The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the ancestor of the Indo-European languages.
It is the best understood of all proto-languages. It was put together by the methods of historical linguistics.
The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the ancestor of the Indo-European languages.
It is the best understood of all proto-languages. It was put together by the methods of historical linguistics.
There are different theories about when and where Proto-Indo-European was spoken. PIE may have been spoken as a single language that began to separate, around 3700 BC. The exact date is not known. The most popular hypothesis for where it came from and how it spread is called the Kurgan hypothesis. In this hypothesis, its origin is in the Pontic-Caspian steppe of Eastern Europe.
There is no direct evidence of PIE because it was never written down. All PIE sounds and words are reconstructed from later Indo-European languages. The asterisk symbol is used to mark reconstructed PIE words: *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.
The vowels in commonly-used notation are:
| length | front | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid | short | *e | *o |
| long | *ē | *ō |
The consonants in commonly-used notation are:
| Labial | Coronal | Dorsal | Laryngeal | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| palatal | plain | labial | |||||
| Nasals | *m | *n | |||||
| Stops | voiceless | *p | *t | *ḱ | *k | *kʷ | |
| voiced | *b | *d | *ǵ | *g | *gʷ | ||
| aspirated | *bʰ | *dʰ | *ǵʰ | *gʰ | *gʷʰ | ||
| Fricatives | *s | *h₁, *h₂, *h₃ | |||||
| Approximants | *r , *l | *j | *w | ||||
The following phonemes are generally accepted:
PIE had a free pitch accent. That means that the stress of a word could be on any syllable and change even for related words. Different meanings of a word could be marked only with high or low pitch.
PIE was an inflected language that had roots with suffixes. The 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.
Those methods were probably used often in PIE. Languages like English, which have few such combinations, come from earlier, more typical Indo-European languages. English comes from Anglo-Saxon, a Western Germanic language. The fact that English once was synthetic like German is shown by cranberry morphemes, which are called that because the "cran-" is a remnant of a word that no longer exists. Also, in mulberry and raspberry, their 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 to show what it could be like. However, they are just educated guesses. Even so, such texts are still useful because they show what PIE might have looked and sounded like.
People have rewritten a text by Schleicher multiple times as an example text:
Avis akvāsas ka
Schleicher's reconstruction says that the o/e vocalism was secondary. His version of PIE is more like Sanskrit than modern reconstructions are.
Owis ek’wōses-kʷe
Hirt introduced the o/e vocalist and some rather different consonants.
The Sheep and the Horses
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 are caused by the different ideas about the sounds and the structure of PIE.