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The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages. 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 mid 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:

• the 3rd millennium BC (excluding the Anatolian branch) in Armenia, according to the Armenian hypothesis (proposed in the context of Glottalic theory);
• the 5th millennium BC (4th excluding the Anatolian branch) in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, according to the mainstream Kurgan hypothesis;
• the 6th millennium BC in India, according to Koenraad Elst's Out of India model.
• the 7th millennium BC in Anatolia (the 5th, in the Balkans, excluding the Anatolian branch), according to Colin Renfrew's Anatolian hypothesis;
• the 7th millennium BC (6th excluding the Anatolian branch), according to a 2003 glottochronological study
• before the 10th millennium BC, in the Paleolithic Continuity Theory

History

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

There is no direct evidence of PIE, because it was never written. All PIE sounds and words are reconstructed from later Indo-European languages using the comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction. The asterisk is used to mark reconstructed PIE words, such as *wódr̥ 'water', *ḱwṓn 'dog', or *tréyes 'three (masculine)'. Many of the words in the modern Indo-European languages seem to have derived from such "protowords" via regular sound changes (e.g., Grimm's law).

As the Proto-Indo-European language broke up, its sound system diverged as well, according to various sound laws in the daughter languages. Notable among these are Grimm's law and Verner's law in Proto-Germanic, loss of prevocalic *p- in Proto-Celtic, reduction to h of prevocalic *s- in Proto-Greek, Brugmann's law and Bartholomae's law in Proto-Indo-Iranian, and Grassmann's law independently in both Proto-Greek and Proto-Indo-Iranian.

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 Urheimaten 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

Morphology

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, 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:

• Schleicher's fable (Avis akvasas ka) by August Schleicher (1868), modernized by Hermann Hirt (1939) and Winfred Lehmann and Ladislav Zgusta (1979)
• The king and the god (rēḱs deiwos-kʷe) by S. K. Sen, E. P. Hamp et al. (1994)

Notes

1. Russell D. Gray and Quentin D. Atkinson, Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin, Nature 426 (27 November 2003) 435-439

References

• Vyacheslav V. Ivanov and Thomas Gamkrelidze, The Early History of Indo-­European Languages, Scientific American, vol. 262, N3, 110­116, March, 1990
• A. Kammenhuber, "Aryans in the Near East," Haidelberg, 1968
• Beekes, Robert S. P. (1995). Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN 90-272-2150-2 (Europe), ISBN 1-55619-504-4 (U.S.).
• Buck, Carl Darling (1933). Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-07931-7.
• Lehmann, W., and L. Zgusta. 1979. Schleicher's tale after a century. In Festschrift for Oswald Szemerényi on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday, ed. B. Brogyanyi, 455–66. Amsterdam.
• Mayrhofer, Manfred (1986). Indogermanische Grammatik, i/2: Lautlehre. Heidelberg: Winter.
• Sihler, Andrew L. (1995). New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-508345-8.
• Szemerényi, Oswald (1996). Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics. Oxford.
• Whitney, William Dwight (1924). Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited (reprint). ISBN 81-208-0621-2 (India), ISBN 0-486-43136-3 (Dover, US).

See also

• Proto-Indo-Europeans
• Indo-European studies
• Proto-Indo-European religion
• Proto-Semitic
• Proto-World language
• Indo-European s-mobile

External links

• Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European (by Vyacheslav V. Ivanov)
• American Heritage Dictionary:
  • Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, essay on the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European
  • Indo-European Roots, index
• PIE grammar
• Indo-European Etymological Dictionary (Leiden University)
• Indo-European Documentation Center at the University of Texas
• "The Indo-Uralic Verb" by Frederik Kortlandt
• Say something in Proto-Indo-European (by Geoffrey Sampson)
• An Overview of the Proto-Indo-European Verb System (by Piotr Gąsiorowski)
• Many PIE example texts
• PIE root etymology database, compiled from Walde-Pokorny by L. Nikolayev and from Friedrich, Tischler (Hittite) and Adams (Tocharian) by Sergei Starostin.
• On the internal classification of Indo-European languages: survey by Václav Blažek. Linguistica ONLINE. ISSN 1801-5336 (Brno, Czech Republic)

• Bronze Age
• Indo-European
• Proto-languages