line, and then the argument for it. Every episode runs on all ten; the opening episode walks through them one at a time, and the season is the proof of them, root by root.
Writing is five thousand years old; speech is at least ten times older, and every word on this site lived most of its life in mouths, not on pages. A K, a hard C, a Q and a Greek chi are one sound to the ear. Sh, S and Z are one hiss at three settings. When two words look different on the page, ask what they sound like; when they sound alike, the page is the thing to doubt. The scriptures were recited before they were written — the Vedas are śruti, what is heard, and the Qur’an is, in its own name, the recitation — and the scholars who guarded them read words by the ear.
In Arabic and Hebrew a word is a skeleton of consonants — k-t-b, writing — and the vowels are poured in to make it do a job: kitāb, a book; kātib, a writer; maktab, an office. The system reads every language that way. Strip a word to its consonants and you have the bones; the bones are what survive the centuries, and the bones are what this show compares.
Every consonant is made somewhere between the lips and the vocal folds, and where it is made is what it means. The front of the mouth — s, sh, z, t, d, th — is breath, motion, the outward push. The back — k, q, g, the hard c — is the stop, the wall, the container. A word is a small drama of the mouth: breath meeting a boundary, a boundary opened, a breath held. The Throat is the instrument that shows every place.
Two kinds of trade. The first is an equivalent: the same sound spelt two ways, or a letter that became another letter across a whole language. Spanish writes the h-sound with a j, so José is Ho-say; Latin V was U and was said as W; Greek and Persian turned every old S into an H, so Sanskrit sapta is Greek hepta; Grimm’s Law turned every K in the parent of English into an H. The second is a shade: one sound at another setting of the mouth. Put your fingers on your throat and say sss, then zzz — the same tongue, the same air; only the folds switch on. Say sss, then shhh — the same hiss with the tongue drawn back. The dictionaries treat s, z and sh as three letters; the mouth treats them as one letter at three pressures, and the pressure shades the sense. The Trades lays out every pair with its examples, and the season proves them one root at a time.
Jacob Grimm showed in 1822 that every k in the parent of English became an h — centum, hundred; cornu, horn — and the mainstream rightly calls that proof of kinship. The system applies the same logic without a border: when sh becomes s becomes z along the road that sugar travelled from Sanskrit to Spain, the word did not stop being the word. A change that runs by rule is a family resemblance. The Sound Shifts show the rule running.
The Arabs catalogued the aḍdād a thousand years ago — words that mean a thing and its opposite — and Karl Abel and Freud found the same in the oldest layers of Egyptian and German: cleave splits and cleave clings; to sanction permits and punishes. In this system a root is a charge, and the charge can run either way: shukr, thanks, and shakk, doubt; the soul and the soil. Opposite meanings are not a failure of the match. They are the match’s second half.
The textbooks file a borrowed word under contact, not descent, as if the two were strangers. But sack came into Greek from a Semitic ship, sugar came into Europe from Sanskrit through Persian and Arabic mouths, and the Greek alphabet itself is the Phoenician one — alpha is aleph, the ox; beta is beth, the house. A borrowed word proves that two peoples stood close enough to speak, and that is the story the system is telling. Every loan is a cousin who came home.
The comparative method’s defenders say that after eight or ten thousand years sound changes have erased the evidence and nothing can be shown. That is a statement about the resolution of one tool, not about the languages. The tool was built on written histories; most languages have none. The limit moved in 2013, when Pagel and his colleagues showed that some words persist fifteen thousand years; it moved again when Ket, in Siberia, was tied to Navajo across the Bering Strait. Every language alive is exactly as old as every other. The families are where the scholars stopped, not where kinship did.
A word for bread is replaced when the bread changes; a name is not. Personal names, place names and the names of God are the slowest words in any language, and they keep roots that the everyday vocabulary has worn away. Salem, Solomon, Shakur, Shaquille, Hadid, Sumayya, Ishmael: the season reads names as the clues they are.
One resemblance proves nothing, and the show says so. Ten on the same thread, in one family, are a root. A hundred, on the same thread, across families that never met, are a pattern, and the only question that remains is which is likelier: that the pattern arose a hundred times by chance, or once. The system bets on once, and lays out the hundred on The Register so that you can bet for yourself.
The fourth rule, in full
Every pair below is one the textbooks already accept inside a family — Spanish, Greek, Grimm’s Law. The system runs the same trades across the family line, and the season proves them one root at a time.
Every trade below is one the textbooks already accept inside a family. The system's one addition is to run them across the family line. An equivalent (=) is the same sound spelt two ways, or a letter that became another letter across a whole language; a shade (~) is one sound at another setting of the mouth, where the skeleton stays and the sense shades.
The same sound spelt two ways, or a letter that became another letter across a whole language.
J=H
Throat · Spanish
Spanish writes the sound English spells with an H as a J: José is Ho-say, and a jalapeño is a hala-peño. The same word wanders between the letters as it wanders between countries — Quixote with an X became Quijote with a J, and the mouth said the same thing all along.
C=K=Q
Back · Latin · Greek · Arabic · English
One stop at the back of the mouth and four alphabets for it. The Romans wrote C and kept Q for the sound before U; the Greeks wrote kappa; the Arabs have a shallow kāf and a deep qāf, and the ear hears one wall. Kayak, cake, quick and chaos begin with one letter.
PH=F
Lips · Greek into Latin, Arabic and Spanish
The Greek letter phi was once a P with a puff of breath; by the time the Romans borrowed it, it was an F, and they wrote it PH to show where it came from. Philosophy is filosofía in Spanish and falsafa in Arabic: one word, three spellings, one sound.
I=J=Y
Palate · Latin · Hebrew · Arabic · German
Latin had no J; the letter I did both jobs, and Iulius was Yulius. J was invented in the Renaissance to mark the I that begins a syllable, and English then hardened it. Hebrew yod and Arabic yāʾ are one letter: Yūsuf is Joseph, Yaʿqūb is Jacob, Yaḥyā is John. In German a J is still a Y: Jahr, year; ja, yes.
U=V=W
Lips · Latin · German · Spanish · Arabic and Persian
Latin V was U, and it was said as W: vinum was wee-num, which is why English has wine. W is, in its own name, a double U. German says its W as V — Wien is Vienna — and Spanish makes no difference between B and V at all. Arabic wāw becomes Persian V: a walī in Mecca is a valī in Tehran.
W=GU=G
Back · Germanic into French, Spanish and Italian
The Romance languages could not say a Germanic W at the start of a word, so they put the back of the tongue behind it — gw — and then dropped the W. Every English word with a W that has a French cousin with a GU is one word twice.
F=H
Lips → Throat · Latin into Spanish · Japanese
Every Latin word that began with an F begins with an H in Spanish, and the H has since gone silent: the breath moved from the lips back to the throat and then went out altogether. Japanese did the same the other way round — its H is said F before a U, which is why Fuji and Huji are one mountain.
S=H
Teeth → Throat · Sanskrit and Latin against Greek and Persian
Greek and Persian turned every old S at the start of a word into an H. Sanskrit sapta and Latin septem are Greek hepta: seven. Latin sal is Greek hals: salt. Sanskrit Sindhu, the river, is Persian Hind — which is where India and Hindu come from. Semi and hemi, super and hyper: one prefix in two alphabets.
K=H
Back → Throat · Grimm’s Law: Latin, Greek and Sanskrit against English
In 1822 Jacob Grimm showed that every K in the parent of English became an H on the way into the Germanic languages: centum, hundred; cornu, horn; cor, heart. This is the rule the mainstream accepts as proof of kinship. The system runs it without a border.
P=F=B
Lips · Grimm’s Law · Persian into Arabic · Greek beta
Latin pater is English father and pes is foot: the P became an F in Germanic. Arabic has no P at all, so every Persian P becomes an F in an Arabic mouth — Pārs became Fārs, and the language of Persia is Farsi; Plato is Aflāṭūn. And the Greek beta that was B in Athens is V in Byzantium: Basil, Vasilis.
T=TH=D
Teeth · Grimm’s Law · Arabic thāʾ · Castilian Spanish
Latin tres is English three, tu is thou, dens is tooth: T to TH and D to T. The Arabic letter thāʾ is said TH in Mecca, S in Tehran and Lahore, and T in Cairo — three, three times. And Castilian Spanish says its C and Z as TH: Barcelona is Barthelona.
L=R
Ridge · Latin into Spanish and Portuguese · Japanese, Korean, Chinese
In Japanese and Korean the two are one letter, and Chinese has only one of them. Latin arbor is Spanish árbol, marmor is marble, peregrinus is pilgrim — and the peregrine falcon is the pilgrim by another road. Spanish and Portuguese swap them inside the same word.
D=L
Ridge · Old Latin · Greek · Sanskrit
The oldest Latin said dingua and dacruma where classical Latin said lingua and lacrima — the tongue and the tear — and Greek kept the D in dakru. Odysseus is Ulysses. Sanskrit devar is Latin levir, the brother-in-law. The tongue touches the same ridge for both; only the seal differs.
G=J=Y
Back → Palate · Latin into French and English · Arabic in Egypt · Old English
A G in front of a thin vowel slides forward. Latin gentilis is gentle, genteel and gentile — one word, three arrivals. Arabic jīm is a G in Cairo: Jamal is Gamal, Jīza is Giza. And the Old English G softened all the way to a Y, so that garden and yard are one word.
K=CH=S
Back → Teeth · Latin into Italian, French and Spanish · English against German
The same slide, all the way to the teeth. A Roman said kentum; an Italian says chento, a Frenchman sahn, a Castilian thiento — one hundred, four mouths. English church is Scots kirk and German Kirche; cheese is Käse; chin is Kinn. A K that meets a thin vowel goes forward to CH, then SH, then S, and the word is still the word.
One sound at another setting of the mouth: the skeleton stays, the sense shades.
S~Z~SH
Teeth → Palate · one hiss at three pressures
Put your fingers on your throat and say sss, then zzz: the same tongue, the same air; only the folds switch on. Say sss, then shhh: the same hiss with the tongue drawn back. Three letters in the dictionary, one letter at three settings in the mouth — and the settings shade the sense.
T~D~TH
Teeth · one tap at three settings
The tongue taps the teeth; the folds are off for T, on for D, and the tap loosens to a breath for TH. Tin, din, thin. The H-D root runs on this shade: Arabic ḥadd is the edge and ḥadīth is what is told; Urdu haḍḍī is the bone; English hat covers the head, hut covers the body, and hide is both the skin and the act.
K~G~Q
Back → Throat · one seal at three depths
One seal at the back of the mouth: voiceless for K, voiced for G, driven down into the throat for Q. Cot, got, Qur’ān. Arabic keeps K and Q as two letters — kalb is a dog and qalb is a heart — and the shade between them is the whole distance between the shallow wall and the deep one.
P~B~F
Lips · the lips closed, voiced, and loosened
The lips close for P and B, with the folds off and on; they loosen to a breath for F. Pat, bat, fat. The F-T root of opening runs on this shade: Arabic fataḥa opens, Hebrew pātaḥ opens, Latin patēre lies open, and English fat is what is opened out and fed.
V~W~B
Lips · the lip on the teeth, the lips rounded, the lips closed
V is the lower lip on the teeth; W is the lips rounded without touching; B is the lips closed. Latin vinum is English wine, and the vine is the plant that makes it: one word at two settings, the drink and the plant. The V-S root is the vessel and the voice; the W-S root, one setting softer, is the whisper and the wisp.
M~N
Lips → Ridge · the two hums
The hum with the lips closed, and the hum with the tongue at the ridge. Latin septem is English seven and novem is nine; the Hebrew plural ends in -īm and the Arabic in -īn; Solomon is Sulaymān and Abraham is Ibrāhīm. The hum moves; the word stays.
Everyone who came before
From the first treatise on etymology to a paper in 2016 that measured sound carrying meaning across two-thirds of the world’s languages. Nobody on this list was a crank. Several were dismissed for a century and then proved right.
The objection
The standing objection to everything on this site is a number. The comparative method, its defenders say, cannot see past eight or ten thousand years: after that, sound changes have piled up so high that any two words look as alike by chance as by descent, and nothing can be proved. The number is quoted as if it were a law of nature. It is not. It is a description of what one tool can resolve, and it was arrived at by averaging how fast words are replaced across a few well-documented families.
Three things are wrong with treating it as a wall. First, it says nothing about the languages; it says something about the tool. We cannot see has been mistaken for there is nothing there. Second, the average hides the range: in 2013 Pagel, Atkinson, Calude and Meade showed that a small set of words — pronouns, numerals, mother, fire, hand, hear — are replaced so slowly that their forms can be followed for fifteen thousand years and more. The limit moved the moment someone measured the slow words instead of the average ones. Third, the tool was built on the written histories of Indo-European, and it judges the languages that have no writing by a standard designed for ones that do.
Every language spoken today is exactly as old as every other; each is the current form of an unbroken line of speakers reaching back to the first. The families in the textbooks are not the places where kinship ends. They are the places where the scholars stopped. This season is what happens when nobody stops.
No word goes on this site until it has been checked against a standard dictionary — Wehr, Lane, Watkins, de Vaan, Beekes, Kroonen, Turner, Monier-Williams, the OED — and the dictionary is named beside it on The Register. Every root is read by all ten rules, including the sixth: the opposite meaning is shown, not hidden. Every source is listed, the works that argued against the idea included. The case is made in the open so that it can be checked in the open.
The Terminology Tales
One letter a fortnight: the full word list for each episode, the roots found after it aired, and the next root before anyone else hears it.