Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the
Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by
linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists.
Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other
proto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE or its
daughter language
In historical linguistics, a daughter language, also known as descendant language, is a language descended from another language, its mother language, through a process of genetic descent. If more than one language has developed from the same pr ...
s, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the
comparative method) were developed as a result.
PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the Late
Neolithic
The Neolithic period, or New Stone Age, is an Old World archaeological period and the final division of the Stone Age. It saw the Neolithic Revolution, a wide-ranging set of developments that appear to have arisen independently in several pa ...
to Early
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pri ...
, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing
Kurgan hypothesis
The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory, Kurgan model, or steppe theory) is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe and pa ...
, the
original homeland of the
Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the
Pontic–Caspian steppe of eastern Europe. The linguistic reconstruction of PIE has provided insight into the pastoral
culture and patriarchal
religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...
of its speakers.
As speakers of Proto-Indo-European became isolated from each other through the
Indo-European migrations, the regional
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety of a language that is ...
s of Proto-Indo-European spoken by the various groups diverged, as each dialect underwent shifts in pronunciation (the
Indo-European sound laws), morphology, and vocabulary. Over many centuries, these dialects transformed into the known ancient Indo-European
language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
s. From there, further linguistic divergence led to the evolution of their current descendants, the modern Indo-European languages. Today, the descendant languages of PIE with the most native speakers are
Spanish,
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
,
Portuguese,
Hindustani (
Hindi
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
and
),
Bengali
Bengali or Bengalee, or Bengalese may refer to:
*something of, from, or related to Bengal, a large region in South Asia
* Bengalis, an ethnic and linguistic group of the region
* Bengali language, the language they speak
** Bengali alphabet, the w ...
,
Russian,
Punjabi
Punjabi, or Panjabi, most often refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to Punjab, a region in India and Pakistan
* Punjabi language
* Punjabi people
* Punjabi dialects and languages
Punjabi may also refer to:
* Punjabi (horse), a British Th ...
,
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
,
Persian,
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
,
Marathi,
Italian, and
Gujarati
Gujarati may refer to:
* something of, from, or related to Gujarat, a state of India
* Gujarati people, the major ethnic group of Gujarat
* Gujarati language, the Indo-Aryan language spoken by them
* Gujarati languages, the Western Indo-Aryan sub- ...
.
PIE is believed to have had an elaborate system of
morphology that included
inflectional suffixes (analogous to English ''child, child's, children, children's'') as well as
ablaut (vowel alterations, as preserved in English ''sing, sang, sung, song'') and
accent. PIE
nominals and
pronouns had a complex system of
declension
In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ...
, and
verbs similarly had a complex system of
conjugation
Conjugation or conjugate may refer to:
Linguistics
*Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form
* Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language
Mathematics
*Complex conjugation, the change ...
. The PIE
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
,
particles,
numerals, and
copula are also well-reconstructed.
Asterisks are used as a conventional mark of reconstructed words, such as *, *, or *; these forms are the reconstructed ancestors of the modern English words ''water'', ''
hound'', and ''three'', respectively.
Development of the hypothesis
No direct evidence of PIE exists; scholars have reconstructed PIE from its present-day descendants using the
comparative method. For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English: and ''foot'', and ''father'', and ''fish''. Since there is a consistent correspondence of the initial consonants that emerges far too frequently to be coincidental, one can infer that these languages stem from a common
parent language.
Detailed analysis suggests a system of
sound laws to describe the
phonetic and
phonological changes from the hypothetical ancestral words to the modern ones. These laws have become so detailed and reliable as to support the
Neogrammarian
The Neogrammarians (German: ''Junggrammatiker'', 'young grammarians') were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound chang ...
rule: the Indo-European sound laws apply without exception.
William Jones, an
Anglo-Welsh philologist
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined ...
and
puisne judge in
Bengal
Bengal ( ; bn, বাংলা/বঙ্গ, translit=Bānglā/Bôngô, ) is a geopolitical, cultural and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the eastern part of the Indian subcontinent at the apex of the Bay of Bengal, predom ...
, caused an academic sensation when he postulated the common ancestry of
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural diffusion ...
,
Greek, and
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
in 1786, but he was not the first to state such a hypothesis. In the 16th century, European visitors to the
Indian subcontinent
The Indian subcontinent is a physiographical region in Southern Asia. It is situated on the Indian Plate, projecting southwards into the Indian Ocean from the Himalayas. Geopolitically, it includes the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, In ...
became aware of similarities between
Indo-Iranian language
The Indo-Iranian languages (also Indo-Iranic languages or Aryan languages) constitute the largest and southeasternmost extant branch of the Indo-European language family (with over 400 languages), predominantly spoken in the geographical subre ...
s and European languages,
and as early as 1653,
Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn
Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (August 28, 1612 – October 3, 1653) was a Dutch scholar (his Latinized name was Marcus Zuerius Boxhornius). Born in Bergen op Zoom, he was professor at the University of Leiden. He discovered the similarity among Indo- ...
had published a proposal for a
proto-language ("Scythian") for the following language families:
Germanic,
Romance,
Greek,
Baltic
Baltic may refer to:
Peoples and languages
*Baltic languages, a subfamily of Indo-European languages, including Lithuanian, Latvian and extinct Old Prussian
*Balts (or Baltic peoples), ethnic groups speaking the Baltic languages and/or originatin ...
,
Slavic,
Celtic
Celtic, Celtics or Keltic may refer to:
Language and ethnicity
*pertaining to Celts, a collection of Indo-European peoples in Europe and Anatolia
**Celts (modern)
*Celtic languages
**Proto-Celtic language
*Celtic music
*Celtic nations
Sports Foo ...
, and
Iranian.
In a memoir sent to the in 1767, , a French Jesuit who spent all his life in India, had specifically demonstrated the analogy between Sanskrit and European languages. According to current academic consensus, Jones's famous work of 1786 was less accurate than his predecessors', as he erroneously included
Egyptian,
Japanese and
Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting
Hindi
Hindi (Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...
.
In 1818,
Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated the set of correspondences in his prize essay ('Investigation of the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language'), where he argued that
Old Norse
Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and their overseas settlement ...
was related to the Germanic languages, and had even suggested a relation to the Baltic, Slavic, Greek, Latin and Romance languages. In 1816,
Franz Bopp published ''On the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit'', in which he investigated a common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. In 1833, he began publishing the ''Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit,
Zend
Zend or Zand ( pal, 𐭦𐭭𐭣) is a Zoroastrian technical term for exegetical glosses, paraphrases, commentaries and translations of the Avesta's texts. The term ''zand'' is a contraction of the Avestan language word ' (, meaning "interpret ...
, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, and German''.
In 1822,
Jacob Grimm formulated what became known as
Grimm's law as a general rule in his . Grimm showed correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages and demonstrated that sound change systematically transforms all words of a language. From the 1870s, the Neogrammarians proposed that sound laws have no exceptions, as illustrated by
Verner's law, published in 1876, which resolved apparent exceptions to Grimm's law by exploring the role of accent (stress) in language change.
August Schleicher's ''A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages'' (1874–77) represented an early attempt to reconstruct the proto-Indo-European language.
By the early 1900s,
Indo-Europeanists had developed well-defined descriptions of PIE which scholars still accept today. Later, the discovery of the
Anatolian and
Tocharian languages
The Tocharian (sometimes ''Tokharian'') languages ( or ), also known as ''Arśi-Kuči'', Agnean-Kuchean or Kuchean-Agnean, are an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family spoken by inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, the Tocharians. Th ...
added to the corpus of descendant languages. A subtle new principle won wide acceptance: the
laryngeal theory, which explained irregularities in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European phonology as the effects of hypothetical sounds which no longer exist in all languages documented prior to the excavation of
cuneiform
Cuneiform is a logo- syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge- ...
tablets in Anatolian.
Julius Pokorny's ('Indo-European Etymological Dictionary', 1959) gave a detailed, though conservative, overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated by 1959.
Jerzy Kuryłowicz's 1956 ''Apophonie'' gave a better understanding of
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became robust enough to establish its relationship to PIE.
Historical and geographical setting
Scholars have proposed multiple hypotheses about when, where, and by whom PIE was spoken. The
Kurgan hypothesis
The Kurgan hypothesis (also known as the Kurgan theory, Kurgan model, or steppe theory) is the most widely accepted proposal to identify the Proto-Indo-European homeland from which the Indo-European languages spread out throughout Europe and pa ...
, first put forward in 1956 by
Marija Gimbutas, has become the most popular. It proposes that the original speakers of PIE were the
Yamnaya culture associated with the
kurgans (burial mounds) on the
Pontic–Caspian steppe north of the Black Sea.
According to the theory, they were
nomadic pastoralists who
domesticated the horse, which allowed them to migrate across Europe and Asia in wagons and chariots.
By the early 3rd millennium BC, they had expanded throughout the Pontic–Caspian steppe and into eastern Europe.
Other theories include the
Anatolian hypothesis
The Anatolian hypothesis, also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory, first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987, proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. ...
,
which posits that PIE spread out from Anatolia with agriculture beginning 7500–6000 BC, the
Armenian hypothesis, the
Paleolithic continuity paradigm
The Proto-Indo-European homeland (or Indo-European homeland) was the prehistoric linguistic homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). From this region, its speakers migrated east and west, and went on to form the proto-communities of ...
, and the
indigenous Aryans theory. Out of all the theories for a PIE homeland, the Kurgan and Anatolian hypotheses are the ones most widely accepted, and also the ones most debated against each other. The question of a PIE homeland is considered to be the biggest controversy in PIE studies, which some linguists think may never be solved.
Descendants
The table lists the main Indo-European language families, comprising the languages descended from Proto-Indo-European.
Commonly proposed subgroups of Indo-European languages include
Italo-Celtic,
Graeco-Aryan,
Graeco-Armenian,
Graeco-Phrygian,
Daco-Thracian, and
Thraco-Illyrian.
There are numerous lexical similarities between the Proto-Indo-European and
Proto-Kartvelian languages due to early
language contact, though some morphological similarities—notably the
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
, which is remarkably similar to the root ablaut system reconstructible for Proto-Kartvelian.
Marginally attested languages
The
Lusitanian language was a marginally attested language spoken in areas near the border between present-day
Portugal
Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of th ...
and
Spain
, image_flag = Bandera de España.svg
, image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg
, national_motto = '' Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond")
, national_anthem = (English: "Royal March")
, ...
.
The
Venetic
Venetic is an extinct Indo-European language, usually classified into the Italic subgroup, that was spoken by the Veneti people in ancient times in northeast Italy (Veneto and Friuli) and part of modern Slovenia, between the Po Delta and ...
and
Liburnian
The Liburnians or Liburni ( grc, Λιβυρνοὶ) were an ancient tribe inhabiting the district called Liburnia, a coastal region of the northeastern Adriatic between the rivers ''Arsia'' ( Raša) and ''Titius'' ( Krka) in what is now Croati ...
languages known from the North Adriatic region are sometimes classified as Italic.
Albanian and Greek are the only surviving Indo-European descendants of a
Paleo-Balkan language area, named for their occurrence in or in the vicinity of the
Balkan peninsula. Most of the other languages of this area—including
Illyrian,
Thracian, and
Dacian—do not appear to be members of any other subfamilies of PIE, but are so poorly attested that proper classification of them is not possible. Forming an exception,
Phrygian is sufficiently well-attested to allow proposals of a particularly close affiliation with Greek, and a
Graeco-Phrygian branch of Indo-European is becoming increasingly accepted.
Phonology
Proto-Indo-European
phonology
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
has been reconstructed in some detail. Notable features of the most widely accepted (but not uncontroversial) reconstruction include:
*three series of
stop consonant
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), li ...
s reconstructed as
voiceless,
voiced, and
breathy voiced;
*
sonorant consonants that could be used
syllabically;
*three so-called
laryngeal consonants, whose exact pronunciation is not well-established but which are believed to have existed in part based on their detectable effects on adjacent sounds;
*the
fricative
A fricative is a consonant 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 ...
*a
vowel
A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...
system in which and were the most frequently occurring vowels.
Notation
Vowels
The vowels in commonly used notation are:
Consonants
The corresponding consonants in commonly used notation are:
Accent
The
Proto-Indo-European accent
Proto-Indo-European accent refers to the accentual ( stress) system of the Proto-Indo-European language.
Description
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is usually reconstructed as having had variable lexical stress: the placement of the stress in a word ...
is reconstructed today as having had variable lexical stress, 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). Stressed syllables received a higher pitch; therefore it is often said that PIE had a
pitch accent
A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ...
. The location of the stress is associated with ablaut variations, especially between normal-grade vowels ( and ) and zero-grade (i.e. lack of a vowel), but not entirely predictable from it.
The accent is best preserved in
Vedic Sanskrit and (in the case of nouns)
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic pe ...
, and indirectly attested in a number of phenomena in other IE languages. To account for mismatches between the accent of Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, as well as a few other phenomena, a few historical linguists prefer to reconstruct PIE as a
tone language
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
where each
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology.
In English, morphemes are ...
had an inherent tone; the sequence of tones in a word then evolved, according to that hypothesis, into the placement of lexical stress in different ways in different IE branches.
Morphology
Root
Proto-Indo-European roots were
affix-lacking
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology.
In English, morphemes are ...
s which carried the core
lexical meaning of a word and were used to derive related words (cf. the English root "-''friend''-", from which are derived related words such as ''friendship,'' ''friendly'', ''befriend'', and newly coined words such as ''unfriend''). Proto-Indo-European was probably a
fusional language
Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.
...
, in which
inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
al morphemes signalled the grammatical relationships between words. This dependence on inflectional morphemes means that roots in PIE, unlike those in English, were rarely used without affixes. A root plus a
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, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carr ...
formed a
word stem, and a word stem plus a desinence (usually an ending) formed a word.
Ablaut
Many morphemes in Proto-Indo-European had short ''e'' as their inherent vowel; the
Indo-European ablaut
In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE).
An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...
is the change of this short ''e'' to short ''o'', long ''e'' (ē), long ''o'' (''ō''), or no vowel. This variation in vowels occurred both within
inflectional morphology (e.g., different grammatical forms of a noun or verb may have different vowels) and
derivational morphology (e.g., a verb and an associated abstract
verbal noun may have different vowels).
Categories that PIE distinguished through ablaut were often also identifiable by contrasting endings, but the loss of these endings in some later Indo-European languages has led them to use ablaut alone to identify grammatical categories, as in the Modern English words ''sing'', ''sang'', ''sung''.
Noun
Proto-Indo-European nouns were probably declined for eight or nine cases:
*
nominative: marks the
subject of a verb, such as ''They'' in ''They ate''. Words that follow a linking verb (
copulative verb) and restate the subject of that verb also use the nominative case. Thus, both ''They'' and ''linguists'' are in the nominative case in ''They are linguists''. The nominative is the dictionary form of the noun.
*
accusative
The accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘ ...
: used for the
direct object
In linguistics, an object is any of several types of arguments. In subject-prominent, nominative-accusative languages such as English, a transitive verb typically distinguishes between its subject and any of its objects, which can include b ...
of a
transitive verb.
*
genitive: marks a
noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, ...
as modifying another noun.
*
dative: used to indicate the indirect object of a transitive verb, such as ''Jacob'' in ''Maria gave Jacob a drink''.
*
instrumental: marks the ''instrument'' or means by, or with, which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action. It may be either a physical object or an abstract concept.
*
ablative: used to express motion away from something.
*
locative: corresponds vaguely to the English prepositions ''in'', ''on'', ''at'', and ''by''.
*
vocative: used for a word that identifies an addressee. A vocative expression is one of direct address where the identity of the party spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence. For example, in the sentence, "I don't know, John", ''John'' is a vocative expression that indicates the party being addressed.
*
allative: used as a type of
locative case that expresses movement towards something. It was preserved in Anatolian (particularly Old Hittite), and fossilized traces of it have been found in Greek. Its PIE shape is uncertain, with candidates including ''*-h
2(e)'', ''*-(e)h
2'', or ''*-a''.
Late Proto-Indo-European had three
grammatical gender
In linguistics, grammatical gender system is a specific form of noun class system, where nouns are assigned with gender categories that are often not related to their real-world qualities. In languages with grammatical gender, most or all noun ...
s:
* masculine
* feminine
* neuter
This system is probably derived from an older two-gender system, attested in Anatolian languages:
common (or
animate
Animation is a method by which still figures are manipulated to appear as moving images. In traditional animation, images are drawn or painted by hand on transparent celluloid sheets to be photographed and exhibited on film. Today, most anim ...
) and neuter (or inanimate) gender. The feminine gender only arose in the later period of the language. Neuter nouns collapsed the nominative, vocative and accusative into a single form, the plural of which used a special
collective suffix (manifested in most descendants as ''-a''). This same collective suffix in extended forms and (respectively on thematic and athematic nouns, becoming ''-ā'' and ''-ī'' in the early daughter languages) became used to form feminine nouns from masculines.
All nominals distinguished three
numbers:
* singular
* dual
* plural
These numerals were also distinguished in verbs (see
below
Below may refer to:
*Earth
* Ground (disambiguation)
*Soil
*Floor
* Bottom (disambiguation)
*Less than
*Temperatures below freezing
*Hell or underworld
People with the surname
*Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general
*Fred Below ...
), requiring
agreement Agreement may refer to:
Agreements between people and organizations
* Gentlemen's agreement, not enforceable by law
* Trade agreement, between countries
* Consensus, a decision-making process
* Contract, enforceable in a court of law
** Meeting ...
with their subject nominal.
Pronoun
Proto-Indo-European pronouns
Proto-Indo-European pronouns have been reconstructed by modern linguists, based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages. This article lists and discusses the hypothesised forms.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) pronouns, especially demo ...
are difficult to reconstruct, owing to their variety in later languages. PIE had personal
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun ( abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not ...
s in the first and second
grammatical person
In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker ( first person), the addressee ( second person), and others ( third pe ...
, but not the third person, where
demonstrative pronouns 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''. There were also two varieties for the accusative, genitive and dative cases, a stressed and an
enclitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
form.
Verb
Proto-Indo-European verbs, like the nouns, exhibited a system of ablaut.
The most basic categorisation for the reconstructed Indo-European verb is
grammatical aspect. Verbs are classed as:
*
stative: verbs that depict a state of being
*
imperfective
The imperfective (abbreviated or more ambiguously ) is a grammatical aspect used to describe ongoing, habitual, repeated, or similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future. Although many languages have a ge ...
: verbs depicting ongoing, habitual or repeated action
*
perfective: verbs depicting a completed action or actions viewed as an entire process.
Verbs have at least four
grammatical moods:
*
indicative: indicates that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in
declarative sentence
In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example " The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." In traditional grammar, it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a complete thoug ...
s.
*
imperative: forms commands or requests, including the giving of prohibition or permission, or any other kind of advice or exhortation.
*
subjunctive: used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred
*
optative
The optative mood ( or ; abbreviated ) is a grammatical mood that indicates a wish or hope regarding a given action. It is a superset of the cohortative mood and is closely related to the subjunctive mood but is distinct from the desiderative mood ...
: indicates a wish or hope. It is similar to the
cohortative mood and is closely related to the
subjunctive mood
The subjunctive (also known as conjunctive in some languages) is a grammatical mood, a feature of the utterance that indicates the speaker's attitude towards it. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to express various states of unreality ...
.
Verbs had two
grammatical voices:
*
active: used in a clause whose subject expresses the main verb's
agent
Agent may refer to:
Espionage, investigation, and law
*, spies or intelligence officers
* Law of agency, laws involving a person authorized to act on behalf of another
** Agent of record, a person with a contractual agreement with an insuranc ...
.
*
mediopassive: for the
middle voice and the
passive voice
A passive voice construction is a grammatical voice construction that is found in many languages. In a clause with passive voice, the grammatical subject expresses the ''theme'' or '' patient'' of the main verb – that is, the person or thing ...
.
Verbs had three
grammatical person
In linguistics, grammatical person is the grammatical distinction between deictic references to participant(s) in an event; typically the distinction is between the speaker ( first person), the addressee ( second person), and others ( third pe ...
s: first, second and third.
Verbs had three
grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions (such as "one", "two" or "three or more"). English and other languages present number categories of ...
s:
*singular
*
dual: referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun.
*
plural
The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...
: a number other than singular or dual.
Verbs were probably marked by a highly developed system of
participle
In linguistics, a participle () (from Latin ' a "sharing, partaking") is a nonfinite verb form that has some of the characteristics and functions of both verbs and adjectives. More narrowly, ''participle'' has been defined as "a word derived from ...
s, one for each combination of tense and voice, and an assorted array of
verbal nouns and adjectival formations.
The following table shows a possible reconstruction of the PIE verb endings from Sihler, which largely represents the current consensus among Indo-Europeanists.
Numbers
Proto-Indo-European numerals are generally reconstructed as follows:
Rather than specifically 100, * may originally have meant "a large number".
Particle
Proto-Indo-European particles
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 ...
were probably used both as
adverb An adverb is a word or an expression that generally modifies a verb, adjective, another adverb, determiner, clause, preposition, or sentence. Adverbs typically express manner, place, time, frequency, degree, level of certainty, etc., answering ...
s and as
postpositions. These postpositions became prepositions in most daughter languages.
Reconstructed particles include for example, * "under, below"; the
negators *, *; the
conjunctions * "and", * "or" and others; and an
interjection, *, expressing woe or agony.
Derivational morphology
Proto-Indo-European employed various means of deriving words from other words, or directly from verb roots.
Internal derivation
Internal derivation was a process that derived new words through changes in accent and ablaut alone. It was not as productive as external (affixing) derivation, but is firmly established by the evidence of various later languages.
=Possessive adjectives
=
Possessive or associated adjectives were probably created from nouns through internal derivation. Such words could be used directly as adjectives, or they could be turned back into a noun without any change in morphology, indicating someone or something characterised by the adjective. They were probably also used as the second elements in compounds. If the first element was a noun, this created an adjective that resembled a present participle in meaning, e.g. "having much rice" or "cutting trees". When turned back into nouns, such compounds were
Bahuvrihis or semantically resembled
agent nouns.
In thematic stems, creating a possessive adjective seems to have involved shifting the accent one syllable to the right, for example:
* ''*tómh₁-o-s'' "slice" (Greek ''tómos'') > ''*tomh₁-ó-s'' "cutting" (i.e. "making slices"; Greek ''tomós'') > ''*dr-u-tomh₁-ó-s'' "cutting trees" (Greek ''drutómos'' "woodcutter" with irregular accent).
* ''*wólh₁-o-s'' "wish" (Sanskrit ''vára-'') > ''*wolh₁-ó-s'' "having wishes" (Sanskrit ''vará-'' "suitor").
In athematic stems, there was a change in the accent/ablaut class. The reconstructed four classes followed an ordering in which a derivation would shift the class one to the right:
: acrostatic → proterokinetic → hysterokinetic → amphikinetic
The reason for this particular ordering of the classes in derivation is not known. Some examples:
* Acrostatic ''*krót-u-s'' ~ ''*krét-u-s'' "strength" (Sanskrit ''krátu-'') > proterokinetic ''*krét-u-s'' ~ ''*kr̥t-éw-s'' "having strength, strong" (Greek ''kratús'').
* Hysterokinetic ''*ph₂-tḗr'' ~ ''*ph₂-tr-és'' "father" (Greek ''patḗr'') > amphikinetic ''*h₁su-péh₂-tōr'' ~ ''*h₁su-ph₂-tr-és'' "having a good father" (Greek ''εὑπάτωρ'', eupátōr).
=Vrddhi
=
A
vrddhi derivation, named after the Sanskrit grammatical term, signifying "of, belonging to, descended from". It was characterised by "upgrading" the root grade, from zero to full (''e'') or from full to lengthened (''ē''). When upgrading from zero to full grade, the vowel could sometimes be inserted in the "wrong" place, creating a different stem from the original full grade.
Examples:
* full grade ''*swéḱuro-s'' "father-in-law" (
Vedic Sanskrit ) > lengthened grade *''swēḱuró-s'' "relating to one's father-in-law" (Vedic ,
Old High German
Old High German (OHG; german: Althochdeutsch (Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050.
There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old Hig ...
''swāgur'' "brother-in-law").
* full grade ''*dyḗw-s'' > zero grade ''*diw-és'' "sky" > new full grade ''*deyw-o-s'' "god,
sky god" (Vedic ,
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
''deus'', etc.). Note the difference in vowel placement, ''*dyew-'' in the full-grade stem of the original noun, but in the vrddhi derivative.
=Nominalization
=
Adjectives with accent on the thematic vowel could be turned into nouns by moving the accent back onto the root. A zero grade root could remain so, or be "upgraded" to full grade like in a vrddhi derivative. Some examples:
* PIE ''*ǵn̥h₁-tó-s'' "born" (Vedic ''jātá-'') > ''*ǵénh₁-to-'' "thing that is born" (German ''Kind'').
* Greek ''leukós'' "white" > ''leũkos'' "a kind of fish", literally "white one".
* Vedic ''kṛṣṇá-'' "dark" > ''kṛ́ṣṇa-'' "dark one", also "antelope".
This kind of derivation is likely related to the possessive adjectives, and can be seen as essentially the reverse of it.
Affixal derivation
Syntax
The
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituenc ...
of the older Indo-European languages has been studied in earnest since at least the late nineteenth century, by such scholars as
Hermann Hirt and
Berthold Delbrück
Berthold Gustav Gottlieb Delbrück (; 26 July 1842 – 3 January 1922) was a German linguist who devoted himself to the study of the comparative syntax of the Indo-European languages.
Early life
Delbrück was born in Putbus. He studied at the u ...
. In the second half of the twentieth century, interest in the topic increased and led to reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European syntax.
Since all the early attested IE languages were inflectional, PIE is thought to have relied primarily on morphological markers, rather than
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
, to signal
syntactic relationships within sentences. Still, a default (
unmarked) word order is thought to have existed in PIE. In 1892,
Jacob Wackernagel
Jacob Wackernagel (11 December 1853 – 22 May 1938) was a Swiss linguist, Indo-Europeanist and scholar of Sanskrit. He was born in Basel, son of the philologist Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806–1869).
Biography
Jacob Wackernagel was born on ...
reconstructed PIE's word order as
subject–verb–object (SVO), based on evidence in Vedic Sanskrit.
Winfred P. Lehmann (1974), on the other hand, reconstructs PIE as a
subject–object–verb (SOV) language. He posits that the presence of
person marking in PIE verbs motivated a shift from OV to VO order in later dialects. Many of the descendant languages have VO order: modern Greek,
Romance and
Albanian prefer SVO,
Insular Celtic has VSO as the default order, and even the
Anatolian languages show some signs of this word order shift.
Tocharian and
Indo-Iranian, meanwhile, retained the conservative OV order. Lehmann attributes the context-dependent order preferences in Baltic, Slavic and Germanic to outside influences.
Donald Ringe (2006), however, attributes these to internal developments instead.
Paul Friedrich (1975) disagrees with Lehmann's analysis. He reconstructs PIE with the following syntax:
* basic SVO word order
* adjectives before nouns
* head nouns before
genitives
*
prepositions rather than postpositions
* no dominant order in
comparative constructions
* main clauses before
relative clauses
Friedrich notes that even among those Indo-European languages with basic OV word order, none of them are ''rigidly'' OV. He also notes that these non-rigid OV languages mainly occur in parts of the IE area that overlap with OV languages from other families (such as
Uralic
The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian lan ...
and
Dravidian), whereas VO is predominant in the central parts of the IE area. For these reasons, among others, he argues for a VO common ancestor.
Hans Henrich Hock (2015) reports that the SVO hypothesis still has some adherents, but the "broad consensus" among PIE scholars is that PIE would have been an SOV language. The SOV default word order with other orders used to express emphasis (e.g.,
verb–subject–object to emphasise the verb) is attested in
Old Indo-Aryan,
Old Iranian,
Old Latin and
Hittite, while traces of it can be found in the
enclitic
In morphology and syntax, a clitic (, backformed from Greek "leaning" or "enclitic"Crystal, David. ''A First Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics''. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980. Print.) is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a ...
personal pronouns of the
Tocharian languages
The Tocharian (sometimes ''Tokharian'') languages ( or ), also known as ''Arśi-Kuči'', Agnean-Kuchean or Kuchean-Agnean, are an extinct branch of the Indo-European language family spoken by inhabitants of the Tarim Basin, the Tocharians. Th ...
.
In popular culture
The
Ridley Scott film ''
Prometheus'' features an android named David (played by
Michael Fassbender) who learns Proto-Indo-European to communicate with the Engineer, an extraterrestrial whose race may have created humans. David practices PIE by reciting
Schleicher's fable. Linguist Dr Anil Biltoo created the film's reconstructed dialogue and had an onscreen role teaching David Schleicher's fable.
The 2016 video game ''
Far Cry Primal'', set in around 10,000 BC, features dialects of an
invented language based partly on PIE, intended to be its fictional predecessor.
Linguists constructed
three dialects—Wenja, Udam and Izila—one for each of the three featured tribes.
See also
*
Indo-European vocabulary
The following is a table of many of the most fundamental Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) words and roots, with their cognates in all of the major families of descendants.
Notes
The following conventions are used:
* Cognates are in general giv ...
*
Proto-Indo-European verbs
*
Proto-Indo-European pronouns
Proto-Indo-European pronouns have been reconstructed by modern linguists, based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages. This article lists and discusses the hypothesised forms.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) pronouns, especially demo ...
*
List of Indo-European languages
*
Indo-European sound laws
Notes
References
Bibliography
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
External links
* At the University of Texas Linguistic Research Center
List of online booksIndo-European LexiconProto-Indo-European Lexiconat the University of Helsinki, Department of Modern Languages, Department of World Cultures, Indo-European Studies
*
Indo-European Grammar, Syntax & Etymology DictionaryIndo-European Lexical Cognacy Database an online collection of video lectures on Ancient Indo-European languages
{{DEFAULTSORT:Proto-Indo-European Language
Bronze Age
Indo-European languages
Language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...