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The Proto-Indo-European language ('''PIE''') is the Hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European Languages , spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans . Although the existence of such a language has been accepted by linguists for a long time, there has been debate about many specific details. DISCOVERY AND RECONSTRUCTION When was PIE spoken? There are several competing hypotheses about when and where PIE was spoken. The only thing known for certain is that the language must have been differentiated into unconnected daughter dialects by the late 3rd Millennium BC . Mainstream estimates of the time between PIE and the earliest attested texts (ca. Nineteenth Century ; see Kültepe Texts ) range around 1,500 to 2,500 years, with extreme proposals diverging up to another 100% on either side:
History See Also: Indo-European studies The classical phase of Indo-European Comparative Linguistics leads from Franz Bopp 's ''Comparative Grammar'' (1833) to August Schleicher 's 1861 ''Compendium'' and up to Karl Brugmann 's '' Grundriss '' published from the 1880s . Brugmann's '' Junggrammatische '' re-evaluation of the field and Ferdinand De Saussure 's development of the Laryngeal Theory may be considered the beginning of "contemporary" Indo-European studies. PIE as described in the early 1900s is still generally accepted today; subsequent work is largely refinement and systematization, as well as the incorporation of new information, notably the Anatolian and Tocharian branches unknown in the 19th century. Notably, the Laryngeal Theory , in its early forms discussed since the 1880s, became mainstream after Jerzy Kuryłowicz 's 1927 discovery of the survival of at least some of these hypothetical phonemes in Anatolian. Julius Pokorny 's '' Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch '' (1959) gave an overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated until the early 20th century, but neglected contemporary trends of morphology and phonology, and largely ignored Anatolian and Tocharian. The generation of Indo-Europeanists active in the last third of the 20th century (such as Calvert Watkins , Jochem Schindler and Helmut Rix ) developed a better understanding of morphology and, in the wake of Kuryłowicz's 1956 ''Apophonie'', understanding of the Ablaut . From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became certain enough to establish its relationship to PIE; see also Indo-Hittite . Method See Also: Historical linguistics Indo-European sound laws
Relationship to other language families Many higher-level relationships between PIE and other language families have been proposed. But these speculative connections are highly 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 , and so on. PHONOLOGY See Also: Proto-Indo-European phonology
Other long vowels may have appeared already in the proto-language by Compensatory Lengthening : . MORPHOLOGY Root See Also: Proto-Indo-European root PIE was an Inflected Language , in which the grammatical relationships between words were signaled through inflectional morphemes (usually endings). The Roots of PIE are basic Morpheme s carrying a Lexical meaning. By addition of Suffix es, they form Stems , and by addition of Desinence s (usually endings), these form grammatically inflected Word s ( Noun s or Verb s). PIE roots are understood to be predominantly monosyllabic with a basic shape CvC(C). This basic root shape is often altered by Ablaut . Roots which appear to be vowel initial are believed by many scholars to have originally begun with a set of consonants, later lost in all but the Anatolian branch, called Laryngeals (usually indicated ''H'', and often specified with a subscript number ''h1, h2, h3''). Thus a verb form such as the one reflected in Latin , Greek (''ágousi''), Sanskrit would be reconstructed as , with the element constituting the root ''per se''. Ablaut See Also: Indo-European ablaut One of the unique aspects of PIE was its ''ablaut'' sequence that contrasted the vowel phonemes o/e/Ø vowel within the same root. Ablaut is a form of vowel variation which changed between these three forms perhaps depending on the adjacent sounds and placement of stress in the word. These changes are echoed in modern Indo-European languages where they have come to reflect grammatical categories. These ablaut grades are usually referred to as ''e-grade, o-grade, zero-grade and lengthened grade.'' Modern English ''sing, sang, sung'' is an example of such an ablaut set and reflects a pre-Proto-Germanic sequence ''sengw-, songw-, sngw-''. Some scholars believe that the inflectional affixes of Indo European reflect ablaut variants, usually zero-grade, of older PIE roots. Often the zero-grade apears where the word's accent has shifted off of the root to one of the affixes. Thus the alternation found in Latin ''est, sunt'' reflects PIE ''h1és-ti, h1s-ónti'' Noun See Also: Proto-Indo-European noun Proto-Indo-European nouns were declined for eight cases ( Nominative , Accusative , Genitive , Dative , Instrumental , Ablative , Locative , Vocative ). There were three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. There are two major types of declension, Thematic And Athematic . Thematic nominal stems are formed with a suffix ''-o-'' (in vocative ''-e'') and the stem does not undergo Ablaut . The athematic stems are more archaic, and they are classified further by their ablaut behaviour (''acro-dynamic'', ''protero-dynamic'', ''hystero-dynamic'' and ''holo-dynamic'', after the positioning of the early PIE accent (''dynamis'') in the paradigm). Pronoun See Also: Proto-Indo-European pronouns and particles 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. Verb See Also: Proto-Indo-European verb The Indo-European verb system is complex and, as the noun, exhibits a system of Ablaut . 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. Numbers See Also: Proto-Indo-European numerals The Proto-Indo-European numerals are generally reconstructed as follows:
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 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, 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:
NOTES REFERENCES
SEE ALSO
Daughter proto-languages
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