Proto-Indo-European language

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

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, the best such texts do have the merit of giving an impression of what a coherent utterance in PIE might have sounded like.

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Published PIE sample texts:

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