[carderne]

That’s kind of my point. That’s the interesting stuff (the fact that Macedonia at some point nominally controlled Kyrgyzstan is much less interesting imo) but it’s much too complex (and unrecorded) to convey in a satisfying way.

[sofixa]

And it was rarely clear enough on the ground, let alone in the little available data. Just in the first quarter of the 20th century there were a ton of conflicts all over Europe to try to clarify borders based on different interpretations of identity based on culture/religion/language/history.

[WillAdams]

A notable observation from a lecture which touched on linguistics I attended:

>Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.

(that is a rough paraphrasing from uncertain organic memory)

This a bit facetious, and greatly simplified (the actual discussion in the lecture was far more nuanced), but it does speak to linguistic archaeology in an interesting way --- two notable books on this:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Wo...

[carderne]

I enjoyed Empires of the Word, will have a look at the other book you recommend.

[sofixa]

> >Europe was once linguistically a borderless continuum of languages which gradually transitioned from Romance languages in the south to the Germanic languages in the north.

Eh, not really true. Not only is that missing slavic languages, there are edge cases like Romania and Albania, which are surrounded by Slavic speakers. There's also Greece, and even more wild, Hungary which is from an entirely separate language family alltogether.

[WillAdams]

That (and Basque) were the complications I noted as simplified out.

[77pt77]

Or Basque...