Proto-Indo-European language

: PIE redirects here. See Pie (disambiguation) for other uses of PIE.

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The Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European languages. The existence of such a language is generally accepted by linguists, though there has been debate about many specific details.

Related Topics:
Language - Hypothetical - Indo-European languages - Linguist

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There is no direct evidence of PIE, because writing was either not yet in use, or was not accessible to the hypothesized speakers of the language. All PIE sounds and words are reconstructed using the comparative method. The asterisk is used to mark reconstructed PIE words, such as *{{PIE|wódr?}} "water", *{{PIE|?w?n}} "dog", or *{{PIE|tréyes}} "three (masculine)". Many of the words in the modern Indo-European languages seem to have derived from such "protowords" via regular sound change (e.g., Grimm's law).

Related Topics:
Writing - Comparative method - Asterisk - Water - Dog - Sound change - Grimm's law

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All Indo-European languages are inflected languages (although many modern Indo-European languages, including Modern English, have lost much of their inflection). By comparative reconstruction, it is quite likely that at least the latest stage of the common PIE mother languages (i.e. Late PIE) was an inflectional (and more suffixing than prefixing) language.

Related Topics:
Inflected languages - Modern English - Suffix - Prefix

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However, by means of internal reconstruction and morphological (re-)analysis of the reconstructed, seemingly most ancient PIE word forms, it has recently been shown to be very probable that at a more distant stage (then: Early) PIE may have been a root-inflectional language like e.g. Proto-Semitic. As a consequence, it seems to be highly probable that PIE once was of the root-and-pattern morphological type (literature: Pooth (2004): "Ablaut und autosegmentale Morphologie: Theorie der uridg. Wurzelflexion", in: Arbeitstagung "Indogermanistik, Germanistik, Linguistik" in Jena, Sept. 2002).

Related Topics:
Morphological - Proto-Semitic

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