Centum burger vs satem burger

You know that feeling where sometimes when you wake up, there’s a specific phrase or word that your brain repeats over and over again? That happened to me this morning, and that was “centum-burger vs satem-burger”. This clearly was an order from God, telling me to (re)construct both these burgers. Or it could also be a groundbreaking technique in American linguistics’ education, but that’d be no fun to discuss.

I am aware that the centum-burger seems to have a clear advantage here, since the word “burger” comes from “hamburger”, which itself comes from “Hamburg”. Hamburg is located in the German-speaking country of Germany, and the Germanic branch of Indo-European languages are centum languages. But this is not that big of an issue, this experiment may in fact prove that nepotism like this has no place in somnilinguistics (is this somnilinguistics? i think it’s more absurdolinguistics).

What is a burger? A Wikipedia-burger has buns, beef, cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles, and ketchup. I will use these to (re)construct my centum and satem-burgers.

I’ll use only the most relevant centum and satem proto languages, since I am literally in high school and do not know any sort of technique to attempt even a humorous reconstruction of my own.

Buns, in Celtic languages, descends from Proto-Celtic *aragnos

Beef descends from Proto-Celtic *weɸolis.

Cheese in Britonnic languages descends from Proto-Brythonic *kọs.

Lettuce in Hellenic languages descends from Proto-Hellenic *ōmós.

Tomato, since the plant has no Eurasian origins, will be the Proto-Nahuan *tomatl for both centum and satem-burgers.

Onion will be the Proto-Germanic *hramusô.

Pickle, in Germanic languages, descends from Proto-Germanic *pikkōną.

Ketchup itself has no Indo-European-related origins, so I’ll use Old Chinese *qʰraːs and *kjum, meaning preserved fish and sauce.

And for the satem-burger’s ingredients:

Buns, in Indo-Iranian languages, descends from Proto-Indo-Iranian *nagná-.

Beef, in Indo-Iranian languages, descends from Proto-Indo-Iranian *gā́wš.

Cheese, in Iranian languages, descends from Proto-Iranian *nayH.

Lettuce will be the Proto-Armenian *gl̥kt-m, which actually is the root for milk, I’m using this because the Armenian word itself is a calque from Latin and doesn’t have a separate root of its own.

Tomato, I already said would be the Proto-Nahuan *tomatl.

Onion will be the Proto-Slavic *lukъ.

Pickle will be the unknown root where Old Armenian gets its word for pickle, *tʿutʿ-.

Ketchup, already mentioned, will be the Old Chinese *qʰraːs and *kjum, meaning preserved fish and sauce.

So our centum-burger looks like this:

*aragnos

*kọs

*weɸolis

*qʰraːs + *kjum

*ōmós

*tomatl

*hramusô

*pikkōną

*aragnos

And our satem-burger looks like this:

*nagná

*nayH

*gā́wš

*qʰraːs + *kjum

*gl̥kt-m

*tomatl

*lukъ

*tʿutʿ-

*nagná

Both in order of burger-order.

My personal winner is, by far, the satem-burger. *gā́wš just sounds delicious, I’d love to have a satem-burger right now. So, in conclusion, it’s very important these days to construct burgers based on the branches of the Indo-European language family. Topics like these are where we should all be focusing our attention, especially when we have 2 memorization-heavy exams the day after. These are the real priorities of mankind in their exams weeks.