Proto-Indo-European language
Encyclopedia
The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the reconstructed
common ancestor of the Indo-European languages
, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans
. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and reconstruction is far advanced and quite detailed.
Scholars estimate that PIE may have been spoken as a single language (before divergence began) around 3700 BC, though estimates by different authorities can vary by more than a millennium. The most popular hypothesis for the origin and spread of the language is the Kurgan hypothesis
, which postulates an origin in the Pontic-Caspian steppe
of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. In modern times the existence of the language was first postulated in the 18th century by Sir William Jones
, who observed the similarities between Sanskrit
, Ancient Greek
, and Latin. By the early 1900s well-defined descriptions of PIE had been developed that are still accepted today (with some refinements).
PIE is thought to have had a complex system of morphology
that included inflections
(suffixing of roots, as in who, whom, whose), and ablaut
(vowel alterations, as in sing, sang, sung). Nouns used a sophisticated system of declension
and verbs used a similarly sophisticated system of conjugation
.
As there is no written evidence of Proto-Indo-European, all knowledge of the language is derived by reconstruction from later languages using linguistic techniques such as the comparative method
and the method of internal reconstruction
. Relationships to other language families, including the Uralic languages
, have been proposed though all such suggestions remain controversial.
is "the single most popular" model, postulating that the Kurgan culture of the Pontic steppe were the hypothesized speakers of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. Alternative theories such as the Anatolian urheimat
and Armenian hypothesis
have also gained acceptance.
The satemization process that resulted in the Centum-Satem isogloss
probably started as early as the 4th millennium BC
and
the only thing known for certain is that the proto language must have been differentiated into unconnected daughter dialects by the late 3rd millennium BC
.
Mainstream linguistic estimates of the time between PIE and the earliest attested texts (ca. nineteenth century BC
; see Kültepe texts
) range around 1,500 to 2,500 years, with extreme proposals diverging up to another 100% on either side. Proposed models include:
making and propagating the observation that Sanskrit
bore a certain resemblance to classical Greek
and Latin
. In The Sanscrit Language (1786) he suggested that all three languages had a common root, and that indeed they may all be further related, in turn, to Gothic
and the Celtic languages
, as well as to Persian
.
His third annual discourse before the Asiatic Society on the history and culture of the Hindus (delivered on 2 February 1786 and published in 1788) with the famed "philologer" passage is often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics
and Indo-European studies
. This is Jones' most quoted passage, establishing his tremendous find in the history of linguistics:
This common source came to be known as Proto-Indo-European.
The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics
leads from Franz Bopp
's Comparative Grammar (1833) to August Schleicher
's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann
's Grundriss published from the 1880s. Brugmann's junggrammatische re-evaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure
's development of the laryngeal theory
may be considered the beginning of "contemporary" Indo-European studies.
PIE as described in the early 1900s is still generally accepted today; subsequent work is largely refinement and systematization, as well as the incorporation of new information, notably the Anatolian
and Tocharian
branches unknown in the 19th century.
Notably, the laryngeal theory
, in its early forms discussed since the 1880s, became mainstream after Jerzy Kuryłowicz's 1927 discovery of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phonemes in Anatolian.
Julius Pokorny
's landmark Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
("Indo-European Etymological Dictionary", 1959) gave a detailed overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated up until that time, but neglected contemporary trends of morphology and phonology (including the laryngeal theory), and largely ignored Anatolian.
The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins
, Jochem Schindler
and Helmut Rix
) developed a better understanding of morphology and, in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie, understanding of the ablaut
. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to establish its relationship to PIE; see also Indo-Hittite
.
. All PIE sounds and words are reconstructed from later Indo-European languages using the comparative method
and the method of internal reconstruction
. An asterisk
is used to mark reconstructed PIE words, such as * 'water
', * 'dog
' (English hound), or * 'three (masculine)'. Many of the words in the modern Indo-European languages seem to have derived from such "protowords" via regular sound change
s (e.g., Grimm's law
).
As the Proto-Indo-European language broke up, its sound system diverged as well, according to various sound laws in the daughter languages. Notable among these are Grimm's law
and Verner's law
in Proto-Germanic
, loss of prevocalic *p- in Proto-Celtic
, reduction to h of prevocalic *s- in Proto-Greek
, Brugmann's law
and Bartholomae's law
in Proto-Indo-Iranian, Grassmann's law
independently in both Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian, and Winter's law and Hirt's law in Balto-Slavic
.
family, encompassing PIE and Uralic
. The evidence usually cited in favor of this consists in a number of striking morphological and lexical resemblances. Opponents attribute the lexical resemblances to borrowing from Indo-European into Uralic. Frederik Kortlandt
, while advocating a connection, concedes that "the gap between Uralic and Indo-European is huge", while Lyle Campbell
, an authority on Uralic, denies any relationship exists.
Other proposals, further back in time (and proportionately less accepted), link Indo-European and Uralic with Altaic
and the other language families of northern Eurasia, namely Yukaghir
, Korean
, Japanese
, Chukotko-Kamchatkan
, Nivkh
, Ainu
, and Eskimo–Aleut, but excluding Yeniseian
(the most comprehensive such proposal is Joseph Greenberg
's Eurasiatic
), or link Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic to Afro-Asiatic
and Dravidian
(the traditional form of the Nostratic
hypothesis), and ultimately to a single Proto-Human
family.
A more rarely mentioned proposal associates Indo-European with the Northwest Caucasian languages
in a family called Proto-Pontic
.
Etruscan
shows some similarities to Indo-European, such as a genitive in -s. There is no consensus on whether these are due to a genetic relationship, borrowing, chance and sound symbolism, or some combination of these.
may hint at an early Sprachbund
or substratum that reached geographically to the PIE homelands. This same type of languages, featuring complex verbs and of which the current Northwest Caucasian languages might have been the sole survivors, was cited by Peter Schrijver to indicate a local lexical and typological reminiscence in western Europe pointing to a possible Neolithic substratum
.
Alternative notations: The aspirated plosives are sometimes written as ; for the palatals, are often used; and can replace .
The following are the main characteristics of PIE consonants:
It is often suggested that all and were earlier derived from an preceded or followed by , but Mayrhofer
, Ringe
and a number of others have argued that PIE did in fact have the phoneme (and possibly also ) independent of .
In fact, Stang's law
, a phonological rule active at the Proto-Indo-European stage, produces from older as the ending of the accusative singular of the stems in (and possibly from older in the respective accusative plural), and therefore compels the assumption that the phoneme was present in the language.
, which could appear on any syllable and whose position often varied among different members of a paradigm (e.g. between singular and plural of a verbal paradigm, or between nominative/accusative and oblique cases of a nominal paradigm). The location of the pitch accent is closely associated with ablaut
variations, especially between normal-grade vowels (/e/ and /o/) and zero-grade vowels (i.e. lack of a vowel). The accent is best preserved in Vedic Sanskrit
and (in the case of nouns) Ancient Greek
, and indirectly attested in a number of phenomena in other PIE languages.
of PIE are basic morpheme
s carrying a lexical meaning. By addition of suffix
es, they form stems, and by addition of desinences (usually endings), these form grammatically inflected word
s (noun
s or verb
s). PIE roots are understood to be predominantly monosyllabic with a basic shape CvC(C). This basic root shape is often altered by ablaut
. Roots which appear to be vowel initial are believed by many scholars to have originally begun with a set of consonants, later lost in all but the Anatolian
branch, called laryngeals (usually indicated , and often specified with a subscript number ). Thus a verb form such as the one reflected in Latin , Greek (ágousi), Sanskrit would be reconstructed as , with the element constituting the root per se.
is the variation in vowels commonly termed ablaut, which occurred both within inflectional morphology (among different members of a nominal or verbal paradigm) and derivational morphology
(between, for example, a verb and an associated verbal noun
). Ablaut in PIE was closely associated with the position of the accent; for example, the alternation found in Latin est, sunt reflects PIE . However, it is not possible to derive either one directly from the other. The primary ablaut variation was between normal grade or full grade ( and ), lengthened grade ( and ), and zero grade (lack of a vowel, which triggered the vocalic allophones of nearby resonants). The normal grade is often characterized as e-grade or o-grade depending on the particular vowel involved. Ablaut occurred both in the root and the ending. Originally, morphological categories were distinguished both by ablaut variations and different endings, but the decay of endings has led some languages to use ablaut alone to distinguish grammatical categories, as in the Modern English words sing, sang, sung, originally reflecting a pre-Proto-Germanic sequence *sengw-, *songw-, *sngw-. Some scholars believe that the inflectional affixes of Indo European reflect ablaut variants, usually zero-grade, of older PIE roots. Often the zero-grade appears where the word's accent has shifted from the root to one of the affixes.
, genitive, dative
, instrumental
, ablative, locative, vocative, and possibly a directive or allative). There were three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
There are two major types of declension, thematic and athematic. Thematic nominal stems are formed with a suffix (in vocative ) and the stem does not undergo ablaut
. The athematic stems are more archaic, and they are classified further by their ablaut behaviour (acrostatic, proterokinetic, hysterokinetic and amphikinetic, after the positioning of the early PIE accent in the paradigm).
s in the first and second person
, but not the third person, where demonstratives were used instead. The personal pronouns had their own unique forms and endings, and some had two distinct stems
; this is most obvious in the first person singular, where the two stems are still preserved in English I and me. According to Beekes, there were also two varieties for the accusative, genitive and dative cases, a stressed and an enclitic form.
As for demonstratives, Beekes tentatively reconstructs a system with only two pronouns: "this, that" and "the (just named)" (anaphoric
). He also postulates three adverbial particles "here", "there" and "away, again", from which demonstratives were constructed in various later languages.
system is complex and, like the noun, exhibits a system of ablaut
. The most basic categorization for the Indo-European verb was grammatical aspect
. Verbs were classed as stative
(verbs that depict a state of being), imperfective
(verbs depicting ongoing, habitual or repeated action) or perfective
(verbs depicting a completed action or actions viewed as an entire process). Verbs have at least four moods
(indicative, imperative
, subjunctive
and optative
, as well as possibly the injunctive
, reconstructible from Vedic Sanskrit), two voices (active
and mediopassive
), as well as three persons
(first, second and third) and three numbers
(singular
, dual and plural
). Verbs were also marked by a highly developed system of participle
s, one for each combination of tense and mood, and an assorted array of verbal noun
s and adjectival formations.
The following table shows two possible reconstructions of the PIE verb endings. Sihler's reconstruction largely represents the current consensus among Indo-Europeanists, while Beekes' is a radical rethinking of thematic verbs; although not widely accepted, it is included to show an example of more far-reaching recent research.
Lehmann believes that the numbers greater than ten were constructed separately in the dialects groups and that originally meant "a large number" rather than specifically "one hundred".
( "and", "or" and others) and an interjection
.
in 1969 observes that in spite of its 150 years' history, comparative linguistics is not in the position to reconstruct a single well-formed sentence in PIE. Nevertheless, such texts do have the merit of giving an impression of what a coherent utterance in PIE might have sounded like.
Published PIE sample texts:
is easily the best-attested.
All of the above languages except for Lusitanian (which occurs in the area of modern Portugal
) occur in or near the Balkan peninsula, and have been collectively termed the "Paleo-Balkan languages
". This is a purely geographic grouping and makes no claims about the relatedness of the languages to each other as compared with other Indo-European languages.
Linguistic reconstruction
Linguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of the unattested ancestor of one or more given languages. There are two kinds of reconstruction. Internal reconstruction uses irregularities in a single language to make inferences about an earlier stage of that language...
common ancestor of the Indo-European languages
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans
Proto-Indo-Europeans
The Proto-Indo-Europeans were the speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language , a reconstructed prehistoric language of Eurasia.Knowledge of them comes chiefly from the linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics...
. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and reconstruction is far advanced and quite detailed.
Scholars estimate that PIE may have been spoken as a single language (before divergence began) around 3700 BC, though estimates by different authorities can vary by more than a millennium. The most popular hypothesis for the origin and spread of the language is the Kurgan hypothesis
Kurgan hypothesis
The Kurgan hypothesis is one of the proposals about early Indo-European origins, which postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language...
, which postulates an origin in the Pontic-Caspian steppe
Pontic-Caspian steppe
The Pontic-Caspian steppe is the vast steppeland stretching from the north of the Black Sea as far as the east of the Caspian Sea, from western Ukraine across the Southern Federal District and the Volga Federal District of Russia to western Kazakhstan,...
of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. In modern times the existence of the language was first postulated in the 18th century by Sir William Jones
William Jones (philologist)
Sir William Jones was an English philologist and scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages...
, who observed the similarities between Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
, Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
, and Latin. By the early 1900s well-defined descriptions of PIE had been developed that are still accepted today (with some refinements).
PIE is thought to have had a complex system of morphology
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
that included inflections
Fusional language
A fusional language is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes in a way that can be difficult to segment....
(suffixing of roots, as in who, whom, whose), and ablaut
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
(vowel alterations, as in sing, sang, sung). Nouns used a sophisticated system of declension
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
and verbs used a similarly sophisticated system of conjugation
Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
.
As there is no written evidence of Proto-Indo-European, all knowledge of the language is derived by reconstruction from later languages using linguistic techniques such as the comparative method
Comparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
and the method of internal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction is a method of recovering information about a language's past from the characteristics of the language at a later date...
. Relationships to other language families, including the Uralic languages
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
, have been proposed though all such suggestions remain controversial.
Discovery and reconstruction
Historical and geographical setting
There are several competing hypotheses about when and where PIE was spoken. The Kurgan hypothesisKurgan hypothesis
The Kurgan hypothesis is one of the proposals about early Indo-European origins, which postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language...
is "the single most popular" model, postulating that the Kurgan culture of the Pontic steppe were the hypothesized speakers of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. Alternative theories such as the Anatolian urheimat
Anatolian hypothesis
The Anatolian hypothesis is also called Renfrew's Neolithic Discontinuity Theory ; it proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia...
and Armenian hypothesis
Armenian hypothesis
The Armenian hypothesis of the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat, based on the Glottalic theory suggests that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken during the 4th millennium BC in the Armenian Highland or Aryan Highland. It is an Indo-Hittite model and does not include the Anatolian languages in...
have also gained acceptance.
The satemization process that resulted in the Centum-Satem isogloss
Centum-Satem isogloss
The centum-satem division is an isogloss of the Indo-European language family, related to the different evolution of the three dorsal consonant rows of the mainstream reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European:...
probably started as early as the 4th millennium BC
4th millennium BC
The 4th millennium BC saw major changes in human culture. It marked the beginning of the Bronze Age and of writing.The city states of Sumer and the kingdom of Egypt were established and grew to prominence. Agriculture spread widely across Eurasia...
and
the only thing known for certain is that the proto language must have been differentiated into unconnected daughter dialects by the late 3rd millennium BC
3rd millennium BC
The 3rd millennium BC spans the Early to Middle Bronze Age.It represents a period of time in which imperialism, or the desire to conquer, grew to prominence, in the city states of the Middle East, but also throughout Eurasia, with Indo-European expansion to Anatolia, Europe and Central Asia. The...
.
Mainstream linguistic estimates of the time between PIE and the earliest attested texts (ca. nineteenth century BC
19th century BC
-Events:* Hittite empire in Hattusa, Anatolia.* 1900 BC: Proto-Greek invasions of Greece.* c. 1900 BC: Minoan Old Palace period starts in Crete.* c. 1900 BC: Fall of last Sumerian dynasty....
; see Kültepe texts
Kültepe
Kültepe is a modern village near the ancient city of Kaneš or Kanesh , located in the Kayseri Province of Turkey's Central Anatolia Region...
) range around 1,500 to 2,500 years, with extreme proposals diverging up to another 100% on either side. Proposed models include:
- the 4th millennium BC4th millennium BCThe 4th millennium BC saw major changes in human culture. It marked the beginning of the Bronze Age and of writing.The city states of Sumer and the kingdom of Egypt were established and grew to prominence. Agriculture spread widely across Eurasia...
(excluding the Anatolian branch) in ArmeniaArmeniaArmenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...
, according to the Armenian hypothesisArmenian hypothesisThe Armenian hypothesis of the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat, based on the Glottalic theory suggests that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken during the 4th millennium BC in the Armenian Highland or Aryan Highland. It is an Indo-Hittite model and does not include the Anatolian languages in...
(proposed in the context of Glottalic theoryGlottalic theoryThe glottalic theory holds that Proto-Indo-European had ejective stops, , but not the murmured ones, , of traditional Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions....
); - the 5th millennium BC5th millennium BCThe 5th millennium BC saw the spread of agriculture from the Near East throughout southern and central Europe.Urban cultures in Mesopotamia and Anatolia flourished, developing the wheel. Copper ornaments became more common, marking the Chalcolithic. Animal husbandry spread throughout Eurasia,...
(4th4th millennium BCThe 4th millennium BC saw major changes in human culture. It marked the beginning of the Bronze Age and of writing.The city states of Sumer and the kingdom of Egypt were established and grew to prominence. Agriculture spread widely across Eurasia...
excluding the Anatolian branch) in the Pontic-Caspian steppePontic-Caspian steppeThe Pontic-Caspian steppe is the vast steppeland stretching from the north of the Black Sea as far as the east of the Caspian Sea, from western Ukraine across the Southern Federal District and the Volga Federal District of Russia to western Kazakhstan,...
, according to Marija GimbutasMarija GimbutasMarija Gimbutas , was a Lithuanian-American archeologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe", a term she introduced. Her works published between 1946 and 1971 introduced new views by combining traditional spadework with linguistics and mythological...
's Kurgan hypothesisKurgan hypothesisThe Kurgan hypothesis is one of the proposals about early Indo-European origins, which postulates that the people of an archaeological "Kurgan culture" in the Pontic steppe were the most likely speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language...
; - the 6th millennium BC6th millennium BCDuring the 6th millennium BC, agriculture spread from the Balkans to Italy and Eastern Europe, and also from Mesopotamia to Egypt. World population was essentially stable at approximately 5 million, though some speculate up to 7 million.-Events:...
or later in Northern Europe according to Lothar Kilian's and, especially, Marek Zvelebil's models of a broader homeland; - the 6th millennium BC6th millennium BCDuring the 6th millennium BC, agriculture spread from the Balkans to Italy and Eastern Europe, and also from Mesopotamia to Egypt. World population was essentially stable at approximately 5 million, though some speculate up to 7 million.-Events:...
in IndiaIndian subcontinentThe Indian subcontinent, also Indian Subcontinent, Indo-Pak Subcontinent or South Asian Subcontinent is a region of the Asian continent on the Indian tectonic plate from the Hindu Kush or Hindu Koh, Himalayas and including the Kuen Lun and Karakoram ranges, forming a land mass which extends...
, according to Koenraad ElstKoenraad ElstKoenraad Elst is a Belgian writer and orientalist .He was an editor of the New Right Flemish nationalist journal Teksten, Kommentaren en Studies from 1992 to 1995, focusing on criticism of Islam, various other conservative and Flemish separatist publications such as Nucleus, t Pallieterke,...
's Out of India modelOut of India theoryThe Out of India theory is the proposition that the Indo-European language family originated in the Indian subcontinent and spread to the remainder of the Indo-European region through a series of migrations...
; - the 7th millennium BC7th millennium BCDuring the 7th millennium BC, agriculture spreads from Anatolia to the Balkans.World population was essentially stable at around 5 million people, living mostly scattered across the globe in small hunting-gathering tribes...
in ArianaArianaAriana was a region of the eastern countries of ancient Iran, next to India.Ariana may also refer to:* Ariana In places:*Ariana Governorate, a governorate in Tunisia*Ariana, Tunisia*Lake Ariana, a lake in Sofia, Bulgaria...
/BMAC according to a number of scholars. - the 7th millennium BC7th millennium BCDuring the 7th millennium BC, agriculture spreads from Anatolia to the Balkans.World population was essentially stable at around 5 million people, living mostly scattered across the globe in small hunting-gathering tribes...
in AnatoliaAnatoliaAnatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...
(the 5th5th millennium BCThe 5th millennium BC saw the spread of agriculture from the Near East throughout southern and central Europe.Urban cultures in Mesopotamia and Anatolia flourished, developing the wheel. Copper ornaments became more common, marking the Chalcolithic. Animal husbandry spread throughout Eurasia,...
, in the BalkansBalkansThe Balkans is a geopolitical and cultural region of southeastern Europe...
, excluding the Anatolian branch), according to Colin Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesisAnatolian hypothesisThe Anatolian hypothesis is also called Renfrew's Neolithic Discontinuity Theory ; it proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia...
; - the 7th millennium BC7th millennium BCDuring the 7th millennium BC, agriculture spreads from Anatolia to the Balkans.World population was essentially stable at around 5 million people, living mostly scattered across the globe in small hunting-gathering tribes...
in AnatoliaAnatoliaAnatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...
(6th6th millennium BCDuring the 6th millennium BC, agriculture spread from the Balkans to Italy and Eastern Europe, and also from Mesopotamia to Egypt. World population was essentially stable at approximately 5 million, though some speculate up to 7 million.-Events:...
excluding the Anatolian branch), according to a 2003 glottochronological study; - before the 10th millennium BCUpper PaleolithicThe Upper Paleolithic is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age as it is understood in Europe, Africa and Asia. Very broadly it dates to between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, roughly coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity and before the advent of...
in the Paleolithic Continuity TheoryPaleolithic Continuity TheoryThe Paleolithic Continuity Theory , since 2010 relabelled as the Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm , is a hypothesis suggesting that the Proto-Indo-European language can be traced back to the Upper Paleolithic, several millennia earlier than the Chalcolithic or at the most Neolithic estimates in other...
.
History
Indo-European studies began with Sir William JonesWilliam Jones (philologist)
Sir William Jones was an English philologist and scholar of ancient India, particularly known for his proposition of the existence of a relationship among Indo-European languages...
making and propagating the observation that Sanskrit
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
bore a certain resemblance to classical Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
and Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
. In The Sanscrit Language (1786) he suggested that all three languages had a common root, and that indeed they may all be further related, in turn, to Gothic
Gothic language
Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. It is known primarily from the Codex Argenteus, a 6th-century copy of a 4th-century Bible translation, and is the only East Germanic language with a sizable Text corpus...
and the Celtic languages
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...
, as well as to Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
.
His third annual discourse before the Asiatic Society on the history and culture of the Hindus (delivered on 2 February 1786 and published in 1788) with the famed "philologer" passage is often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics
Historical linguistics
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. It has five main concerns:* to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages...
and Indo-European studies
Indo-European studies
Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. Its goal is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European , and its speakers, the...
. This is Jones' most quoted passage, establishing his tremendous find in the history of linguistics:
This common source came to be known as Proto-Indo-European.
The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness....
leads from Franz Bopp
Franz Bopp
Franz Bopp was a German linguist known for extensive comparative work on Indo-European languages.-Biography:...
's Comparative Grammar (1833) to August Schleicher
August Schleicher
August Schleicher was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language...
's 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann was a German linguist. He is a towering figure in Indo-European linguistics.-Biography:He was educated at Halle and Leipzig. He was instructor in the gymnasium at Wiesbaden and at Leipzig, and in 1872-77 was assistant at the Russian Institute of Classical Philology at the latter place...
's Grundriss published from the 1880s. Brugmann's junggrammatische re-evaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure
Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...
's development of the laryngeal theory
Laryngeal theory
The laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three , consonant sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language...
may be considered the beginning of "contemporary" Indo-European studies.
PIE as described in the early 1900s is still generally accepted today; subsequent work is largely refinement and systematization, as well as the incorporation of new information, notably the Anatolian
Anatolian languages
The Anatolian languages comprise a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...
and Tocharian
Tocharian languages
Tocharian or Tokharian is an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family. The name is taken from the people known to the Greeks as the Tocharians . These are sometimes identified with the Yuezhi and the Kushans. The term Tokharistan usually refers to 1st millennium Bactria, which the...
branches unknown in the 19th century.
Notably, the laryngeal theory
Laryngeal theory
The laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three , consonant sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language...
, in its early forms discussed since the 1880s, became mainstream after Jerzy Kuryłowicz's 1927 discovery of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phonemes in Anatolian.
Julius Pokorny
Julius Pokorny
Julius Pokorny was an Austrian linguist and scholar of the Celtic languages, particularly Irish, and a supporter of Irish nationalism. He held academic posts in Austrian and German universities.-Life:...
's landmark Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch
Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch
The Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch was published in 1959 by the Austrian-German comparative linguist and Celtic languages expert Julius Pokorny...
("Indo-European Etymological Dictionary", 1959) gave a detailed overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated up until that time, but neglected contemporary trends of morphology and phonology (including the laryngeal theory), and largely ignored Anatolian.
The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins
Calvert Watkins
Calvert Watkins is a professor Emeritus of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and professor-in-residence at UCLA.His doctoral dissertation, Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I...
, Jochem Schindler
Jochem Schindler
Jochem Schindler was an Austrian Indo-Europeanist. In spite of his comparatively thin bibliography, he made important contributions, in particular to the theory of Proto-Indo-European language nominal inflection and ablaut.-References:*Eichner Compositiones Indogermanicae in memoriam Jochem...
and Helmut Rix
Helmut Rix
Helmut Rix was a German linguist and professor of the Sprachwissenschaftliches Seminar of Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg, Germany....
) developed a better understanding of morphology and, in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie, understanding of the ablaut
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to establish its relationship to PIE; see also Indo-Hittite
Indo-Hittite
In Indo-European linguistics, the term Indo-Hittite refers to Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages may have split off the Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages...
.
Method
There is no direct evidence of PIE, because it was never writtenWritten language
A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken or gestural languages....
. All PIE sounds and words are reconstructed from later Indo-European languages using the comparative method
Comparative method
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with common descent from a shared ancestor, as opposed to the method of internal reconstruction, which analyzes the internal...
and the method of internal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction is a method of recovering information about a language's past from the characteristics of the language at a later date...
. An asterisk
Asterisk
An asterisk is a typographical symbol or glyph. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a star. Computer scientists and mathematicians often pronounce it as star...
is used to mark reconstructed PIE words, such as * 'water
Water
Water is a chemical substance with the chemical formula H2O. A water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. Water is a liquid at ambient conditions, but it often co-exists on Earth with its solid state, ice, and gaseous state . Water also exists in a...
', * 'dog
Dog
The domestic dog is a domesticated form of the gray wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The dog may have been the first animal to be domesticated, and has been the most widely kept working, hunting, and companion animal in...
' (English hound), or * 'three (masculine)'. Many of the words in the modern Indo-European languages seem to have derived from such "protowords" via regular sound change
Sound change
Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation or sound system structures...
s (e.g., Grimm's law
Grimm's law
Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...
).
As the Proto-Indo-European language broke up, its sound system diverged as well, according to various sound laws in the daughter languages. Notable among these are Grimm's law
Grimm's law
Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...
and Verner's law
Verner's law
Verner's law, stated by Karl Verner in 1875, describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, when immediately following an unstressed syllable in the same word, underwent voicing and became respectively the fricatives *b, *d, *z,...
in Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic language
Proto-Germanic , or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all the Germanic languages, such as modern English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Luxembourgish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and Swedish.The Proto-Germanic language is...
, loss of prevocalic *p- in Proto-Celtic
Proto-Celtic language
The Proto-Celtic language, also called Common Celtic, is the reconstructed ancestor language of all the known Celtic languages. Its lexis can be confidently reconstructed on the basis of the comparative method of historical linguistics...
, reduction to h of prevocalic *s- in Proto-Greek
Proto-Greek language
The Proto-Greek language is the assumed last common ancestor of all known varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean, the classical Greek dialects , and ultimately Koine, Byzantine and modern Greek...
, Brugmann's law
Brugmann's law
Brugmann's law, named for Karl Brugmann, states that Proto-Indo-European in non-final syllables became *ā in open syllables in Indo-Iranian. Everywhere else the outcome was *ǎ, the same as the reflexes of PIE *e and *a...
and Bartholomae's law
Bartholomae's law
Bartholomae's law is an early Indo-European sound law affecting the Indo-Iranian family. It states that in a cluster of two or more obstruents , any one of which is a voiced aspirated stop anywhere in the sequence, the whole cluster becomes voiced and aspirated...
in Proto-Indo-Iranian, Grassmann's law
Grassmann's Law
Grassmann's law, named after its discoverer Hermann Grassmann, is a dissimilatory phonological process in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit which states that if an aspirated consonant is followed by another aspirated consonant in the next syllable, the first one loses the aspiration...
independently in both Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian, and Winter's law and Hirt's law in Balto-Slavic
Balto-Slavic languages
The Balto-Slavic language group traditionally comprises Baltic and Slavic languages, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points to the period of common development...
.
Proposed genetic connections
Many higher-level relationships between Proto-Indo-European and other language families have been proposed, but these hypothesized connections are highly controversial. A proposal often considered to be the most plausible of these is that of an Indo-UralicIndo-Uralic languages
Indo-Uralic is a proposed language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic.A genetic relationship between Indo-European and Uralic was first proposed by the Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1869 but was received with little enthusiasm...
family, encompassing PIE and Uralic
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages constitute a language family of some three dozen languages spoken by approximately 25 million people. The healthiest Uralic languages in terms of the number of native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, Mari and Udmurt...
. The evidence usually cited in favor of this consists in a number of striking morphological and lexical resemblances. Opponents attribute the lexical resemblances to borrowing from Indo-European into Uralic. Frederik Kortlandt
Frederik Kortlandt
Frederik Herman Henri Kortlandt is a professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is an expert on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in...
, while advocating a connection, concedes that "the gap between Uralic and Indo-European is huge", while Lyle Campbell
Lyle Campbell
Lyle Richard Campbell is a linguist and leading expert on indigenous American languages—especially those of Mesoamerica—and on historical linguistics in general. He also has expertise in Uralic languages. He is presently Professor of Linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.-Life and...
, an authority on Uralic, denies any relationship exists.
Other proposals, further back in time (and proportionately less accepted), link Indo-European and Uralic with Altaic
Altaic languages
Altaic is a proposed language family that includes the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Japonic language families and the Korean language isolate. These languages are spoken in a wide arc stretching from northeast Asia through Central Asia to Anatolia and eastern Europe...
and the other language families of northern Eurasia, namely Yukaghir
Yukaghir languages
The Yukaghir languages are a small family of two closely related languages – Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir – spoken by the Yukaghir in the Russian Far East living in the basin of the Kolyma River. According to the 2002 Russian census, both Yukaghir languages taken together have 604 speakers...
, Korean
Korean language
Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...
, Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
, Chukotko-Kamchatkan
Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages
The Chukotko-Kamchatkan or Chukchi–Kamchatkan languages are a language family of extreme northeastern Siberia. Its speakers are indigenous hunter-gatherers and reindeer-herders....
, Nivkh
Nivkh language
Nivkh or Gilyak is a language spoken in Outer Manchuria, in the basin of the Amgun , along the lower reaches of the Amur itself, and on the northern half of Sakhalin. 'Gilyak' is the Manchu appellation...
, Ainu
Ainu language
Ainu is one of the Ainu languages, spoken by members of the Ainu ethnic group on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaidō....
, and Eskimo–Aleut, but excluding Yeniseian
Yeniseian languages
The Yeniseian language family is spoken in central Siberia.-Family division:0. Proto-Yeniseian...
(the most comprehensive such proposal is Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Greenberg
Joseph Harold Greenberg was a prominent and controversial American linguist, principally known for his work in two areas, linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages.- Early life and career :...
's Eurasiatic
Eurasiatic languages
Eurasiatic is a language macrofamily proposed by Joseph Greenberg that includes many language families historically spoken in northern Eurasia. The eight branches of Eurasiatic are Etruscan, Indo-European, Uralic–Yukaghir, Altaic, Korean-Japanese-Ainu, Gilyak, Chukotian, and Eskimo–Aleut, spoken in...
), or link Indo-European, Uralic, and Altaic to Afro-Asiatic
Afro-Asiatic languages
The Afroasiatic languages , also known as Hamito-Semitic, constitute one of the world's largest language families, with about 375 living languages...
and Dravidian
Dravidian languages
The Dravidian language family includes approximately 85 genetically related languages, spoken by about 217 million people. They are mainly spoken in southern India and parts of eastern and central India as well as in northeastern Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iran, and...
(the traditional form of the Nostratic
Nostratic languages
Nostratic is a proposed language family that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia, including the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian languages...
hypothesis), and ultimately to a single Proto-Human
Proto-Human language
The Proto-Human language is the hypothetical most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages.The concept of "Proto-Human" presupposes monogenesis of all recorded spoken human languages....
family.
A more rarely mentioned proposal associates Indo-European with the Northwest Caucasian languages
Northwest Caucasian languages
The Northwest Caucasian languages, also called Abkhazo-Adyghean, or sometimes Pontic as opposed to Caspian for the Northeast Caucasian languages, are a group of languages spoken in the Caucasus region, chiefly in Russia , the disputed territory of Abkhazia, and Turkey, with smaller communities...
in a family called Proto-Pontic
Proto-Pontic language
Pontic is the proposed language family or macrofamily, comprising the Indo-European and Northwest Caucasian language families, with Proto-Pontic being the reconstructed proto-language.-History of the proposal:...
.
Etruscan
Etruscan language
The Etruscan language was spoken and written by the Etruscan civilization, in what is present-day Italy, in the ancient region of Etruria and in parts of Lombardy, Veneto, and Emilia-Romagna...
shows some similarities to Indo-European, such as a genitive in -s. There is no consensus on whether these are due to a genetic relationship, borrowing, chance and sound symbolism, or some combination of these.
Proposed areal connections
The existence of certain PIE typological features in Northwest Caucasian languagesNorthwest Caucasian languages
The Northwest Caucasian languages, also called Abkhazo-Adyghean, or sometimes Pontic as opposed to Caspian for the Northeast Caucasian languages, are a group of languages spoken in the Caucasus region, chiefly in Russia , the disputed territory of Abkhazia, and Turkey, with smaller communities...
may hint at an early Sprachbund
Sprachbund
A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...
or substratum that reached geographically to the PIE homelands. This same type of languages, featuring complex verbs and of which the current Northwest Caucasian languages might have been the sole survivors, was cited by Peter Schrijver to indicate a local lexical and typological reminiscence in western Europe pointing to a possible Neolithic substratum
Neolithic creolisation hypothesis
The Neolithic creolisation hypothesis, first put forward by Marek Zvelebil in 1995, contributes to the Proto-Indo-European Urheimat issue and proposes a cultural melting pot in the Neolithic of Northern Europe of foreign Neolithic farmers and indigenous Mesolithic hunter-gatherer communities, that...
.
Consonants
| Labial Labial consonant Labial consonants are consonants in which one or both lips are the active articulator. This precludes linguolabials, in which the tip of the tongue reaches for the posterior side of the upper lip and which are considered coronals... |
Coronal Coronal consonant Coronal consonants are consonants articulated with the flexible front part of the tongue. Only the coronal consonants can be divided into apical , laminal , domed , or subapical , as well as a few rarer orientations, because only the front of the tongue has such... |
Dorsal Dorsal consonant Dorsal consonants are articulated with the mid body of the tongue . They contrast with coronal consonants articulated with the flexible front of the tongue, and radical consonants articulated with the root of the tongue.-Function:... |
Laryngeal Laryngeal theory The laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three , consonant sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language... |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| palatal | plain | labial | |||||
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
|||||||
| Plosive | voiceless |
||||||
| voiced | |||||||
| aspirated Aspiration (phonetics) In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of air that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. To feel or see the difference between aspirated and unaspirated sounds, one can put a hand or a lit candle in front of one's mouth, and say pin ... |
|||||||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
|||||||
| Liquid Liquid consonant In phonetics, liquids or liquid consonants are a class of consonants consisting of lateral consonants together with rhotics.-Description:... |
|||||||
| Semivowel Semivowel In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel is a sound, such as English or , that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary rather than as the nucleus of a syllable.-Classification:... |
|||||||
Alternative notations: The aspirated plosives are sometimes written as ; for the palatals, are often used; and can replace .
The following are the main characteristics of PIE consonants:
- PIE had a large number of stops, but few fricatives. The traditional (pre-laryngeal) reconstruction included only one fricative, /s/; however, the modern theory includes three additional fricatives, commonly known as laryngealsLaryngeal theoryThe laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three , consonant sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language...
and assumed to have been pronounced far back in the mouth (i.e. velarVelar fricativeVelar fricative can refer to*voiced velar fricative: in the International Phonetic Alphabet*voiceless velar fricative: in the International Phonetic Alphabet...
, uvularUvular fricativeUvular fricative can refer to:* Voiced uvular fricative* Voiceless uvular fricative...
, and/or glottal). Laryngeals disappeared from all PIE languages except (to some extent) the Anatolian languages, and as a result the exact pronunciation of the laryngeals is disputed; some linguists have even asserted that /*h₁/ might not have been a fricative at all, but a glottal stopGlottal stopThe glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
. - The number of dorsal consonantDorsal consonantDorsal consonants are articulated with the mid body of the tongue . They contrast with coronal consonants articulated with the flexible front of the tongue, and radical consonants articulated with the root of the tongue.-Function:...
s has long been a source of contention. The traditional theory, which most linguists still adhere to, calls for three series of back stops, traditionally termed "palatovelar", "plain velar" and "labiovelar" (under an alternative view, plain velar, uvularUvular consonantUvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and...
, and labialized uvular, respectively). The dispute concerns the status of the traditional plain velar series, which is the least-common series and is most often attested in certain environments; the palatovelar series is not often found in these same environments. Furthermore, in all, or nearly all, daughters the plain velars have merged into one of the other two series. This has led some linguists to reconstruct only two series, with the distinction between "palatovelar" and "plain velar" a secondary distinction that arose as an areal feature in some of the daughters. - PIE is traditionally reconstructed with three types of voicings for its stops: voiceless, voiced, and breathy-voicedBreathy voiceBreathy voice is a phonation in which the vocal cords vibrate, as they do in normal voicing, but are held further apart, so that a larger volume of air escapes between them. This produces an audible noise...
(traditionally termed "voiced aspirated"). This is typologically uncommon (and in fact the original breathy-voiced series has been transformed into other sounds in all but the Indo-Aryan languagesIndo-Aryan languagesThe Indo-Aryan languages constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family...
); as a result some linguists have proposed the glottalic theoryGlottalic theoryThe glottalic theory holds that Proto-Indo-European had ejective stops, , but not the murmured ones, , of traditional Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions....
, which proposes a very different reconstruction of these three series. (This theory, however, is not widely accepted today.) - A notable characteristic is that the resonants /r/, /l/, /m/, /n/, /y/ and /w/ could appear as vowels as well as consonants, specifically when not adjacent to another vowel. (The same is usually held to be true of the laryngeals, as well.) This has led to some dispute as to whether PIE should be reconstructed with phonemes /i/ and /u/, or whether these should be considered allophoneAllophoneIn phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
s of /y/ and /w/; however, there is some evidence that /i/, at least, could occur in the same environments as /y/.
Vowels
- Short vowels: , (and possibly ).
- Long vowels: , (and possibly ). Sometimes a colon (:) is employed instead of the macron sign to indicate vowel lengthVowel lengthIn linguistics, vowel length is the perceived duration of a vowel sound. Often the chroneme, or the "longness", acts like a consonant, and may etymologically be one, such as in Australian English. While not distinctive in most dialects of English, vowel length is an important phonemic factor in...
(*a:, *e:, *o:). - DiphthongDiphthongA diphthong , also known as a gliding vowel, refers to two adjacent vowel sounds occurring within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: That is, the tongue moves during the pronunciation of the vowel...
s: . Diphthongs are sometimes understood as combinations of a vowel plus a semivowel, e. g. *ey or instead of *ei. - Vocalic allophones of laryngeals, nasals, liquids and semivowels: .
- Long variants of these vocalic allophones may have appeared already in the proto-language by compensatory lengtheningCompensatory lengtheningCompensatory lengthening in phonology and historical linguistics is the lengthening of a vowel sound that happens upon the loss of a following consonant, usually in the syllable coda...
(for example of a vowel plus a laryngeal): .
It is often suggested that all and were earlier derived from an preceded or followed by , but Mayrhofer
Manfred Mayrhofer
Manfred Mayrhofer is an Indo-Europeanist specialized on Indo-Iranian languages. Mayrhofer is professor emeritus at the University of Vienna. He is noted for his etymological dictionary of Sanskrit....
, Ringe
Donald Ringe
Donald Ringe is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist.He received Ph.D in linguistics at the Yale University in 1984 under the supervision of the late Warren Cowgill. He taught Classics at Bard College from 1983 to 1985, and since 1985 he has been on the Faculty in Linguistics at the...
and a number of others have argued that PIE did in fact have the phoneme (and possibly also ) independent of .
In fact, Stang's law
Stang's law
Stang's law is a Proto-Indo-European phonological rule named after Norwegian linguist Christian Stang. The law governs the word-final sequences of a vowel, followed by a laryngeal or a semivowel */y/ or */w/, followed by a nasal, and according to the law those sequences are simplified in a way that...
, a phonological rule active at the Proto-Indo-European stage, produces from older as the ending of the accusative singular of the stems in (and possibly from older in the respective accusative plural), and therefore compels the assumption that the phoneme was present in the language.
Accent
PIE had a free pitch accentPitch accent
Pitch accent is a linguistic term of convenience for a variety of restricted tone systems that use variations in pitch to give prominence to a syllable or mora within a word. The placement of this tone or the way it is realized can give different meanings to otherwise similar words...
, which could appear on any syllable and whose position often varied among different members of a paradigm (e.g. between singular and plural of a verbal paradigm, or between nominative/accusative and oblique cases of a nominal paradigm). The location of the pitch accent is closely associated with ablaut
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
variations, especially between normal-grade vowels (/e/ and /o/) and zero-grade vowels (i.e. lack of a vowel). The accent is best preserved in Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit
Vedic Sanskrit is an old Indo-Aryan language. It is an archaic form of Sanskrit, an early descendant of Proto-Indo-Iranian. It is closely related to Avestan, the oldest preserved Iranian language...
and (in the case of nouns) Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
, and indirectly attested in a number of phenomena in other PIE languages.
Root
PIE was an inflected language, in which the grammatical relationships between words were signaled through inflectional morphemes (usually endings). The rootsRoot (linguistics)
The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family , which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....
of PIE are basic morpheme
Morpheme
In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...
s carrying a lexical meaning. By addition of suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
es, they form stems, and by addition of desinences (usually endings), these form grammatically inflected word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
s (noun
Noun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
s or verb
Verb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
s). PIE roots are understood to be predominantly monosyllabic with a basic shape CvC(C). This basic root shape is often altered by ablaut
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
. Roots which appear to be vowel initial are believed by many scholars to have originally begun with a set of consonants, later lost in all but the Anatolian
Anatolian languages
The Anatolian languages comprise a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...
branch, called laryngeals (usually indicated , and often specified with a subscript number ). Thus a verb form such as the one reflected in Latin , Greek (ágousi), Sanskrit would be reconstructed as , with the element constituting the root per se.
Ablaut
An important component of PIE morphophonologyMorphophonology
Morphophonology is a branch of linguistics which studies, in general, the interaction between morphological and phonetic processes. When a morpheme is attached to a word, it can alter the phonetic environments of other morphemes in that word. Morphophonemics attempts to describe this process...
is the variation in vowels commonly termed ablaut, which occurred both within inflectional morphology (among different members of a nominal or verbal paradigm) and derivational morphology
Derivational morphology
Derivational morphology changes the meaning of words by applying derivations. Derivation is the combination of a word stem with a morpheme, which forms a new word, which is often of a different class...
(between, for example, a verb and an associated verbal noun
Verbal noun
In linguistics, the verbal noun turns a verb into a noun and corresponds to the infinitive in English language usage. In English the infinitive form of the verb is formed when preceded by to, e.g...
). Ablaut in PIE was closely associated with the position of the accent; for example, the alternation found in Latin est, sunt reflects PIE . However, it is not possible to derive either one directly from the other. The primary ablaut variation was between normal grade or full grade ( and ), lengthened grade ( and ), and zero grade (lack of a vowel, which triggered the vocalic allophones of nearby resonants). The normal grade is often characterized as e-grade or o-grade depending on the particular vowel involved. Ablaut occurred both in the root and the ending. Originally, morphological categories were distinguished both by ablaut variations and different endings, but the decay of endings has led some languages to use ablaut alone to distinguish grammatical categories, as in the Modern English words sing, sang, sung, originally reflecting a pre-Proto-Germanic sequence *sengw-, *songw-, *sngw-. Some scholars believe that the inflectional affixes of Indo European reflect ablaut variants, usually zero-grade, of older PIE roots. Often the zero-grade appears where the word's accent has shifted from the root to one of the affixes.
Noun
Proto-Indo-European nouns were declined for eight or nine cases (nominative, accusativeAccusative case
The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
, genitive, dative
Dative case
The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....
, instrumental
Instrumental case
The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action...
, ablative, locative, vocative, and possibly a directive or allative). There were three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
There are two major types of declension, thematic and athematic. Thematic nominal stems are formed with a suffix (in vocative ) and the stem does not undergo ablaut
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
. The athematic stems are more archaic, and they are classified further by their ablaut behaviour (acrostatic, proterokinetic, hysterokinetic and amphikinetic, after the positioning of the early PIE accent in the paradigm).
Pronoun
PIE pronouns are difficult to reconstruct owing to their variety in later languages. This is especially the case for demonstrative pronouns. PIE had personal pronounPronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s in the first and second person
Grammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
, but not the third person, where demonstratives were used instead. The personal pronouns had their own unique forms and endings, and some had two distinct stems
Suppletion
In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". The term "suppletion" implies...
; this is most obvious in the first person singular, where the two stems are still preserved in English I and me. According to Beekes, there were also two varieties for the accusative, genitive and dative cases, a stressed and an enclitic form.
| Personal pronouns (Beekes) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First person | Second person | |||
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | |
| Nominative Nominative case The nominative case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or the predicate noun or predicate adjective, as opposed to its object or other verb arguments... |
||||
| Accusative Accusative case The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions... |
||||
| Genitive Genitive case In grammar, genitive is the grammatical case that marks a noun as modifying another noun... |
||||
| Dative Dative case The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink".... |
||||
| Instrumental Instrumental case The instrumental case is a grammatical case used to indicate that a noun is the instrument or means by or with which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action... |
? | ? | ||
| Ablative Ablative case In linguistics, ablative case is a name given to cases in various languages whose common characteristic is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ... |
||||
| Locative Locative case Locative is a grammatical case which indicates a location. It corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions "in", "on", "at", and "by"... |
||||
As for demonstratives, Beekes tentatively reconstructs a system with only two pronouns: "this, that" and "the (just named)" (anaphoric
Anaphora (linguistics)
In linguistics, anaphora is an instance of an expression referring to another. Usually, an anaphoric expression is represented by a pro-form or some other kind of deictic--for instance, a pronoun referring to its antecedent...
). He also postulates three adverbial particles "here", "there" and "away, again", from which demonstratives were constructed in various later languages.
Verb
The Indo-European verbVerb
A verb, from the Latin verbum meaning word, is a word that in syntax conveys an action , or a state of being . In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive...
system is complex and, like the noun, exhibits a system of ablaut
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, ablaut is a system of apophony in Proto-Indo-European and its far-reaching consequences in all of the modern Indo-European languages...
. The most basic categorization for the Indo-European verb was grammatical aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
. Verbs were classed as stative
Stative verb
A stative verb is one that asserts that one of its arguments has a particular property . Statives differ from other aspectual classes of verbs in that they are static; that is, they have undefined duration...
(verbs that depict a state of being), imperfective
Imperfective aspect
The imperfective is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed with internal structure, such as ongoing, habitual, repeated, and similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future...
(verbs depicting ongoing, habitual or repeated action) or perfective
Perfective aspect
The perfective aspect , sometimes called the aoristic aspect, is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed as a simple whole, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. The perfective aspect is equivalent to the aspectual component of past perfective forms...
(verbs depicting a completed action or actions viewed as an entire process). Verbs have at least four moods
Grammatical mood
In linguistics, grammatical mood is a grammatical feature of verbs, used to signal modality. That is, it is the use of verbal inflections that allow speakers to express their attitude toward what they are saying...
(indicative, imperative
Imperative mood
The imperative mood expresses commands or requests as a grammatical mood. These commands or requests urge the audience to act a certain way. It also may signal a prohibition, permission, or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...
, subjunctive
Subjunctive mood
In grammar, the subjunctive mood is a verb mood typically used in subordinate clauses to express various states of irreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet occurred....
and optative
Optative mood
The optative mood is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope. It is similar to the cohortative mood, and closely related to the subjunctive mood....
, as well as possibly the injunctive
Injunctive mood
The injunctive mood was a mood in Sanskrit characterized by secondary endings but no augment, and usually looked like an augmentless aorist or imperfect. It typically stood in a main clause and had a subjunctive or imperative meaning; for example, it could indicate intention, e.g. "Indra's heroic...
, reconstructible from Vedic Sanskrit), two voices (active
Active voice
Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages....
and mediopassive
Mediopassive voice
The mediopassive voice is a grammatical voice which subsumes the meanings of both the middle voice and the passive voice.Languages of the Indo-European family typically have two or three voices of the three: active, middle, and passive. "Mediopassive" may be used to describe a category that covers...
), as well as three persons
Grammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
(first, second and third) and three numbers
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
(singular
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
, dual and plural
Plural
In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
). Verbs were also marked by a highly developed system of participle
Participle
In linguistics, a participle is a word that shares some characteristics of both verbs and adjectives. It can be used in compound verb tenses or voices , or as a modifier...
s, one for each combination of tense and mood, and an assorted array of verbal noun
Verbal noun
In linguistics, the verbal noun turns a verb into a noun and corresponds to the infinitive in English language usage. In English the infinitive form of the verb is formed when preceded by to, e.g...
s and adjectival formations.
The following table shows two possible reconstructions of the PIE verb endings. Sihler's reconstruction largely represents the current consensus among Indo-Europeanists, while Beekes' is a radical rethinking of thematic verbs; although not widely accepted, it is included to show an example of more far-reaching recent research.
| Sihler (1995) | Beekes (1995) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Athematic | Thematic | Athematic | Thematic | ||
| Singular Grammatical number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions .... |
1st Grammatical person Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns... |
||||
| 2nd | |||||
| 3rd | |||||
| Dual | 1st | ||||
| 2nd | |||||
| 3rd | |||||
| Plural | 1st | ||||
| 2nd | |||||
| 3rd |
Numbers
The Proto-Indo-European numerals are generally reconstructed as follows:| Sihler | Beekes | |
|---|---|---|
| one | ||
| two | ||
| three | (full grade) / (zero grade) | |
| four | (o-grade) / (zero grade) (see also the ) |
|
| five | ||
| six | ; originally perhaps | |
| seven | ||
| eight | , or , | |
| nine | ||
| ten | ||
| twenty | ; originally perhaps | |
| thirty | ; originally perhaps | |
| forty | ; originally perhaps | |
| fifty | ; originally perhaps | |
| sixty | ; originally perhaps | |
| seventy | ; originally perhaps | |
| eighty | ; originally perhaps | |
| ninety | ; originally perhaps | |
| hundred | ; originally perhaps | |
| thousand | ; |
Lehmann believes that the numbers greater than ten were constructed separately in the dialects groups and that originally meant "a large number" rather than specifically "one hundred".
Particle
Many particles could be used both as adverbs and postpositions, like "under, below". The postpositions became prepositions in most daughter languages. Other reconstructible particles include negators , conjunctionsGrammatical conjunction
In grammar, a conjunction is a part of speech that connects two words, sentences, phrases or clauses together. A discourse connective is a conjunction joining sentences. This definition may overlap with that of other parts of speech, so what constitutes a "conjunction" must be defined for each...
( "and", "or" and others) and an interjection
Interjection
In grammar, an interjection or exclamation is a word used to express an emotion or sentiment on the part of the speaker . Filled pauses such as uh, er, um are also considered interjections...
.
Sample texts
As PIE was spoken by a prehistoric society, no genuine sample texts are available, but since the 19th century modern scholars have made various attempts to compose example texts for purposes of illustration. These texts are educated guesses at best; Calvert WatkinsCalvert Watkins
Calvert Watkins is a professor Emeritus of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and professor-in-residence at UCLA.His doctoral dissertation, Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I...
in 1969 observes that in spite of its 150 years' history, comparative linguistics is not in the position to reconstruct a single well-formed sentence in PIE. Nevertheless, such texts do have the merit of giving an impression of what a coherent utterance in PIE might have sounded like.
Published PIE sample texts:
- Schleicher's fableSchleicher's fableSchleicher's fable is an artificial text composed in the reconstructed language Proto-Indo-European , published by August Schleicher in 1868. Schleicher was the first scholar to compose a text in PIE. The fable is entitled Avis akvāsas ka...
() by August SchleicherAugust SchleicherAugust Schleicher was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language...
(1868), modernized by Hermann HirtHermann HirtHermann Hirt was German philologist and Indo-Europeanist.- Biography :Hirt wrote on German metres , edited Schopenhauer's Parerga , and then devoting himself to Indo-Germanic philology made special studies on accent, writing Der indogermanische Accent and Der...
(1939) and Winfred Lehmann and Ladislav ZgustaLadislav ZgustaLadislav Zgusta was a Czech–American historical linguist and lexicographer, who wrote one of the first textbooks on lexicography. He was a professor of linguistics and classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dutch lexicographer Piet van Sterkenburg referred to Zgusta as...
(1979) - The king and the godThe king and the godThe king and the god is the title of a short dialogue composed in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language. It is loosely based on the "king Harishcandra" episode of Aitareya Brahmana . S. K. Sen asked a number of Indo-Europeanists The king and the god is the title of a short dialogue...
() by S. K. Sen, E. P. Hamp et al. (1994)
Generally accepted subfamilies (clades)
- Proto-Albanian language
- Proto-Anatolian languageProto-Anatolian languageProto-Anatolian is the proto-language from which Anatolian languages emerged. As with all other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; the language has been reconstructed by applying the comparative method to all the attested Anatolian languages as well as other Indo-European...
- Proto-Armenian languageProto-Armenian languageThe earliest testimony of the Armenian language dates to the 5th century AD . The earlier history of the language is unclear and the subject of much speculation....
- Proto-Balto-Slavic languageProto-Balto-Slavic languageProto-Balto-Slavic is reconstructed proto-language descending from Proto-Indo-European and out of which all later Balto-Slavic languages and dialects descended, such as modern Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Russian.The Proto-Balto-Slavic language is not directly attested by any surviving texts...
- Proto-Celtic languageProto-Celtic languageThe Proto-Celtic language, also called Common Celtic, is the reconstructed ancestor language of all the known Celtic languages. Its lexis can be confidently reconstructed on the basis of the comparative method of historical linguistics...
- Proto-Germanic languageProto-Germanic languageProto-Germanic , or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all the Germanic languages, such as modern English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Luxembourgish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and Swedish.The Proto-Germanic language is...
- Proto-Greek languageProto-Greek languageThe Proto-Greek language is the assumed last common ancestor of all known varieties of Greek, including Mycenaean, the classical Greek dialects , and ultimately Koine, Byzantine and modern Greek...
- Proto-Indo-Iranian languageProto-Indo-Iranian languageProto-Indo-Iranian is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European. Its speakers, the hypothetical Proto-Indo-Iranians, are assumed to have lived in the late 3rd millennium BC, and are usually connected with the early Andronovo archaeological...
- Proto-Italic language
- Proto-Slavic languageProto-Slavic languageProto-Slavic is the proto-language from which Slavic languages later emerged. It was spoken before the seventh century AD. As with most other proto-languages, no attested writings have been found; the language has been reconstructed by applying the comparative method to all the attested Slavic...
- Proto-Tocharian language
Marginally attested languages
These include languages that do not appear to be members of any of the above families, but which are so poorly attested that proper classification of them is not possible. Of these languages, PhrygianPhrygian language
The Phrygian language was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, spoken in Asia Minor during Classical Antiquity .Phrygian is considered to have been closely related to Greek....
is easily the best-attested.
- Phrygian languagePhrygian languageThe Phrygian language was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, spoken in Asia Minor during Classical Antiquity .Phrygian is considered to have been closely related to Greek....
- Dacian languageDacian languageThe extinct Dacian language may have developed from proto-Indo-European in the Carpathian region around 2,500 BC and probably died out by AD 600. In the 1st century AD, it was the predominant language of the ancient regions of Dacia and Moesia and, possibly, of some surrounding regions.It belonged...
- Thracian languageThracian languageThe Thracian language was the Indo-European language spoken in ancient times in Southeastern Europe by the Thracians, the northern neighbors of the Ancient Greeks. The Thracian language exhibits satemization: it either belonged to the Satem group of Indo-European languages or it was strongly...
- Illyrian language
- Venetic languageVenetic languageVenetic is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken in ancient times in the North East of Italy and part of modern Slovenia, between the Po River delta and the southern fringe of the Alps....
- Messapic language
- Ancient Macedonian languageAncient Macedonian languageAncient Macedonian was the language of the ancient Macedonians. It was spoken in the kingdom of Macedon during the 1st millennium BCE and it belongs to the Indo-European group of languages...
- Lusitanian languageLusitanian languageLusitanian was a paleohispanic language that apparently belonged to the Indo-European family. Its relationship to the Celtic languages of the Iberian Peninsula, either as a member, a cousin , or as a different branch of Indo-European, is debated. It is known from only five inscriptions, dated from...
All of the above languages except for Lusitanian (which occurs in the area of modern Portugal
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...
) occur in or near the Balkan peninsula, and have been collectively termed the "Paleo-Balkan languages
Paleo-Balkan languages
Paleo-Balkan is a geolinguistic term referring to the Indo-European languages that were spoken in the Balkans in ancient times. Except for Greek and the language that gave rise to Albanian , they are all extinct, due to Hellenization, Romanization, and Slavicisation.- Classification :The following...
". This is a purely geographic grouping and makes no claims about the relatedness of the languages to each other as compared with other Indo-European languages.
Hypothetical clades
- Italo-CelticItalo-CelticIn historical linguistics, Italo-Celtic is a grouping of the Italic and Celtic branches of the Indo-European language family on the basis of features shared by these two branches and no others. These are usually considered to be innovations, which are likely to have developed after the breakup of...
- Graeco-Aryan
- Graeco-ArmenianGraeco-ArmenianGraeco-Armenian is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Greek and Armenian languages which postdates the Proto-Indo-European...
- Daco-Thracian
- Thraco-IllyrianThraco-IllyrianThraco-Illyrian refers to a hypothesis that the Thraco-Dacian and Illyrian languages comprise a distinct branch of Indo-European. Thraco-Illyrian is also used as a term merely implying a Thracian-Illyrian interference, mixture or sprachbund, or as a shorthand way of saying that it is not...
See also
- Indo-European languagesIndo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...
- Indo-European vocabularyIndo-European vocabularyThe following is a table of the many of most fundamental Proto-Indo-European language words and roots, with their cognates in all of the major families of descendants...
- Laryngeal theoryLaryngeal theoryThe laryngeal theory is a generally accepted theory of historical linguistics which proposes the existence of one, or a set of three , consonant sounds termed "laryngeals" that appear in most current reconstructions of the Proto-Indo-European language...
- List of Indo-European languages
- Modern Indo-European language
External links
- Indo-European/Modern German Dictionary by Gerhard Köbler (contains Indo-European Grammar in Vorwort section) (in German)
- A list of PIE etyma and their meanings from the Indo-European Etymological Dictionary by Julius Pokorny (University of Texas)
- Database query for Pokorny's dictionary (includes comments and searchable cognates) (Leiden University)
- Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European (by Vyacheslav V. Ivanov)
- Indo-European family tree, showing Indo-European languages and sub branches
- Image of Indo-European migrations from the Armenian Highlands
- PIE theoretical grammar
- Indo-European Etymological Dictionary database (Leiden University)
- Indo-European Documentation Center at the University of TexasUniversity of Texas at AustinThe University of Texas at Austin is a state research university located in Austin, Texas, USA, and is the flagship institution of the The University of Texas System. Founded in 1883, its campus is located approximately from the Texas State Capitol in Austin...
- "The Indo-Uralic Verb" by Frederik KortlandtFrederik KortlandtFrederik Herman Henri Kortlandt is a professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He is an expert on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in...
- Say something in Proto-Indo-European (by Geoffrey Sampson)
- An Overview of the Proto-Indo-European Verb System (by Piotr Gąsiorowski)
- PIE root etymology database (by S.L.Nikolaev and S.A.Starostin)
- On the internal classification of Indo-European languages: survey by Václav BlažekVáclav BlažekVáclav Blažek is a historical linguist. He is a professor at Masaryk University and also teaches at the University of West Bohemia ....
. Linguistica ONLINE. ISSN 1801-5336 (BrnoBrnoBrno by population and area is the second largest city in the Czech Republic, the largest Moravian city, and the historical capital city of the Margraviate of Moravia. Brno is the administrative centre of the South Moravian Region where it forms a separate district Brno-City District...
, Czech RepublicCzech RepublicThe Czech Republic is a landlocked country in Central Europe. The country is bordered by Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the east, Austria to the south, and Germany to the west and northwest....
) - Proto-Indo-European Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh list appendix)
