WORDS IN MOTION
Follow a sound through time.
Trace reconstructed words down historical branches—or release a sound into an illustrative landscape of possible change.
DESCENT TREE
One root, several outcomes
STOCHASTIC LANDSCAPE
Where repeated histories settle
Illustrative model · not calibrated forecasts
Historical view
A compact teaching dataset built around familiar Indo-European cognates. It preserves the broad descent and major sound laws while collapsing dialects, overlapping periods and many intermediate stages.
Possible-futures view
A transparent toy model whose weights encode common pathways. It demonstrates the interaction concept; its percentages should not be read as empirical estimates for a real speech community.
Sources to extend it
Glottolog for topology; Wiktionary and specialist etymological dictionaries for forms; Index Diachronica and historical grammars for rules; calibrated transition models for probabilities.