Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European

language family.[1] No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed

features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-
European languages.[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 approximately

4500 BCE to 2500 BCE[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.

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,

*ḱwn̥tós, 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 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 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 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 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 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.