Questions tagged [proto-indo-european]
Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed proto-language for the Indo-European language family
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What are the different schools of PIE reconstruction?
I have read some works on Proto-Indo-European which mention different schools that advocate for different paradigms of reconstruction, such as the Leiden and the Erlangen schools. I'd like to know if ...
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Why is reconstructed PIE so typologically unusual?
I'm probably not the first to notice that a large number of features of reconstruct Proto-Indo-European are typological irregularities. The most famous of these probably being the voiceless/voiced/...
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What is the relationship between the PIE roots *dekṃ and *kṃtóm?
It seems that there is a consensus that the PIE roots for ten and hundred are, respectively, *deḱṃ and *ḱṃtóm. There also seems to be a consensus that *ḱṃtóm is a shortened version of *deḱṃtóm. These ...
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What is the meaning of the number 2 in Proto-Indo European reconstructions? e.g. As in *tewtéh₂, meaning "people" or "tribe"
I am a writer doing some research into ancient languages for a story I am creating. Despite having done some formal and informal study on linguistics (I am familiar with a phonetic chart) and informal ...
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Why do neuter nominative and accusative always agree in IE languages?
The question that I have is a simple one.
Of every neuter noun, pronoun, or adjective, in any IE language (as far as I know), the nominative and accusative cases agree in all numbers. Why is this?
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Spelling of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European
Who introduced the notation e̯ a̯ o̯ (vowels with inverted breve below) for Proto-Indo-European laryngeals and when?
Proto-Indo-European has been reconstructed with so-called "laryngeal" consonants, ...
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What are the reasons to count Armenian as an Indo-European language?
Often I encounter arguments that Armenian is in fact not an Indo-European language. The claims assert that the regular correspondences between Armenian and PIE are too unrealistic, too rare and too ...
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Derivation of the Indo-European lemma *bʰréh₂tēr ‘brother’
According to Wiktionary, the word “brother” is traced back to the reconstructed Indo-European lemma *bʰréh₂tēr with the same meaning.
It seems to be structurally similar to other kinship terms, such ...
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Why does Greek "ναι" mean "yes" while it comes from a PIE root meaning "no"?
According to Wiktionary, the Greek word ναι comes from Ancient Greek ναί, which is a variation of νή, which comes from Proto-Indo-European ne, which means no.
Why can a word have the opposite ...
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What are known PIE stock phrases?
In the wikipedia page for Proto-Indo-European, it said that Proto-Indo-Europeans had "oral heroic poetry or song lyrics that used stock phrases such as imperishable fame and wine-dark sea". What are ...
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How would Slavs call a bear if they didn't use euphemism?
Unlike Latin "ursus" or English "bear", the Slavic word "medved" is not cognate to the reconstructed PIE "*Hrtkos". It is believed that this word is a Slavic euphemism meaning "honey-eater". I am ...
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Why was India as the homeland of PIE abandoned?
I have recently become very interested in the linguistics in the problem of the Indo-Aryan migration controversy. I understand in the early 19th century India was favored as the Proto-Indo-European ...
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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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How does the initial consonant in "Jupiter" and "Zeus" come from the "d" in PIE "*dyew-"?
Jupiter, is from Proto-Indo-European *dyew- (“sky”) (whence also Latin diēs).
Cognate with Ancient Greek Ζεύς (Zeus), Hittite 𒅆𒍑 (sius), Sanskrit द्यु (dyú). The nominative Iuppiter comes from ...
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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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How can I check whether 'question' in English, and 'xahesh' in Persian are cognates?
It seems plausible to me, and I would like to know how to verify it.
Why I think xahesh might be cognate with question:
xahesh (IPA: /xɑːheʃ/) in Modern Persian is a noun meaning "request, plea". ...
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Reconstructed PIE grammar? Could we be able to speak in Proto-European?
I'm interested in etymology, so I see often the root of a word shown as a reconstructed PIE root, but is it only a set of words, or could we speak this reconstructed language? (even if it's only a ...
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Any reasons for unexplained centumization in Balto-Slavic?
Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages are called satem languages, because in them the Proto-Indo-European palatovelars *ḱ, *ǵ, and *ǵʰ developed into sibilants or affricats, usually into [s]/[z]- or ...
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Does English "day" really come from PIE *dʰegʷʰ- (“to burn”)?
day
From Middle English day, from Old English dæġ (“day”), from Proto-West Germanic *dag, from Proto-Germanic *dagaz (“day”), from Proto-Indo-European *dʰogʷʰ-o-s, from *dʰegʷʰ- (“to burn”).
Cognate ...
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How does L. "quartus" come from L. "quattuor", which has "quat" but "quart"?
quartus
From Latin quattuor ("four"), originally from Proto-Indo-European
As at July 2 2021, the Etymology at the same link for quartus Wiktionary has changed.
From Proto-Indo-European *...
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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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Etymology of the word "sport"
I wonder what is the etymology of the word sport.
Vasmer says that it is from disport "amusement", a contraction from Middle English disporten from Old French desporter "to take away", "to distract ...
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Does knowing PIE roots help with vocab?
It is known that in theory (and in practice, but you need dedication in practice) learning Latin can help with vocabulary in English. (I know Spanish, it helped me with vocab words, and I'm learning ...
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Why are the orthographies of Ancient/Proto Languages so Impractical?
For example: In the Romanization of Sumerian, /ŋ/ is written as ⟨g̃⟩ or ⟨ĝ⟩ instead of ⟨ng⟩ or even ⟨ŋ⟩. Also in Sumerian /t͡sʰ/ is written ⟨ř⟩ or ⟨dr⟩. The list goes on with Sumerian.
In Proto-Indo-...
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Was language invented only once or several times?
We have over 5000 language on Earth as of now, some extant and others not. These all came from what we now call proto languages, but do scientists believe that all proto languages came from one "mono-...
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Understanding the reflexes of PIE *ǵneh3- in Sanskrit, Latin and Greek
Today I was trying to reconstruct some PIE roots by myself and I came across the word for '(to) know' in different indo-european languages. Here are some examples:
Eng. (to) know
It. conoscere
Lat. (...
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Did the PIE word for "copper" mean "imitation"?
Michiel de Vaan's Etymological Dictionary of Latin has for PIE:
a̯ei̯os copper
and
a̯eimos imitation, substitute
a̯imea̯ image, copy
All three words seemingly have the same root a̯ei̯-
Are these ...
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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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Is the prefix "proto-" reserved only for unattested languages ?
I'm not sure if there's a consensus in linguistic nomenclature about using the aforementioned prefix in naming the reconstructed languages.
As we all probably know, in linguistics, there's a custom ...
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Why are the reconstructed forms of PIE root in Etymonline and Wiktionary different?
I found PIE roots described in Etymonline (or American Heritage Dictionary) and Wiktionary are quite different. For examples:
agō: *ag- (Etymonline),
*h₂eǵ- (Wiktionary)
laxō: *sleg- (...
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Which Indo European language best preserves the features of Proto Indo-European?
Among all attested Indo European languages, which one best preserves the features of Proto Indo-European? Which is most useful in the reconstruction of PIE?
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What evidence supports labialized velars in PIE?
Traditional reconstruction gives the following velars in PIE:
*/ḱ/, */ǵ/, */ǵʰ/
*/k/, */g/, */gʰ/
*/kʷ/, */gʷ/, */gʷʰ/
I wonder what evidence is there to consider velars */kʷ/, */gʷ/, */gʷʰ/ ...
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Did Proto-Indo-European put the adjective before or behind the noun?
Did PIE put the adjective behind the noun (like Romance languages usually do) or before the noun (like Germanic languages)?
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Etymology of some Romance languages' verbs meaning "to sleep"
Portuguese, Spanish and French dormir, Italian dormire etc. come from the Latin verb dormīo.
Wiktionary's entry says that its etymology is:
From Latin dormīre, present active infinitive of dormiō, ...
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PIE -enk reflexes in Modern English
I recently found out the origin of the verb 'bring' as being derived from bher- (carry) and enk- (to go to) and how they fused together and came into Germanic as *bhrengk- then coming down into ...
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Statistical tests of PIE laryngeal theory
The fashionable theory of PIE laryngeals offers plausible explanations for many phenomena, but plausibility is not proof. Are any implications of the postulated laryngeals amenable to statistical ...
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Proposed binary divisions of Proto-Indo-European
One well-known division of Indo-European languages is Centum - Satem. However, my wikipedia-induced understanding is that due to the existence of Tocharian it is at best unclear whether it corresponds ...
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Are PIE *suHnús "son" and *snusós "daughter-in-law" related?
One of the Proto-Indo-European words for "son" appears to have been *suHnús (Skt. sūnú-, Goth. sunus, etc.). The word for "daughter-in-law" is reconstructed as *snusós (Lat. nurus, ...
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Are the inflectional endings in English known to have evolved from separate words or do they go too far back into PIE to know?
English isn't a highly inflected language, but it did evolve from one and still has at least: -s, -es; -ed, -ing; -er, -est; for nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Do we know if these all evolved from ...
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What arguments support Alwin Kloekhorst's analysis of proto-indo-european phonemes?
in short:
Is there any discussion available online of the following reinterpretation (due to Alwin Kloekhorst) of the stops in the Indo-European phoneme inventory?
classical inventory ...
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Origin of current order pattern in English/German
It is well-known, or better said, well-accepted, that the ancestral language Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was a OV language with a very limited (or nonexistent) use of subordinate clauses. In Proto-...
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Phonemic similarities between "mother" and "father" in different language families
The words for "mother" and "father" in at least a few language families have a phonetic similarity which I find interesting. Compare the Latin and Greek words (μήτηρ/πατήρ mater/pater) with the (...
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Why does word-initial upsilon always have a rough breathing?
How did a rough breathing develop before all words starting with an upsilon in Ancient Greek? This is a commonly noted fact about the distribution of these sounds (or rather spellings), but I’m having ...
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Indo-European prepositions: why prepositions?
In a related but different question to Indo-European prepositions: whence did they come?, why do just about all modern Indo-European languages have prepositions rather than postpositions?
PIE is ...
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Why do PIE verbs have suffixes -m-, -s-, -t-, while personal pronouns have m-, t-, s-?
Usually it is assumed that in PIE the verb forms for the singular first, second, and third person are respectively -m-, -s-, -t- (cfr. Latin).
The personal pronouns, instead, have the second and ...
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Agglutination in Proto-Indo-European
Based on numerous sources, it seems clear that Proto-Indo-European was
Productively agglutinative with non-root morphemes (and perhaps some specific roots that are also able to act like bound ...
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How different were Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic?
It's (generally) accepted that Proto-Indo-European (PIE) evolved into the subfamilies Proto-Italic, Proto-Germanic, and Proto-Iranian among others.
English uses a Latin Writing system which evolved ...
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What's weird about Proto-Indo-European Stops?
I was reading Wikipedia, and it maintains that it's unusual for a language to have a voiceless-voiced-breathy distinction (without a voiceless aspirated), but that the Sanskrit 4-way distinction is ...
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Limits of historical linguistic reconstruction
It is a well-known and widely repeated fact that the linguistic reconstruction associated with the comparative method is no longer effective for large temporal depths (informally estimated to be ...
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