Proto-Indo-European language

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This article contains characters used to write reconstructed Proto-Indo-European words (for an explanation of the notation, see Proto-Indo-European phonology). Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode combining characters and Latin characters.

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.^[1]

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^[2] 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.^[3]

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 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 as a conventional mark of reconstructed words, such as *wódr̥, *ḱwṓ, or *tréyes; 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.^[4] For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English: piede and foot, padre and father, pesce 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.^[5] 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,^[6] 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,^[7] 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.^[8] In a memoir sent to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1767, Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, a French Jesuit who spent all his life in India, had specifically demonstrated the analogy between Sanskrit and European languages.^[9] 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, Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated the set of correspondences to include other^{[clarification needed]} 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.^[10]

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 a language.^[11] 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.^[12]

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.^[13]

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 no longer exist in all languages documented prior to the excavation of cuneiform tablets in Anatolian.

Julius Pokorny's Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ('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. 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.^[a] 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.^{[18]:305–7[19]} 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.^[19] By the early 3rd millennium BC, they had expanded throughout the Pontic–Caspian steppe and into eastern Europe.^[20]

Other theories include the Anatolian hypothesis,^[21] the Armenian hypothesis, the Paleolithic continuity paradigm, and the indigenous Aryans theory.^{[citation needed]} An overview map^[22] summarises the origin theories.^[23]

Classification of Indo-European languages. Red: Extinct languages. White: categories or unattested proto-languages. Left half: centum languages; right half: satem languages

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.

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, which is remarkably similar to the root ablaut system reconstructible for Proto-Kartvelian^[25][26]—may suggest a higher-level phylogenetic relationship.^[relevant?]

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.

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.^[27][28][29]

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 detectable effects on adjacent sounds;
• the fricative /s/
• a vowel system in which /e/ and /o/ were the most frequently occurring vowels.

Notation[]

The vowels and their commonly used notation are:^[30]

Vowels[]

Consonants[]

The corresponding consonants and their commonly used notation are:^[31][32]

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 (/e/ and /o/) 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.^{[citation needed]}

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.^[33]

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).^[34]

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:^[35]

• 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. 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 *-h₂(e), *-(e)h₂, or *-a.^[36]

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.^[37]

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.^[38]

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, *ḱm̥tóm may originally have meant "a large number".^[40]

Particle[]

Proto-Indo-European particles could be used both as adverbs and postpositions, like *upo "under, below". The postpositions became prepositions in most daughter languages. Other reconstructible particles include negators (*ne, *mē), conjunctions (*kʷe "and", *wē "or" and others) and an interjection (*wai!, 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:^[41]

• *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:^[41]

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:^[42]

• full grade *swéḱuro-s "father-in-law" (Vedic Sanskrit śváśura-) > lengthened grade *swēḱuró-s "relating to one's father-in-law" (Vedic śvāśura-, Old High German swāgur "brother-in-law").
• (*dyḗw-s ~) zero grade *diw-és "sky" > full grade *deyw-o-s "god, sky god" (Vedic devás, 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:^[43]

• 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[]

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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.^[44]

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.^[45] 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 as of 2015 the "broad consensus" among PIE scholars is that PIE would have been a subject–object–verb (SOV) language.^[46]

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.^[45] 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.^[47] The context-dependent order preferences in Baltic, Slavic and Germanic are a complex topic, with some attributing them to outside influences ^[47] and others to internal developments.^[48]

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.^[49] Linguist Dr Anil Biltoo created the film's reconstructed dialogue and had an onscreen role teaching David Schleicher's fable.^[50]

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.^[51] 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

Notes[]

References[]

Bibliography[]

• Anthony, David W.; Ringe, Don (2015). "The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives". Annual Review of Linguistics. 1 (1): 199–219. doi:10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124812.
• Bomhard, Allan (2019). "The Origins of Proto-Indo-European: The Caucasian Substrate Hypothesis". Journal of Indo-European Studies. 47 (1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2019).
• Mallory, J. P. (1989). In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archaeology, and Myth. Thames and Hudson. ISBN 9780500050521.
• Mallory, JP; Adams, DQ (2006), The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 9780199296682
• Meier-Brügger, Michael (2003), Indo-European Linguistics, New York: de Gruyter, ISBN 3-11-017433-2
• Szemerényi, Oswald (1996), Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics, Oxford
• "Voiceless high vowels and syncope in older Indo-European" (PDF). Martin Kummel, department of Indo-European linguistics, University of Jena.

External links[]

Look up Appendix:List of Proto-Indo-European roots in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• At the University of Texas Linguistic Research Center: List of online books, Indo-European Lexicon
• Proto-Indo-European Lexicon at the University of Helsinki, Department of Modern Languages, Department of World Cultures, Indo-European Studies
• "Wheel and chariot in early IE: What exactly can we conclude from the linguistic data?" (PDF). Martin Joachim Kümmel, department of Indo-European linguistics, University of Jena.
• Indo-European Grammar, Syntax & Etymology Dictionary
• Indo-European Lexical Cognacy Database
• glottothèque - Ancient Indo-European Grammars online, an online collection of video lectures on Ancient Indo-European languages