Proto-indo-european

As the tribe grew proto-indo-european and spread throughout the region, proto-indo-european, dialects arose which, over time, became more and more mutually incomprehensible.

The first stage of Indo-European study was the broad classification work that established many of the well-accepted groups of Indo-European languages. This was done by the s. Since then, a few other languages of the family have been added. The work of subgrouping is more difficult and there are still points of disagreement among scholars. In the s, scholars began to reconstruct sounds and words of the presumed ancestral language from which all Indo-European languages are descended. This reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European is necesssarily partial. The actual language was a normal language with tens of thousands of vocabulary items and a full grammar, but all that can be reconstructed of it is a few thousand words and some basic grammatical properties.

Proto-indo-european

Knowledge of them comes chiefly from that linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics. Mainstream scholars place them in the Pontic—Caspian steppe across Eurasia this steppe extends from northeastern Bulgaria and southeastern Romania , through Moldova , and southern and eastern Ukraine , through the Northern Caucasus of southern Russia , and into the Lower Volga region of western Kazakhstan , adjacent to the Kazakh steppe to the east, both forming part of the larger Eurasian Steppe. In the words of philologist Martin L. West , "If there was an Indo-European language, it follows that there was a people who spoke it: not a people in the sense of a nation, for they may never have formed a political unity, and not a people in any racial sense, for they may have been as genetically mixed as any modern population defined by language. The Indo-Europeans were a people in the sense of a linguistic community. We should probably think of them as a loose network of clans and tribes, inhabiting a coherent territory of limited size. While 'Proto-Indo-Europeans' is used in scholarship to designate the group of speakers associated with the reconstructed proto-language and culture, the term 'Indo-Europeans' may refer to any historical people that speak an Indo-European language. Using linguistic reconstruction from old Indo-European languages such as Latin and Sanskrit , hypothetical features of the Proto-Indo-European language are deduced. Assuming that these linguistic features reflect culture and environment of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the following cultural and environmental traits are widely proposed:. A phylogenetic analysis of Indo-European folktales found that one tale, The Smith and the Devil , could be confidently reconstructed to the Proto-Indo-European period. This story, found in contemporary Indo-European folktales from Scandinavia to India, describes a blacksmith who offers his soul to a malevolent being commonly a devil in modern versions of the tale in exchange for the ability to weld any kind of materials together. The blacksmith then uses his new ability to stick the devil to an immovable object often a tree , thus avoiding his end of the bargain. According to the authors, the reconstruction of this folktale to PIE implies that the Proto-Indo-Europeans had metallurgy, which in turn "suggests a plausible context for the cultural evolution of a tale about a cunning smith who attains a superhuman level of mastery over his craft". Researchers have made many attempts to identify particular prehistoric cultures with the Proto-Indo-European-speaking peoples, but all of such theories remain speculative. The scholars of the s who first tackled the question of the Indo-Europeans' original homeland also called Urheimat , from German , had essentially only linguistic evidence.

A subtle new principle won wide acceptance: the laryngeal theorywhich explained irregularities in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European proto-indo-european as the effects of hypothetical sounds which no longer exist in proto-indo-european languages documented prior to the excavation of cuneiform tablets in Anatolian, proto-indo-european.

Proto-Indo-European is a reconstructed language. Its words and roots are not directly attested in any written works, but have been reconstructed through the comparative method , which finds regular similarities between languages that cannot be explained by coincidence or word-borrowing, and extrapolates ancient forms from these similarities. According to our criteria for inclusion , terms in Proto-Indo-European should not be present in entries in the main namespace, but may be added to the Reconstruction: namespace. From Wiktionary, the free dictionary. Proto-Indo-European language. Edit category data. Recent changes.

This group includes a huge number of languages, ranging from English and Spanish to Russian, Kurdish and Persian. This approach draws on phylogenetics — the study of how biological species evolve — which also provides the most appropriate model for describing and quantifying the historical relationships between languages. Despite numerous studies, many questions still remain as to the origin of Indo-European: where was the original Indo-European language spoken in prehistoric times? How long ago did this language group emerge? How did it spread across Eurasia? There are two main, though apparently contradictory, established hypotheses. On one side we have the Anatolian Hypothesis , which traces the origins of the Indo-European people to Anatolia, in modern day Turkey, during the Neolithic era. According to this hypothesis, created by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew , Indo-European languages began to spread towards Europe around 9, years ago, alongside the expansion of agriculture. On the other side we have the Steppe Hypothesis , which places the origin of Indo-European languages further north, in the Pontic Steppe.

Proto-indo-european

Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where and when the first Indo-European languages were spoken and what kind of lives those first speakers led. Half of the world speaks languages that originated with a small group of people somewhere around the Black Sea. Just who they were is becoming clearer. Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language. Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it. Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6, years ago.

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In order to decide which of these two hypotheses is correct, genetic studies have been carried out to compare DNA found at prehistoric sites with that of modern humans. On the other side we have the Steppe Hypothesis , which places the origin of Indo-European languages further north, in the Pontic Steppe. Leave the question of any PIE documents, but even her name and home address are not known. John Benjamins Publishing Company. John Benjamins. Once there was a king. Anatolia or the Pontic Steppe? Once there was a king. In the early s, the question became associated with the expansion of a supposed " aryan race ", a now-discredited theory that was promoted during the expansion of European empires and the rise of " scientific racism ". This dependence on inflectional morphemes means that roots in PIE, unlike those in English, were rarely used without affixes.

Knowledge of them comes chiefly from that linguistic reconstruction, along with material evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics.

Researchers have put forward a great variety of proposed locations for the first speakers of Proto-Indo-European. The literature supporting such a homeland is both extensive and persuasive [ Anthony suggests that the Proto-Indo-European language formed mainly from a base of languages spoken by Eastern European hunter-gathers with influences from languages of northern Caucasus hunter-gatherers, in addition to a possible later influence from the language of the Maikop culture to the south which is hypothesized to have belonged to the North Caucasian family in the later neolithic or Bronze Age involving little genetic impact. Among his reasons being: that the Yamnaya lack evidence of genetic influence from the Bronze Age or late neolithic Caucasus deriving instead from an earlier mixture of Eastern European hunter-gatherers and Caucasus hunter-gatherers and have paternal lineages that seem to derive from the hunter-gatherers of the Eastern European Steppe rather than the Caucasus, as well as a scarcity in the Yamnaya of the Anatolian Farmer admixture that had become common and substantial in the Caucasus around 5, BC. Retrieved 26 August University of Chicago Press. Retrieved 24 March The University of Edinburgh. ISSN Categories : English terms prefixed with proto- English 8-syllable words English terms with IPA pronunciation English terms with audio links English lemmas English proper nouns English uncountable nouns English multiword terms en:Linguistics English terms with usage examples English nouns English countable nouns en:Anthropology English adjectives English uncomparable adjectives en:Indo-European studies. Bibcode : PNAS..