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The Proto-Indo-European language ('''PIE''') is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European Languages . The existence of such a language is generally accepted by Linguist s, though there has been debate about many specific details.
All Indo-European languages are Inflected Languages (although many modern Indo-European languages, including Modern English , have lost much of their inflection). By comparative reconstruction, it is quite likely that at least the latest stage of the common PIE mother languages (''Late'' PIE) was an inflectional language, which was more Suffix ing than Prefix ing. However, by means of internal reconstruction and Morphological (re-)analysis of the reconstructed, seemingly most ancient PIE word forms, it has recently been shown to be very probable that at a more distant stage PIE (''Early'' PIE) may have been a root-inflected language, as was Proto-Semitic . As a consequence, it seems to be highly probable that PIE once was of the root-and-pattern morphological type (literature: Pooth (2004): "''Ablaut und autosegmentale Morphologie: Theorie der uridg. Wurzelflexion''", in: Arbeitstagung "''Indogermanistik, Germanistik, Linguistik''" in Jena, Sept. 2002). PHONOLOGY Proto-Indo-European is conjectured to have used the following Phonemes . See Indo-European Languages for a summary of how these sounds evolved in the various Indo-European languages. Consonants The table gives the most common notation in modern publications. Variant transcriptions are given below. Raised stands for Aspiration . According to the Glottalic Theory , the "voiced stops" of the system as described above were glottalic, perhaps Ejectives , while the "voiced aspirated stops" may not have been voiced.
Labials , grouped with the cover symbol ''P''. was a very rare phoneme, which is one argument in favor of the glottalic theory - it seems that languages having ejective stops tend not to have an ejective labial stop . Coronals/Dentals The standard reconstruction identified three coronal/dental stops: . They are symbolically grouped with the cover symbol ''T''. Some theorists conclude that consonant clusters of the form ''TK'' would undergo a metathesis in the proto-language, resulting in , compare Hittite ''dagan'' "earth" with Greek ''khthōn'' "earth", from , from earlier , Hittite ''hartagas'' "monster", Greek ''arktos'' "bear" from from earlier . Both metathetized and unmetathetized forms survive in different ablaut grades of the root "burn" (cognate to '' Dagaz '', day) in Sanskrit, "is being burnt" < and "burns" < . Dorsals Direct comparison, informed by the Centum-Satem Isogloss yields the reconstruction of three rows of Dorsal Consonant s in PIE.
The Centum group of languages merged the palatovelars with the plain velars while the Satem group of languages merged the labiovelars with the plain velars .
Fricatives (with the voiced allophone ). The "laryngeals" may have been fricatives, but there is no consensus as to their phonetic realization. There were also fricative allophones of , usually transcribed . Laryngeals The symbols , with cover symbol (or and ), stand for three hypothetical " Laryngeal " phonemes. There is no consensus as to what these phonemes were, but it is widely accepted that was probably uvular or pharyngeal, and that was labialized. Commonly cited possibilities are and ; there is some evidence that may have been two consonants, and , that fell together. The '' Schwa indogermanicum'' symbol is commonly used for a laryngeal between consonants. Nasals and Liquids , with vocalic allophones , grouped with the cover symbol ''R''. Semivowels (also transcribed ) with vocalic allophones . Vowels
Other long vowels may have appeared already in the proto-language by Compensatory Lengthening : . It is often suggested that all sounds (short and long) were earlier derived from an preceded or followed by , but Mayrhofer (1986: 170 ff.) has argued that PIE did in fact have and phonemes independent of . ABLAUT See Also: Indo-European ablaut Indo-European had a characteristic general ablaut sequence that contrasted the vowel phonemes through the same root. NOUN Nouns were declined for eight cases ( Nominative , Accusative , Genitive , Dative , Instrumental , Ablative , Locative , Vocative ). There were three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. PRONOUN PIE pronouns are difficult to reconstruct due to their variety in later languages. This is especially the case for Demonstrative Pronoun s. PIE had personal Pronoun s 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. As for demonstratives, Beekes (1995) tentatively reconstructs a system with only two pronouns: "this, that" and "the (just named)" ( Anaphoric ). He also postulates three adverbial particles "here", "there" and "away, again", from which demonstratives were constructed in various later languages. There was also an interrogative/indefinite pronoun with the stem (adjectival ), and probably a relative pronoun with the stem . A third-person reflexive pronoun (acc.), (gen.), (dat.), parallel to the first and second person singular personal pronouns, also existed, as well as possessive pronominal adjectives. PIE had a separate set of endings for pronouns; many of these were later borrowed as nominal endings. VERB The Indo-European verb system is complex and exhibits a system of Ablaut , as is still visible in the Germanic languages (among others)—for example, the vowel in the English verb ''to sing'' varies according to the conjugation of the verb: ''sing'', ''s'''a'''ng'', and ''s'''u'''ng''. The system is clearly represented in Ancient Greek and Vedic Sanskrit , two of the most completely attested of the early daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European. Verb s 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 Aspect ual value. Indicative forms of the Imperfect and (less likely) the Pluperfect may have existed. Verbs were also marked by a highly developed system of Participle s, one for each combination of tense and mood, and an assorted array of Verbal Noun s and adjectival formations. A number of secondary forms could be created, such as the ual.) Only later, and gradually, were these various forms combined into a single set of inflectional paradigms. Vedic Sanskrit had still not completed the process, and even Ancient Greek has places where the old unorganized system still shows through. (As a result, verbs in Vedic Sanskrit have the appearance at first glance of a fantastically complex and disorganized system, with numerous redundancies combined with inexplicable holes. The system of PIE must have looked even more strongly like this.) The primary distinction in verbs between the different ways of forming the present tenses was between thematic () classes, with a "thematic" vowel or before the endings, and athematic () classes, with endings added directly to the root. The endings themselves differed somewhat, at the very least in the first-person singular, with the endings as indicated ( vs. ). Traditional accounts say that this is the only form where the endings differed, except for the presence or absence of the thematic vowel; but some newer researchers, e.g. Beekes (1995), have proposed a totally different set of thematic endings, based primarily on Greek and Lithuanian . These proposals are still controversial, however. The original meanings of the past tenses (aorist, perfect and imperfect) are often assumed to match their meanings in Greek. That is, the aorist represents a single action in the past, viewed as a discrete event; the imperfect represents a repeated past action or a past action viewed as extending over time, with the focus on some point in the middle of the action; and the perfect represents a present state resulting from a past action. This corresponds, approximately, to the English distinction between "I ate", "I was eating" and "I have eaten", respectively. (Note that the English "I have eaten" often has the meaning, or at least the strong implication, of "I am in the state resulting from having eaten", in other words "I am now full". Similarly, "I have sent the letter" means approximately "The letter is now (in the state of having been) sent". However, the Greek, and presumably PIE, perfect, more strongly emphasizes the ''state'' resulting from an action, rather than the action itself, and can shade into a present tense.) Note that in Greek the difference between the present, aorist and perfect tenses when used outside of the indicative (that is, in the subjunctive, optative, imperative, infinitive and participles) is almost entirely one of Grammatical Aspect , not of tense. That is, the aorist refers to a simple action, the present to an ongoing action, and the perfect to a state resulting from a previous action. An aorist infinitive or imperative, for example, does ''not'' refer to a past action, and in fact for many verbs (e.g. "kill") would likely be more common than a present infinitive or imperative. (In some participial constructions, however, an aorist participle can have either a tensal or aspectual meaning.) It is assumed that this distinction of aspect was the original significance of the PIE "tenses", rather than any actual tense distinction, and that tense distinctions were originally indicated by means of adverbs, as in Chinese . However, it appears that by late PIE, the different tenses had already acquired a tensal meaning in particular contexts, as in Greek, and in later Indo-European languages this became dominant. The meanings of the three tenses in the oldest Vedic Sanskrit , however, differs somewhat from their meanings in Greek, and thus it is not clear whether the PIE meanings corresponded exactly to the Greek meanings. In particular, the Vedic imperfect had a meaning that was close to the Greek aorist, and the Vedic aorist had a meaning that was close to the Greek perfect. Meanwhile, the Vedic perfect was often indistinguishable from a present tense (Whitney 1924). In the moods other than the indicative, the present, aorist and perfect were almost indistinguishable from each other. (The lack of semantic distinction between different grammatical forms in a literary language often indicates that some of these forms no longer existed in the spoken language of the time. In fact, in Classical Sanskrit , the subjunctive dropped out, as did all tenses of the optative and imperative other than the present; meanwhile, in the indicative the imperfect, aorist and perfect became largely interchangeable, and in later Classical Sanskrit, all three could be freely replaced by a participial construction. All of these developments appear to reflect changes in spoken Middle Indo-Aryan ; among the past tenses, for example, only the aorist survived into early Middle Indo-Aryan, which was later displaced by a participial past tense.) NUMBERS See also Indo-European Numerals . The numbers are generally reconstructed as follows:
RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER LANGUAGE FAMILIES Many higher-level relationships between PIE and other language families have been proposed. Due to the great time depths, there is necessarily a great deal of speculation involved, and as a result the proposals are very 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 Urheimat en 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 of 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 , etc. DEVELOPMENT See Also: Indo-European sound laws
SAMPLE TEXTS 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 rightly 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, the best 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:
SEE ALSO REFERENCES
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