Proto-Indo-European language

Proto-Indo-European(PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of theIndo-European language family.No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived bylinguistic reconstructionfrom documented Indo-European languages.
Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any otherproto-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 and itsdaughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as thecomparative method) were developed as a result.
PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from approximately 4500 BCE to 2500 BCEduring the LateNeolithicto EarlyBronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailingKurgan hypothesis, theoriginal homelandof theProto-Indo-Europeansmay have been in thePontic–Caspian steppeof eastern Europe. The linguistic reconstruction of PIE has provided insight into the pastoralcultureand patriarchalreligionof its speakers.
As speakers of Proto-Indo-European became isolated from each other through theIndo-European migrations, the regionaldialectsof Proto-Indo-European spoken by the various groups diverged, as each dialect underwent shifts in pronunciation (theIndo-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 is believed to have had an elaborate system ofmorphologythat includedinflectional suffixes(analogous to Englishchild, child's, children, children's) as well asablaut(vowel alterations, as preserved in Englishsing, sang, sung, song) andaccent. PIEnominalsandpronounshad a complex system ofdeclension, andverbssimilarly had a complex system ofconjugation. The PIEphonology,particles,numerals, andcopulaare also well-reconstructed.
Asterisks are used by linguists as a conventional mark of reconstructed words, such as *wódr̥, *ḱwn̥tós, or *tréyes; these forms are the reconstructed ancestors of the modern English wordswater,hound, andthree, respectively.
No direct evidence of PIE exists; scholars have reconstructed PIE from its present-day descendants using thecomparative method.For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English:piedeandfoot,padreandfather,pesceandfish. Since there is a consistent correspondence of the initial consonants (pandf) that emerges far too frequently to be coincidental, one can infer that these languages stem from a commonparent language.Detailed analysis suggests a system ofsound lawsto describe thephoneticandphonologicalchanges from the hypothetical ancestral words to the modern ones. These laws have become so detailed and reliable as to support theNeogrammarian hypothesis: the Indo-European sound laws apply without exception.
William Jones, anAnglo-Welshphilologistandpuisne judgeinBengal, caused an academic sensation when in 1786 he postulated the common ancestry ofSanskrit,Greek,Latin,Gothic, theCeltic languages, andOld Persian,but he was not the first to state such a hypothesis. In the 16th century, European visitors to theIndian subcontinentbecame aware of similarities betweenIndo-Iranian languagesand European languages,and as early as 1653,Marcus Zuerius van Boxhornhad published a proposal for aproto-language("Scythian") for the following language families:Germanic,Romance,Greek,Baltic,Slavic,Celtic, andIranian.In a memoir sent to theAcadémie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettresin 1767,Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, a FrenchJesuitwho 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 includedEgyptian,JapaneseandChinesein the Indo-European languages, while omittingHindi.
In 1818, Danish linguistRasmus Christian Raskelaborated the set of correspondences in his prize essayUndersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse('Investigation of the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language'), where he argued thatOld Norsewas related to the Germanic languages, and had even suggested a relation to the Baltic, Slavic, Greek, Latin and Romance languages.In 1816,Franz BopppublishedOn the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit, in which he investigated the common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. In 1833, he began publishing theComparative Grammar of Sanskrit,Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, and German.
In 1822,Jacob Grimmformulated what became known asGrimm's lawas a general rule in hisDeutsche Grammatik. 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 byVerner'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'sA 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-Europeanistshad developed well-defined descriptions of PIE which scholars still accept today. Later, the discovery of theAnatolianandTocharian languagesadded to the corpus of descendant languages. A subtle new principle won wide acceptance: thelaryngeal 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 ofcuneiformtablets in Anatolian. This theory was first proposed byFerdinand de Saussurein 1879 on the basis of internal reconstruction only,and progressively won general acceptance afterJerzy Kuryłowicz's discovery of consonantal reflexes of these reconstructed sounds in Hittite.
Julius Pokorny'sIndogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch('Indo-European Etymological Dictionary', 1959) gave a detailed, though conservative, overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated by 1959. Jerzy Kuryłowicz's 1956Apophoniegave a better understanding ofIndo-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. TheKurgan hypothesis, first put forward in 1956 byMarija Gimbutas, has become the most popular.It proposes that the original speakers of PIE were theYamnaya cultureassociated with thekurgans(burial mounds) on thePontic–Caspian steppenorth of the Black Sea.According to the theory, they werenomadic pastoralistswhodomesticated 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 the Pontic–Caspian steppe and into eastern Europe.
Other theories include theAnatolian hypothesis,which posits that PIE spread out from Anatolia with agriculture beginningc.7500–6000 BCE,theArmenian hypothesis, thePaleolithic continuity paradigm, and theindigenous Aryanstheory. The last two of these theories are not regarded as credible within academia.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.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 the main Indo-European language families, comprising the languages descended from Proto-Indo-European.
Commonly proposed subgroups of Indo-European languages includeItalo-Celtic,Graeco-Aryan,Graeco-Armenian,Graeco-Phrygian,Daco-Thracian, andThraco-Illyrian.
There are numerous lexical similarities between the Proto-Indo-European andProto-Kartvelianlanguages due to earlylanguage contact,as well as some morphological similarities—notably theIndo-European ablaut, which is remarkably similar to the root ablaut system reconstructible for Proto-Kartvelian.
TheLusitanian languagewas a marginally attested language spoken in areas near the border between present-dayPortugalandSpain.
TheVeneticandLiburnianlanguages known from the North Adriatic region are sometimes classified as Italic.
Albanian and Greek are the only surviving Indo-European descendants of aPaleo-Balkanlanguage area, named for their occurrence in or in the vicinity of theBalkan peninsula. Most of the other languages of this area—includingIllyrian,Thracian, andDacian—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,Phrygianis sufficiently well-attested to allow proposals of a particularly close affiliation with Greek, and aGraeco-Phrygianbranch of Indo-European is becoming increasingly accepted.
Proto-Indo-Europeanphonologyhas been reconstructed in some detail. Notable features of the most widely accepted (but not uncontroversial) reconstruction include:
The vowels in commonly used notation are:
The corresponding consonants in commonly used notation are:
Allsonorants(i.e. nasals, liquids and semivowels) can appear insyllabicposition. The syllabic allophones of *y and *w are realized as the surface vowels *i and *u respectively.
TheProto-Indo-European accentis 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 apitch accent. The location of the stress is associated with ablaut variations, especially between full-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 inVedic Sanskritand (in the case of nouns)Ancient Greek, and indirectly attested in a number of phenomena in other IE languages, such asVerner's Lawin the Germanic branch. Sources for Indo-European accentuation are also theBalto-Slavicaccentual system andplenespelling inHittitecuneiform. 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 atone languagewhere eachmorphemehad 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.
Proto-Indo-European, like its earliest attested descendants, was a highly inflected,fusional language. Suffixation and ablaut were the main methods of marking inflection, both for nominals and verbs. The subject of a sentence was in the nominative case and agreed in number and person with the verb, which was additionally marked for voice, tense, aspect, and mood.
Proto-Indo-European nominals and verbs were primarily composed of roots –affix-lackingmorphemesthat carried the corelexicalmeaning of a word. They were used to derive related words (cf. the English root "-friend-", from which are derived related words such asfriendship,friendly,befriend, and newly coined words such asunfriend). As a rule, roots were monosyllabic, and had the structure (s)(C)CVC(C), where the symbols C stand for consonants, V stands for a variable vowel, and optional components are in parentheses. All roots ended in a consonant and, although less certain, they appear to have started with a consonant as well.
A root plus asuffixformed aword stem, and a word stem plus aninflectional endingformed a word. Proto-Indo-European was afusional language, in whichinflectionalmorphemes signaled the grammatical relationships between words. This dependence on inflectional morphemes means that roots in PIE, unlike those in English, were rarely used without affixes.
Many morphemes in Proto-Indo-European had shorteas their inherent vowel; theIndo-European ablautis the change of this shorteto shorto, longe(ē), longo(ō), or no vowel. The forms are referred to as the "ablaut grades" of the morpheme—thee-grade,o-grade, zero-grade (no vowel), etc. This variation in vowels occurred both withininflectional morphology(e.g., different grammatical forms of a noun or verb may have different vowels) andderivational morphology(e.g., a verb and an associated abstractverbal nounmay 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 wordssing,sang,sung.
Proto-Indo-European nounswere probably declined for eight or nine cases:
Late Proto-Indo-European had threegrammatical genders:
This system is probably derived from an older two-gender system, attested in Anatolian languages:common(oranimate) 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 specialcollectivesuffix*-h2(manifested in most descendants as-a). This same collective suffix in extended forms*-eh2and*-ih2(respectively on thematic and athematic nouns, becoming-āand-īin the early daughter languages) became used to form feminine nouns from masculines.
All nominals distinguished threenumbers:
These numbers were also distinguished in verbs (seebelow), requiringagreementwith their subject nominal.
Proto-Indo-European pronounsare difficult to reconstruct, owing to their variety in later languages. PIE had personalpronounsin the first and secondgrammatical person, but not the third person, wheredemonstrative pronounswere used instead. The personal pronouns had their own unique forms and endings, and some hadtwo distinct stems; this is most obvious in the first person singular where the two stems are still preserved in EnglishIandme. There were also two varieties for the accusative, genitive and dative cases, a stressed and anencliticform.
Proto-Indo-European verbs, like the nouns, exhibited an ablaut system.
The most basic categorisation for the reconstructed Indo-European verb isgrammatical aspect. Verbs are classed as:
Verbs have at least fourgrammatical moods:
Verbs had twogrammatical voices:
Verbs had threegrammatical persons: first, second and third.
Verbs had threegrammatical numbers:
Verbs were probably marked by a highly developed system ofparticiples, one for each combination of tense and voice, and an assorted array ofverbal nounsand 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.
Proto-Indo-European numeralsare generally reconstructed as follows:
Rather than specifically 100, *ḱm̥tómmay originally have meant "a large number".
Proto-Indo-European particleswere probably used both asadverbsand aspostpositions. These postpositions became prepositions in most daughter languages.
Reconstructed particles include for example, *upo"under, below"; thenegators*ne, *mē; theconjunctions*kʷe"and", *wē"or" and others; and aninterjection, *wai!, expressing woe or agony.
Proto-Indo-European employed various means of deriving words from other words, or directly from verb roots.
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 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 wereBahuvrihisor semantically resembledagent nouns.
In thematic stems, creating a possessive adjective seems to have involved shifting the accent one syllable to the right, for example:
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:
The reason for this particular ordering of the classes in derivation is not known. Some examples:
Avrddhiderivation, 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:
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:
This kind of derivation is likely related to the possessive adjectives, and can be seen as essentially the reverse of it.
Thesyntaxof the older Indo-European languages has been studied in earnest since at least the late nineteenth century, by such scholars asHermann HirtandBerthold 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 thanword order, to signalsyntacticrelationships within sentences.Still, a default (unmarked) word order is thought to have existed in PIE. In 1892,Jacob Wackernagelreconstructed PIE's word order assubject–verb–object(SVO), based on evidence in Vedic Sanskrit.
Winfred P. Lehmann(1974), on the other hand, reconstructs PIE as asubject–object–verb(SOV) language. He posits that the presence ofperson markingin PIE verbs motivated a shift from OV to VO order in later dialects. Many of the descendant languages have VO order: modern Greek,RomanceandAlbanianprefer SVO,Insular Celtichas VSO as the default order, and even theAnatolian languagesshow some signs of this word order shift.TocharianandIndo-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:
Friedrich notes that even among those Indo-European languages with basic OV word order, none of them arerigidlyOV. 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 asUralicandDravidian), 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–objectto emphasise the verb) is attested inOld Indo-Aryan,Old Iranian,Old LatinandHittite, while traces of it can be found in theencliticpersonal pronouns of theTocharian languages.