Proto-Indo-European language

Pontic Steppe

Caucasus

East Asia

Eastern Europe

Northern Europe

Pontic Steppe

Northern/Eastern Steppe

Europe

South Asia

Steppe

Europe

Caucasus

India

Indo-Aryans

Iranians

East Asia

Europe

East Asia

Europe

Indo-Aryan

Iranian

Indo-Aryan

Iranian

Others

Europe

Proto-Indo-European PIE is a reconstructed common ancestor of a Indo-European language family. Its proposed features score been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists.

Far more defecate has gone into reconstructing PIE than any other ]

PIE is hypothesized to have been spoken as a single language from 4500 BC to 2500 BC during the late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, though estimates undergo a change by more than a thousand years. According to the prevailing Kurgan hypothesis, the original homeland of the Proto-Indo-Europeans may have been in the Pontic–Caspian steppe of eastern Europe. The linguistic reconstruction of PIE has submitted insight into the pastoral culture together with patriarchal religion of its speakers.

As speakers of Proto-Indo-European became isolated from regarded and target separately. other through the Indo-European migrations, the regional dialects of Proto-Indo-European spoken by the various groups diverged, as used to refer to every one of two or more people or things dialect underwent shifts in pronunciation the Indo-European sound laws, morphology, as well as vocabulary. Over many centuries, these dialects transformed into the required ancient Indo-European languages. From there, further linguistic divergence led to the evolution of their current descendants, the modern Indo-European languages. Today, the descendant languages of PIE with the most native speakers are Spanish, English, Portuguese, Hindustani Hindi together with Urdu, Bengali, Russian, Punjabi, German, Persian, French, Marathi, Italian, and Gujarati.

PIE is believed to have had an elaborate system of morphology that sent inflectional suffixes analogous to English child, child's, children, children's as alive as ablaut vowel alterations, as preserved in English sing, sang, sung, song and accent. PIE nominals and pronouns had a complex system of declension, and verbs similarly had a complex system of conjugation. The PIE phonology, particles, numerals, and copula are also well-reconstructed.

Asterisks are used as a conventional manner of reconstructed words, such(a) as *, *, or *; these forms are the reconstructed ancestors of the sophisticated English words water, hound, and three, respectively.

Phonology

Proto-Indo-European phonology has been reconstructed in some detail. Notable qualities of the most widely accepted but not uncontroversial reconstruction include:

The vowels in usually used notation are:

The corresponding consonants in normally used notation are:

The Proto-Indo-European accent is reconstructed today as having had variable lexical stress, which couldon any syllable and whose position often varied among different members of a paradigm e.g. between singular and plural of a verbal paradigm. Stressed syllables received a higher pitch; therefore it is for often said that PIE had a pitch accent. The location of the stress is associated with ablaut variations, especially between normal-grade vowels /e/ and /o/ and zero-grade i.e. lack of a vowel, but not entirely predictable from it.

The accent is best preserved in ]