30
votes
Why are the orthographies of Ancient/Proto Languages so Impractical?
First, it's worth noting that these are transcriptions, used by linguists, not actual orthographies used by native speakers. The ancient Sumerians didn't write their word for "god" as diĝir; they ...
- 62.2k
28
votes
Derivation of the Indo-European lemma *bʰréh₂tēr ‘brother’
Lots (and I mean lots) of ink has been spent going over the possible etymology of this root – so far with no firm conclusions.
A recent ‘current state of affairs’ treatment not only of *bʰréh₂tēr, but ...
- 3,536
21
votes
What is the meaning of the number 2 in Proto-Indo European reconstructions? e.g. As in *tewtéh₂, meaning "people" or "tribe"
The numbers are specific to Proto-Indo-European.
Scholars aren't sure how PIE was pronounced: after all, there are no native speakers around now, or records from the time. All of the sounds in ...
- 62.2k
21
votes
Does knowing PIE roots help with vocab?
Not really.
English has a lot of words borrowed directly from Latin, or through a close relative (Norman French), which are still spelled almost exactly as they were two thousand years ago. It's easy ...
- 62.2k
19
votes
Accepted
Which Indo European language best preserves the features of Proto Indo-European?
There are many possible answers to this question.
Historically, the comparative method was born from observing the regularity of phonological and morphological correspondences between Classical ...
- 2,539
17
votes
Accepted
How different were Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic?
As you noticed, there is something common between modern Romance and Germanic languages which is not shared by other Indo-European languages. It does not come from their ancestral languages (Latin and ...
- 1,174
16
votes
Why are the reconstructed forms of PIE root in Etymonline and Wiktionary different?
The main problem with these particular reconstructions is that the author of "etymonline" does not use diacritics. In fact, there is a very significant difference between *g and *ǵ (they develop ...
- 23.7k
16
votes
Reconstructed PIE grammar? Could we be able to speak in Proto-European?
Just a set of words, or is there also a reconstructed grammar letting us speak in Common Proto-European?
Absolutely! In fact, one of the best ways to show that a language is Indo-European is through ...
- 62.2k
16
votes
Why was India as the homeland of PIE abandoned?
When a word can be reconstructed to a proto-language, it is generally assumed that there was such a word in the proto-language. Then if the meaning of the word can also be reconstructed, it is ...
- 80.3k
15
votes
Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Yeniseian paper
From your paper:
Chance is ruled out by probability, because two unrelated language families can’t have 74 accidental resemblances.
The problem is, this simply isn't true. Here are 109 accidental ...
- 62.2k
14
votes
Is there evidence that "proto-" languages actually existed?
This question seems confused. For one thing, you never define what you mean by “such languages”. A precise formulation of the concepts is important.
No reasonable linguist would support the idea that,...
- 17.4k
14
votes
Why are the reconstructed forms of PIE root in Etymonline and Wiktionary different?
Proto-Indo-European has gone through different stages of development historically, which represent higher levels of abstraction.
In particular, the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory, ...
- 3,266
14
votes
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) words with IPA
The problem is, nobody is quite sure how PIE was pronounced!
When we talk about PIE phonemes like /*d/, we don't mean it was actually IPA [d]. We mean that "there seems to have been a phoneme, which ...
- 62.2k
14
votes
What language branch of PIE does Kartvelian belong to? (Georgian language)
Kartvelian is not part of Indo-European, and in fact is not known to be related to any other language family. Some linguists have connected it with IE as part of a proposed larger family called ...
- 10.8k
14
votes
Apparent sound crespondences between Eurasian, Trans-New-Guinean, Pama-Nyungan and Burushaski
I don't see any regular correspondences in the data you've presented.
A regular correspondence involves a series of forms in which, whenever language A has sound X, language B has sound Y. For example,...
- 10.8k
13
votes
Proposed binary divisions of Proto-Indo-European
As for the centum-satem distinction, nowadays indoeuropeanists usually don't think of it as a west-east dialect division but they rather view the satem palatalisation as an innovation which took place ...
- 1,418
13
votes
Accepted
Why does Greek "ναι" mean "yes" while it comes from a PIE root meaning "no"?
Lat. nē 'really, true' and Tocharian B nai 'indeed, surely' seem to be the IE-parallels. The IE demonstrative *(h1e-)no- 'he there, that one' seems to be the root according to Beekes (with a ...
- 2,522
13
votes
Why does it seem that all Proto-Germanic words have PIE roots?
It is not the case that pretty much all PGmc words are from PIE. Many well-known linguists have turned their attention to the problem of precisely why PGmc had such a large proportion of non-IE ...
- 707
12
votes
Is there evidence that "proto-" languages actually existed?
Proto-languages are indeed theories, the way that Evolution or Gravity is a theory. Confirmation of theories comes through their fit of the data, as @sumelic argues.
As theoretical constructs, they ...
- 3,266
12
votes
Accepted
Does knowing PIE roots help with vocab?
Yes. I subscribe to Ed Klima's theory about practical language learning. That is, you learn by being exposed to examples of the language while you're paying attention. And nothing else really counts....
- 12.4k
12
votes
Accepted
If Hebrew is not related to Slavic, why there are apparent sound correspondences?
Just as you cannot compare two random species today to accurately assess their taxonomy (otherwise we would conclude all crabs form a single family when they actually form at least five distinct ...
- 6,272
11
votes
Spelling of laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European
Typing these characters is fairly straightforward, if you have an appropriate keyboard (or can customize yours): they're simply the lowercase Latin letters <e a o>, followed by the character U+032F ...
- 62.2k
11
votes
Accepted
If the Armenian word for "foot", "otn", really comes from PIE *podm, why did the 'p' disappear?
What we see in otn isn't *p- > ∅, which isn't a rule in Armenian, but *po- > o-, which probably is. Some comparanda to support this: ordi 'child' and ortʿ 'calf', both from the o-grade of the ...
- 2,060
10
votes
How different were Proto-Italic and Proto-Germanic?
Even if these languages belong to the Indo-European family, there's a huge gap of time and space standing between Pre-Italic and Pre-Germanic languages.
"A probable cladistic tree of the IE family"(a)...
- 1,989
10
votes
Accepted
What is the contribution of Tocharian to the reconstruction of Proto-Indogermanic?
Generally speaking, Tocharian was not quite a game changer.
Tocharian languages are the most-eastern IE languages; and yet they belong to the centum group, although they share with the satǝm group at ...
- 234
10
votes
Accepted
Was language invented only once or several times?
The question raises three terminological issues: what is "language", what is "invented" and what is "once"? It does presuppose that there was a prior state without language, and a later state with it (...
- 80.3k
10
votes
Accepted
Noun inflection in which IE language is close to PIE noun inflection?
A simply approach to the question is to find which language (if any one language can be determined) has the most similar noun paradigm to PIE. The phonology of the suffixes can also be concidered.
...
- 316
10
votes
Statistical tests of PIE laryngeal theory
Your proposed statistical test would not actually provide evidence (much less proof) for the laryngeal theory. You might use statistical methods to compute the significance of certain correlations, ...
- 80.3k
10
votes
Accepted
Are there any Latin and (ancient) Hebrew words with common origins?
Definitely!
The most common are direct loanwords from one language into another, or Wanderwörter, words that spread over long distances via trade.
For the first category, look at sabbatum, the Latin ...
- 62.2k
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