Engines of America · The Language Engine
Every word
on the record.
The old dictionaries of the land and the old world, in one place. Look up any word. See one meaning across a hundred word lists. Test any two languages against chance. And see who wrote every word down, and why.
Most of what's on paper about our languages was written by priests sent to convert us, by colonists, and by government men. Every word here shows who wrote it, when, and what they were there for. Filter to our own speakers, or to the colonizers' books, and see what changes.
The math stays honest: a link only counts when it beats chance, and the engine proves itself first on families everyone agrees on. It puts no dates on anything. Dates come from their timeline, not from the words.
Type a word in any language, or a meaning in English, Spanish or French. Every old dictionary we hold gets searched: 49 books, 134,000 entries. Each hit opens on the scanned page.
Pick one everyday meaning (water, sun, mother, serpent…) and see the word for it in every list we hold, side by side, with each word's sound skeleton. Words that share a skeleton line up in the same color.
Line up two languages meaning by meaning. Same first consonant sounds on the same meaning is a match. Then the meanings get shuffled thousands of times to see what luck alone gives. Beat luck by a lot, and it's worth digging.
Every word reduced to its sound skeleton: the consonant classes linguists use to compare languages (P for b, p, f, v; T for t, d; K for k, g, q; S for s, z; M; N; R for r and l; W; J for y; H for h and a word that opens on a vowel). Pick how the word was spelled, since a Spanish friar and an English writer wrote the same sound differently.
Every language of the land tested against every old world language, in every mode. The bar is set for the number of pairs tried: with thousands of pairs, some beat chance by luck alone, so a pair has to clear the bar to count.
Before any result counts, the engine has to prove the method works. It must find the families everyone agrees on (Spanish~Portuguese, Hebrew~Arabic, Guaraní~Tupinambá, Phoenician~Hebrew) and find nothing between languages nobody links (Japanese~Swahili, Basque~Yoruba). If it fails, it says so out loud.
Where the words come from, and what they were made to mean. Every word-origin case in the Library: the names they gave us, the names they took, sound matches put to the test, and the codes in their own books. Each one keeps its receipts and its label.
Every word list in the engine, and who made it. Priests and missionaries wrote most of the land's dictionaries, to preach in our languages. Colonists and government men wrote others. A few were written by the people themselves. Weigh every list by its maker.