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57-505: Both of these works aim to provide an overview of the lexical knowledge of the Proto-Indo-European language accumulated through the early 20th century. The IEW is now significantly outdated, especially as it was conservative even when it was written, ignoring the now integral laryngeal theory , and hardly including any Anatolian material. Other Proto-Indo-European language dictionaries and grammars This article about

114-652: A dictionary is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Indo-European languages -related article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Proto-Indo-European language Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European Proto-Indo-European ( PIE )

171-546: A French Jesuit who spent most of 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 . In 1818, Danish linguist Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated

228-536: A PIE ablauting paradigm * dóru , * dreus , which is still reflected directly in Vedic Sanskrit nom. dā́ru 'wood', gen. drṓs . Similarly, PIE * ǵónu , * ǵnéus can be reconstructed for 'knee' from Ancient Greek gónu and Old English cnēo . In that case, there is no extant ablauting paradigm in a single language, but Avestan accusative žnūm and Modern Persian zānū are attested, which strongly implies that Proto-Iranian had an ablauting paradigm. That

285-677: A PIE homeland, the Kurgan and Anatolian hypotheses are the ones most widely accepted, and also the ones most debated against each other. Following the publication of several studies on ancient DNA in 2015, Colin Renfrew, the original author and proponent of the Anatolian hypothesis, has accepted the reality of migrations of populations speaking one or several Indo-European languages from the Pontic steppe towards Northwestern Europe. The table lists

342-457: A consonant, all thematic nominals have suffixes ending in a vowel, and none are root nouns. The accent is fixed on the same syllable throughout the inflection. From the perspective of the daughter languages, a distinction is often made between vowel stems (that is, stems ending in a vowel: i- , u- , (y)ā- , (y)o- stems) and consonantic stems (the rest). However, from the PIE perspective, only

399-549: A conventional mark of reconstructed words, such as * wódr̥ , * ḱwn̥tós , or * tréyes ; these forms are the reconstructed ancestors of the modern English words water , hound , and three , respectively. 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: piede and foot , padre and father , pesce and fish . Since there

456-453: 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 . From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became robust enough to establish its relationship to PIE. 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

513-472: A grammatical function, a change of gender within a sentence signaling the end of a noun phrase (a head noun and its agreeing adjectives) and the start of a new one. An alternative hypothesis to the two-gender view is that Proto-Anatolian inherited a three-gender PIE system, and subsequently Hittite and other Anatolian languages eliminated the feminine by merging it with the masculine. Some endings are difficult to reconstruct and not all authors reconstruct

570-627: 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

627-613: 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 ,

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684-511: A vowel as a prefix. For example, * kʷelh₁- 'turn' gives * kʷe -kʷl(h₁)-ó-s 'wheel', and * bʰrew- 'brown' gives * bʰé -bʰru-s 'beaver'. This type of derivation is also found in verbs, mainly to form the perfect . As with PIE verbs, a distinction is made between primary formations , which are words formed directly from a root as described above, and secondary formations , which are formed from existing words (whether primary or secondary themselves). A fundamental distinction

741-422: Is a consistent correspondence of the initial consonants ( p and f ) 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

798-408: Is a general consensus as to which nominal accent-ablaut patterns must be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European. Given that the foundations for the system were laid by a group of scholars ( Schindler , Eichner , Rix , and Hoffmann ) during the 1964 Erlanger Kolloquium , which discussed the works of Pedersen and Kuiper on nominal accent-ablaut patterns in PIE, the system is sometimes referred to as

855-426: Is an inherent (lexical) property of each noun; all nouns in a language that have grammatical genders are assigned to one of its classes. There was probably originally only an animate (masculine/feminine) versus an inanimate (neuter) distinction. This view is supported by the existence of certain classes of Latin and Ancient Greek adjectives which inflect only for two sets of endings: one for masculine and feminine,

912-415: Is an inherent property of a noun but is part of the inflection of an adjective, because it must agree with the gender of the noun it modifies. Thus, the general morphological form of such words is R+S+E : The process of forming a lexical stem from a root is known in general as derivational morphology , while the process of inflecting that stem is known as inflectional morphology. As in other languages,

969-572: 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 , and verbs similarly had a complex system of conjugation . The PIE phonology , particles , numerals , and copula are also well-reconstructed. Asterisks are used by linguists as

1026-495: Is made between thematic and athematic nominals. The stem of athematic nominals ends in a consonant. They have the original complex system of accent/ablaut alternations described above and are generally held as more archaic. Thematic nominals, which became more and more common during the times of later PIE and its younger daughter languages, have a stem ending in a thematic vowel , * -o- in almost all grammatical cases, sometimes ablauting to * -e- . Since all roots end in

1083-995: 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. Proto-Indo-European phonology has been reconstructed in some detail. Notable features of the most widely accepted (but not uncontroversial) reconstruction include: The vowels in commonly used notation are: Proto-Indo-European nominals Proto-Indo-European nominals include nouns , adjectives , and pronouns . Their grammatical forms and meanings have been reconstructed by modern linguists, based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages . This article discusses nouns and adjectives; Proto-Indo-European pronouns are treated elsewhere. The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) had eight or nine cases , three numbers (singular, dual and plural) and probably originally two genders (animate and neuter), with

1140-469: Is reconstructed in addition to the ordinary locative singular in * -i . In contrast to the other weak cases, it typically has full or lengthened grade of the stem. An alternative reconstruction is found in Beekes (1995). This reconstruction does not give separate tables for the thematic and athematic endings, assuming that they were originally the same and only differentiated in daughter languages. There

1197-512: Is relevant for inflecting the athematic nominals of different accent and ablaut classes. Three numbers were distinguished: singular, dual and plural. Many (possibly all) athematic neuter nouns had a special collective form instead of the plural, which inflected with singular endings, but with the ending * -h₂ in the direct cases, and an amphikinetic accent/ablaut pattern (see below). Late PIE had three genders , traditionally called masculine , feminine and neuter . Gender or noun class

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1254-424: Is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family . No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. 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

1311-559: The Erlangen model . Early PIE nouns had complex patterns of ablation according to which the root, the stem and the ending all showed ablaut variations. Polysyllabic athematic nominals (type R+S+E ) exhibit four characteristic patterns, which include accent and ablaut alternations throughout the paradigm between the root, the stem and the ending. Root nouns (type R+E ) show a similar behavior but with only two patterns. The patterns called "Narten" are, at least formally, analogous to

1368-465: The Germanic languages (in the form of strong verbs ). PIE also had a class of monosyllabic root nouns which lack a suffix, the ending being directly added to the root (as in * dómh₂-s 'house', derived from * demh₂- 'build' ). These nouns can also be interpreted as having a zero suffix or one without a phonetic body ( * dóm-Ø-s ). Verbal stems have corresponding morphological features,

1425-558: 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 Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1767, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux ,

1482-452: The Narten presents in verbs, as they alternate between full ( * e ) and lengthened grades ( * ē ). Notes: The classification of the amphikinetic root nouns is disputed. Since those words have no suffix, they differ from the amphikinetic polysyllables in the strong cases (no o -grade) and in the locative singular (no e -grade suffix). Some scholars prefer to call them amphikinetic and

1539-591: The Neogrammarian hypothesis : the Indo-European sound laws apply without exception. William Jones , an Anglo-Welsh philologist and puisne judge in Bengal , caused an academic sensation when in 1786 he postulated the common ancestry of Sanskrit , Greek , Latin , Gothic , the Celtic languages , and Old Persian , but he was not the first to state such a hypothesis. In the 16th century, European visitors to

1596-417: The eh₂ -stems, ih₂ -stems, uh₂ -stems and bare h₂ -stems, which are found in daughter languages as ā- , ī- , ū- and a- stems, respectively. They originally were the feminine equivalents of the o -stems, i -stems, u -stems and root nouns. Already by late PIE times, however, this system was breaking down. * -eh₂ became generalized as the feminine suffix, and eh₂ -stem nouns evolved more and more in

1653-478: The 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE and its daughter languages , 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 approximately 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age , though estimates vary by more than

1710-569: 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

1767-638: The Pontic–Caspian steppe and into eastern Europe. Other theories include the Anatolian hypothesis , which posits that PIE spread out from Anatolia with agriculture beginning c. 7500–6000 BCE, the Armenian hypothesis , the Paleolithic continuity paradigm , and the indigenous Aryans theory. The last two of these theories are not regarded as credible within academia. Out of all the theories for

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1824-526: The Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Kartvelian languages due to early language contact , as well as some morphological similarities—notably the Indo-European ablaut , which is remarkably similar to the root ablaut system reconstructible for Proto-Kartvelian. 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

1881-429: The above system had been already significantly eroded, with one of the root ablaut grades tending to be extended throughout the paradigm. The erosion is much more extensive in all the daughter languages, with only the oldest stages of most languages showing any root ablaut and typically only in a small number of irregular nouns: The most extensive remains are in Vedic Sanskrit and Old Avestan (the oldest recorded stages of

1938-436: The animate later splitting into the masculine and the feminine. Nominals fell into multiple different declensions . Most of them had word stems ending in a consonant (called athematic stems) and exhibited a complex pattern of accent shifts and/or vowel changes ( ablaut ) among the different cases. Two declensions ended in a vowel ( * -o/-e ) and are called thematic ; they were more regular and became more common during

1995-602: The 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 Deutsche Grammatik . Grimm showed correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages and demonstrated that sound change systematically transforms all words of

2052-472: The corresponding polysyllables holokinetic (or holodynamic , from holos = whole). Some also list mesostatic (meso = middle) and teleutostatic types, with the accent fixed on the suffix and the ending, respectively, but their existence in PIE is disputed. The classes can then be grouped into three static (acrostatic, mesostatic, teleutostatic) and three or four mobile (proterokinetic, hysterokinetic, amphikinetic, holokinetic) paradigms. By late PIE,

2109-420: The data, often reconstructing multiple forms when daughter languages show divergent outcomes. Ringe (2006) is somewhat more speculative, willing to assume analogical changes in some cases to explain divergent outcomes from a single source form. Fortson (2004) is between Sihler and Ringe. The thematic vowel * -o- ablauts to * -e- only in word-final position in the vocative singular, and before * h₂ in

2166-963: The direction of thematic o -stems, with fixed ablaut and accent, increasingly idiosyncratic endings and frequent borrowing of endings from the o -stems. Nonetheless, clear traces of the earlier system are seen especially in Sanskrit , where ī -stems and ū -stems still exist as distinct classes comprising largely feminine nouns. Over time, these stem classes merged with i -stems and u -stems, with frequent crossover of endings. Grammatical gender correlates only partially with sex, and almost exclusively when it relates to humans and domesticated animals. Even then, those correlations may not be consistent: nouns referring to adult males are usually masculine ( father , brother , priest ), nouns referring to adult females ( mother , sister , priestess ) are usually feminine, but diminutives may be neuter regardless of referent, as in both Greek and German. Gender may have also had

2223-582: The effects of hypothetical sounds which no longer exist in all languages documented prior to the excavation of cuneiform tablets in Anatolian. This theory was first proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879 on the basis of internal reconstruction only, and progressively won general acceptance after Jerzy Kuryłowicz 's discovery of consonantal reflexes of these reconstructed sounds in Hittite. Julius Pokorny 's Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ('Indo-European Etymological Dictionary', 1959) gave

2280-507: The history of PIE and its older daughter languages. PIE very frequently derived nominals from verbs. Just as English giver and gift are ultimately related to the verb give , * déh₃tors 'giver' and * déh₃nom 'gift' are derived from * deh₃- 'to give', but the practice was much more common in PIE. For example, * pṓds 'foot' was derived from * ped- 'to tread', and * dómh₂s 'house' from * demh₂- 'to build'. The basic structure of Proto-Indo-European nouns and adjectives

2337-654: The main Indo-European language families, comprising the languages descended from Proto-Indo-European. Slavic: Russian , Ukrainian , Belarusian , Polish , Czech , Slovak , Sorbian , Serbo-Croatian , Bulgarian , Slovenian , Macedonian , Kashubian , Rusyn Iranic: Persian , Pashto , Balochi , Kurdish , Zaza , Ossetian , Luri , Talyshi , Tati , Gilaki , Mazandarani , Semnani , Yaghnobi ; Nuristani 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

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2394-534: 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 BCE, they had expanded throughout

2451-416: The neuter nominative and accusative plural. The vocative singular is also the only case for which the thematic nouns show accent retraction , a leftward shift of the accent, denoted by * -ĕ . The dative, instrumental and ablative plural endings probably contained a * bʰ but are of uncertain structure otherwise. They might also have been of post-PIE date. For athematic nouns, an endingless locative

2508-525: The nominative has the ablaut vowels * é–o–Ø while the genitive has the ablaut vowels * Ø–Ø–é — i.e. all three components have different ablaut vowels, and the stress position has also moved. A large number of different patterns of ablaut variation existed; speakers had to both learn the ablaut patterns and memorize which pattern went with which word. There was a certain regularity of which patterns occurred with which suffixes and formations, but with many exceptions. Already by late PIE times, this system

2565-454: The oldest Indic and Iranian languages, c.  1700–1300 BC ); the younger stages of the same languages already show extensive regularization. In many cases, a former ablauting paradigm was generalized in the daughter languages but in different ways in each language. For example, Ancient Greek dóru 'spear' < PIE nominative * dóru 'wood, tree' and Old English trēo 'tree' < PIE genitive * dreu-s reflect different stems of

2622-517: The other for neuter. Further evidence comes from the Anatolian languages such as Hittite which exhibit only the animate and the neuter genders. The feminine ending is thought to have developed from a collective/abstract suffix * -h₂ that also gave rise to the neuter collective. The existence of combined collective and abstract grammatical forms can be seen in English words such as youth = "the young people (collective)" or "young age (abstract)". Remnants of this period exist in (for instance)

2679-478: The position of the accent likewise occurred in both derivation and inflection, and is often considered part of the ablaut system (which is described in more detail below ). For example, the nominative form * léymons 'lake' (composed of the root * ley- in the ablaut form * léy- , the suffix in the form * -mon- and the ending in the form * -s ) had the genitive * limnés (root form * li- , suffix * -mn- and ending * -és ). In this word,

2736-405: The possible suffixes that can be added to a given root, and the meaning that results, are not entirely predictable, while the process of inflection is largely predictable in both form and meaning. Originally, extensive ablaut (vowel variation, between * e , * o , * ē , * ō and Ø , i.e. no vowel) occurred in PIE, in both derivation and inflection and in the root, suffix, and ending. Variation in

2793-426: 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

2850-428: 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. PIE

2907-403: The root present and the root aorist . Not all nominals fit the basic R+S+E pattern. Some were formed with additional prefixes. An example is * ni -sd-ó-s 'nest', derived from the verbal root * sed- 'sit' by adding a local prefix and thus meaning "where [the bird] sits down" or the like. A special kind of prefixation, called reduplication , uses the first part of the root plus

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2964-584: The same sets of endings. For example, the original form of the genitive plural is a particular thorny issue, because different daughter languages appear to reflect different proto-forms. It is variously reconstructed as * -ōm , * -om , * -oHom , and so on. Meanwhile, the dual endings of cases other than the merged nominative/vocative/accusative are often considered impossible to reconstruct because these endings are attested sparsely and diverge radically in different languages. The following shows three modern mainstream reconstructions. Sihler (1995) remains closest to

3021-730: The set of correspondences in his prize essay Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse ('Investigation of the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language'), where he argued that Old Norse 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

3078-445: The system of PIE nominal inflection with eight or nine cases: nominative , accusative , vocative , genitive , dative , instrumental , ablative , locative , and possibly a directive or allative . The so-called strong or direct cases are the nominative and the vocative for all numbers, and the accusative case for singular and dual (and possibly plural as well), and the rest are the weak or oblique cases. This classification

3135-613: The thematic ( o- )stems are truly vocalic. Stems ending in * i or * u such as * men-t i - are consonantic (i.e. athematic) because the * i is just the vocalic form of the glide * y , the full grade of the suffix being * -te y - . Post-PIE ā was actually * eh₂ in PIE. Among the most common athematic stems are root stems, i -stems, u -stems, eh₂ -stems, n -stems, nt -stems, r -stems and s -stems. Within each of these, numerous subclasses with their own inflectional peculiarities developed by late PIE times. PIE nouns and adjectives (as well as pronouns) are subject to

3192-416: Was extensively simplified, and daughter languages show a steady trend towards more and more regularization and simplification. Far more simplification occurred in the late PIE nominal system than in the verbal system, where the original PIE ablaut variations were maintained essentially intact well into the recorded history of conservative daughter languages such as Sanskrit and Ancient Greek , as well as in

3249-659: Was the same as that of PIE verbs . A lexical word (as would appear in a dictionary) was formed by adding a suffix ( S ) onto a root ( R ) to form a stem . The word was then inflected by adding an ending ( E ) to the stem. The root indicates a basic concept, often a verb (e.g. * deh₃- 'give'), while the stem carries a more specific nominal meaning based on the combination of root and suffix (e.g. * déh₃-tor- 'giver', * déh₃-o- 'gift'). Some stems cannot clearly be broken up into root and suffix altogether, as in * h₂r̥tḱo- 'bear'. The ending carries grammatical information, including case, number, and gender. Gender

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