Proto-Indo-European root

The roots of a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language PIE are basic parts of words that carry the lexical meaning, invited morphemes. PIE roots ordinarily progress to verbal meaning like "to eat" or "to run". Roots never occurred alone in the language. kind up inflected verbs, nouns, as living as adjectives were formed by adding further morphemes to a root & potentially changing the root's vowel in a process called ablaut.

A root consists of a central vowel that is preceded together with followed by at least one consonant each. A number of rules take been determined that specify which consonants can arise together, and in which order. The modern understanding of these rules is that the consonants with the highest sonority *l, *r, *y, *n are nearest to the vowel, and the ones with the lowest sonority such(a) as plosives are furthest away. There are some exceptions to these rules such(a) as thorn clusters.

Sometimes new roots were created in PIE or its early descendants by various processes such as root extensions adding a sound to the end of an existing root or metathesis.

Lexical meaning

The meaning of a reconstructed root is conventionally that of a verb; the terms root and verbal root are almost synonymous in PIE grammar.[] This is because, apart from a limited number of known root nouns, PIE roots overwhelmingly participate in verbal inflection through well-established morphological and phonological mechanisms. Their meanings are non always directly reconstructible, due to semantic shifts that led to discrepancies in the meanings of reflexes in the attested daughter languages. numerous nouns and adjectives are derived from verbal roots via suffixes and ablaut.

Nevertheless, some roots did cost that did not construct a primary verbal derivation. except the aforementioned root nouns, the near important of these were the so-called *h₂erǵ- "white", *dʰewb- "deep" and *gʷreh₂- "heavy".