Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the theorized 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 proto-languages (such as
Proto-Germanic and
Proto-Indo-Iranian), 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 to Early
Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing
Kurgan hypothesis, 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 of its speakers.
As speakers of Proto-Indo-European became isolated from each other through the
Indo-European migrations, the regional
dialects 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
languages. 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,
Portuguese,
Hindustani (
Hindi and
Urdu),
Bengali,
Russian,
Punjabi,
German,
Persian,
French,
Marathi,
Italian, and
Gujarati.
PIE is believed to have had an elaborate system of
morphology that included
inflectional suffixes (analogous to English ''life, lives, life's, lives) 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, and
verbs similarly had a complex system of
conjugation. The PIE
phonology,
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 assume 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 rule: the Indo-European sound laws apply without exception.
William Jones, an
Anglo-Welsh philologist and
puisne judge in
Bengal, caused an academic sensation when he postulated the common ancestry of
Sanskrit,
Latin, and
Greek in 1786, but he was not the first to state such a hypothesis. In the 16th century, European visitors to the Indian subcontinent became aware of similarities between
Indo-Iranian languages and European languages,
and as early as 1653
Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn had published a proposal for a
proto-language ("Scythian") for the following language families:
Germanic,
Romance,
Greek,
Baltic,
Slavic,
Celtic, 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. In the perspective of 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.
In 1818
Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated the set of correspondences to include other Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit and Greek, and the full range of consonants involved. 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, 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 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 had disappeared from all documented languages, but which were later observed in newly excavated
cuneiform tablets in Anatolian.
Julius Pokorny's ('Indo-European Etymological Dictionary', 1959) gave a detailed, though conservative, overview of the lexical knowledge then accumulated.
Jerzy Kuryłowicz's 1956 ''Apophonie'' gave a better understanding of
Indo-European ablaut. 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, 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
Armenian hypothesis, the
Paleolithic Continuity Theory, and the
indigenous Aryans theory. An overview map summarises the origin theories.
Branches
The table lists the main Indo-European language families.
Commonly proposed subgroups of Indo-European languages include
Italo-Celtic,
Graeco-Aryan,
Graeco-Armenian,
Graeco-Phrygian,
Daco-Thracian, and
Thraco-Illyrian.
Due to early
language contact, there are some lexical similarities between the
Proto-Kartvelian and Proto-Indo-European languages.
Marginally attested languages
The
Lusitanian language was a marginally attested language spoken in areas near the border between present-day
Portugal and
Spain.
The
Venetic and
Liburnian languages known from the North Adriatic region are sometimes classified as Italic.
The
Paleo-Balkan languages, which occur in or near the
Balkan peninsula, do not appear to be members of any of the subfamilies of PIE, but are so poorly attested that proper classification of them is not possible. Albanian and Greek are the only surviving Indo-European descendants of the Paleo-Balkan group. Other major languages of this areal grouping included
Phrygian,
Illyrian,
Thracian, and
Dacian.
Phonology
Proto-Indo-European
phonology has been reconstructed in some detail. Notable features of the most widely accepted (but not uncontroversial) reconstruction include:
*three series of
stop consonants 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 detectible effects on adjacent sounds;
*the
fricative
*a
vowel system in which and were the most frequently occurring vowels.
Notation
The vowels and their commonly used notation are:
Vowels
Consonants
The corresponding consonants and their commonly used notation are:
Accent
The
Proto-Indo-European accent 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. 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, 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 where each
morpheme 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
morphemes 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 even newly coined words like ''unfriend''). Proto-Indo-European was a
fusional language, in which
inflectional 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 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 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 are 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 and rename 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: used for the
direct object of a
transitive verb.
*
genitive: marks a
noun 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. Only the Anatolian languages use this case, and it may not have existed in Proto-Indo-European at all.
Late Proto-Indo-European had three
grammatical genders:
* masculine,
* feminine,
* neuter.
This system is probably derived from an older, simpler, two-gender system, attested in Anatolian languages:
common (or
animate) and neuter (inanimate) gender. The feminine gender only arose in the later period of the language.
All nominals distinguished three
numbers:
* singular,
* dual, and
* plural.
Pronoun
Proto-Indo-European pronouns are difficult to reconstruct, owing to their variety in later languages. PIE had personal
pronouns in the first and second
grammatical person, 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 form.
Verb
Proto-Indo-European verbs, like the nouns, exhibited a system of ablaut. The most basic categorisation 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
*
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 sentences.
*
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: indicates a wish or hope. It is similar to the
cohortative mood and is closely related to the
subjunctive mood.
Verbs had two
grammatical voices:
*
active: used in a clause whose subject expresses the main verb's
agent.
*
mediopassive: for the
middle voice and the
passive voice.
Verbs had three
grammatical persons: first, second and third.
Verbs had three
grammatical numbers:
*singular
*
dual: referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or pronoun.
*
plural: a number other than singular or dual.
Verbs were also marked by a highly developed system of
participles, 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 could be used both as
adverbs and
postpositions, like "under, below". The postpositions became prepositions in most daughter languages. Other reconstructible particles include
negators (),
conjunctions ( "and", "or" and others) and an
interjection (, an expression of 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 could be 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 could also be used as the second element of a compound. 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 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 known 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, signified "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 ''swāgur'' "brother-in-law").
* (''*dyḗw-s'' ~) zero grade ''*diw-és'' "sky" > full grade ''*deyw-o-s'' "god,
sky god" (Vedic ,
Latin ''deus'', etc.). Note the difference in vowel placement, ''*dyew-'' in the full-grade stem of the original noun but ''*deyw-'' 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 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. 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, to signal
syntactic relationships within sentences. Still, a default (
unmarked) word order is thought to have existed in PIE. This was reconstructed by
Jacob Wackernagel as being
subject–verb–object (SVO), based on evidence in Vedic Sanskrit, and the SVO hypothesis still has some adherents, but the "broad consensus" among PIE scholars is that PIE would have been a
subject–object–verb (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 personal pronouns of the
Tocharian languages.
A shift from OV to VO order is posited to have occurred in late PIE since many of the descendant languages have this 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. The context-dependent order preferences in Baltic, Slavic and Germanic are a complex topic, with some attributing them to outside influences
and others to internal developments.
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
*
Proto-Indo-European verbs
*
Proto-Indo-European pronouns
*
List of Indo-European languages
*
Indo-European sound laws
References
Further reading
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
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
Category:Bronze Age
Category:Indo-European languages
Language
Indo-European