Monday, September 8, 2025

Proto-Indo-European language?

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Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family.
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Pro·to-In·do-Eu·ro·pe·an
/ˌprōdōˌindōˌyo͝orəˈpēən/
noun
  1. the unrecorded language from which all Indo-European languages are thought to derive.
adjective
  1. relating to Proto-Indo-European.
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There's no single language closest to Proto-Indo-European (PIE), but Lithuanian is considered the most conservative living language, preserving many ancient features. Other contenders include the extinct Hittite (as the oldest attested language) and Sanskrit (due to its conservative oral tradition). All modern Indo-European languages have diverged from PIE, with some branches and languages preserving more archaic features than others. 
Why the debate for "closest" language?
  • Conservatism:
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The Proto-Indo-Europeans are a prehistoric ethnolinguistic group of Eurasia who spoke Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo- ...
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Proto-Indo-European homeland - Wikipedia
Indo-European languages - Wikipedia
Proto-Indo-European language | Britannica
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Things to know
It was a reconstructed language based on common words and cognates with a "consistent" vowel/consonant change in various European languages both old and modern.
34 answers  ·  Top answer: One of the main factors in considering a genetic relation between Indo-European languages ...
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referred to as “Indo-European,” “Proto-Indo-European,” the “common parent language,” or the “original language” (Ursprache) of the family.
Basically, Greek changed more in the 2000 year period from when PIE was spoken to Mycenae Greece than in the 3500 year period from Mycenae Greece to modern ...
17 answers  ·  Top answer: It should be noted that many Indo-European languages took significant influence from 'substrate' ...
All Indo-European languages descend from a language known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE), which was spoken in a region north of the Black Sea sometime between ...
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the hypothetical common ancestor of the Indo-European language family, believed to have been spoken around 4500 to 2500 BCE.
Do mainstream historians accept the idea that a PIE language existed?
Top comment · Yeah to be honest the entire comment is based on the idea that we know for sure that "proto-languages" existed, and from there it tries to find which languages can be traced back to PIE. The opposite happened: European travellers noticed some strange similarities between words in Latin/Greek and in Samskrit. That happened soon after the works of scholars such as Joseph Juste Scaliger in the 16th century who noticed links between extant and past European languages, though at the time it wasn't clear if these links were the result of geographic proximity or common ancestry. The first word that was used for comparison was "god", and thus the first four families identified were the Germanic oner (gott group), the Romance group (deus), the Greek group (theos) and the Slavic group (bog). Rapidly the hypothesis of common ancestry took precedence, expecially with the works of linguist Marcus van Boxhorn in the 17th century who identifies 7 groups: greek, latin, persian, germanic, slavic, celtic and baltic (which he named "scythic"). It's probably important to mention that grammarians from the Roman antiquity also wondered why so many words between Greek and Latin looked similar, so comparative works weren't new, but the idea of a common ancestry was. For the Roman grammarians, similarities came from geographical proximity or hellenization. Parallelly to the European comparative linguistics tradition, there was also an Indian one, represented for example by Siraj ud Din Ali Khan Arzu in the 18th century, who hypothesized a common origin for Persian and Samskrit. Following this, William Jones discovered that Latin, Greek and Samskrit had common origins, because of the common word roots and grammatical similarities that couldn't be coincidental. It's important to note that at this point, there wasn't yet an attempt at reconstructing what the original language was like. We have to wait for August Schleicher in the 19th century for that, with the Stammbaumtheorie, which is the foundation of linguistic reconstruction (and the concept of proto-language). It's sometimes compared to a sort of "linguistic triangulation". Then there are four major events that shaped IE studies, the first one being the deciphering of Old Persian in 1846, the second one is the discovery of Tokharian, the third one the deciphering of Hittite in 1917. Hittite belongs to the oldest branch of IE (the Anatolian family). The fourth one is the decyphering of Mycenian. These events made it possible to verify how we reconstructed PIE and phonetic changes through time. Note, there are still debates on the reconstruction of PIE, especially what we refer to as the "laryngals" (the sounds noted as H1, H2 and H3). Basically, it makes no doubt that all IE languages are related, however the proto-language itself is a hypothesis that is the result of linguistic reconstruction, which itself stems from linguistic comparison. It's a very strong hypothesis because we have often been able to predict and verify linguistic shifts in the IE family, and we have a set of established sound laws (such as Grimm's law that states that to certain IE sounds correspond certain Proto-Germanic sounds, for example IE dh -> Germanic n, as seen in médhu -> honey (compare with Samskrit madhu, Greek methu, Latin mel - genitive mellis). It is hypothetically possible to make predictions by starting with a PIE root and trying to predict what the descendant of this word should look like in a given language, but it's not really the usual methodology to verify that a language is IE, because obviously it's hard to pretend and to prove that we didn't know the word beforehand, and because there are also a lot of semantic shifts. Instead, predictions work by establishing sound laws for each branch, and verifying that there are no exceptions (but the ones that can be explained by later borrowings). Establishing that a language is IE is done through lexical and grammatical comparison, and by establishing and verifying the sound laws that govern sound shifts in the history of a given language or language family. As a last note, the idea that some words refer to ancient concepts (such as "fire" or in the case of IE, "charriot") is interested and lets us estimate when PIE probably existed (and where, especially if we use the words for various types of trees), however it is not necessary to establish the common ancestry of these languages and the fact that at some point, some sort of PIE language existed... Whether it was spoken by a homogeneous population or was some kind of lingua franca.
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Latest comment · I mean, the time in which PIE is proposed to have existed predates any historical documentation from that region, so this isn't really part of the field of history There are no sources to investigate or interpretations to be drawn. All of the evidence for PIE is linguistics, so it makes sense that historians in general will have at best maybe a slightly-above-laypeople level of understanding.
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50+ comments · 6 days ago
r/AskHistorians
Reddit
1:55
What was the Proto-Indo-European language, and why is it written like that? Let’s learn about languages, history, historical linguistics, and all sorts of other things along the way! And while you’re at it - check out those videos from @arum_natzorkhang and Nardi (@ languagehacks), they’re awesome! #language #history #linguistics #didyouknow #education
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w0rdsatw0rk · Instagram
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Proto-Indo-European mentioned 🗣️🗣️ #linguistics #welshlanguage #celticlanguages #linguisticsmajor
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Oliver’s Oxford
TikTok
2:48
What was the Proto-Indo-European language, and why is it written like that? Let’s learn about languages, history, historical linguistics, and all sorts of other things along the way! And while you’re at it - check out those videos from @Arum Natzorkhang (COMMS
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Griffin · TikTok
Linguistic enthusiast & musician
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Reconstructing and Ranking MORE Proto-Languages
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Zzineohp
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