Proto Indo European

I didn't see a thread for this, so here's one.

For those of you who aren't familiar with Proto Indo European (I'll call it PIE from now on, if you don't mind), it is the reconstructed ancestor language of many of the worlds modern languages, including speakers in Europe and the Americas, Australia, Asia, and Africa. When I say "reconstructed" I mean that dedicated linguists have done painstaking analysis and a lot of detective work to trace common elements of modern languages back to a single source.

Now I'm hardly an expert on the subject, so I thought I'd post some informative links. To those of you who are wary of Wikipedia, I would say these articles are likely to be fairly accurate and extensive, so give it a chance if you're interested. :)

http://colfa.utsa.edu/drinka/pie/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_strong_verb

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/sanskrit.htm

Couldn't resist this thread... :)

I have little to say, except that, knowing quite a few linguists as an undergraduate, since their department was close to ours, I have learned to be very wary of these reconstructions, if they go too far back.
It is very tricky to really think of PIE as an actual language, just the description of those features which we can recover as common between the various branches of Indo-European languages - last time I saw any of it (years ago) it seemed a collection of carefully distilled word stems and a set of rules concerning word inflections and grammar.


Anyway, these theories about how languages are connected and how they evolve are definitely fascinating.
I think it's crucial, however, to be extremely cautious when trying to connect this to any material evidence - theories about which archaeological heritage might go with PIE have been problematic, as far as I am concerned (as it happens quite often when people try to connect linguistic groups with pots, even when the language in question isn't quite as hypothetical).


By the way, as far as I am aware, PIE is the ancestor of Indo-European languages, but there is a *very* tentative attempt to go further back and reconstruct links with various Asian languages and also a group which includes the semitic and some African languages ... I think that's where things get very dodgy!!

I have nothing insightful or meaningful to add, but I'm so glad you've started this thread, as I'm fascinated by the whole idea of PIE and links between language groups, too.

It's funny for me to see this thread. I was trying (without much success mind) to remember what I had learnt about PIE in a uni class and explain the idea to my friends the last night.