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"PIE" redirects here. For other uses, see PIE (disambiguation).
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Indo-European topics |
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The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans. The existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for over a century, and there have been many attempts at reconstruction. Nevertheless, many disagreements and uncertainties remain.
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There are several competing hypotheses about when and where PIE was spoken. The only thing known for certain is that the language must have been differentiated into unconnected daughter dialects by the late 3rd millennium BC. Mainstream estimates of the time between PIE and the earliest attested texts (ca. nineteenth century BC; see K眉ltepe texts) range around 1,500 to 2,500 years, with extreme proposals diverging up to another 100% on either side:
The classical phase of Indo-European comparative linguistics leads from Franz Bopp\'s Comparative Grammar (1833) to August Schleicher\'s 1861 Compendium and up to Karl Brugmann\'s Grundriss published from the 1880s. Brugmann\'s junggrammatische re-evaluation of the field and Ferdinand de Saussure\'s development of the laryngeal theory may be considered the beginning of "contemporary" Indo-European studies.
PIE as described in the early 1900s is still generally accepted today; subsequent work is largely refinement and systematization, as well as the incorporation of new information, notably the Anatolian and Tocharian branches unknown in the 19th century.
Notably, the laryngeal theory, in its early forms discussed since the 1880s, became mainstream after Jerzy Kury艂owicz\'s 1927 discovery of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phonemes in Anatolian. Julius Pokorny\'s Indogermanisches Etymologisches W枚rterbuch (1959) gave an overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated until the early 20th century, but neglected contemporary trends of morphology and phonology, and largely ignored Anatolian and Tocharian.
The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins, Jochem Schindler and Helmut Rix) developed a better understanding of morphology and, in the wake of Kury艂owicz\'s 1956 Apophonie, understanding of the ablaut. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to establish its relationship to PIE; see also Indo-Hittite.
There is no direct evidence of PIE, because it was never written. All PIE sounds and words are reconstructed from later Indo-European languages using the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction. An asterisk is used to mark reconstructed PIE words, such as* w贸dr胎 \'water\', *岣眞峁搉 \'dog\' (English hound), or *tr茅yes \'three (masculine)\'. Many of the words in the modern Indo-European languages seem to have derived from such "protowords" via regular sound changes (e.g., Grimm\'s law).
As the Proto-Indo-European language broke up, its sound system diverged as well, according to various sound laws in the daughter languages. Notable among these are Grimm\'s law and Verner\'s law in Proto-Germanic, loss of prevocalic *p- in Proto-Celtic, reduction to h of prevocalic *s- in Proto-Greek, Brugmann\'s law and Bartholomae\'s law in Proto-Indo-Iranian, and Grassmann\'s law independently in both Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian.
Many higher-level relationships between PIE and other language families have been proposed. But these speculative connections are highly controversial. Perhaps the most widely accepted proposal is of an Indo-Uralic family, encompassing PIE and Uralic. The evidence usually cited in favor of this is the proximity of the proposed Urheimaten of the two families, the typological similarity between the two languages, and a number of apparent shared morphemes. Frederik Kortlandt, while advocating a connection, concedes that "the gap between Uralic and Indo-European is huge", while Lyle Campbell, an authority on Uralic, denies any relationship exists.
Other proposals, further back in time (and correspondingly less accepted), model PIE as a branch of Indo-Uralic with a Caucasian substratum; link PIE and Uralic with Altaic and certain other families in Asia, such as Korean, Japanese, Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut (representative proposals are Nostratic and Joseph Greenberg\'s Eurasiatic); or link some or all of these to Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian, etc., and ultimately to a single Proto-World family (nowadays mostly associated with Merritt Ruhlen). Various proposals, with varying levels of skepticism, also exist that join some subset of the putative Eurasiatic language families and/or some of the Caucasian language families, such as Uralo-Siberian, Ural-Altaic (once widely accepted but now largely discredited), Proto-Pontic, and so on.
| Labial | Coronal | Velar | Laryngeal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| palatal | plain | labial | |||||
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Plosive | p | t | 岣 | k | k史 | ||
| voiced | b | d | 堑 | g | g史 | ||
| aspirated | b拾 | d拾 | 堑拾 | g拾 | g史拾 | ||
| Fricative | s | h鈧, h鈧, h鈧 | |||||
| Liquid | r, l | ||||||
| Semivowel | j | w | |||||
Other long vowels may have appeared already in the proto-language by compensatory lengthening: 墨, 奴, r胎虅, l胎虅, m胎虅, n胎虅.
PIE was an inflected language, in which the grammatical relationships between words were signaled through inflectional morphemes (usually endings). The roots of PIE are basic morphemes carrying a lexical meaning. By addition of suffixes, they form stems, and by addition of desinences (usually endings), these form grammatically inflected words (nouns or verbs). PIE roots are understood to be predominantly monosyllabic with a basic shape CvC(C). This basic root shape is often altered by ablaut. Roots which appear to be vowel initial are believed by many scholars to have originally begun with a set of consonants, later lost in all but the Anatolian branch, called laryngeals (usually indicated H, and often specified with a subscript number h1, h2, h3). Thus a verb form such as the one reflected in Latin agunt, Greek 峒勎澄肯呄兾 (谩gousi), Sanskrit ajanti would be reconstructed as h2e堑-onti, with the element h2e堑 constituting the root per se.
One of the unique aspects of PIE was its ablaut sequence that contrasted the vowel phonemes o/e/脴 [no vowel] within the same root. Ablaut is a form of vowel variation which changed between these three forms perhaps depending on the adjacent sounds and placement of stress in the word. These changes are echoed in modern Indo-European languages where they have come to reflect grammatical categories. These ablaut grades are usually referred to as: e-grade and o-grade, sometimes collectively termed full grade; zero-grade (no vowel, 脴); and lengthened grade (膿 or 艒). Modern English sing, sang, sung is an example of such an ablaut set and reflects a pre-Proto-Germanic sequence sengw-, songw-, sngw-. Some scholars believe that the inflectional affixes of Indo European reflect ablaut variants, usually zero-grade, of older PIE roots. Often the zero-grade appears where the word\'s accent has shifted from the root to one of the affixes. Thus the alternation found in Latin est, sunt reflects PIE h1茅s-ti, h1s-贸nti
Proto-Indo-European nouns were declined for eight cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, instrumental, ablative, locative, vocative). There were three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter.
There are two major types of declension, thematic and athematic. Thematic nominal stems are formed with a suffix -o- (in vocative -e) and the stem does not undergo ablaut. The athematic stems are more archaic, and they are classified further by their ablaut behaviour (acro-dynamic, protero-dynamic, hystero-dynamic and holo-dynamic, after the positioning of the early PIE accent (dynamis) in the paradigm).
PIE pronouns are difficult to reconstruct due to their variety in later languages. This is especially the case for demonstrative pronouns.
PIE had personal pronouns in the first and second person, but not the third person, where demonstratives 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. According to Beekes (1995), there were also two varieties for the accusative, genitive and dative cases, a stressed and an enclitic form.
| Personal pronouns (Beekes 1995) | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First person | Second person | |||
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | |
| Nominative | h鈧乪堑(oH/Hom) | wei | tuH | yuH |
| Accusative | h鈧乵茅, h鈧乵e | nsm茅, n艒s | tw茅 | usm茅, w艒s |
| Genitive | h鈧乵茅ne, h鈧乵oi | ns(er)o-, nos | tewe, toi | yus(er)o-, wos |
| Dative | h鈧乵茅堑拾io, h鈧乵oi | nsmei, ns | t茅b拾io, toi | usmei |
| Instrumental | h鈧乵o铆 | ? | to铆 | ? |
| Ablative | h鈧乵ed | nsmed | tued | usmed |
| Locative | h鈧乵o铆 | nsmi | to铆 | usmi |
As for demonstratives, Beekes (1995) tentatively reconstructs a system with only two pronouns: so/seh鈧/tod "this, that" and h鈧乪/ (h鈧)ih鈧/(h鈧)id "the (just named)" (anaphoric). He also postulates three adverbial particles 岣眎 "here", h鈧俥n "there" and h鈧俥u "away, again", from which demonstratives were constructed in various later languages.
The Indo-European verb system is complex and, as the noun, exhibits a system of ablaut.
Verbs have at least four moods (indicative, imperative, subjunctive and optative, as well as possibly the injunctive, reconstructible from Vedic Sanskrit), two voices (active and mediopassive), as well as three persons (first, second and third) and three numbers (singular, dual and plural). Verbs are conjugated in at least three "tenses" (present, aorist, and perfect), which actually have primarily aspectual value. Indicative forms of the imperfect and (less likely) the pluperfect may have existed. Verbs were also marked by a highly developed system of participles, one for each combination of tense and mood, and an assorted array of verbal nouns and adjectival formations.
| Buck 1933 | Beekes 1995 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Athematic | Thematic | Athematic | Thematic | ||
| Singular | 1st | -mi | -艒 | -mi | -oH |
| 2nd | -si | -esi | -si | -eh鈧乮 | |
| 3rd | -ti | -eti | -ti | -e | |
| Plural | 1st | -mos/mes | -omos/omes | -mes | -omom |
| 2nd | -te | -ete | -th鈧乪 | -eth鈧乪 | |
| 3rd | -nti | -onti | -nti | -o | |
The Proto-Indo-European numerals are generally reconstructed as follows:
| Sihler 1995, 402鈥24 | Beekes 1995, 212鈥16 | |
| one | *Hoi-no-/*Hoi-wo-/*Hoi-k(史)o-;*sem- | *Hoi(H)nos |
| two | *d(u)wo- | *duoh鈧 |
| three | *trei- (full grade)/*tri- (zero grade) | *treies |
| four | *k史etwor- (o-grade)/*k史etur- (zero grade), see also the k史etw贸res rule | *k史etu艒r |
| five | *penk史e | *penk史e |
| six | *s(w)e岣眘; originally perhaps*we岣眘 | *(s)u茅ks |
| seven | *septm胎 | *s茅ptm |
| eight | *o岣眛艒,*o岣眛ou or*h鈧僥岣眛艒,*h鈧僥岣眛ou | *h鈧僥岣眛eh鈧 |
| nine | *(h鈧)newn胎 | *(h鈧)n茅un |
| ten | *de岣眒胎(t) | *d茅岣眒t |
| twenty | *w墨岣眒胎t-; originally perhaps*wid岣眔mt- | *duid岣眒ti |
| thirty | *tr墨岣眔mt-; originally perhaps*trid岣眔mt- | *trih鈧俤岣眔mth鈧 |
| forty | *k史etwr胎虅岣眔mt-; originally perhaps*k史etwr胎d岣眔mt- | *k史eturd岣眔mth鈧 |
| fifty | *penk史膿岣眔mt-; originally perhaps*penk史ed岣眔mt- | *penk史ed岣眔mth鈧 |
| sixty | *s(w)e岣眘岣眔mt-; originally perhaps*we岣眘d岣眔mt- | *ueksd岣眔mth鈧 |
| seventy | *septm胎虅岣眔mt-; originally perhaps*septm胎d岣眔mt- | *septmd岣眔mth鈧 |
| eighty | *o岣眛艒(u)岣眔mt-; originally perhaps*h鈧僥岣眛o(u)d岣眔mt- | *h鈧僥岣眛h鈧僤岣眔mth鈧 |
| ninety | *(h鈧)newn胎虅岣眔mt-; originally perhaps*h鈧乶ewn胎d岣眔mt- | *h鈧乶eund岣眔mth鈧 |
| hundred | *岣眒胎tom; originally perhaps*d岣眒胎tom | *d岣眒t贸m |
| thousand | *堑heslo-,*tusd岣眔mti | *堑拾es-l- |
Lehmann (1993, 252-255) believes that the numbers greater than ten were constructed separately in the dialects groups and that*岣眒胎t贸m originally meant "a large number" rather than specifically "one hundred."
As PIE was spoken by a prehistoric society, no genuine sample texts are available, but since the 19th century modern scholars have made various attempts to compose example texts for purposes of illustration. These texts are educated guesses at best; Calvert Watkins in 1969 observes that in spite of its 150 years\' history, comparative linguistics is not in the position to reconstruct a single well-formed sentence in PIE. Nevertheless, such texts do have the merit of giving an impression of what a coherent utterance in PIE might have sounded like.
Published PIE sample texts:
Look up Appendix:List of Proto-Indo-European roots in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
| Indo-European studies |
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| Language | Phonology | s-mobile | Sound laws |
| Ablaut | Nouns | Numerals | Pronouns and particles | Roots | Verbs |
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