For the hypothetical speakers of this language, see Proto-Indo-Europeans.
Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the ancestor of the Indo-European languages.
A lot of people have worked on making it, more than any other proto-language. It is the best-understood of all proto-languages. The techniques of comparison and analysis are called historical linguistics.
There are different hypotheses about when and where PIE was spoken. Scientists think that that PIE may have been spoken as a single language, before it began to separate, around 3700 BC. The exact date is not known, it can be different by more than a millennium. The most popular hypothesis for where it came from and how it spread is called the Kurgan hypothesis, an origin in the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe.
There is no direct evidence of PIE because it was never written. All PIE sounds and words are reconstructed from later Indo-European languages. The asterisk symbol is used to mark reconstructed PIE words, for example: *wódr̥ 'water', *ḱwṓn 'dog', or *tréyes 'three (masculine)'. Many words in modern Indo-European languages seem to have come from such "proto-words" by regular sound changes, such as Grimm's law.
Long vowels ā, ē, ō; usually the macron is used to mark long vowels (a:, e:, o:). Sometimes, a colon (:) is also used to say that the vowel is long.
vowel allophones of consonantal phonemes: u, i, r̥, l̥, m̥, n̥.
PIE had a free pitch accent. That means that the stress of a word could happen on any syllable and could change even for related words. Different meanings of a word could be marked only with high or low pitch.
PIE was an inflected language: it had roots with suffixes. That basic root shape is often altered by the ablaut, a system of regular vowel changes. An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb sing, sang, sung and the related noun song.
Most Indo-European languages are synthetic. That means they have many morphemes per word. Morphemes may be combined to make complex words, as in German Root words may be put on "bound morphemes" to show their function, which are morphemes that appear only as part of a larger word.
German example: Aufsichtsratsmitgliederversammlung => "Supervision + council + member + assembly"
Spanish example: escribiéndomelo => "writing it to me"
Those methods were probably used often in PIE. Languages like English, which don't have a lot of combinations like that, come from from earlier, more typical Indo-European languages. English comes from from Anglo-Saxon, a Western Germanic language. The fact that English once was synthetic like German is shown by cranberry morphemes, which are so called because the "cran-" is a fossil of a word that no longer exists. Also, mulberry and raspberry, where also the first syllable is a bound morpheme.
Because PIE was spoken a very long time ago, there are no texts anymore. Scientists have tried many times to make example texts for to show what it could be like. These are just educated guesses. People have tried for 150 years to make a single sentence in PIE, but this has not happened yet. Even so, such texts are still useful because they show what PIE might have looked like.
Schleicher's reconstruction says that that the o/e vocalism was secondary. His version of PIE is more like Sanskrit than modern reconstructions are.
Hirt introduced the o/e vocalist and some rather different consonants.
Some of the differences between the texts are just different spelling conventions: w and u̯, for example, are only different ways to indicate the same sound, a consonantal u. However, many other differences happen because there are different ideas on the sounds and the structure of PIE.
↑ Ivanov, Vyacheslav V.& Gamkrelidze, Thomas 1990. The early history of Indo-­European languages. Scientific American 262, March.
This page was last changed on 16 September 2018, at 21:51.