r/IndoEuropean • u/lpetrich • 20d ago
Linguistics How much can one deduce about Proto-Indo-European if one only had the present-day Indo-European languages?
Many language families are only known from members documented only over the last few centuries, so it would be interesting to speculate about how much we can learn about Proto-Indo-European if we only had its present-day members. As part of this exercise, let us suppose that we already know how to do historical-linguistics research.
Some families would be easy to recognize: Goidelic, Brythonic, Romance, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Greek, Armenian, Iranian, and Indic. Some would be more difficult: Celtic, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian. Indo-European itself would be even more difficult, but I think that it could still be recognized.
One would try to avoid the complication of borrowed words by using lists of highly-conserved and seldom-borrowed words, like the Swadesh, Dolgopolsky, and Leipzig-Jakarta lists, lists with pronouns, "name", small numerals, human beings and close kinship terms, body parts, and common animals, plants, natural phenomena, qualities, and actions.
With these lists, one can find sound correspondences like Grimm's law.
Grammar would be more difficult, but one can make a little progress.
Although articles (a, an, the) are common, they have a lot of variety, and one will conclude that they are later inventions and that if PIE had any articles, they were lost.
Noun plurals have a lot of variety, as do noun cases, with no cases to seven cases in Baltic and some Slavic languages. Some languages have more cases in pronouns than nouns, and some of these ones are closely related to languages with more cases. Did they partially lose cases?
There are some correspondences in the noun cases:
- Dative plural: Icelandic -um, German -n, Baltic, most Slavic -m-
- Nominative singular -s absent from accusative singular: Greek, Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian), nominative but not accusative singular -r: Icelandic
Turning to verbs, several of the languages have similar personal endings, subject-agreement ones, though several others have much-reduced endings or no endings. For the present tense, I come up with these simplified forms for the more distinct endings:
- Icelandic: -, -r, -r; -um, -idh, -a
- Spanish: -o, -s, -; -mos, -is, -n
- Irish: -im, -ir, -ann; -imid, -ann, -id
- Lithuanian: -u, -i, -a; -me, -te, -a
- Russian: -yu, -sh, -t; -m, -te, -t
- Greek: -o, -is, -i; -ume, -ete, -un
- Albanian: -(j), -(n), -(n); -m, -n, -n
- Persian: -am, -i, -ad; -im, -id, -and
- Bengali: -i, (-ish, -o), -e (singular, plural)
Greek also has mediopassive endings: -ome, -ese, -ete; -omaste, -este, -onde -- the only language to have such endings.
In general, however, verb tense, aspect, mood, and voice constructions are often subfamily-specific and hard to relate across the subfamilies.
There is an exception: the suppletion in the verb "to be":
- English: (inf) be, (3s) is, (past 3s) was
- Spanish: (past 3s) fue, (3s) es
- Lithuanian: (inf) bûti, (3s) yra,(2s) esi
- Serbo-Croatian: (inf) biti, (3s) jesti
- Persian: (inf, vb noun) budan, (3s) ast
- Irish: is
- Welsh: (vb noun) bod
- Albanian: (3s) është
- Greek: (3s) ine, (2s) ise
- Armenian: (3s) ê, (2s) es
The Romance f- is related to others' b- by a sound correspondence: Italian fratello ~ French frère ~ English brother ~ Welsh brawd (pl. brodyr) ~ Lithuanian brolis ~ Russian brat ~ Czech bratr ~ Persian barâdar ~ Hindi bhâi
Looking halfway back to the emergence of the Latin and Greek literary traditions (~ 200 BCE, ~ 800 BCE), back to around 900 CE, one finds that Old English, Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Norse have grammar much like Icelandic grammar. Old Church Slavonic is much like reconstructed Proto-Slavic, noun cases and all.
One finds much less borrowing, and one finds a little more support for PIE grammatical features. In particular, Old Irish has dative plural -b, much like Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic -m, and Old French has a curious declension: nom sing -s, acc sing -, nom pl -, acc pl -s, something like Greek, Baltic, Icelandic, and Old Norse -s and -r.
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u/lpetrich 19d ago edited 19d ago
Indo-European is unusual for language families with its time depth having attested members with great antiquity. List of languages by first written account - Wikipedia Among families with present-day speakers, only Semitic beats it in oldest attested member, with Akkadian (2600 BCE) beating Hittite (1700 BCE).
However, IE and Sino-Tibetan beat Semitic in oldest attested members with descendants that are still spoken:
Bayesian phylogenetic analysis of Semitic languages identifies an Early Bronze Age origin of Semitic in the Near East - PMC has date 3750 BCE for Proto-Semitic.
Northwest Semitic: (calc) 2100 BCE
South Semitic: