''Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon'' (''NIL'', ''"Nominals in the Indo-European Lexicon"'') is an

etymological dictionary An etymological dictionary discusses the etymology of the words listed. Often, large dictionaries, such as the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' and ''Webster's'', will contain some etymological information, without aspiring to focus on etymology. E ...

of the

Proto-Indo-European 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- ...

(PIE) nominals, that is,

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, ...

s and

adjective In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ma ...

s. It appeared in 2008, edited by German linguists Dagmar S. Wodtko, Britta Irslinger, and Carolin Schneider. Like other modern PIE dictionaries, ''NIL'' utilizes the modern three-

laryngeal theory The laryngeal theory is a theory in the historical linguistics of the Indo-European languages positing that: * The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) had a series of phonemes beyond those reconstructable by the comparative method. That is, th ...

for its reconstructions.

History

During the 2000s, scientists at the

University of Freiburg The University of Freiburg (colloquially german: Uni Freiburg), officially the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (german: Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg), is a public research university located in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemb ...

worked on a project called "Indogermanisches Nomen" ("Indo-European Nominal"), comprising a volume on nominal

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 ...

, to become part of

Manfred Mayrhofer Manfred Mayrhofer (26 September 1926 – 31 October 2011) was an Austrian Indo-Europeanist who specialized in Indo-Iranian languages. Mayrhofer served as professor emeritus at the University of Vienna. He is noted for his etymological dictionar ...

's series on Indo-European grammar; a dictionary called ''Lexikon der indogermanischen Nomina'' (''LIN'', "Lexicon of the Indo-European Nominals" in analogy to the ''

Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben The ''Lexikon der indogermanischen Verben'' (''LIV'', ''"Lexicon of the Indo-European Verbs"'') is an etymological dictionary of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) verb. The first edition appeared in 1998, edited by Helmut Rix. A second edition follow ...

'', ''LIV''); and a work on PIE primary adjectives. Eventually, the project was cancelled due to cutting of funds.

DFG-Projekt "Indogermanisches Nomen"
In 2008, a reduced version of the ''LIN'' was published under the title ''Nomina im Indogermanischen Lexikon''. It includes only a limited selection of words and is lacking the planned grammatical section, which should have listed PIE nominal inflection types (again in analogy to the ''LIV'') along with their scope of use and syntactic implications. Still, an overview of PIE mechanisms for deriving nominals from verbs –

root In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the su ...

nouns, suffixes, vṛddhi derivations, etc. – is included.

Entries

Part of the entries are based on noun stems (for example 'horse') or adjectival stems ( 'deep'), while a large number of PIE nominals are derived from verbal roots (such as 'shine, glow'). The entries are modelled on the concept of the ''LIV''. Each contains * the conjectured meaning of the stem or root, * reconstructed stems and derivations with their reflexes in the daughter languages, * extensive footnotes (with references, remarks on alternative and dubious reconstructions, etc., sometimes exceeding ten pages for a single entry), * the page numbers of the corresponding '' LIV'', '' IEW'', '' EIEC'' and '' LIPP'' entries, where they exist. The daughter languages often have changed the meanings of inherited words. Consequently, many of ''NIL''s entries contain words with widely different meanings. For example, the entry 'deep' treats the Lithuanian words ''dubùs'' 'deep' and ''dubuõ'' 'bowl, pelvis',

Old Irish Old Irish, also called Old Gaelic ( sga, Goídelc, Ogham script: ᚌᚑᚔᚇᚓᚂᚉ; ga, Sean-Ghaeilge; gd, Seann-Ghàidhlig; gv, Shenn Yernish or ), is the oldest form of the Goidelic/Gaelic language for which there are extensive writt ...

''dub(o/ā)'' 'dark, black', and Albanian ''det'' 'sea', among many others. 'shine, glow' lists derivatives with meanings as diverse as 'a light, insight, appearance, wrath, white, clean.'

References

External links

Pokorny PIE Data
(University of Texas)

(based on the ''IEW'' and including laryngeal-based reconstructions, but only as alternative lemmas with cross references to the pre-laryngeal ones) {{Proto-Indo-European language 2008 non-fiction books Indo-European linguistics works Etymological dictionaries

History

Entries

See also

Other PIE dictionaries and grammars

References

External links