Proto-Indo-European language

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"PIE" and "Proto-Indo-European" redirect here; see PIE (disambiguation) for other
uses and Proto-Indo-Europeans for the people.
Not to be confused with Pre-Indo-European languages or Paleo-European languages.
Proto-Indo-European
PIE
Reconstruction of Indo-European languages
Region See § Region
Era See § Era
Lower-order reconstructions
Proto-Albanian
Proto-Anatolian
Proto-Armenian
Proto-Balto-Slavic
Proto-Celtic
Proto-Germanic
Proto-Greek
Proto-Indo-Iranian
Proto-Italic
Proto-Tocharian
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Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the theorized common ancestor of the Indo-European
language family.[1] Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic
reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-
Indo-European exists.[2]

Far more work has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other proto-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 or
its daughter languages, and many of the modern techniques of linguistic
reconstruction (such as the comparative method) were developed as a result.
[citation needed]

PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500
BC[3] during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates vary by more
than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original
homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of
eastern 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. Today, the descendant languages of PIE with the
most native speakers are Spanish, English, Portuguese, Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu),
Bengali, Russian, Punjabi, German, Persian, French, Marathi, Italian, and Gujarati.

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 as a conventional mark of reconstructed words, such as *wódr̥,

*ḱwṓ, or *tréyes; these forms are the reconstructed ancestors of the modern English
words water, hound, and three, respectively.

Contents
1 Development of the hypothesis
2 Historical and geographical setting
3 Branches
3.1 Marginally attested languages
4 Phonology
4.1 Notation
4.1.1 Vowels
4.1.2 Consonants
4.2 Accent
5 Morphology
5.1 Root
5.2 Ablaut
5.3 Noun
5.4 Pronoun
5.5 Verb
5.6 Numbers
5.7 Particle
5.8 Derivational morphology
5.8.1 Internal derivation
5.8.1.1 Possessive adjectives
5.8.1.2 Vrddhi
5.8.1.3 Nominalization
5.8.2 Affixal derivation
6 Syntax
7 In popular culture
8 See also
9 Notes
10 References
11 Bibliography
12 External links
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 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 rule: the Indo-European sound laws apply without
exception.

William Jones, an Anglo-Welsh philologist and puisne judge in Bengal, caused an

academic sensation when he postulated the common ancestry of Sanskrit, Greek, and
Latin in 1786,[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 all
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, Rasmus Christian Rask elaborated the set of correspondences to include

other[clarification needed] Indo-European languages, such as Sanskrit and Greek,
and the full range of consonants involved. In 1816, Franz Bopp published On the
System of Conjugation in Sanskrit, in which he investigated a 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.[11]

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.[12] 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.[13]

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.[14]

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.

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.

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 Black Sea.[19]: 305–7 
[20] According to the theory, they were
nomadic pastoralists who domesticated the horse, which allowed them to migrate
across Europe and Asia in wagons and chariots.[20] By the early 3rd millennium BC,
they had expanded throughout the Pontic–Caspian steppe and into eastern Europe.[21]

Other theories include the Anatolian hypothesis,[22] which posits that PIE spread
out from Anatolia with agriculture around 9000 BC,[23] the Armenian hypothesis, the
Paleolithic continuity paradigm, and the indigenous Aryans theory.[citation needed]
An overview map[24] summarises the origin theories.[25]

Classification of Indo-European languages. Red: Extinct languages. White:

categories or unattested proto-languages. Left half: centum languages; right half:
satem languages
Branches
Main article: Indo-European languages
The table lists the main Indo-European language families.

Clade Proto-language Description Historical languages Modern descendants

Anatolian Proto-Anatolian All now extinct, the best attested being the Hittite
language. Hittite, Luwian, Palaic, Lycian, Lydian There are no living descendants
of Proto-Anatolian.
Tocharian Proto-Tocharian An extinct branch known from manuscripts dating from the
6th to the 8th century AD and found in northwest China. Tocharian A, Tocharian B
There are no living descendants of Proto-Tocharian.
Italic Proto-Italic This included many languages, but only descendants of Latin
(the Romance languages) survive. Latin, Faliscan, Umbrian, Oscan, African Romance,
Dalmatian Portuguese, Galician, Spanish, Ladino, Catalan, Occitan, French, Italian,
Rhaeto-Romance, Romanian, Aromanian, Sardinian, Venetian, Latin (as a liturgical
language of the Catholic Church and the official language of the Vatican City)
Celtic Proto-Celtic Once spoken across Europe, but now mostly confined to its
northwestern edge. Gaulish, Celtiberian, Pictish, Cumbric, Old Irish, Middle Welsh
Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Manx
Germanic Proto-Germanic Branched into three subfamilies: West Germanic, East
Germanic (now extinct), and North Germanic. Old English, Old Norse, Gothic,
Frankish, Vandalic, Burgundian, Crimean Gothic, Norn English, German, Afrikaans,
Dutch, Yiddish, Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Frisian, Icelandic, Faroese,
Luxembourgish, Scots
Balto-Slavic Proto-Balto-Slavic Branched into the Baltic languages and the Slavic
languages. Old Prussian, Old Church Slavonic, Sudovian, Selonian, Polabian,
Knaanic Baltic Latvian and Lithuanian; Slavic Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian,
Polish, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Macedonian
Indo-Iranian Proto-Indo-Iranian Branched into the Indo-Aryan, Iranian and
Nuristani languages. Vedic Sanskrit, Pali, Prakrit languages; Old Persian,
Parthian, Old Azeri, Median, Elu, Sogdian, Saka, Avestan, Bactrian Indo-Aryan
Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu), Marathi, Sylheti, Bengali, Assamese, Odia, Konkani,
Gujarati, Nepali, Dogri, Sindhi, Maithili, Sinhala, Dhivehi, Punjabi, Kashmiri,
Sanskrit (revived); Iranic Persian, Pashto, Balochi, Kurdish, Zaza, Ossetian, Luri,
Talyshi, Tati, Gilaki, Mazandarani, Semnani, Yaghnobi, Nuristani
Armenian Proto-Armenian Branched into Eastern Armenian and Western Armenian.
Classical Armenian Eastern Armenian, Western Armenian
Hellenic Proto-Greek Ancient Greek Demotic, Italiot Greek (Calabrian and Griko),
Pontic, Mariupolitan, Cappadocian, Tsakonian, Yevanic, Maniot, Himariote, Cypriot,
Cretan, and other
Albanian Proto-Albanian Albanian is the only modern representative of a distinct
branch of the Indo-European language family.[26] Illyrian (disputed)
Daco-Thracian (disputed)

Tosk and Gheg

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, though some morphological
similarities—notably the Indo-European ablaut, which is remarkably similar to the
root ablaut system reconstructible for Proto-Kartvelian[27][28]—may suggest a
higher-level phylogenetic relationship.[relevant?]

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.[29][30][31]

Phonology
Main article: Proto-Indo-European 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.
Notation
Vowels
The vowels in commonly used notation are:[32]

length front back

Mid short *e *o
long *ē *ō
Consonants
The corresponding consonants in commonly used notation are:[33][34]

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
Liquids *r,*l
Semivowels *y *w
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; therefore it is often said
that PIE had a pitch accent. The location of the stress is associated with ablaut
variations, especially between normal-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. 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.[citation needed]

Morphology
Root
Proto-Indo-European roots were affix-lacking morphemes which carried the core
lexical meaning of a word and 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). Proto-Indo-European was
probably a fusional language, in which inflectional morphemes signalled the
grammatical relationships between words. This dependence on inflectional morphemes
means that roots in PIE, unlike those in English, were rarely used without affixes.
A root plus a suffix formed a word stem, and a word stem plus a desinence (usually
an ending) formed a word.[35]

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. 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).[36]

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:[37]

nominative: marks the subject of a verb, such as They in They ate. Words that
follow a linking verb and rename the subject of that verb also use the nominative
case. Thus, both They and linguists are in the nominative case in They are
linguists. 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: corresponds 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. Its PIE shape is uncertain, with candidates
including *-h2(e), *-(e)h2, or *-a.[38]
Late Proto-Indo-European had three grammatical genders:

masculine
feminine
neuter
This system is probably derived from an older, simpler, two-gender system, attested
in Anatolian languages: common (or animate) and neuter (inanimate) gender. The
feminine gender only arose in the later period of the language.[39]

All nominals distinguished three numbers:

singular
dual
plural
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.[40]

Personal pronouns[40]
First person Second person
Singular Plural Singular Plural
Nominative *h₁eǵ(oH/Hom) *wei *tuH *yuH
Accusative *h₁mé, *h₁me *nsmé, *nōs *twé *usmé, *wōs
Genitive *h₁méne, *h₁moi *ns(er)o-, *nos *tewe, *toi *yus(er)o-, *wos
Dative *h₁méǵʰio, *h₁moi *nsmei, *ns *tébʰio, *toi *usmei
Instrumental *h₁moí *nsmoí *toí *usmoí
Ablative *h₁med *nsmed *tued *usmed
Locative *h₁moí *nsmi *toí *usmi
Verb
Proto-Indo-European verbs, like the nouns, exhibited a system of ablaut.

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)[41]
Athematic Thematic
Singular 1st *-mi *-oh₂
2nd *-si *-esi
3rd *-ti *-eti
Dual 1st *-wos *-owos
2nd *-th₁es *-eth₁es
3rd *-tes *-etes
Plural 1st *-mos *-omos
2nd *-te *-ete
3rd *-nti *-onti
Numbers
Proto-Indo-European numerals are generally reconstructed as follows:

Sihler[41]
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)
four *kʷetwóres (o-grade), *kʷ(e)twr̥- (zero grade)
(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, *ḱm̥tóm may originally have meant "a large number".
[42]

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:[43]

*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:[43]

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 ~ *kr̥t-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, signified "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:[44]

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").
(*dyḗw-s ~) zero grade *diw-és "sky" > 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:[45]

PIE *ǵn̥h₁-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
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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.[46]

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.[47] Still, a default (unmarked) word
order is thought to have existed in PIE. This was reconstructed by Jacob
Wackernagel as being subject–verb–object (SVO), based on evidence in Vedic
Sanskrit, and the SVO hypothesis still has some adherents, but as of 2015 the
"broad consensus" among PIE scholars is that PIE would have been a subject–object–
verb (SOV) language.[48]

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.[47] A shift from OV to VO order is posited to
have occurred in late PIE since many of the descendant languages have this 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.[49] The context-dependent order preferences in Baltic, Slavic and Germanic
are a complex topic, with some attributing them to outside influences [49] and
others to internal developments.[50]

In popular culture
The Ridley Scott film Prometheus features an android named David (played by Michael
Fassbender) who learns Proto-Indo-European to communicate with the Engineer, an
extraterrestrial whose race may have created humans. David practices PIE by
reciting Schleicher's fable.[51] Linguist Dr Anil Biltoo created the film's
reconstructed dialogue and had an onscreen role teaching David Schleicher's fable.
[52]

The 2016 video game Far Cry Primal, set in around 10,000 BC, features dialects of
an invented language based partly on PIE, intended to be its fictional predecessor.
[53] Linguists constructed three dialects—Wenja, Udam and Izila—one for each of the
three featured tribes.

See also
Indo-European vocabulary
Proto-Indo-European verbs
Proto-Indo-European pronouns
List of Indo-European languages
Indo-European sound laws
Notes
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."[15]
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."[16]
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."[17]
Strazny: "The single most popular proposal is the Pontic steppes (see the Kurgan
hypothesis)..."[18]
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Fortson (2004), p. 16.
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"Perfect Phylogenetic Networks: A New Methodology for Reconstructing the
Evolutionary History of Natural Languages, pg. 396" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the
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Fortson (2010), §4.2, §4.20.
Fortson (2004), pp. 73–74.
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Fortson (2004), pp. 102, 105.
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Jay Jasanoff. The Prehistory of the Balto-Slavic Accent. p. 22.
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doi:10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-124812.
Bomhard, Allan (2019). "The Origins of Proto-Indo-European: The Caucasian Substrate
Hypothesis". Journal of Indo-European Studies. 47 (1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2019).
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External links
Look up Appendix:List of Proto-Indo-European roots in Wiktionary, the free
dictionary.
At the University of Texas Linguistic Research Center: List of online books, Indo-
European Lexicon
Proto-Indo-European Lexicon 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?" (PDF). Martin Joachim Kümmel, department of Indo-European linguistics,
University of Jena.
Indo-European Grammar, Syntax & Etymology Dictionary
Indo-European Lexical Cognacy Database
glottothèque - Ancient Indo-European Grammars online, an online collection of video
lectures on Ancient Indo-European languages
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