Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of theIndo-European language family.[1] No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived bylinguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages.[2]
Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any otherproto-language, and it is the best understood of all proto-languages of its age. The majority of linguistic work during the 19th century was devoted to the reconstruction of PIE and itsdaughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic reconstruction (such as thecomparative method) were developed as a result.[3]
PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from approximately 4500 BCE to 2500 BCE[4] during the LateNeolithic to EarlyBronze Age, though estimates vary by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailingKurgan hypothesis, theoriginal homeland of theProto-Indo-Europeans may have been in thePontic–Caspian steppe of eastern Europe. The linguistic reconstruction of PIE has provided insight into the pastoralculture and patriarchalreligion of its speakers.[5]
As speakers of Proto-Indo-European became isolated from each other through theIndo-European migrations, the regionaldialects of Proto-Indo-European spoken by the various groups diverged, as each dialect underwent shifts in pronunciation (theIndo-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.
Asterisks are used by linguists as a conventional mark of reconstructed words, such as *wódr̥, *ḱwn̥tós, or *tréyes; these forms are the reconstructed ancestors of the modern English wordswater,hound, andthree, respectively.
No direct evidence of PIE exists; scholars have reconstructed PIE from its present-day descendants using thecomparative method.[6] For example, compare the pairs of words in Italian and English:piede andfoot,padre andfather,pesce andfish. Since there is a consistent correspondence of the initial consonants (p andf) that emerges far too frequently to be coincidental, one can infer that these languages stem from a commonparent language.[7] Detailed analysis suggests a system ofsound laws to describe thephonetic andphonological changes from the hypothetical ancestral words to the modern ones. These laws have become so detailed and reliable as to support theNeogrammarian hypothesis: the Indo-European sound laws apply without exception.
In 1818, Danish linguistRasmus Christian Rask elaborated the set of correspondences in his prize essayUndersøgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse ('Investigation of the Origin of the Old Norse or Icelandic Language'), where he argued thatOld Norse was related to the Germanic languages, and had even suggested a relation to the Baltic, Slavic, Greek, Latin and Romance languages.[12] In 1816,Franz Bopp publishedOn 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 theComparative Grammar of Sanskrit,Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Old Slavic, Gothic, and German.[13]
In 1822,Jacob Grimm formulated what became known asGrimm's law as a general rule in hisDeutsche Grammatik. Grimm showed correlations between the Germanic and other Indo-European languages and demonstrated that sound change systematically transforms all words of a language.[14] From the 1870s, the Neogrammarians proposed that sound laws have no exceptions, as illustrated byVerner's law, published in 1876, which resolved apparent exceptions to Grimm's law by exploring the role of accent (stress) in language change.[15]
August Schleicher'sA 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.[16]
By the early 1900s,Indo-Europeanists had developed well-defined descriptions of PIE which scholars still accept today. Later, the discovery of theAnatolian andTocharian languages added to the corpus of descendant languages. A subtle new principle won wide acceptance: thelaryngeal 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 ofcuneiform tablets in Anatolian. This theory was first proposed byFerdinand de Saussure in 1879 on the basis of internal reconstruction only,[17] and progressively won general acceptance afterJerzy Kuryłowicz's discovery of consonantal reflexes of these reconstructed sounds in Hittite.[18]
Julius Pokorny'sIndogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch ('Indo-European Etymological Dictionary', 1959) gave a detailed, though conservative, overview of the lexical knowledge accumulated by 1959. Jerzy Kuryłowicz's 1956Apophonie gave a better understanding ofIndo-European ablaut. From the 1960s, knowledge of Anatolian became robust enough to establish its relationship to PIE.
InThe Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World, Mallory and Adams illustrate the resemblance with the following examples ofcognate forms (with the addition of Old English for further comparison):[19]
Scholars have proposed multiple hypotheses about when, where, and by whom PIE was spoken. TheKurgan hypothesis, first put forward in 1956 byMarija Gimbutas, has become the most popular.[a] It proposes that the original speakers of PIE were theYamnaya culture associated with thekurgans (burial mounds) on thePontic–Caspian steppe north of the Black Sea.[24]: 305–7 [25] According to the theory, they werenomadic pastoralists whodomesticated the horse, which allowed them to migrate across Europe and Asia in wagons and chariots.[25] By the early 3rd millennium BCE, they had expanded throughout the Pontic–Caspian steppe and into eastern Europe.[26]
Other theories include theAnatolian hypothesis,[27] which posits that PIE spread out from Anatolia with agriculture beginningc. 7500–6000 BCE,[28] theArmenian hypothesis, thePaleolithic continuity paradigm, and theindigenous Aryans theory. The last two of these theories are not regarded as credible within academia.[29][30] 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.[31] 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.[32][33]
Classification of Indo-European languages.[citation needed] Red: Extinct languages. White: categories or unattested proto-languages. Left half:centum languages; right half:satem languages
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.[34]
The table lists the main Indo-European language families, comprising the languages descended from Proto-Indo-European.
There are numerous lexical similarities between the Proto-Indo-European andProto-Kartvelian languages due to earlylanguage contact,[citation needed] as well as some morphological similarities—notably theIndo-European ablaut, which is remarkably similar to the root ablaut system reconstructible for Proto-Kartvelian.[37][38]
TheVenetic andLiburnian languages known from the North Adriatic region are sometimes classified as Italic.
Albanian and Greek are the only surviving Indo-European descendants of aPaleo-Balkan language area, named for their occurrence in or in the vicinity of theBalkan peninsula. Most of the other languages of this area—includingIllyrian,Thracian, andDacian—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 aGraeco-Phrygian branch of Indo-European is becoming increasingly accepted.[39][40][41]
Proto-Indo-Europeanphonology has been reconstructed in some detail. Notable features of the most widely accepted (but not uncontroversial) reconstruction include:
three so-calledlaryngeal 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;
Allsonorants (i.e. nasals, liquids and semivowels) can appear insyllabic position. The syllabic allophones of *y and *w are realized as the surface vowels *i and *u respectively.[45]
TheProto-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; therefore it is often said that PIE had apitch 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 inVedic Sanskrit and (in the case of nouns)Ancient Greek, and indirectly attested in a number of phenomena in other IE languages, such asVerner's Law in the Germanic branch. Sources for Indo-European accentuation are also theBalto-Slavic accentual system andplene spelling inHittite 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 atone language where eachmorpheme 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.[46]
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.[47]
Proto-Indo-European nominals and verbs were primarily composed of roots –affix-lackingmorphemes that carried the corelexical meaning of a word. They were used to derive related words (cf. the English root "-friend-", from which are derived related words such asfriendship,friendly,befriend, and newly coined words such asunfriend). 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.[47]
A root plus asuffix formed aword stem, and a word stem plus aninflectional ending formed a word. Proto-Indo-European was afusional language, in whichinflectional 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.[48]
Many morphemes in Proto-Indo-European had shorte as their inherent vowel; theIndo-European ablaut is the change of this shorte to shorto, longe (ē), longo (ō), or no vowel. The forms are referred to as the "ablaut grades" of the morpheme—thee-grade,o-grade, zero-grade (no vowel), etc. This variation in vowels occurred both withininflectional morphology (e.g., different grammatical forms of a noun or verb may have different vowels) andderivational morphology (e.g., a verb and an associated abstractverbal noun may have different vowels).[49]
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 wordssing,sang,sung.
nominative: marks thesubject 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.
dative: used to indicate the indirect object of a transitive verb, such asJacob inMaria gave Jacob a drink.
instrumental: marks theinstrument 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 prepositionsin,on,at, andby.
vocative: used for a word that identifies an addressee. Avocative 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 oflocative 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.[51] Its PIE shape is uncertain, with candidates including*-h2(e),*-(e)h2, or*-a.[52]
This system is probably derived from an older two-gender system, attested in Anatolian languages:common (oranimate) and neuter (or inanimate) gender. The feminine gender only arose in the later period of the language.[53] Neuter nouns collapsed the nominative, vocative and accusative into a single form, the plural of which used a specialcollective 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.
Proto-Indo-European pronouns are difficult to reconstruct, owing to their variety in later languages. PIE had personalpronouns in the first and secondgrammatical person, but not the third person, wheredemonstrative pronouns were used instead. The personal pronouns had their own unique forms and endings, and some hadtwo distinct stems; this is most obvious in the first person singular where the two stems are still preserved in EnglishI andme. There were also two varieties for the accusative, genitive and dative cases, a stressed and anenclitic form.[54]
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 indeclarative 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
Verbs were probably marked by a highly developed system ofparticiples, one for each combination of tense and voice, and an assorted array ofverbal 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.
Reconstructed particles include for example, *upo "under, below"; thenegators *ne, *mē; theconjunctions *kʷe "and", *wē "or" and others; and aninterjection, *wai!, expressing woe or agony.
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 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 wereBahuvrihis or semantically resembledagent nouns.
In thematic stems, creating a possessive adjective seems to have involved shifting the accent one syllable to the right, for example:[57]
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:[57]
Avrddhi 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.
full grade*swéḱuro-s "father-in-law" (Vedic Sanskritśváśura-) > lengthened grade *swēḱuró-s "relating to one's father-in-law" (Vedicśvāśura-,Old High Germanswāgur "brother-in-law").
full grade*dyḗw-s > zero grade*diw-és "sky" > new full grade*deyw-o-s "god,sky god" (Vedicdevás,Latindeus, etc.). Note the difference in vowel placement,*dyew- in the full-grade stem of the original noun, but*deyw- in the vrddhi derivative.
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:[59]
PIE*ǵn̥h₁-tó-s "born" (Vedicjātá-) >*ǵénh₁-to- "thing that is born" (GermanKind).
Greekleukós "white" >leũkos "a kind of fish", literally "white one".
Vedickṛṣṇá- "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.
Thesyntax of the older Indo-European languages has been studied in earnest since at least the late nineteenth century, by such scholars asHermann Hirt andBerthold Delbrück. In the second half of the twentieth century, interest in the topic increased and led to reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European syntax.[60]
Since all the early attested IE languages were inflectional, PIE is thought to have relied primarily on morphological markers, rather thanword order, to signalsyntactic relationships within sentences.[61] Still, a default (unmarked) word order is thought to have existed in PIE. In 1892,Jacob Wackernagel reconstructed PIE's word order assubject–verb–object (SVO), based on evidence in Vedic Sanskrit.[62]
Winfred P. Lehmann (1974), on the other hand, reconstructs PIE as asubject–object–verb (SOV) language. He posits that the presence ofperson 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 andAlbanian prefer SVO,Insular Celtic has VSO as the default order, and even theAnatolian languages show some signs of this word order shift.Tocharian andIndo-Iranian, meanwhile, retained the conservative OV order. Lehmann attributes the context-dependent order preferences in Baltic, Slavic and Germanic to outside influences.[63]Donald Ringe (2006), however, attributes these to internal developments instead.[64]
Paul Friedrich (1975) disagrees with Lehmann's analysis. He reconstructs PIE with the following syntax:
Friedrich notes that even among those Indo-European languages with basic OV word order, none of them arerigidly 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 asUralic andDravidian), whereas VO is predominant in the central parts of the IE area. For these reasons, among others, he argues for a VO common ancestor.[65]
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.[62] The SOV default word order with other orders used to express emphasis (e.g.,verb–subject–object to emphasise the verb) is attested inOld Indo-Aryan,Old Iranian,Old Latin andHittite, while traces of it can be found in theenclitic personal pronouns of theTocharian languages.[61]
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."[20]
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."[21]
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 theEncyclopædia Britannica and theGrand Dictionnaire Encyclopédique Larousse."[22]
Strazny: "The single most popular proposal is the Pontic steppes (see the Kurgan hypothesis)..."[23]
^Blench, Roger (2004). "Archaeology and language: Methods and issues". In Bintliff, J. (ed.).A Companion to Archaeology(PDF). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell. pp. 52–74.
^Kuryłowicz, Jerzy (1927). "ə indo-européen etḫ hittite". In: Witold Taszycki and Witold Doroszewki (eds.),Symbolae Grammaticae in honorem Ioannis Rozwadowski, v. 1, 95–104. Krakow: Uniwersytet Jagielloński.
^Gimbutas, Marija (1985). "Primary and Secondary Homeland of the Indo-Europeans: comments on Gamkrelidze-Ivanov articles".Journal of Indo-European Studies.13 (1–2):185–202.
^"The opposing argument, that speakers of Indo-European languages were indigenous to the Indian subcontinent, is not supported by any reliable scholarship".Doniger, Wendy (2017)."Another Great Story"Archived 14 May 2023 at theWayback Machine", review of Asko Parpola'sThe Roots of Hinduism. In:Inference, International Review of Science, Volume 3, Issue 2.
^Gamkrelidze, Th. & Ivanov, V. (1995). Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and a Proto-Culture. 2 Vols. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
^Gamkrelidze, T. V. (2008). Kartvelian and Indo-European: a typological comparison of reconstructed linguistic systems. Bulletin of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences 2 (2): 154–160.
^Brixhe, Claude (2008)."Phrygian". In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.).The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. Cambridge University Press. p. 72.ISBN9781139469333.
^Burrow, T (1955).The Sanskrit Language. Motilal Banarsidass Publ.ISBN81-208-1767-2.
^abBeekes, Robert (1995).Comparative Indo-European linguistics: an introduction. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Publishing Company. pp. 147,212–217, 233, 243.ISBN978-1556195044.
^abHock, Hans Henrich (2015). "Proto-Indo-European verb-finality: Reconstruction, typology, validation". In Kulikov, Leonid; Lavidas, Nikolaos (eds.).Proto-Indo-European Syntax and its Development. John Benjamins.
Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias, eds. (25 September 2017),Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics, vol. 1, De Gruyter Mouton,doi:10.1515/9783110261288,ISBN978-3-110-26128-8
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,ISBN978-3-110-52387-4
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,ISBN978-3-110-54243-1
Strazny, Philipp, ed. (2000),Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics, Routledge,ISBN978-1-579-58218-0
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