Proto-Indo-European language

Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed

common ancestor of the Indo-European language Proto-Indo-European
family.[1] No direct record of Proto-Indo-European PIE
exists; its proposed features have been derived by Reconstruction of Indo-European languages
linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo- Region Proto-Indo-European
European languages. Far more work has gone into homeland, most likely on
reconstructing PIE than any other proto-language, and the
it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its Pontic–Caspian steppe
age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th
Era c. 4500 – c. 2500 BC
century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE and
its daughter languages, and many of the modern Lower-order Proto-Albanian
techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as the reconstructions Proto-Anatolian
comparative method) were developed as a result.[2] Proto-Armenian
Proto-Balto-Slavic
PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single
language from approximately 4500 BCE to Proto-Celtic
2500 BCE[3] during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Proto-Germanic
Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand Proto-Greek
years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, Proto-Indo-Iranian
the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans
Proto-Italic
may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of eastern
Proto-Tocharian
Europe. The linguistic reconstruction of PIE has
provided insight into the pastoral culture and
patriarchal religion of its speakers.[4] As speakers of Proto-Indo-European became isolated from each
other through the Indo-European migrations, the regional dialects of Proto-Indo-European spoken by the
various groups diverged, as each dialect underwent shifts in pronunciation (the Indo-European sound
laws), morphology, and vocabulary. Over many centuries, these dialects transformed into the known
ancient Indo-European languages. From there, further linguistic divergence led to the evolution of their
current descendants, the modern Indo-European languages.

PIE is believed to have had an elaborate system of morphology that included inflectional suffixes
(analogous to English child, child's, children, children's) as well as ablaut (vowel alterations, as preserved
in English sing, sang, sung, song) and accent. PIE nominals and pronouns had a complex system of
declension, and verbs similarly had a complex system of conjugation. The PIE phonology, particles,
numerals, and copula are also well-reconstructed. Asterisks are used by linguists as a conventional mark
of reconstructed words, such as *wódr̥ , *ḱwn̥ tós, or *tréyes; these forms are the reconstructed ancestors
of the modern English words water, hound, and three, respectively.
Development of the hypothesis
No direct evidence of PIE exists; scholars have reconstructed PIE from its present-day descendants using
the comparative method.[5] For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English: piede and
foot, padre and father, pesce and fish. Since there is a consistent correspondence of the initial consonants
(p and f) that emerges far too frequently to be coincidental, one can infer that these languages stem from a
common parent language.[6] Detailed analysis suggests a system of sound laws to describe the phonetic
and phonological changes from the hypothetical ancestral words to the modern ones. These laws have
become so detailed and reliable as to support the Neogrammarian hypothesis: the Indo-European sound
laws apply without exception.

William Jones, an Anglo-Welsh philologist and puisne judge in Bengal, caused an academic sensation
when in 1786 he postulated the common ancestry of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, the Celtic languages,
and Old Persian,[7] but he was not the first to state such a hypothesis. In the 16th century, European
visitors to the Indian subcontinent became aware of similarities between Indo-Iranian languages and
European languages,[8] and as early as 1653, Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn had published a proposal for a
proto-language ("Scythian") for the following language families: Germanic, Romance, Greek, Baltic,
Slavic, Celtic, and Iranian.[9] In a memoir sent to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1767,
Gaston-Laurent Coeurdoux, a French Jesuit who spent most of his life in India, had specifically
demonstrated the analogy between Sanskrit and European languages.[10] According to current academic
consensus, Jones's famous work of 1786 was less accurate than his predecessors', as he erroneously
included Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese in the Indo-European languages, while omitting Hindi.

In 1818, Danish linguist Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated the set of correspondences in his prize essay
Undersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse ('Investigation of the Origin of
the Old Norse or Icelandic Language'), where he argued that Old Norse was related to the Germanic
languages, and had even suggested a relation to the Baltic, Slavic, Greek, Latin and Romance
languages.[11] In 1816, Franz Bopp published On the System of Conjugation in Sanskrit, in which he
investigated the common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German. In 1833, he began
publishing the Comparative Grammar of Sanskrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic,
and German.[12]

In 1822, Jacob Grimm formulated what became known as Grimm's law as a general rule in his Deutsche
Grammatik. Grimm showed correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages and
demonstrated that sound change systematically transforms all words of a language.[13] From the 1870s,
the Neogrammarians proposed that sound laws have no exceptions, as illustrated by Verner's law,
published in 1876, which resolved apparent exceptions to Grimm's law by exploring the role of accent
(stress) in language change.[14]

August Schleicher's A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek
and Latin Languages (1874–77) represented an early attempt to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European
language.[15]

By the early 1900s, Indo-Europeanists had developed well-defined descriptions of PIE which scholars
still accept today. Later, the discovery of the Anatolian and Tocharian languages added to the corpus of
descendant languages. A subtle new principle won wide acceptance: the laryngeal theory, which
explained irregularities in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European phonology as the effects of
hypothetical sounds which no longer exist in all languages documented prior to the excavation of
cuneiform tablets in Anatolian. This theory was first proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879 on the
basis of internal reconstruction only,[16] and progressively won general acceptance after Jerzy
Kuryłowicz's discovery of consonantal reflexes of these reconstructed sounds in Hittite.[17]

Julius Pokorny's Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ('Indo-European Etymological

Dictionary', 1959) gave a detailed, though conservative, overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated
by 1959. Jerzy Kuryłowicz's 1956 Apophonie gave a better understanding of Indo-European ablaut. From
the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became robust enough to establish its relationship to PIE.

In The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, Mallory and
Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples of cognate forms (with the addition of Old
English for further comparison):[18]

PIE English Old English Latin Greek Sanskrit

*méh₂tēr mother mōdor māter mḗtēr mātár-

*ph₂tḗr father fæder pater patḗr pitár-

*bʰréh₂tēr brother brōþor frāter phrḗtēr bhrā́tar-

*swésōr sister sweostor soror éor svásar-

*suHnús, suHyús son sunu - huiús sūnú-

*dʰugh₂tḗr daughter dohtor - thugátēr duhitár-

*gʷṓus cow cū bōs boûs gáu-

Historical and geographical setting

Scholars have proposed multiple hypotheses about
when, where, and by whom PIE was spoken. The
Kurgan hypothesis, first put forward in 1956 by
Marija Gimbutas, has become the most popular.[a] It
proposes that the original speakers of PIE were the
Yamnaya culture associated with the kurgans (burial
mounds) on the Pontic–Caspian steppe north of the Early Indo-European migrations from the Pontic
Black Sea.[23]: 305–7 [24] According to the theory, they steppes and across Central Asia according to the
were nomadic pastoralists who domesticated the widely held Kurgan hypothesis
horse, which allowed them to migrate across Europe
and Asia in wagons and chariots.[24] By the early 3rd
millennium BCE, they had expanded throughout the Pontic–Caspian steppe and into eastern Europe.[25]

Other theories include the Anatolian hypothesis,[26] which posits that PIE spread out from Anatolia with
agriculture beginning c. 7500–6000 BCE,[27] the Armenian hypothesis, the Paleolithic continuity
paradigm, and the indigenous Aryans theory. The last two of these theories are not regarded as credible
within academia.[28][29] Out of all the theories for a PIE homeland, the Kurgan and Anatolian hypotheses
are the ones most widely accepted, and also the ones most debated against each other.[30] Following the
publication of several studies on ancient DNA in 2015, Colin Renfrew, the original author and proponent
of the Anatolian hypothesis, has accepted the reality of migrations of populations speaking one or several
Indo-European languages from the Pontic steppe towards Northwestern Europe.[31][32]

Classification of Indo-European languages. Red: Extinct languages. White: categories or unattested proto-
languages. Left half: centum languages; right half: satem languages

Descendants
The antiquity of the earliest attestation (in units of 500 years) of each Indo-European group is: 2000–1500
BCE for Anatolian; 1500–1000 BCE for Indo-Aryan and Greek; 1000–500 BCE for Iranian, Celtic, Italic,
Phrygian, Illyrian, Messapic, South Picene, and Venetic; 500–1 BCE for Thracian and Ancient
Macedonian; 1–500 CE for Germanic, Armenian, Lusitanian, and Tocharian; 500–1000 CE for Slavic;
1500–2000 CE for Albanian and Baltic.[33]

The table lists the main Indo-European language families, comprising the languages descended from
Proto-Indo-European.
 Proto- Historical
Clade Description Modern descendants
language languages

Hittite, Luwian,
All now extinct, the
Palaic, Lycian,
Proto- best attested being There are no living descendants of Proto-
Anatolian Lydian, Carian,
Anatolian the Hittite Anatolian.
Pisidian, Sidetic,
language.
Milyan

An extinct branch
known from
manuscripts dating
Proto- Tocharian A, There are no living descendants of Proto-
Tocharian from the 6th to the
Tocharian Tocharian B Tocharian.
8th century AD
and found in
northwest China.
Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Ladino,
This included Latin, Faliscan, Catalan, Occitan, French, Italian, Friulian,
many languages, Umbrian, Oscan, Romansh, Romanian, Aromanian,
but only African Sardinian, Corsican, Venetian, Latin (as a
Proto- descendants of Romance, liturgical language of the Catholic Church
Italic
Italic Latin (the Dalmatian, and the official language of the Vatican
Romance Volscian, Marsi, City), Picard, Mirandese, Aragonese,
languages) Pre-Samnite, Walloon, Piedmontese, Lombard,
survive. Paeligni, Sabine Neapolitan, Sicilian, Emilian-Romagnol,
Ligurian, Ladin

Gaulish,
Once spoken
Lepontic, Noric,
across Europe, but
Pictish, Cumbric,
Proto- now mostly Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton,
Celtic Old Irish, Middle
Celtic confined to its Cornish, Manx
Welsh,
northwestern
Gallaecian,
edge.
Galatian

Old English, Old

Norse, Gothic,
Branched into Old High
English, German, Afrikaans, Dutch,
three subfamilies: German, Old
Yiddish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish,
Proto- West Germanic, Saxon, Vandalic,
Germanic Frisian, Icelandic, Faroese,
Germanic East Germanic Burgundian,
Luxembourgish, Scots, Limburgish,
(now extinct), and Crimean Gothic,
Wymysorys, Elfdalian
North Germanic. Norn,
Greenlandic
Norse

Old Prussian, Old Baltic: Latvian, Latgalian and Lithuanian;

Church Slavonic, Slavic: Russian, Ukrainian,
Sudovian,
Branched into the Belarusian, Polish, Czech, Slovak,
Proto- Semigallian,
Balto- Baltic languages
Balto- Selonian, Sorbian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian,
Slavic and the Slavic
Slavic Skalvian,
languages.
Galindian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Kashubian,
Polabian, Rusyn
Knaanic

Indo- Proto- Branched into the Vedic Sanskrit, Indo-Aryan: Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu),
Iranian Indo- Indo-Aryan, Pali, Prakrit Marathi, Sylheti, Bengali, Assamese, Odia,
Iranian Iranian and languages; Old Konkani, Gujarati, Nepali, Dogri, Romani,
Nuristani Persian, Sindhi, Maithili, Sinhala, Dhivehi, Punjabi,
languages. Parthian, Old Kashmiri, Sanskrit (revived);
Azeri, Median,
Elu, Sogdian, Iranian: Persian, Pashto, Balochi,
Saka, Avestan, Kurdish, Zaza, Ossetian, Luri,
Bactrian Talyshi, Tati, Gilaki, Mazandarani,
 Semnani, Yaghnobi;

Nuristani: Katë, Prasun, Ashkun,

Nuristani Kalasha, Tregami,
Zemiaki

Branched into
Proto- Eastern Armenian Classical
Armenian Armenian
Armenian and Western Armenian
Armenian.

Modern Greek and

Ancient Greek,
Proto- Tsakonian are the
Hellenic Ancient Greek, Tsakonian
Greek only surviving
Macedonian
varieties of Greek.
Albanian is the
only surviving
representative of Illyrian
Proto- the Albanoid (disputed); Daco-
Albanian branch of the Indo- Albanian (Gheg and Tosk)
Albanian Thracian
European (disputed)
language
family.[34][35]

Commonly proposed subgroups of Indo-European languages include Italo-Celtic, Graeco-Aryan, Graeco-

Armenian, Graeco-Phrygian, Daco-Thracian, and Thraco-Illyrian.

There are numerous lexical similarities between the Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Kartvelian languages
due to early language contact, as well as some morphological similarities—notably the Indo-European
ablaut, which is remarkably similar to the root ablaut system reconstructible for Proto-Kartvelian.[36][37]

Marginally attested languages

The Lusitanian language was a marginally attested language spoken in areas near the border between
present-day Portugal and Spain.

The Venetic and Liburnian languages known from the North Adriatic region are sometimes classified as
Italic.

Albanian and Greek are the only surviving Indo-European descendants of a Paleo-Balkan language area,
named for their occurrence in or in the vicinity of the Balkan peninsula. Most of the other languages of
this area—including Illyrian, Thracian, and Dacian—do not appear to be members of any other
subfamilies of PIE, but are so poorly attested that proper classification of them is not possible. Forming
an exception, Phrygian is sufficiently well-attested to allow proposals of a particularly close affiliation
with Greek, and a Graeco-Phrygian branch of Indo-European is becoming increasingly
accepted.[38][39][40]

Phonology
Proto-Indo-European phonology has been reconstructed in some detail. Notable features of the most
widely accepted (but not uncontroversial) reconstruction include:
 three series of stop consonants reconstructed as voiceless, voiced, and breathy voiced;
sonorant consonants that could be used syllabically;
three so-called laryngeal consonants, whose exact pronunciation is not well-established but
which are believed to have existed in part based on their detectable effects on adjacent
sounds;
the fricative /s/
a vowel system in which /e/ and /o/ were the most frequently occurring vowels. The
existence of /a/ as a separate phoneme is debated.

Notation

Vowels
The vowels in commonly used notation are:[41]

Type length front back

short *e *o
Mid
long *eː *oː

Consonants
The corresponding consonants in commonly used notation are:[42][43]

Dorsal Laryngeal
Type Labial Coronal
palatal plain labial glottal velar or uvular

Nasals *m /m/ *n /n/

*k *kʷ
voiceless *p /p/ *t /t/ *ḱ /kʲ/
/k/ /kʷ/

(*b) *g *gʷ
Stops voiced *d /d/ *ǵ /ɡʲ/
/b/ /ɡ/ /ɡʷ/

*bʰ *ǵʰ *gʰ *gʷʰ

aspirated *dʰ /dʱ/
/bʱ/ /ɡʲʱ/ /ɡʱ/ /ɡʷʱ/

Laryngeal
Pronunciation
*h₁ *h₂ *h₃
(J. E.
/h/~/ʔ/ /x/~/qː/ /ɣʷ/~/qʷː/ Rasmussen,
Fricatives *s /s/
Kloekhorst)

Syllabic
[ə] [ɐ] [ɵ]
allophone

Trill *r /r/
Liquids
Lateral *l /l/

*w
*y /j/
/w/
Semivowels
*u Syllabic
*i [i]
[u] allophone[44]
All sonorants (i.e. nasals, liquids and semivowels) can appear in syllabic position. The syllabic
allophones of *y and *w are realized as the surface vowels *i and *u respectively.[44]

Accent
The Proto-Indo-European accent is reconstructed today as having had variable lexical stress, which could
appear on any syllable and whose position often varied among different members of a paradigm (e.g.
between singular and plural of a verbal paradigm). Stressed syllables received a higher pitch and it is
often said that PIE had a pitch accent. The location of the stress is associated with ablaut variations,
especially between full-grade vowels (/e/ and /o/) and zero-grade (i.e. lack of a vowel), but not entirely
predictable from it.

The accent is best preserved in Vedic Sanskrit and (in the case of nouns) Ancient Greek, and indirectly
attested in a number of phenomena in other IE languages, such as Verner's Law in the Germanic branch.
Sources for Indo-European accentuation are also the Balto-Slavic accentual system and plene spelling in
Hittite cuneiform. To account for mismatches between the accent of Vedic Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, as
well as a few other phenomena, a few historical linguists prefer to reconstruct PIE as a tone language
where each morpheme had an inherent tone; the sequence of tones in a word then evolved, according to
that hypothesis, into the placement of lexical stress in different ways in different IE branches.[45]

Morphology
Proto-Indo-European, like its earliest attested descendants, was a highly inflected, fusional language.
Suffixation and ablaut were the main methods of marking inflection, both for nominals and verbs. The
subject of a sentence was in the nominative case and agreed in number and person with the verb, which
was additionally marked for voice, tense, aspect, and mood.[46]

Root
Proto-Indo-European nominals and verbs were primarily composed of roots – affix-lacking morphemes
that carried the core lexical meaning of a word. They were used to derive related words (cf. the English
root "-friend-", from which are derived related words such as friendship, friendly, befriend, and newly
coined words such as unfriend). As a rule, roots were monosyllabic, and had the structure (s)(C)CVC(C),
where the symbols C stand for consonants, V stands for a variable vowel, and optional components are in
parentheses. All roots ended in a consonant and, although less certain, they appear to have started with a
consonant as well.[46]

A root plus a suffix formed a word stem, and a word stem plus an inflectional ending formed a word.
Proto-Indo-European was a fusional language, in which inflectional morphemes signaled the grammatical
relationships between words. This dependence on inflectional morphemes means that roots in PIE, unlike
those in English, were rarely used without affixes.[47]
Ablaut
Many morphemes in Proto-Indo-European had short e as their inherent vowel; the Indo-European ablaut
is the change of this short e to short o, long e (ē), long o (ō), or no vowel. The forms are referred to as the
"ablaut grades" of the morpheme—the e-grade, o-grade, zero-grade (no vowel), etc. This variation in
vowels occurred both within inflectional morphology (e.g., different grammatical forms of a noun or verb
may have different vowels) and derivational morphology (e.g., a verb and an associated abstract verbal
noun may have different vowels).[48]

Categories that PIE distinguished through ablaut were often also identifiable by contrasting endings, but
the loss of these endings in some later Indo-European languages has led them to use ablaut alone to
identify grammatical categories, as in the Modern English words sing, sang, sung.

Noun
Proto-Indo-European nouns were probably declined for eight or nine cases:[49]

nominative: marks the subject of a verb. Words that follow a linking verb (copulative verb)
and restate the subject of that verb also use the nominative case. The nominative is the
dictionary form of the noun.
accusative: used for the direct object of a transitive verb.
genitive: marks a noun as modifying another noun.
dative: used to indicate the indirect object of a transitive verb, such as Jacob in Maria gave
Jacob a drink.
instrumental: marks the instrument or means by, or with, which the subject achieves or
accomplishes an action. It may be either a physical object or an abstract concept.
ablative: used to express motion away from something.
locative: expresses location, corresponding vaguely to the English prepositions in, on, at,
and by.
vocative: used for a word that identifies an addressee. A vocative expression is one of direct
address where the identity of the party spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence.
For example, in the sentence, "I don't know, John", John is a vocative expression that
indicates the party being addressed.
allative: used as a type of locative case that expresses movement towards something. It
was preserved in Anatolian (particularly Old Hittite), and fossilized traces of it have been
found in Greek. It is also present in Tocharian.[50] Its PIE shape is uncertain, with candidates
including *-h2(e), *-(e)h2, or *-a.[51]
Late Proto-Indo-European had three grammatical genders:

masculine
feminine
neuter
This system is probably derived from an older two-gender system, attested in Anatolian languages:
common (or animate) and neuter (or inanimate) gender. The feminine gender only arose in the later
period of the language.[52] Neuter nouns collapsed the nominative, vocative and accusative into a single
form, the plural of which used a special collective suffix *-h2 (manifested in most descendants as -a).
This same collective suffix in extended forms *-eh2 and *-ih2 (respectively on thematic and athematic
nouns, becoming -ā and -ī in the early daughter languages) became used to form feminine nouns from
masculines.

All nominals distinguished three numbers:

singular
dual
plural
These numbers were also distinguished in verbs (see below), requiring agreement with their subject
nominal.

Pronoun
Proto-Indo-European pronouns are difficult to reconstruct, owing to their variety in later languages. PIE
had personal pronouns in the first and second grammatical person, but not the third person, where
demonstrative pronouns 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. There were also two varieties for the accusative, genitive
and dative cases, a stressed and an enclitic form.[53]

Personal pronouns[53]
First person Second person
Case
Singular Plural Singular Plural

Nominative *h₁eǵ(oH/Hom) *wei *tuH *yuH

Accusative *h₁mé, *h₁me *n̥ smé, *nōs *twé *usmé, *wōs

Genitive *h₁méne, *h₁moi *n̥ s(er)o-, *nos *tewe, *toi *yus(er)o-, *wos

Dative *h₁méǵʰio, *h₁moi *n̥ smei, *n̥ s *tébʰio, *toi *usmei

Instrumental *h₁moí *n̥ smoí *toí *usmoí

Ablative *h₁med *n̥ smed *tued *usmed

Locative *h₁moí *n̥ smi *toí *usmi

Verb
Proto-Indo-European verbs, like the nouns, exhibited an ablaut system.

The most basic categorisation for the reconstructed Indo-European verb is grammatical aspect. Verbs are
classed as:

stative: verbs that depict a state of being

imperfective: verbs depicting ongoing, habitual or repeated action
perfective: verbs depicting a completed action or actions viewed as an entire process.
Verbs have at least four grammatical moods:
 indicative: indicates that something is a statement of fact; in other words, to express what
the speaker considers to be a known state of affairs, as in declarative sentences.
imperative: forms commands or requests, including the giving of prohibition or permission,
or any other kind of advice or exhortation.
subjunctive: used to express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion, possibility,
judgment, opinion, obligation, or action that has not yet occurred
optative: indicates a wish or hope. It is similar to the cohortative mood and is closely related
to the subjunctive mood.
Verbs had two grammatical voices:

active: used in a clause whose subject expresses the main verb's agent.
mediopassive: for the middle voice and the passive voice.
Verbs had three grammatical persons: first, second and third.

Verbs had three grammatical numbers:

singular
dual: referring to precisely two of the entities (objects or persons) identified by the noun or
pronoun.
plural: a number other than singular or dual.
Verbs were probably marked by a highly developed system of participles, one for each combination of
tense and voice, and an assorted array of verbal nouns and adjectival formations.

The following table shows a possible reconstruction of the PIE verb endings from Sihler, which largely
represents the current consensus among Indo-Europeanists.

Sihler (1995)[54]
Person
Athematic Thematic

1st *-mi *-oh₂

Singular 2nd *-si *-esi

3rd *-ti *-eti

1st *-wos *-owos

Dual 2nd *-th₁es *-eth₁es

3rd *-tes *-etes

1st *-mos *-omos

Plural 2nd *-te *-ete

3rd *-nti *-onti

Numbers
Proto-Indo-European numerals are generally reconstructed as follows:
 Number Sihler[54]

one *(H)óynos/*(H)óywos/*(H)óyk(ʷ)os; *sḗm (full grade), *sm̥ - (zero grade)

two *d(u)wóh₁ (full grade), *dwi- (zero grade)

three *tréyes (full grade), *tri- (zero grade)

*kʷetwóres (o-grade), *kʷ(e)twr̥ - (zero grade)

four
(see also the kʷetwóres rule)

five *pénkʷe

six *s(w)éḱs; originally perhaps *wéḱs, with *s- under the influence of *septḿ̥

seven *septḿ̥

eight *oḱtṓ(w) or *h₃eḱtṓ(w)

nine *h₁néwn̥

ten *déḱm̥ (t)

Rather than specifically 100, *ḱm̥ tóm may originally have meant "a large number".[55]

Particle
Proto-Indo-European particles were probably used both as adverbs and as postpositions. These
postpositions became prepositions in most daughter languages.

Reconstructed particles include for example, *upo "under, below"; the negators *ne, *mē; the
conjunctions *kʷe "and", *wē "or" and others; and an interjection, *wai!, expressing woe or agony.

Derivational morphology
Proto-Indo-European employed various means of deriving words from other words, or directly from verb
roots.

Internal derivation
Internal derivation was a process that derived new words through changes in accent and ablaut alone. It
was not as productive as external (affixing) derivation, but is firmly established by the evidence of
various later languages.

Possessive adjectives
Possessive or associated adjectives were probably created from nouns through internal derivation. Such
words could be used directly as adjectives, or they could be turned back into a noun without any change
in morphology, indicating someone or something characterised by the adjective. They were probably also
used as the second elements in compounds. If the first element was a noun, this created an adjective that
resembled a present participle in meaning, e.g. "having much rice" or "cutting trees". When turned back
into nouns, such compounds were Bahuvrihis or semantically resembled agent nouns.
In thematic stems, creating a possessive adjective seems to have involved shifting the accent one syllable
to the right, for example:[56]

*tómh₁-o-s "slice" (Greek tómos) > *tomh₁-ó-s "cutting" (i.e. "making slices"; Greek tomós) >
*dr-u-tomh₁-ó-s "cutting trees" (Greek drutómos "woodcutter" with irregular accent).
*wólh₁-o-s "wish" (Sanskrit vára-) > *wolh₁-ó-s "having wishes" (Sanskrit vará- "suitor").
In athematic stems, there was a change in the accent/ablaut class. The reconstructed four classes followed
an ordering in which a derivation would shift the class one to the right:[56]

acrostatic → proterokinetic → hysterokinetic → amphikinetic

The reason for this particular ordering of the classes in derivation is not known. Some examples:

Acrostatic *krót-u-s ~ *krét-u-s "strength" (Sanskrit krátu-) > proterokinetic *krét-u-s ~ *kr̥ t-
éw-s "having strength, strong" (Greek kratús).
Hysterokinetic *ph₂-tḗr ~ *ph₂-tr-és "father" (Greek patḗr) > amphikinetic *h₁su-péh₂-tōr ~
*h₁su-ph₂-tr-és "having a good father" (Greek εὑπάτωρ, eupátōr).

Vrddhi
A vrddhi derivation, named after the Sanskrit grammatical term, signifying "of, belonging to, descended
from". It was characterised by "upgrading" the root grade, from zero to full (e) or from full to lengthened
(ē). When upgrading from zero to full grade, the vowel could sometimes be inserted in the "wrong" place,
creating a different stem from the original full grade.

Examples:[57]

full grade *swéḱuro-s "father-in-law" (Vedic Sanskrit śváśura-) > lengthened grade
*swēḱuró-s "relating to one's father-in-law" (Vedic śvāśura-, Old High German swāgur
"brother-in-law").
full grade *dyḗw-s > zero grade *diw-és "sky" > new full grade *deyw-o-s "god, sky god"
(Vedic devás, Latin deus, etc.). Note the difference in vowel placement, *dyew- in the full-
grade stem of the original noun, but *deyw- in the vrddhi derivative.

Nominalization
Adjectives with accent on the thematic vowel could be turned into nouns by moving the accent back onto
the root. A zero grade root could remain so, or be "upgraded" to full grade like in a vrddhi derivative.
Some examples:[58]

PIE *ǵn̥ h₁-tó-s "born" (Vedic jātá-) > *ǵénh₁-to- "thing that is born" (German Kind).
Greek leukós "white" > leũkos "a kind of fish", literally "white one".
Vedic kṛṣṇá- "dark" > kṛ́ṣṇa- "dark one", also "antelope".
This kind of derivation is likely related to the possessive adjectives, and can be seen as essentially the
reverse of it.
Affixal derivation

Syntax
The syntax of the older Indo-European languages has been studied in earnest since at least the late
nineteenth century, by such scholars as Hermann Hirt and Berthold Delbrück. In the second half of the
twentieth century, interest in the topic increased and led to reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European
syntax.[59]

Since all the early attested IE languages were inflectional, PIE is thought to have relied primarily on
morphological markers, rather than word order, to signal syntactic relationships within sentences.[60]
Still, a default (unmarked) word order is thought to have existed in PIE. In 1892, Jacob Wackernagel
reconstructed PIE's word order as subject–verb–object (SVO), based on evidence in Vedic Sanskrit.[61]

Winfred P. Lehmann (1974), on the other hand, reconstructs PIE as a subject–object–verb (SOV)
language. He posits that the presence of person marking in PIE verbs motivated a shift from OV to VO
order in later dialects. Many of the descendant languages have VO order: modern Greek, Romance and
Albanian prefer SVO, Insular Celtic has VSO as the default order, and even the Anatolian languages
show some signs of this word order shift. Tocharian and Indo-Iranian, meanwhile, retained the
conservative OV order. Lehmann attributes the context-dependent order preferences in Baltic, Slavic and
Germanic to outside influences.[62] Donald Ringe (2006), however, attributes these to internal
developments instead.[63]

Paul Friedrich (1975) disagrees with Lehmann's analysis. He reconstructs PIE with the following syntax:

basic SVO word order

adjectives before nouns
head nouns before genitives
prepositions rather than postpositions
no dominant order in comparative constructions
main clauses before relative clauses
Friedrich notes that even among those Indo-European languages with basic OV word order, none of them
are rigidly OV. He also notes that these non-rigid OV languages mainly occur in parts of the IE area that
overlap with OV languages from other families (such as Uralic and Dravidian), whereas VO is
predominant in the central parts of the IE area. For these reasons, among others, he argues for a VO
common ancestor.[64]

Hans Henrich Hock (2015) reports that the SVO hypothesis still has some adherents, but the "broad
consensus" among PIE scholars is that PIE would have been an SOV language.[61] The SOV default word
order with other orders used to express emphasis (e.g., verb–subject–object to emphasise the verb) is
attested in Old Indo-Aryan, Old Iranian, Old Latin and Hittite, while traces of it can be found in the
enclitic personal pronouns of the Tocharian languages.[60]

See also
Indo-European vocabulary
 Proto-Indo-European verbs
Proto-Indo-European pronouns
List of Indo-European languages
Indo-European sound laws
List of proto-languages

Notes
a. See:
Bomhard: "This scenario is supported not only by linguistic evidence, but also by a
growing body of archeological and genetic evidence. The Indo-Europeans have been
identified with several cultural complexes existing in that area between 4,500—3,500
BCE. The literature supporting such a homeland is both extensive and persuasive [...].
Consequently, other scenarios regarding the possible Indo-European homeland, such as
Anatolia, have now been mostly abandoned."[19]
Anthony & Ringe: "Archaeological evidence and linguistic evidence converge in support
of an origin of Indo-European languages on the Pontic-Caspian steppes around 4,000
years BCE. The evidence is so strong that arguments in support of other hypotheses
should be reexamined."[20]
Mallory: "The Kurgan solution is attractive and has been accepted by many
archaeologists and linguists, in part or total. It is the solution one encounters in the
Encyclopædia Britannica and the Grand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse."[21]
Strazny: "The single most popular proposal is the Pontic steppes (see the Kurgan
hypothesis)..."[22]

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Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, vol. 1, De Gruyter Mouton,
doi:10.1515/9783110261288 (https://doi.org/10.1515%2F9783110261288), ISBN 978-3-
110-26128-8
Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias, eds. (23 October 2017), "Handbook of
Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics: An International Handbook",
Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, vol. 2, De Gruyter
Mouton, doi:10.1515/9783110523874 (https://doi.org/10.1515%2F9783110523874),
ISBN 978-3-110-52387-4
Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias, eds. (11 June 2018), Handbook of Comparative
and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, vol. 3, De Gruyter Mouton,
doi:10.1515/9783110542431 (https://doi.org/10.1515%2F9783110542431), ISBN 978-3-
110-54243-1
Strazny, Philipp, ed. (2000), Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics, Routledge,
ISBN 978-1-579-58218-0
External links
At the University of Texas Linguistic Research Center: List of online books (http://liberalarts.
utexas.edu/lrc/resources/books/index.php) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20170728
215921/http://liberalarts.utexas.edu/lrc/resources/books/index.php) 28 July 2017 at the
Wayback Machine, Indo-European Lexicon (https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex)
Proto-Indo-European Lexicon (http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi/) at the University of Helsinki,
Department of Modern Languages, Department of World Cultures, Indo-European Studies
"Wheel and chariot in early IE: What exactly can we conclude from the linguistic data?" (http
s://archive.org/details/kummeleaa2019.pdf) (PDF). Martin Joachim Kümmel, department of
Indo-European linguistics, University of Jena.
Indo-European Lexical Cognacy Database (http://ielex.mpi.nl/) Archived (https://web.archiv
e.org/web/20151107054612/http://ielex.mpi.nl/) 7 November 2015 at the Wayback Machine
glottothèque – Ancient Indo-European Grammars online (https://spw.uni-goettingen.de/proje
cts/aig/index.html), an online collection of video lectures on Ancient Indo-European
languages

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