Questions tagged [indo-european]
The language family covering the majority of the languages of Europe and the northern parts of the Indian subcontinent.
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Did PIE *h3 cause voicing in any other words than the "drink" word?
The Proto-Indo-European "third laryngeal", *h3, is often assumed to have been a voiced sound based on the fact that some reflexes of the "drink" root *peh3- appear to show voicing assimilation of p to ...
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Are these Kazakh words considered borrowings (from Russian?) or onomatopoieias?
These three words are very similar in English, Russian and Kazakh. At least the Russian set is considered inherited from PIE.
English - Russian - Kazakh
crush - крушить (krushitь) - қырш (qyrsh)
...
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How did the name for st Peter become to be rendered as "Peter" in English, and why is not rendered as "stone" or "rock"
As I understand it, in the original bible passage, Jesus says to Peter "And I tell you that you are Petros, and on this petra I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it"
And ...
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Why do English, Italian, German, Spanish, French and Latin share a common alphabet and many words?
I wonder why English, Italian, German, Spanish, French and Latin share common alphabet and other words.
Also what is the relation among them.
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Literature on the reconstruction of proto-Greek
I usually find scattered proto-Greek word reconstructions, but I never came across literature that focus on the reconstruction of that language. Do you know of any?
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Difference between "Leiden school" and "mainstream" Indo-Europeanists?
Recently, I've been asked what the difference between the "Leiden school" and "mainstream" Indo-Europeanists is. The asker is planning to study in Leiden and has been concerned with the many vague ...
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Origins of gender distinction in verbs in Slavic
This is a thing that I have been thinking about for a while. I know that PIE did not have gender distinction in verb forms, and its presence in modern Slavic languages must be an innovation.
If I am ...
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Comprehensive diacritics normalization
I would like to construct a normalization program for text containing diacritics or special symbols. For some languages that I am familiar with, I can obtain a canonical form easily;
German:
ä -> ...
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Why does "before" mean both "in front of" and "prior to"?
The word "before" means both "in front of" and "prior to".
Not only in English though - in many European languages:
in Dutch "voor" means both
in Italian "prima" can mean both (afaik)
in French "(en) ...
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Evolution of Definite Articles in Indo-European Languages [duplicate]
I am a complete layman in linguistics, so the question I have probably has no scholarly merit whatsoever. My question concerns the definite articles in Indo-European languages. Almost all Indo-...
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Spelling Similarities in English and Spanish but not in Italian and Spanish
The spelling of the word 'admit' has a ⟨d⟩ in both English and the Spanish equivalent, admitir, but not in Italian ammettere. Why is the ⟨d⟩ absent in the Italian equivalent?
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connection between Castor (one of the Διόσκουροι) and the animal (beaver)?
The history of the Ancient Greek word κάστωρ (beaver) is unclear. It may be :
a foreign loan-word (? Sanskrit कस्तूरी kastūrī, “musk”)
a Greek word meaning "shining (animal)" from καίνυμαι (perfect
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Etymology of Greek Enualios
Enualios or Enyalius (Ἐνυάλιος) is, in Homer and other Greek authors, either an epithet of the war god Ares or else the name of a separate god, the son of Ares and brother or partner of Enyo (whose ...
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Articles in Indo-European Languages
I study Turkic languages. Does anybody know a comparative study of Indo-European languages and Altaic languages or a study which proves that Altaic languages have articles?
I compared some suffixes ...
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Would someone be able to identify this language and translate the text to english? [closed]
I just bought this bracelet at a random goodwill shop in Boston and it's beautiful, I would just like to make sure I'm not wearing something offensive or religiously significant.
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What is the origin and meaning of the word/name "Idora"? (Shortened)
I have been researching the word "Idora" for a couple years now in hopes of discovering the meaning as it applies to the defunct trolley park "Idora Park" formerly in Youngstown, Ohio.
"Idora Park" ...
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Help me find an early Old Norse dictionary (or even a grammar)
For some time I've been looking for a dictionary of Old Norse that reflects an early situation in the language; this kind of resource has been amazingly hard to find, for some reason. Most ...
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Etymology of Ancient Greek deictic -ī
In Ancient Greek, a deictic particle -ī can be attached to demonstratives to strengthen the "this here" meaning: e.g. houtos "this one", houtosī "this one right here". What is the origin of this -ī?
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Has any language ever borrowed an interrogative or relative pronoun?
One of the lexical similarities between reconstructed Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Uralic is in the interrogative and relative pronouns. For the former, in PIE there's a family of interrogatives ...
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Did Uralic borrow basic vocabulary from PIE, and if so why?
This section of the Wikipedia article on laryngeal theory lists proposed IE-to-Uralic loanwords containing laryngeals. Several of these have quite basic meanings: "woman", "person", "do", "give", "go"....
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How is it that such varied sounds (in major European Languages) came to be represented by the same letter "j"?
The letter "j" is pronounced differently in the following major European languages:
English: just /d͡ʒʌst/
Spanish: justo /ˈxus.to/
German: junge /ˈjʊŋə/
French: juste /ʒyst/
How is ...
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Pro-Drop Typology in Indo-European Languages
A different question made me wonder what is the norm for Indo-European with regard to pro-drop? I know Italic languages generally do it, while Germanic languages generally don't. What about the rest ...
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Are Armenian գունդ (gund) and Sanskrit गिन्दुक (ginduka) related?
I was just looking at the words for "ball" in many languages.
I noticed that Armenian has a word գունդ gund and Hindustani has a word गेंद / گیند gẽnd.
I didn't spot any other language with a ...
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What's the relation between Germanic suffixes -ly, -lich, -lijk, ... and Turkic suffixes -lik -liq
What's the relation between Germanic adjectival/adverbial suffixes
-ly, -lich, -lijk, ...
and Turkic suffixes
-lik -liq
that convert nouns/adjectives to nouns
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Is the Proto-Indo-European "ǵenh₁-" (to produce) related to "gʷḗn" (woman)?
I noticed a possible connection between the Ancient Greek "γυνή" and "γένεσις". I think semantically a relation between the two terms is plausible. Unfortunately I don't know enough about PIE ...
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Sources for etymologies of Ancient Greek proper names and placenames?
There are good etymological dictionaries for Ancient Greek: if you're searching for the origin of a word, you'll probably find information in Frisk, Chantraine, or Beekes. But if you're looking for ...
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Current status of the controversy on the date of Indo-European dispersion
There are two conflicting theories about the dispersion of the people speaking proto-Indo-European (by which I mean the common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, excluding Hittite and other ...
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Is "Kent" in Tashkent of Turkic origin or Indo-European?
In Turkish there is this word Kent which means city. Some Turkic city names have this as a suffix, like Başkent and Tashkent. In Azerbaijani the same word, with the spelling of Kənd (Kand) means ...
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Etymology of Latin suffix -ālis
What is the etymology of the Latin suffix "-ālis" (and related forms like "-āris") as in "nātūrālis"? Do we know any corresponding suffix in other Indo-European languages?
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Relics of reduplication in modern Germanic languages
I'm wondering whether some german verbs, like, for example:
bibbern
plappern
lallen
...
and as well some similar english verbs of which now only "to giggle" comes to my mind, are indeed relics of (...
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Germanic comparative grammars?
Can anyone recommend a good comparative grammar of the Germanic languages -- or, failing that, good historical grammars specifically for Old English and Old Norse?
Ideally, what I want is a ...
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Why does the pronunciation of Germanic languages before vowel shift seems to have been more "Indo-European"?
I think the vowels have become "harsher" during the vowel shift and has made them sound very different from Latin, Greek, Sanskrit,... which generally use "soft" vowels.
Can we deduce that the vowel ...
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What did the Greeks and Romans believe about language relationships?
The ancient Greeks and Romans had no concept of historical linguistics or of the Indo-European language family. However, it would have been noticeable to anyone who spoke even a little of both Greek ...
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Mine, Yours, Ours, His, Hers, Its, and Don't Forget Theirs
What exactly are the Indo-European predicative mine/yours/ours/his/hers/its/theirs forms, in terms of word class and inflection? Would they be considered the genitive (or even the dative) case of ...
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What is the origin of Russian барин ['bа:rʲin]?
The word (pl. баре, ['bа:rʲe]) is roughly rendered into English as 'gentry' meaning 'a noble person without a position at imperial court'. The boyar is possibly not a cognate.
What surprises me the ...
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Discontinuous morphemes in Indo-European languages
Indo-European is not a language family known for discontinuous morphology, but there are occasional examples. I can think of two:
The German and Dutch past participle formants, ge-en and ge-t, e.g. ...
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Adverbial free relative clauses, in early Indo-European languages and generally
By "adverbial free relative clause" (maybe there's a better term for this) I mean a relative clause which (a) is headed by an indefinite fused relative pronoun, e.g. English whoever, whatever, and (b) ...
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Origin of *-k- "extension" in (aorist of) some IE verbs?
In Greek, the PIE verbal roots *dheh1 'put' or 'do', *Hieh1 'throw', and *deh3 'give' show up with an unexpected -k- in some aorist forms: ἔθηκα, ἧκα, ἔδωκα. In Latin, the reflexes of the first two ...
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Word-initial consonant clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/, an Indo-European characteristic?
All the cases I've seen of a consonant /s/ (or similar pronunciations) at the beginning of a word occur in Indo-European languages. Can we say that this is a characteristic of this language family?
/...
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Why do the sounds [ks] have their own single letter 'X' in European languages?
It seems that the original intent of the letter 'X' was to pronounce the phoneme [k^h] in Classical Greek but evolved over time to be [ks].
My question is: How come there are so many European ...
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What is the most ancient form of Armenian verb 'to be'?
The infinitive form of the verb in Eastern Armenian (provided there are infinitives) is a suppletive 'linEl'. I am surprised to notice its resemblance to most Finno-Ugric words of similar meaning, e....
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Caucasoid people, Common Genetic roots and Common Proto-Language? [closed]
It is so probable that all Caucasoid people have had a common ancestor.
Does The fact that most of Caucasoid people speak a Semitic or Indo-European language not suggest that there has been an ...
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The reason for similarity of Turkic "min" and latin "mille", Turkic "dil" and dutch "taal"?
What's the linguistic relation between
the Turkic words bin or min and Latin word mille meaning thousand
Turkic dil and dutch taal meaninge language?
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The "close front rounded vowel" mainly used in Germanic, Altaic and far Asian languages
Why is the "close front rounded vowel" /y/ mainly used in Germanic, Altaic and far Asian languages but rare in Latin*, Indo-Iranian and Slavic languages?
Can we say that Germanic phonetics is less ...
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Is there any agglutinative Indo-European language?
It seems like Indo-European languages are always stuck between throwing away complicated fusional grammar (like English) or retaining most of it (like Russian). Are there any Indo-European languages ...
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Origin of articles in European languages
I read that PIE, Latin, old English, and even old German did not use articles, yet current English, German and Romance languages all use articles.
Is it true that articles developed in all these ...
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Cellar door and Indo-European languages
Where I grew up (UK) there was a pub called The Drysalters. I always liked this name without having any idea what a drysalter was, or having any association or emotional connection to the pub itself.
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Are there any languages that are more analytic than English other than Afrikaans in the Indo-European family?
Are there any languages that are more analytic than (or as analytic as) English other than Afrikaans in the Indo-European family?
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What rule governs the vowel alternations in Latin caput/capit-/-cep(t)-/-cipit-/-ciput?
In different forms, the Latin root caput "head" appears with different vowels:
a-u: caput (nominative singular);
a-i: capitis (genitive singular), capitī (dative singular), capita (nominative plural),...
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What is the proper way to write Hindi phonetically in English?
I've noticed that when Hindi is I guess transliterated phonetically transcribed to the English Alphabet many of the letters are doubled to represent the correct sound that one would make if you were ...
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