The
particles of the
Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) have been reconstructed by modern linguists based on similarities found across all
Indo-European languages.
Adverbs
Adverbs used as adpositions
Many particles could be used both as
adverbs and
postpositions. This is similar to modern languages; compare English ''He is above in the attic'' (adverb) and ''The bird is above the house'' (preposition). The postpositions became prepositions in the daughter languages except
Anatolian,
Indo-Iranian and
Sabellic; some of the other branches such as
Latin and
Greek preserve postpositions vestigially.
Reflexes
In biology, a reflex, or reflex action, is an involuntary, unplanned sequence or action and nearly instantaneous response to a Stimulus (physiology), stimulus.
Reflexes are found with varying levels of complexity in organisms with a nervous s ...
, or descendants of the PIE reconstructed forms in its daughter languages, include the following.
Untranslated reflexes have the same meaning as the PIE word.
In the following languages, two reflexes separated by a slash mean:
*English:
Old English
Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...
/
Modern English
*German:
Old High German /
New High German
*Irish:
Old Irish /
Modern Irish
*Persian:
Old Persian
Old Persian is one of the two directly attested Old Iranian languages (the other being Avestan language, Avestan) and is the ancestor of Middle Persian (the language of Sasanian Empire). Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native ...
/
Modern Persian
*Tocharian:
Tocharian A /
Tocharian B
Negating prefixes (privatives)
Two
privatives can be reconstructed, and , the latter only used for negative
commands
Command may refer to:
Computing
* Command (computing), a statement in a computer language
* COMMAND.COM, the default operating system shell and command-line interpreter for DOS
* Command key, a modifier key on Apple Macintosh computer keyboards
* ...
. The privative prefix is likely the
zero grade of .
Adverbs derived from adjectives
Adverbs derived from adjectives (like English ''bold-ly'', ''beautiful-ly'') arguably cannot be classified as particles. In Proto-Indo-European, these are simply case forms of adjectives and thus better classified as
nouns. An example is "greatly", a nominative-accusative singular.
Conjunctions
The following
conjunctions can be reconstructed:
Placed after the joined word, as in Latin ("Senate and people of Rome"), joining and .
Interjections
There is only one PIE
interjection that can be securely reconstructed; the second is uncertain.
Notes
References
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Proto-Indo-European Particle
Particle
Parts of speech